Edward Morris was commissioned to write Ronald Reagan’s biography. For years, he collected material and had enough rosewood files made to fill an entire room. He examined and inspected every possible aspect of the beloved actors administration and personal life. Then he gave up. He had, he explained, not been able to get into Reagan’s secret: did Ronald Reagan play “the boy next door” or was he the real thing? Did he avoid complex terminology so that others would understand him, or was he a bit simple himself? And when he related stories from films, presenting them as factual history, did he know he was lying?
In searching for Reagan’s great secret, he lost confidence that there really was such a thing. He did end up writing the book, but he called it a novel.
A Hint of Sadism
This story will be retold in just a few days. Even after eight years of being the most powerful as well as the most watched man in the world, George W. Bush has kept his secret intact. He comes across with the same brutal briskness as he did ten years ago as an ambitious President’s son when a reporter from “Talk” magazine interviewed him in Texas.
At that time, the public was absorbed by the fate of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman since World War Two to be sentenced to death in Texas. The reporter and Bush, who as Governor held the power of life and death over Tucker, talked of the case. Tucker had appeared the previous evening on the “Larry King” television show. The reporter, who had not seen the King show, asked Bush what Tucker had said. “Well, what would she say,” Bush answered by pursing his lips to imitate a woman and whimpering, “Please don’t kill me.”
The reporter later asked his television audience how he should have reacted to that exchange. Should he have played the hopeless good guy and latter-day hippie and been outraged by the mockery of a death row inmate or should he have laughed along with Bush in the hope that this brief display of tastelessness would later be compensated for by a nobler sentiment? In any case, Bush rejected any change in his lifelong support for the death penalty and Karla Faye was executed. This brief scene ten years ago revealed the true George Bush: the cold humor and the readiness to bravely end other peoples’ lives, even against public consensus. Where Reagan displayed a sunny disposition that clearly illuminated his negative side in such a way that no one could dislike him personally, in countless stories about George Bush there wafts a slight breeze of sadism that chills people and begs the question of whether the man was really all there.
The noted American author Nora Ephron saw the psychopathological dimension of this question more clearly than most political correspondents did in her article entitled “What’s Eating George Bush?” Political correspondents are obliged to maintain a sense of relevance and rationality when writing about their protagonists. Ephron witnessed the key moment of the Bush years that has almost been forgotten: on May 11th 2005, a private airplane violated the no-fly zone around Washington and approached the capitol. The Secret Service quickly cleared the White House and escorted Dick Cheney and Laura Bush to an underground bunker. The President was not present; he was bicycling in Maryland. The point that so fascinated Nora Ephron was the fact that Bush was made aware of the situation only after the danger had already passed.
His wife had been whisked away to a bunker during an emergency and that wasn’t sufficient reason to interrupt the President’s workout? Ephron suspects that Bush’s obsession with physical exertion is rooted in his struggle with depression that often affects alcoholics. And on that day in May, those around Bush decided to give the physical exertion a chance to work its effects on Bush before he was confronted with the upsetting news.
Later that same year, Bush retreated to his ranch for several weeks and was returning from his vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Bush reacted to this situation, by no means unusual for heads of state, as if he were under heavy medication, irritated and hesitating and as Ephron described it “as if he were under water.” She suspects his doctors had been adjusting him to new medication during his vacation.
This past summer sealed Bush’s political fate: not the Iraq war, but his protracted response to the natural catastrophe in New Orleans is what caused his loss of stature among Republicans. At his final press conference last week he addressed that period and explained why he had just flown over New Orleans rather than stopping there. Landing Air Force One there, he said, would have diverted so many traffic cops to his entourage that the press would have had something new to complain about. The fact that the agency responsible was incapable of action because it was led by a political hack with experience only in the horse breeding industry wasn’t mentioned. The fact that government coordination of emergency assistance in general was completely miserable wasn’t mentioned. The substantial criticism directed at him by most observers, including Republican presidential candidate John McCain, wasn’t mentioned.
Nora Ephron’s article published in the “Huffington Post” broke a unique taboo, but Bush’s supporters may be able to use it to their advantage under the heading “mental incapacity.” Bush’s departure is merely a political event; legally, accountability during the Bush era will only be established over years, perhaps even decades, to come. Numerous laws protect the president and vice-president of the United States, as well as other former government officials, from legal prosecution after they leave office. Because of that fact, many judges in other parts of the world may feel obligated to entertain lawsuits filed against them.
Families of victims killed in poorly planned military action or deliberately by police or military action would be entitled to legal redress, just as would the many innocent individuals incarcerated without trial and tortured in American prisons. There may be thousands of legal claims in this regard, so there will be ample opportunity for discussion about guilt or innocence.
A Universal Failure
Now is also the time to read the Bush years as a bizarre educational novel describing how the public learned the reality of politics. On election night 2000, I was sitting in the CNN newsroom in Atlanta as a silent witness to the proceedings. It made little difference to anyone there whether Al Gore, a moderate liberal and business-friendly proponent of the “Third Way” moved into the White House, or whether a moderate Republican and proponent of “compassionate conservatism” did. The rhythm of life was determined by the economy and the events on Wall Street; the republic was made up of more or less well functioning subsystems that required little more than the occasional appearance of a master of ceremonies at a Washington holiday event.
None of that survived Bush; not one single functional element of the former superpower, nothing of symbolic Western goodwill and certainly not the basic trust in government and markets. More thoroughly than “Ton Steine Scherben” could have ever imagined, Bush destroyed everything he wished to destroy.* The Erfurt-based political scientist Dietmar Herz said, in total astonishment, “There is no area of politics where the Bush administration didn’t fail.” In the end, he also destroyed the office he held. Stubbornness or inability – intention or pathology? Here we again have the central question of the post-Bush era: too little oversight of financial markets under Bush led to the crisis that will prevent Obama from implementing his policies, at least as planned. There appears to be little chance to implement his much-wanted tax cuts. But does Bush even realize what he has done? The clearest statement he’s made concerning the financial meltdown to date was, “Sorry ‘bout that.”
Overwhelmed by the Office
When things settle down, George Bush’s secret will often be the subject of much contemplation. Everywhere in the world there’s this childish wish that such an important job as president will only be filled by someone up to the task. But what happens if that’s not the case? Sometime in the middle of his first term, perhaps even earlier, he must have realized that the job was far too big for him. But then came the battle for re-election, the long-desired second term. Ephron says it brought along a pit into which George Bush fell and from which he was never able to escape.
The public with its regressive inattention and its propensity to hope for the best, believing that everything would turn out OK, made it too easy for Bush. Just as the reporter who avoided a direct confrontation with Bush by neglecting to ask why he thought it appropriate to mock a woman pleading for her life, too many diplomats, officials and reporters gave tacit approval to Bush’s plans just because they came from above. And only others would have to die.
*Translators Note: Ton Steine Scherben was one of Germany’s most influential rock bands in the ‘70s and ‘80s, known for left-wing radical music
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