“Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush”
Author: Jon Meacham
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 836
Price: $35.00 (Hardcover)
Jon Meacham is in a small group of elite presidential biographers, the group including Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, David McCullough and a few others. He has written of the friendship of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and biographies of Thomas Jefferson, “The Art of Power,” and Andrew Jackson, “American Lion,” which won the Pulitzer Prize.
It is not surprising then, that George H. W. Bush, who has maintained a discreet and dignified silence on political matters since leaving the White House in 1993, agreed to cooperate with Meacham and sit for many hours of interviews, for this thorough, in fact ,monumental account of Bush’s private and political life, 91 years and counting.
When “Destiny and Power” was released, just a few weeks ago, the first interviews on TV were dominated by questions about Bush’s opinions of his son’s presidency and especially his remarks on Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These comments come on pages 585 to 591 of 600 pages of text.
(It was pretty clear in those first days that the TV reporters had not yet read the book itself.)
Of Bush ’43’s presidency, he admitted to discomfort with the “cowboy image” and said the rhetoric was a little too “hot”: “axis of evil” for instance. Of Cheney, he was not the same man ’41 had known, had become much more hawkish, and had, unfortunately, set up a power center of his own. Bush would never have done such a thing while serving as Vice President to Ronald Reagan.
Bush thought Rumsfeld “an unreflective hawk” who “served the President badly” and was always too arrogant; it’s clear Bush ’41 never liked him much anyway.
The other 591 pages are Bush’s own story, complex, varied, and almost entirely admirable.
Born in 1924, President ’89-’93, but it seems longer ago.
First, he has an extraordinary pedigree. The Bushes were Mayflower people, and the Walkers arrived not long after. The lineage includes Episcopal priests, bankers, iron manufacturers. George’s father, Prescott Bush, was the U.S. Senator from Connecticut.
Bush graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover on June 12th, his eighteenth birthday, joined the Navy and became probably the youngest flight officer in the Navy during WWII.
Flying a bomber off carriers in the Pacific, Bush was shot down off Chichi-Jima but rescued by a submarine on “lifeguard" duty. At war’s end, having flown the full complement of missions and been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Bush returned, married Barbara Pierce, and finished Yale in 2 ½ years: Phi Beta Kappa, Skull and Bones, captain of the baseball team.
Bush could easily have merged into the world of investment bankers, the suburban rich, but a powerful sense of noblesse oblige prevented that.
His energy, his desire to make it big and get rich on his own, fast, all combined to move him in 1948 to the oil fields of West Texas, where fortunes were being made.
It was a bold move: New Englanders rarely cross the Hudson, never mind move to Texas.
By age 26, he had his fortune and began a life of service through politics that took him to Congress, then Ambassador to the U.N., then head of the RNC, envoy to China, Director of the CIA. Although Bush at different times opposed Johnson’s war on poverty, Medicare, the civil rights bill, integration of private restaurants, the nuclear test ban treaty and admission of China to the U.N., he was never in favor with the Republican right wing.
(While still in the House he had voted for a Fair Housing Bill and he received mountains of hate mail from his Texas constituents.)
After Reagan had won the nomination and was in the process of selecting a running mate, Bush, given his extensive dossier, seemed a logical choice but was picked only after Gerald Ford declined. Ford decided, quite sensibly, that a person who had been President of the United States might not be a good fit for the number two spot.
After eight years as an unimpeachably loyal vice president, Bush took his turn.
Throughout, we see an earnest and honorable man, but Meacham does not avoid conflicts. Bush agreed to allow Lee Atwater to besmirch Michael Dukakis with the Willie Horton ads. Atwater, eventually regretting his actions, made a public apology in 1994.
Meacham explains: what you DO with political power is much more important than worrying over the niceties of getting that power. Saints don’t often run for president.
We may, wrongly, think of the Bush years as uneventful. In his calm, prudent fashion, Bush managed, so to speak, the end of the Cold War: collapse of the Soviet Union, fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification of Germany and the plot against Gorbachev, without a shot fired. Meacham reminds his readers that this was not foreordained; tensions, especially over Germany, were intense.
Leaders get less recognition for having prevented disasters than for actions taken, but Bush also prosecuted and won, quickly and efficiently, the First Gulf War. There is reason to think his ranking among presidents will rise.
Bush Sr. is a decorous man and has remained mostly silent. However, he is now 91, loosening up a little, and readers will enjoy his candid appraisals of Nancy Reagan and Dan Quayle. Bush says of Ross Perot that he “would vote for Bill Clinton in a minute before Ross Perot—I know too much about Ross Perot and his paranoia.”
Here is a footnote that catches the eye: in the spring of ’88, having won the New Hampshire primary and on his way to the nomination, Bush was seeking a running mate. He insisted on keeping his options open, but when “New York developer Donald Trump mentioned his availability as a vice presidential candidate to Lee Atwater Bush thought the overture ‘strange and unbelievable.’”
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
