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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Bush
Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Junior Jacob
Weisberg presents an amateur psychological profile of George W. Bush in his
new book, The Bush
Tragedy. Weisberg uses a Shakespearean quote to begin each chapter. While
it remains early for history to weigh in on this presidency, Weisberg, editor
of Slate, abandons the humor he’s
used in the past (Bushisms), and attempts to take Bush seriously and reflect
on what we’ve learned about him. We read about overconfidence paired with
insecurity. We recognize the weight of his relationship with his father on
much of his life, and the ways in which his Walker family genes provide a
context for much of his behavior. Here’s an excerpt, from
the end of Chapter 3, “The Gospel of George,” pp. 104-107: It
is tempting to seek such theological threads in Bush's comments. All this
talk of God and guidance, this biblical imagery, must, we imagine, mean something, perhaps tempered to accommodate the strictures of
secular leadership. But in theological, as opposed to political and
personal, terms, it doesn't—it's mostly resonant speech-writing. Bush's idea
of divine providence had no larger significance in terms of his Methodist
faith, which rejects the Calvinist concept of predestination. In his book Heroic
Conservatism, Gerson assures us that Bush did not believe
that God was guiding his actions in any explicit way. Eventually, the
missionary found a mission and began spreading the good news of democracy
with evangelical fervor--a turn I'll examine in Chapter 6. But to look for a
theological motivation for this idea is to fall into the fallacy of thinking
that Bush's oratory is packed with more meaning than it seems to be, when it
usually contains less. To understand Bush's view of the world as driven by
religion, as opposed to dressed up in religion, is to commit the same error.
The religious aura of Bush's presidency is mostly atmospherics. Faith may
give him comfort, but it does not provide him with instructions. A
higher power did not guide Bush's response to September ii in any way that
mattered. The president's biggest decisions followed more closely the advice
of a lesser power, his vice president. Religion couldn't guide his response
because Bush's faith was a constructed persona, the projection of a chosen
identity rather than a framework for looking at the world. The more
inadequate he felt to events, the more deeply he delved into the only
religious tradition he had access to, the paltry spirituality of the recovery
movement. The Christian cowboy reached into his saddlebag and found a
painting of himself charging up a hill. There were few resources in his
intellectually shallow, self-help faith to guide the immense decisions he had
to make. With no theological grounding or genuine
framework of belief, Bush returned from his soul-searching with ecumenical
bromides that sounded like they might mean something, but mostly didn't.
After September ii, Bush sounded at moments like a religious zealot. But this was entirely
misleading. The president did not see the conflict in terms of a clash of
civilizations, but rather as one in which all well-meaning believers were on
the same side. On occasion after occasion, he praised Islam as a
"peaceful religion." And while it was his biblical and bellicose
comments that got attention, most of what Bush said in those days was
striking in its banality. Love your neighbor. Good will triumph in the end.
Have faith—any faith. Pray for whatever. God bless you all. He was zealously
proclaiming the message inside a fortune cookie. If Bush's new language was
liturgical in cadence and occasionally in reference, it was mostly political
in inspiration. One of his favorite points to make was that he wanted to be a
"consequential" leader. Left unstated was the opposition between
this and the transitional, inconsequential leader he thought his father was.
Sounding religious helped him reframe his presidency in grander, historical
terms; he needed faith to be a "war president." The first book Bush
read after the attacks was about Lincoln during the Civil War. He seemed to
see himself as part Lincoln and part Reagan—the last president he viewed as
consequential. His language reflected his notion, and that of his
speech-writers, of how Reagan had spoken to the nation as he led the country
in a great moral conflict. Reagan's single most famous comment was his
calling America's Cold War enemy the "Evil Empire." Applying the
analogy to the War on Terror, Bush now spoke a kind of evangelical
Reaganese. In personal terms, religious
language expressed how Bush thought he had to appear to the country. Like
Henry V, he seemed to think that whatever doubts he might feel in private, he
needed to play the part of the fearless leader to family, staff, and nation.
He wanted everyone to know that God was guiding him. But this was a hollow
certainty and a hollow confidence. As with his conversion by Billy Graham and
his decision to run for president, this faith narrative was a conscious
autobiographical construction. In this sense, Bush's projection of religious
assurance after September II is entirely compatible with the premeditation
evident in his earlier turn to God. To say that Bush's religious
persona is a calculated projection does not mean it
is fraudulent. For practiced politicians, the question of whether
any behavior is genuine can seldom be answered. For them, calculation and
sincerity are not opposites. The skillful leader harmonizes them, coming to
truly believe in what he thinks he needs to do to succeed. Piety, like any
other political mask, tends to become a genuine face over time. The secular misunderstanding of
Bush is that his relationship with God has turned him into a harsh man, driven
by moral certainty, and attempting to foist his evangelical views onto
others. Many of those who know Bush best see the religious influence in,
his life cutting in precisely the opposite direction. As one of the
evangelical staff members in the White House told me over lunch in the summer
of 2007, Bush's
religion has made him more genuinely humble and less absolutist in the way he
defends his views. Believing that he too is a lowly sinner, Bush learned to
be more tolerant of the faults of others. Faith has helped him repress Smirk #1, the
one that expresses contempt. And it has hardly made him into a zealot. When
it comes to spreading his religious views, Bush hasn't bothered trying to
persuade his own daughters, or his closest adviser, Karl Rove. But
if his eternal perspective improves Bush's personality, it diminishes any
ability he might otherwise have to take in ambiguity and complexity. Early in
his presidency, Bush told Senator Joe Biden, "I don't do nuance."
That line was probably spoken with self-deprecating irony (Smirk #2), but
it captures a truth about the intellectually constricting lens of his faith.
Bush rejects nuance not because he's mentally incapable of engaging with it,
but because he has chosen to disavow it. Applying a crude religious lens that
clarifies all decisions as moral choices rather than complicated trade-offs
helps him fend off the deliberation and uncertainty he identifies with his
father. But closing one's mind to complexity isn't
mere intellectual laziness; it's a fundamental evasion of freedom, God-given
or otherwise. When Henry V shakes off Falstaff, he repudiates immorality, but
at the cost of
embracing narrowness. A simple
faith frees George W from the kind of agonizing and struggle his father went
through in handling the largest questions of his presidency, and helps him
cope with the heavy burden of the job. But it comes at a tragic cost. A too
crude religious understanding has limited Bush's ability to comprehend the
world. The habit of pious simplification has undermined the Decider's
decision-making. Whether
you’re a supporter of George W. Bush or would like to forget him quickly,
reading The
Bush Tragedy will lead you think a bit more about the man and what he has
been doing. Weisberg writes some great paragraphs in this book, as noted in
the excerpt, and for those alone it’s worth reading this book. Steve
Hopkins, April 21, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Bush Tragedy.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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