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The Book on Bush - The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush - Book Review
National Review, Feb 24, 2003 by Lou Cannon
The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, by David Frum (Random House, 303 pp., $25.95)
Four decades ago, former White House speechwriter Emmett Hughes caused a stir in Washington with a thoughtful memoir of the Eisenhower presidency called The Ordeal of Power. The book was reflective and respectful; it was a sensation because Hughes had violated a prevailing taboo by writing candidly about the president. Former White House aides were then the Washington equivalent of indentured servants: If they wrote memoirs-and most didn't-they were expected to extol the virtues of the president they had served. The model of the hagiographic genre was Roosevelt and Hopkins, a worshipful memoir by the playwright Robert Sherwood, an intimate of President Franklin Roosevelt.
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When the presidency plummeted in public esteem after Vietnam and Watergate, the genre disintegrated. Beginning with Lyndon Johnson, former officials distanced themselves from their presidents in attempts to salvage their own reputations (think Robert McNamara) or bolster their bank accounts. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter were pilloried, psychoanalyzed, and patronized by ex-aides in ways that Eisenhower would have found unimaginable. Ronald Reagan restored order to the presidency but not the genre. "Kick-and-tell" memoirs, to use Kenneth Adelman's phrase, flourished during the Reagan years and continued through the Bush and Clinton presidencies. Their recurrent theme was that [Name of President] had failed the nation because he was not wise enough to follow the advice of his former aide, the author (think David Stockman or George Stephanopoulos).
David Frum's memoir of the early presidency of George W. Bush is a welcome throwback. He does for Bush what Hughes did for Eisenhower, which is to assess his suitability for the presidency in terms of character, temperament, and vision. Bush admires Eisenhower: He put a picture of Ike on the wall in the cabinet room and a bronze bust of him in the Oval Office. As Frum sees it, "Eisenhower represented the kind of president that Bush wanted to be-a leader above party, a leader who drew his power from personal authority." Bush also was determined to make nonpartisanship work. He named a Democrat to his cabinet, attended Democratic congressional retreats, and declined to criticize Democrats by name.
This spirit of nonpartisanship is genuine, but Frum thinks it led Bush astray. He specifically blames it for the "fiasco" of Bush's half-baked energy policy, bipartisan only in the sense that it infuriated everyone. Hughes reached a similar conclusion about Eisenhower's bipartisanship. Democrats took advantage of his decency, and bipartisanship undermined his attempts to rejuvenate the Republican party.
For both presidents, however, character trumps political deficiencies. Ike, said Hughes, "gave uncompromising scorn to all temptations of expediency." Bush, says Frum, has been "dauntless, far-seeing, and consistent" in standing up to terrorism. But up close, again like Ike, Bush is not as pleasant as he seems to outsiders. Frum finds him "tart, not sweet," a welcome exception to the "White House code of niceness."
Then there is the theme of Bush's alleged dim-wittedness, standard fodder for comedians. As a writer who has spent a chunk of his career trying to explain that Ronald Reagan really was intelligent but in a different way from other politicians, I am sympathetic to Frum's valiant struggle on this score. Bush has a poor memory for figures (unlike Reagan). In every conversation, he makes "at least one jaw- droppingly candid remark-a brutally frank assessment of some foreign leader or an expression of doubt about some program to which he is publicly committed." Nonetheless, and very much like Reagan, Bush is focused on large goals. "Bush was not a lightweight," Frum writes. "He was, rather, a very unfamiliar type of heavyweight. Words often failed him, his memory sometimes betrayed him, but his vision was large and clear. And when he perceived new possibilities, he had the courage to act."
Bush's courage and resolve were apparent to the nation in the grim days after 9/11. His "great gift" to America in this crisis, Frum writes, was calm and self-restraint. "He seemed to feel not the rage that the rest of the country felt, but the quiet determination he knew it ought to feel. He made it clear to his writers that he would pronounce no words of vengeance or anger. When he spoke off-the-cuff, he again and again paraphrased the commandment of Romans 12:21: 'Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.'"
Bush's interpretation of this maxim caused some foot shuffling at both ends of the ideological spectrum. The Left fretted about a loss of civil liberties, while the Right suspected that Bush was naive about Islamic anti-Americanism. Bush was concerned about the possibility of hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11 and expressed this after his visit to a Washington mosque: "Those who feel they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don't represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind." But the president backed legislation that expanded the power of the federal government to arrest people on suspicion, and most of those detained were Muslims. Bush also agreed to freeze the assets of the nation's largest Muslim charity because of its record of supporting the terrorist group Hamas. "In the end," Frum writes, "Bush was simultaneously generous and respectful toward the Islamic faith and unillusioned about and unwilling to appease domestic Muslim organizations. Some critics on the Right thought that the second set of impulses conflicted with the first. Many on the Left thought that the first was nothing more than a cynical cover for the second. Bush never understood why he could not honor both impulses at the same time."
