A New Biography Says George W. Bush Really Was the Decider

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/books/review/george-w-bush-biography-by-jean-edward-smith.html

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BUSHBy Jean Edward SmithIllustrated. 808 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.

It’s an axiom of American politics that presidents become more popular once they are ex-presidents. Admittedly, George W. Bush had nowhere to go but up. With two months left in his second term, Bush’s approval rating sat at an abysmal 25 percent, just one point higher than Richard Nixon’s during Watergate. On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when a Marine helicopter ferried the outgoing president away from the United States Capitol, many in the crowd serenaded him with chants of “Bye-bye Bush!” and “Go home to Texas!”

Then the predictable happened. Bush’s absence from public life made Americans’ hearts for him grow fonder. Out of the spotlight, he busied himself painting oil portraits of family pets and world leaders; when he did dip his toe into political waters, it was for laudable and uncontroversial causes like fighting AIDS and malaria in Africa. His poll numbers began their inexorable climb. By June of last year, Bush’s favorability rating was 52 percent — higher than Obama’s at the time. His younger brother, Jeb, started his ill-fated 2016 presidential run with the declaration, “I am my own man.” But by the end of Jeb’s run, he was appearing alongside Dubya at rallies. Although Jeb’s fraternal Hail Mary ultimately fell short, his older brother’s re-emergence on the campaign trail only served to confirm that, fewer than eight years after being hounded from the White House, George W. Bush had become a less polarizing, fairly popular, at times even lovable figure.

Readers of the presidential historian Jean Edward Smith’s mammoth new biography, “Bush,” will surely be cured of this political amnesia. Smith — who has written biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower — is unsparing in his verdict on our 43rd president. “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush,” Smith writes in the first sentence of the preface. And then he gets harsh.

In Smith’s clipped retelling of his subject’s early years, Bush was an unaccomplished, callow son of privilege who cashed in on his family’s connections for everything from his admission to Yale to his avoidance of Vietnam. Quoting Bush’s tautological explanation of his wasted youth — “When I was young and irresponsible, I behaved young and irresponsibly” — Smith concludes, “That pretty well says it all.” Being Texas governor “was scarcely a full-time job,” and his 2000 victory in the presidential race owed as much to the ineptness of his Democratic opponent, Al Gore — who “came across as wooden and self-­important” — as it did to Bush’s “ease on the campaign trail.”

None of this prepared Bush for the gravity of the responsibilities he would face as president, Smith argues, and time and again Bush failed to meet the challenges of the office. “His initial response to the subprime mortgage meltdown was similar to his initial response to Hurricane Katrina,” Smith writes. “He watched it happen.” Bush promoted incompetent yes-men and yes-women — “people who knew the president, had worked closely with him and were prepared to do his bidding” — to key posts in his administration, whether it was making Alberto Gonzales his attorney general or trying (and failing) to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court. Even Bush’s speeches are subjected to Smith’s — and, by extension, history’s — withering judgment: “Bush’s second Inaugural Address must rank as one of the most ill-considered of all time.”

And then, of course, there’s Iraq. Just as the war ultimately consumed much of Bush’s presidency, so does it consume much of “Bush,” as Smith offers an exhaustive, excruciating autopsy of the American invasion and its bloody aftermath. “Unfamiliar with the rules and norms of the world beyond America’s borders” and “smitten with his role as commander in chief,” Smith writes, Bush committed “easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

And Smith makes clear that in his considered opinion it was Bush’s decision. He pins Iraq — and every other Bush failure — on the president and the president alone. Although Bush has often been portrayed as the puppet of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove or some other offstage figure, Smith argues that in the Bush administration, Bush was — to a degree unusual even for a president — the ultimate authority. Or, as he liked to think of himself, he was “the decider.” He empowered confidants like Condoleezza Rice, first as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, who “sought to provide Bush with what made him most comfortable,” and if his advisers gave him reasoned analysis instead of the comfort he craved, he simply ignored them in favor of his own gut. It was Bush, after all, who in his “Mission Accomplished” speech on the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln announced, without consulting the Pentagon or State Department, that he intended to bring democracy to Iraq. Just as it was Bush who, after that decision proved disastrous, “short-circuited the military chain of command” by reorganizing the staff of the National Security Council so that David Petraeus could communicate directly with the president rather than having to go through his immediate superiors. “Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt,” Smith concludes, “had White House decision-making been so personalized.”

Smith’s theory about Bush’s “personalization of presidential power” sometimes leads him to let other administration officials off the historical hook. He portrays Cheney, for instance, as merely a devoted helpmate whose attempt to take command of the response to 9/11 was “not a power grab” but a “good faith” offer that was “a reflection of the president’s unfamiliarity with the issues.” Donald Rumsfeld is forgiven his swaggering arrogance: While Smith heaps scorn on Bush’s bellicose statements, comparing them at one point to those of “a mid-20th-century European dictator,” he writes that the secretary of defense only “unwittingly exacerbated” tensions with France and Germany when he dismissively referred to them as “old Europe.”

Perhaps Smith is more charitable to Cheney and Rumsfeld because, unlike Bush, they granted him interviews. (Bush canceled an interview on the grounds that Smith had once written a critical book about his father, the 41st president.) But it seems that neither man told Smith anything revelatory. Indeed, Smith’s biography of Bush unearths little new information on its subject. Most of “Bush” relies on previous books by journalists like Peter Baker, Robert Draper and Bob Woodward or the memoirs of key figures including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush himself. Nonetheless, Smith is an able synthesizer who weaves together a readable if often workmanlike narrative out of these sources.

More important, despite his unremittingly negative assessment, Smith is neither a partisan nor a polemicist; he’s a historian and his conclusions carry weight. When, toward the end of “Bush,” he allows that his subject “may not have been America’s worst president,” the act of charity stings far worse than his cruelest barbs. It also strikes an ironic note, since, given the state of the 2016 campaign, it’s now depressingly easy to imagine a president worse than George W. Bush.