What George H. W. Bush got wrong
George H. W. Bush, at a campaign event, in 1988.
George W. Bush tends to deflect questions about his legacy by saying that only history will be the judge of his Presidency, and “I’m just not going to be around to see the final verdict.” Yet his father, George H. W. Bush, at ninety-one, is living long enough to see the verdict on his own Presidency—and he has to like the results. The forty-first President is being treated to a rolling tribute that is no doubt bittersweet, but certainly more sweet than bitter for a one-term President who left office being blamed for a recession, charged with indifference to the struggles of ordinary Americans, and vilified by the right for breaking his campaign pledge of “no new taxes.”
Today there is a consensus across much of the political spectrum that George H. W. Bush was a President of some consequence, a man of conscience and reason, a steady hand at a time of geopolitical instability. There is even an argument to be made that Bush is, as Mark Updegrove, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, contends, “our most revered living president.” Some of that reverence, to be sure, stems from Bush’s near-total withdrawal from the political arena—even, or especially, during his son’s troubled tenure as President. (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, by contrast, have been more publicly engaged as post-Presidents, and more willing than Bush to accept the risks in that.) During those difficult years, 41’s reputation rose as 43’s sank. In part, it rose because 43’s sank; the son’s liabilities tended to magnify the father’s better qualities: his pragmatism and restraint, his multilateralism.
But George H. W. Bush’s brand of leadership stands up well enough in its own right. It was not empty flattery when, in 2013, President Obama praised him at a White House celebration of civic voluntarism, a cause long championed by Bush. “Given the humility that’s defined your life,” Obama told Bush at the East Room ceremony, “I suspect it’s harder for you to see something that’s clear to everybody else around you, and that’s how bright a light you shine.”
When we rank, reconsider, laud, or denounce past Presidents, living or dead, we are taking stock of our own times. In that sense, the vindication of George H. W. Bush is a reflection of what we know we’ve lost. Jon Meacham’s new biography of Bush, “Destiny and Power,” makes that plain from its very first pages. “Americans unhappy with the reflexively polarized politics of the first decades of the twenty-first century will find the presidency of George H.W. Bush refreshing, even quaint,” Meacham writes in his prologue. “He embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price.” Meacham lists achievements that any Democratic President would be happy to claim: the Americans with Disabilities Act, the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, an expansion of tax credits for families with children. But, on the domestic front, Bush’s reputation rests, principally, on his tax-pledge apostasy—his retreat, by the summer of 1990, from the showy supply-side absolutism of 1988, and his resulting agreement with congressional Democrats to cut spending and raise taxes. “Our people were running and screaming, and I can understand why,” Bush wrote in his diary after striking the deal. “I guess this is the biggest test of my Presidency.”
By “our people,” Bush meant the most religiously anti-tax, anti-government conservatives—the G.O.P.’s bitter-enders. Vice-President Dan Quayle and others urged Bush to make his case to them and the nation for raising taxes, but Bush refused; he told Quayle that the results of the budget deal would speak for themselves. Meacham attributes this reticence to Bush’s discomfort with speeches—Bush had been cowed, Meacham believes, by “the Reagan rhetorical legacy” and the slings of the news media. But there is more at work here than Meacham acknowledges, and it has to be weighed in any full accounting of Bush’s life and leadership. Bush shrank from defending the tax increase, in part, because he had always shrunk from challenging, in any principled, public way, his party’s right wing.
“Our people” were never really Bush’s people; he knew it, and so did they. Some conservatives never really forgave Bush for dismissing Reagan’s supply-side platform as “voodoo economics” during the 1980 primaries, and Bush, for his part, continued to see them as zealots. In 1987, as Vice-President, Bush turned down an invitation to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Fuck ’em, I ain’t going,” Bush is said to have told his advisers. “You can’t satisfy those people.” In 1989, when one of those people—Newt Gingrich—became the House minority whip, President Bush invited him and one of his lieutenants, Representative Vin Weber, of Minnesota, to the White House for a beer. As Meacham recounts, the conversation was friendly, but as the two congressmen got up to leave, Weber asked the President “what your biggest fear is about us.” “Well,” Bush replied, “I’m worried that sometimes your idealism”—his polite way of describing their ideological fervency—“will get in the way of what I think is sound governance.”
Bush saw which way his party was sliding, as Meacham makes powerfully clear. One of the most startling passages in the book comes from Bush’s private account of a 1988 encounter with a woman who supported the televangelist Pat Robertson’s campaign for the Republican nomination. The woman refused to shake the Vice-President’s hand. Bush complained in his diary:
There’s something terrible about those who carry it to extremes. They’re scary. They’re there for spooky, extraordinary right-winged reasons. They don’t care about Party. They don’t care about anything. They’re the excesses. They could be Nazis, they could be Communists, they could be whatever. In this case, they’re religious fanatics and they’re spooky. They will destroy this party if they’re permitted to take over.
Bush deserves points for prescience—but not for courage. While Meacham insists that Bush “made no apologies for his preference for pragmatism over ideology,” this is too forgiving. Bush, true, was never an ideologue, but he did often strain to appear as one. As early as 1964, in his losing bid to displace Ralph Yarborough, the Democratic senator from Texas, Bush took “far-right positions to get elected,” as he himself recalled, and came to regret it. Not entirely. In 1988, he ran for President as a social conservative, painting the hapless Michael Dukakis—a technocrat if ever there was one—as a scheming, vaguely foreign collectivist who had it in for religion and the Pledge of Allegiance. It was an unconvincing and yet brutally effective performance. Four years later, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in Houston, Bush knocked America’s system of public education as schools “run by government,” and disowned his greatest domestic achievement—the 1990 budget deal. “It was a mistake to go along with the Democratic tax increase,” Bush told the delegates. “And I admit it.”
In electoral politics—as opposed to the appointed positions (C.I.A. director, U.N. Ambassador) that he clearly relished—Bush was forever on edge, on the defensive, dropping his “g”s, painting himself as an anti-intellectual oilman from “a little shotgun house” on the frontier, conceding ground to Gingrich, Robertson, Grover Norquist, and Pat Buchanan that he could never gain back. Bush deplored the rightward lurch of the G.O.P., but lacked the will or the fire to fight for its future. He did not, in the phrase of William F. Buckley, Jr., “stand athwart history, yelling Stop”; he tried, instead, to go with the flow. The fact that Bush disbelieved some of the dogma he espoused is not, in the end, exculpatory. We might celebrate 41, as Jon Meacham does, as the last great Republican moderate, but he could have been so much greater.
Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, is the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court” and is a partner at West Wing Writers.