President Bush addresses troops in Afghanistan, March 2006
I’ve never been a fan of President George W. Bush. I don’t expect ever to be. When he ran for the presidency in 2000, I thought he had far too little experience for the job, and I was pretty sure that without his father’s name and connections, his candidacy would simply not have occurred. As a life-long Democrat, I naturally disagreed with most of his domestic policies. I didn’t like the way his partisans smeared Sen. John McCain, an honorable man who deserved better. I thought his early months in office were ho-hum. He impressed me in the weeks following 9/11, but all the same, I felt any president would have adopted much the same demeanor, and made much the same decisions.
All that said, I thought he was one of the most presidential looking men ever to hold the office. Until he opened his mouth. Bush came across as a buffoon so often I was just flat out dismayed. I’d squint hard, try to see Bush as his supporters saw him, and I could never manage it. He looked very much like the man I feared he would be when he ran for president: a chief executive hopelessly out of his depth. I can be politically opposed to an American president, but I still want him to be presidential, and I want to feel as if he is my president, too. Every chief executive in my lifetime, be he Republican or Democrat, gave me that sense — I would like to say, kept that covenant. Bush did not, primarily, I think, because he bought into the successful but reptilian Karl Rove strategy of mobilizing his political base and the hell with the rest of us.
I didn’t like Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. I didn’t think it was equitable, I thought it supremely inefficient as a way to stimulate the economy. I didn’t like the way he scuttled the hard-fought effort to balance the federal budget. I didn’t like the way he took a wrecking ball to a system of multilateral diplomacy that his predecessors had carefully nurtured and which had served the United States well for half a century. I didn’t like the Patriot Act. I’m a traditional conservative: I’m suspicious of giving that much power to the government. I thought Guantanamo was a disgrace, not because I had any sympathy for its inmates but because it undercut a key element of America’s strength in the world: the perception that it tries to do the right thing, to live up to its best values. And I thought the decision to invade Iraq was misguided, the case for war unconvincing, and the aftermath of the invasion — the jovial tolerance of massive looting and disorder, for instance — just plain disturbing.
Basically, I haven’t liked much about the 43rd president of the United States. That said, I think President Bush is arguably the most significant man to occupy the Oval Office since Franklin Roosevelt. And although I deeply disagree with most of what he’s done, I have at least come to respect him as a man. Which comes as a genuine relief, because no true American wants to feel about his president the way I felt about George W. Bush.
Most of my new regard for the president has come in the past year. I’ve had three principal instructors, two of whom will astonish most right-wingers. The first is Bob Woodward. I’ve read all four of Woodward’s books on the Bush presidency, most recently The War Within, and although I cannot gainsay that Woodward’s portrayal is of a commander in chief who never made a mistake he couldn’t blissfully ignore, Woodward is to his very core a journalist who cares mainly about reporting what he sees. And what he saw — and continues to see — in President Bush is a man of remarkable vision, steadiness of purpose, moral courage, willingness to make the hard choices, and an almost superhuman serenity once having made them. He is indeed The Decider. It is, in typical Bush fashion, a clumsy expression, but somehow more compelling than the orthodox rendering, “the decision-maker,” would have been.
The second are the numerous officers I’ve met who have been in the same room with Bush, either briefing the president or listening as someone else does. They are not necessarily fans of the president’s decision to invade Iraq and I have met no one yet who thinks highly of his handling of the war prior to the Surge, nor have I heard anyone tell me that Bush is a deeply thoughtful man of penetrating intellect. What I do hear, consistently, is that he is a far, far cry from the disingenuous boob he so often seems to be in his television appearances. Officers basically read human beings for a living: who’s got what it takes, who doesn’t, who’s a real leader, who’s merely a manager, etc. They particularly respect someone who is a natural leader. And Bush, in their book, is exactly that. He asks good questions. He’s his own man: with few exceptions I hear nothing but contempt for the thesis that he was ever a puppet of Dick Cheney or anyone else, though plainly a president of his limited experience had to rely heavily on his top advisers once plunged into the cauldron of September 11. I hear repeatedly that in person he is a man of astonishing charisma, capable of igniting and sustaining tremendous loyalty in his subordinates, and authentic and straightforward in manner — a quality soldiers highly prize.
Josh Brolin as George W. Bush in "W." (2008)
My third tutor is one that has flabbergasted everyone to whom I’ve so far mentioned him: Oliver Stone, producer-director of W., which is one of the best and most affecting political films I have ever seen. Sure, Stone carries a lot of ideological baggage, but just as Woodward is a born journalist, Stone is a born film-maker, and he creates characters, not caricatures. Thus his portrait of Nixon, in the 1995 film of that name, is masterful in the way it recreates the man’s complexities and contradictions, the roots of his demons, his struggle to contain them and the way in which they mastered and destroyed him. You cannot watch the film and not care deeply about Nixon, not feel some sort of kinship between his hopes and torments and your own.
It is the same with Josh Brolin’s brilliant portrayal of George W. Bush and the brilliant screenplay that makes Brolin’s performance such a marvel. Stone makes us care about Bush, gains our sympathy for a young man in the shadow of a demanding father (and makes you heartily wish he’d clocked Bush the elder), impresses us with his reckless but appealing joie de vivre, touches us with his midlfe taking stock and embracing Christianity, and maintains our sympathy as we see a character we have come to care about assume a position in life that is an impressive achievement, earnestly embraced, but ultimately beyond his capabilities: an all too human instance of reach exceeding grasp.
The sequence that ends the film brought tears to my eyes — and threatens to do so every time I think of it. It isn’t George W. Bush the bumbler we’re looking at. It is George W. Bush our brother, a fellow voyager on this mysterious journey of life, and the emotion reflected on his face is one that many of us have felt at one time or another. And maybe, at the end of all our mortal strivings, the emotion that awaits us all.
