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The real Dubya
The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 04/07/2002 | Frank Bruni

Posted on 04/06/2002 3:44:37 PM PST by Pokey78

He was lampooned as a bumbling lightweight, but in America's hour of need George W Bush showed he had been badly misjudged, writes Frank Bruni, who has spent years watching him for The New York Times

For George W Bush September 11, 2001, promised to be a fairly typical day. His schedule featured his favourite travelling act, a kind of colour-by-numbers event he could do in his sleep. He was going to visit a school in Florida, mingle with the children there, smile at them, listen to them read — nothing even remotely taxing.

At about 9.05am everything changed. Bush was in a classroom among the children and had already been informed that a plane had hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center — a freak accident, or so it had seemed. Now he was being told about a second plane hitting the second tower and it was clear that it wasn't an accident at all. His chief of staff, Andy Card, whispered in his ear: "America's under attack."

The television cameras and the people around the president didn't pick up the words, but they saw the reaction on Bush's face — a brief, muted play of shock, wonder and horror. That was the picture, unplanned and unstudied, that would endure. There was no script for this and it quickly showed. In a way neither he nor his advisers could ever have imagined, Bush was being tested — it was anyone's guess how he would bear up.

Even a few of the president's advisers had worried that he could seem small and insubstantial. He projected affability more easily than authority, levity more readily than gravity. All of this had made him an unusual candidate for the presidency and had posed questions about how successfully he could slip into the role under normal circumstances.

After September 11, those questions loomed even larger. Bush was being asked to command and console a nation through a new era of uncertainty and a crisis more challenging than those most other presidents had faced. Was he ready for — and capable of — this?

I had been watching Bush for more than two years, as the New York Times reporter assigned to his presidential campaign and then as the newspaper's White House correspondent. I had travelled tens of thousands of miles and exchanged at least as many words with him. But I wasn't at all sure what to expect.

The Bush I knew was part-scamp and part-bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy, a weekday gym rat, an adult with an inner child that often burst through. When I interviewed him in June 2000 aboard his campaign plane, a flight attendant walked by with the hot towels. Bush took his, cleaned his hands with it and then draped it over his entire face and turned towards me. He was trying to initiate a toddler's game of peekaboo.

On the campaign trail, Bush could be surprisingly casual and silly. He would touch the people around him a lot (I should hasten to add that Bush was more restrained with female reporters). He pinched our cheeks or gently slapped them in an almost grandmotherly, aren't-you-adorable fashion. At least twice on the candidate's plane, I felt hands closing tight on my throat and turned around to see that they belonged to the future president of the United States, a devilish gleam in his eyes.

Bald reporters received a different treatment, one that Bush thought funny enough to repeat time and again. He would lay his hands on their gleaming pates, assume an expression of ministerial concern and bellow: "Heal!"

His sense of humour tilted towards the Austin Powers school, not just figuratively but literally. He was constantly lifting his little finger to the corner of his mouth to mimic the Dr Evil character in the Powers movies — which he loved — and he laughed loudly when a supporter gave him a doctored photograph depicting him as his father's Mini-Me.

Bush's playfulness, nonchalance and clumsiness survived his transition from the governor's mansion in Texas to the White House. He did not take on an air of exaggerated self-importance but instead sat behind his desk in the Oval Office and lampooned the obsequiousness that so often came his way. "My, Mr President, you look fabulous today," he would exclaim. Or, "Mr President, that was a magnificent speech."

When he stood beside Tony Blair at Camp David, a reporter asked Bush whether they had any interests in common. "Well," Bush said, "we both use Colgate toothpaste." Blair interjected: "They're going to wonder how you know that, George!"

Not since Yogi Berra, the baseball player of "It's déjàˆ vu all over again" fame, had a public figure produced such a bumper crop of bloopers. He sympathised with the difficulties some Americans faced in trying "to put food on your family". He feared that excessive regulation of education from Washington put "this kind of federal cuff link" on schools and teachers. He said the salient question behind any education policy was: "Is our children learning?" He also believed the country should pursue free trade policies that knocked down not only tariffs and barriers but also "bariffs and terriers".

To some observers, the evidence was stark and irrefutable: Bush was a bozo. This judgment was wilfully selective. The naysayers focused on Bush's grades at Yale, which showed him to be a run-of-the-mill C student. They were in fact no worse than those Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, got at Harvard for a long stretch of his time there and they were better than the ones John McCain, Bush's Republican rival, got at the US Naval Academy.

There were other sides of Bush that provided more heartening omens for his ability to meet the demands placed on him after September 11. At his inauguration in January 2001, he described the American story as one of a "slaveholding society that became a servant of freedom", and implored Americans to be "citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects". As he did so, his voice trembled with conviction, and when he looked towards his father, who had once held the same office, his eyes held the suggestion of tears.

Two days after the terrorist attacks, when Bush allowed the television cameras into the Oval Office to record his side of a telephone conversation with Rudolph Giuliani, the then mayor of New York, his performance was less than inspiring. There were long, uncertain pauses between sentences and a fumbling at the right thing to say. Afterwards he was asked by a reporter whether he believed the terrorists had intended to assassinate him and "Where your heart was for yourself?"

"Well," Bush said, "I don't think about myself right now. I think about the families, the children. I am a loving guy." With these words, tears welled into his eyes. They didn't make him look weak, they made him look compassionate, just as his campaign slogan had promised.

Bush was to cry again when he spoke about the lives of American soldiers lost in Afghanistan. His emotional side had frequently surfaced when he was away from the cameras during the presidential election race. He had a deeply soulful streak, which grew more pronounced as the campaign intensified and the pressure mounted.

Every so often, Bush would murmur a wistful aside about his regret that Barbara and Jenna, his twin daughters, did not demonstrate more pride in his campaign. He let it be known that they were miffed about the disruption to their lives and dreaded the thought of Secret Service protection throughout their college years if he won.

He also let it be known that he would be happy for them to show up on the campaign trail more often than they did, which was almost never. They just weren't all that interested, he explained, with a hurt look in his eyes.

During the televised debates with Al Gore, Bush's wife Laura brought good news on this front. She told me that Barbara, who had just started studying at Yale, and Jenna, who was at the University of Texas, were tuning in religiously to the debates. They had taken offence, she said, during one debate in which Gore noted that all of his own children had taken the trouble to be in the audience. The
Bush girls had considered this a slap to them, and told Laura so.

More important, they told their father that they were keeping up with what he was doing. Laura recalled that after one of the debates, Jenna, the less easily impressed of the two, gave her father a simple, four-word review that made him cry: "Dad, you did great."

Bush himself had lived since childhood with his father's formidable accomplishments and he had dutifully followed his father's path, first to Yale, then into the oil business. But every step of the way, he had not quite managed to match his father's success. One point of comparison said it all. His father had been a fighter pilot in the second world war and had a medal to show for the time he was shot down over the Pacific. More than 25 years later, George W signed up to be a fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard, thus avoiding combat in Vietnam and living at an apartment complex in Houston with a volleyball net strung across the outdoor pool.

Bush had to know it wasn't the same and, for all his light-heartedness, there were signs that this bothered him. In 1973, he took his younger brother Marvin out on the town in Washington DC, drank copiously and ploughed his car into a neighbour's rubbish bins. His father was waiting up for him at home, but when Bush got there he did not docilely submit to a lecture.

"You want to go mano a mano right here?" he asked his father, inviting him to step outside. It was the frustration of a young man who had come to realise how hard it was to measure up. 

During the campaign, much of his parents' conversation revolved around their surprise at how far George W had come, a progress they attributed in large part to timing and luck. It was his more studious, more articulate brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, whom they had expected to be a future ruler. George W was the court jester.

On the eve of Bush's formal nomination for president by the Republican party, his father offered me an explanation for his son's success that had little to do with his intrinsic merits and dwelt instead on forces outside his control.

"I think it's change," Bush Sr said. "I think I was the victim of people wanting change. Eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush: 'We want a change'.

"And all the things that I felt strongly about never materialised as issues. I think the same thing is true now. I think people kind of like change and that works for George's benefit. I don't think Gore can present himself as a candidate of change.

"I'm amazed — still amazed — at the way he's done," his father continued.

Barbara Bush confirmed that when her son had announced his intention to run for governor in Texas, she had told him it was an ill-advised, ill-fated idea. But both she and her husband conceded that once he had taken the reins in Texas, he was bound to be considered for president. "It's a 6in putt," said the former president, indulging in his love of golfing metaphors.

Jeb Bush, who joined us for lunch on the terrace at the family's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, talked about how much his brother was benefiting from the Republicans' exile from the White House for two terms, just as Bill Clinton had benefited from the Democrats' exile. As Jeb did this, his mother made a point of praising how articulate he was; his father had already tossed several of my questions to Jeb, claiming he was the one who would know best.

Their diminution of George W warrants notice because his parents are long-time public figures who know how to keep their lips zipped in front of journalists. If they let loose with even a few suggestions that their eldest son had surprised them and done more than they ever expected, there must be more, much more, where it came from.

Bush must have sensed this — must have spent a lifetime sensing this. He must have noticed the kind of thing I did when, in Kennebunkport, his father deferred to Jeb and then beamed with admiration as he spoke so fluently. How often had George W been on the receiving end of such an impressed expression? There were suggestions, too, that Bush's father had been actively involved in promoting Dick Cheney, his former defence secretary, for the vice-presidency, although the former president rang me to deny it.

"What I see emerging," he told me, "is that the old guy drove the choice. That is absolutely inaccurate." But he went on to acknowledge that he had offered his son opinions on various candidates for the post, including Cheney. When I asked if he had spoken directly to Cheney to urge him to think about taking the job, the elder Bush replied: "I cannot reveal whether I did or I didn't." After a beat, he added mischievously: "Please respect my age — 76. I'm forgetful."

Of the two Mrs Bushes, I found George W's wife Laura particularly intriguing because she remained so completely unknowable. I had never met someone in public life who seemed to have so little appetite for it and brought to it so little ego. She fell back time and again on the same words to describe her feelings, to the point where the words held no meaning at all.

Anything that happened to her — being the wife of the Republican nominee, giving a speech at the Republican convention on live television — was simply "fun" or "really fun" or "really a lot of fun". About five months into the first year of the administration, I ran into her at a party and asked her how she was adjusting to the White House. She said she was having a lot of fun. 

Yet Laura was nowhere near as square as her unimaginative outfits and hairstyle suggested. When she and a group of friends staged joint celebrations for their 40th and 50th birthdays, they went river rafting. She was also said to have quite a number of gay male friends. Others who crossed paths with her during the campaign said that when she was in settings where she felt totally safe, she would bum cigarette after cigarette, indulging a minor vice she never acknowledged in public.

She had experienced sadness in her past — when she was a child her mother had several times miscarried or given birth to a child that died in infancy, and when she was 17, she drove through a stop sign and barrelled into the car of a classmate from school. He died.

Now, as a grown-up, she was a cleanliness and neatness freak, scrubbing and organising all the time, inoculating her world against disorder. The books she and Bush owned were arranged in one house in accordance with the Dewey Decimal System.

Laura also represented Bush's uncanny luck, or talent, in choosing people to surround him who invariably made him better or set him straight. By all accounts, she was more influential than anyone in coaxing him to stop drinking. Years later, during the campaign, she more than anyone else kept his cockiness in check. "Bushieeeee!" she would reprimand him whenever he got too testy or too silly.

Bush had little time for Gore, his presidential rival. Privately, he made it clear that he saw Gore as equal parts pompous blowhard and preening chameleon. For Bush, this was distilled in a single, oddly chosen detail: "The man dyes his hair."

"What does that tell you about him?" Bush would ask, a question that was entirely rhetorical because he would then answer it himself. "He doesn't know who he is." It seemed not to matter to Bush that he had no evidence of this follicular fraudulence. As he saw it, Gore lacked authenticity and the proof was smack dab above his rising forehead.

In conversation, Bush displayed a stunning estrangement from nearly all aspects of popular culture. When a reporter mentioned the word vegan one day, Bush looked confused; he didn't know what that was. When it came to movies and music, the man had apparently never picked up People magazine and never surfed the channels. He had never heard of Sex and the City, the television show, and thought Friends was a movie. The extent of his commentary on modern theatre was a professed affection for the musical Cats.

Yet whenever you wanted to dismiss Bush as slow-witted or unreasonably pleased with himself, he would show a flash of cleverness and self-knowledge about his failings. And he would be likeable. Politicians are good seducers — at least the good ones are — and Bush was practised in the art of seduction.

His campaign was the most intricately orchestrated of the bunch. A reporter covering Bush could bet that if he attended a Republican fundraiser in a hotel ballroom packed with fleshy white men, the cameras would be nowhere to be found. If he took a walk through a Hispanic neighbourhood, however, there would be a film crew fit to tackle a David Lean epic. And if Bush stumbled across a shopkeeper who expressed faith in the Republican way, he would refer to this man in stump speeches as a veritable prophet upon the land.

Bush had once been so enamoured of his gut instincts and so convinced of his intrinsic charm that he considered intense preparation for the showier, more superficial campaign rituals to be the refuge of sissies. Yet he began preparing for his debates with Gore several months before they took place. He would sit with his advisers, study videotapes of his rival's previous debate performances and face off against Gore's stand-in, Senator Judd Gregg, wherever he could. He practised under bright lights and well past his bedtime, which was usually 10pm, so that he would be ready for debates that lasted this late.

As the months rolled by, his certainty that he was going to be president — "You mark my words" — was replaced by a gentler, calmer assertion: "I believe I'm going to be president." This subtle change reflected the ways in which Bush had matured during the campaign. He had started out with only a few stray flecks of grey in his hair and now had a generous covering, and what had happened on the outside had clearly happened on the inside, too. He was not a new man, but he was a slightly different one, and maybe a slightly better one.

A few minutes after the networks declared a Gore victory in Florida in November, Bush fled the restaurant where he was having dinner with his family and headed home to the governor's mansion in Austin. He left without finishing his pudding. There were subsequent reports that before he left the dinner table, Jeb, who was with him, wept and apologised to him. There were reports that the two brothers bickered so heatedly that their father had to intervene, and there were contradictory reports that George W simply hugged Jeb. Whatever happened, this much was clear: if he was in the process of losing the election, Bush didn't want to do it in company.

Later that night he allowed a dozen reporters to see him. We marched into the mansion and upstairs to the living room where Bush, Laura and his parents sat around a fireplace, a television set nearby. By this point, his advisers had determined that the Florida count was still an open question and Bush wanted to get that message to voters in parts of the country where the polls hadn't closed.

He tried to look upbeat and more or less succeeded. I asked him how he might get through a night like this, with his whole future on the line. "Actually, my whole future isn't on the line," he said, adding with a nod to his parents, "I'm not worried about me getting through it."

His father looked as though he was trying to smile through an evisceration. Bush's face was braver and more tranquil, which was something of a riddle, given his apparently panicked retreat to the mansion. He had clearly learnt to press his talent for detachment into the service of a useful and reassuring equanimity, something that would prove to be even more helpful to him later, during the most challenging days of his presidency.

Over the ensuing weeks, as the disputed election rumbled on, I came to wonder if Bush's stillness was about more than simple steadiness, if he was going through a fresh bout of ambivalence, the old ghost come back to haunt him. He had agreed, in a happy-go-lucky fashion, to run for president, to make a decent go of it. He had come to treat the task he had set for himself with more deference and respect, and had even seemed to sharpen his desire for the prize.

But was this the prize he had bargained for? A victory, if he managed it, so narrow and ambiguous that it would send him to Washington without a mandate or a heady sense of triumph? Watching him through 36 days of stalemate, before the Supreme Court effectively handed him the presidency, I could not stop wondering if he was having second thoughts.

"More than anything," one of his old friends told me, "he's uncomfortable. He doesn't like the mess." This was a family trait. The Bushes did not like conflict or controversy. 

After September 11, we had a President Bush who to a significant degree was what Candidate Bush had augured. The Bush we got was the Bush we glimpsed. He was palpably sensitive, at least on an emotional front. There were stories of his encounters with people touched by that horrific day, and some of them spoke of the comfort they took from Bush or the strength they saw in him.

He was still comically bumbling. I could not get out of my head the tales about how much trouble Bush had with the simple chore of reading and recording his radio addresses. He would fluff key words and lines, grow flustered and irritable, and have to start again, sometimes more than once, a White House aide told me. Did that matter? Probably not.

Was he also deeper and more curious than he usually let on? Perhaps. I recalled a conversation I had had with him a long time ago that contradicted my opinion that he wasn't much of a reader. Bush mentioned, in response to a question, that he had just finished One Nation, Two Cultures by Gertrude Himmelfarb, an intellectual examination of the post-1960s cultural divide. There was no way he pulled that title out of the air.

Some things never change. When President Vladimir Putin of Russia came to visit him last autumn, Bush shared a memory of their first meeting in June:

"So we are getting ready to have our first press conference and I said, 'Say, I understand you have got two daughters.'

He said, 'Yes, they're teenagers.'

I said, 'I've been through that myself.'

"I said, 'Who did you name them for?' He said, 'Well, we named them for our mothers, my mother and my mother-in-law.'

I said, 'That's interesting, that's exactly what Laura and I did.'

"And I said, 'Gosh, the thing I want most in life is for those girls to be able to grow up in a free world and prosper and realise their dreams.'

He said, 'That's exactly what I hope for as well.'

"There's a lot in common, even though, between our two countries, it's a long way away. And it all starts with the human element, the thing that matters most in life and that is our faiths and our families and our respect and loves as dads for our daughters." Evasive, mundane, stuttering, sincere, sweet and, in the end, a bit platitudinous and a bit profound — it was all there, and it was all Bush.

©Frank Bruni 2002

Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W Bush by Frank Bruni is published by HarperCollins at £18.99.


TOPICS: Editorial; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
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1 posted on 04/06/2002 3:44:37 PM PST by Pokey78
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To: Pokey78
Yes, lets hear it for Jorge Bush, best freind the third world ever had. Bye America!
2 posted on 04/06/2002 4:01:35 PM PST by dead culture watch
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To: dead culture watch
You mind explaining your post? I can't make heads or tails of it.
3 posted on 04/06/2002 4:03:38 PM PST by rdb3
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To: dead culture watch
If you want people to take your off-topic rants seriously, then learn to spell friend, freind.
4 posted on 04/06/2002 4:04:12 PM PST by Friedrich Hayek
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To: Pokey78
Good read
5 posted on 04/06/2002 4:07:34 PM PST by linn37
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To: dead culture watch
Obviously your detractors do not understand the humor behind your remarks.

Me I would like a president to stand by his words.

You are either with us or against us, or I am a free trader, or CFR as currently configured is unconstitutional and I can't support it, we will have education vouchers in my education program, and if you lie to me I will never trust you.

Oh well we can dream can't we?

6 posted on 04/06/2002 4:09:21 PM PST by dts32041
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To: dts32041
You can dream all you want to, but you'll never find a beter man than George W. Bush to vote for. I have a feeling that that is what irks the crap out of you.
7 posted on 04/06/2002 4:15:50 PM PST by Howlin
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To: rdb3; rintense; deport; Miss Marple; DJ88; kayak; Carolinamom; Freedom'sWorthIt; OldFriend...
One of the Unappeasables, no doubt.
8 posted on 04/06/2002 4:17:17 PM PST by Howlin
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To: Howlin
LOL! Howlin, as I was reading your comment, your name came into my mind before I even read your name. You're the best!
9 posted on 04/06/2002 4:19:13 PM PST by looney tune
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To: Howlin
Must be because the statement certainly doesn't make sense.
10 posted on 04/06/2002 4:22:12 PM PST by rdb3
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To: dead culture watch
yeah, explain yourself. I don't quite understand what you are trying to say. Did you read the same thread?
11 posted on 04/06/2002 4:26:07 PM PST by olliemb
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To: Friedrich Hayek
Since you're comfortable being a "Spelling Nanny" on his post, I'll take the liberty of being a "Grammar Nanny" on the same - lets
12 posted on 04/06/2002 4:30:13 PM PST by Senator Pardek
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To: Pokey78
I love this president. I believe to the depth of my soul that he is where he is today because that's exactly the way God wanted it.

President Bush has an incredible effect on people, have you ever noticed it, he makes people smile. It's all around him, where-ever he goes, people just can't help smiling.

I trust him.

13 posted on 04/06/2002 4:33:03 PM PST by McGavin999
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To: Howlin
Geez, and it only took two posts for the bashing to begin. Must be a Saturday, huh?
14 posted on 04/06/2002 4:37:28 PM PST by rintense
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To: Howlin
Thanks! Good read!
15 posted on 04/06/2002 4:40:06 PM PST by hoosiermama
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To: rintense
Golly--and here I am still arguing with "Buckeroo" on that Blair/Bush live thread...
*pouring large glass of Chardonnay...it's been that kind of day
16 posted on 04/06/2002 4:44:36 PM PST by twyn1
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To: Senator Pardek
Weak riposte. Try again.
17 posted on 04/06/2002 4:44:37 PM PST by Friedrich Hayek
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To: ohioWfan;rintense
Psst...you might like it better over here.

Rin...is there going to be a Dose tonight? I'm having company for dinner so I will have difficulty joining in. However, I'm sure I can manage a peak or two.

18 posted on 04/06/2002 4:44:58 PM PST by Wphile
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To: McGavin999
Loved what you said in your #13 post! I wholeheartedly agree.
19 posted on 04/06/2002 4:48:47 PM PST by NordP
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To: twyn1
Golly--and here I am still arguing with "Buckeroo" on that Blair/Bush live thread... *pouring large glass of Chardonnay...it's been that kind of day

LOL I tried to engage Mr . Buckeroo, but I don't think he answered me yet. As to your choice of beverage, I think maybe the Pinot Grigio fits the bill for tonight for me. Gee, so many Bushwhackers lately, so little substance.
20 posted on 04/06/2002 4:50:39 PM PST by baseballmom
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