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Like Queen Cersei, old King George knows that revenge is a dish that doesn’t lose its flavor when served cold. After more than a decade of publicly keeping his lips zipped, Poppy Bush took his full measure of payback in Jon Meacham’s new biography, “ Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.”
While W. used to say that what he liked about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld was their brass appendages, Poppy offered a dimmer anatomical appraisal, calling each an “iron-ass.”
He said he thought Rumsfeld served W. badly, and Rumsfeld responded with his usual charm, noting “Bush 41 is getting up in years.”
The gentlemanly 91-year-old is not going gentle into that good night. He finally spit out what he had been obsessing about privately for so long: Why did Cheney, 41’s loyal defense secretary, turn so belligerent and unilateral, “knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything and use force to get our way in the Middle East”? How did the neocons manage to push his son’s administration into pursuing their foolish agenda of refashioning the Middle East at the point of a gun?
He ultimately faults his son for the administration’s deadly embrace of Cheney and the neocons and for allowing Cheney to create his own national security apparatus, noting: “But it’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault,” adding at another point, “The buck stops there.”
Bush senior, who had been so deferential and dutiful as a vice president that he endangered his chances of being president, with George Will calling him a “lap dog,” was offended by Cheney’s White House empire-building and upset that his son let his vice president grab so much power.
A surprised W. told Meacham, “He certainly never expressed that opinion to me, either during the presidency or after.” He added that his father “would never say to me, ‘Hey, you need to rein in Cheney. He’s ruining your administration.’ It would be out of character for him to do that. And in any event, I disagree with his characterization of what was going on. I made the decisions.
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Even for a Waspy American family with scorn for introspection and a long tradition of fathers not weighing in, choosing to let their sons make their own life choices, it’s remarkable that two presidents who went to war with the same Iraqi dictator can bluntly talk to each other only through a biographer.
If only they were Italian. Maybe the father could have simply said to the son in real time: “Don’t screw this up, invade the wrong country and create a power vacuum in the Middle East. Dick’s gone nuts.”
The sad part is, they probably now agree on Cheney, whom W. has distanced himself from, and Rumsfeld, fired by W. in the second term.
Far from shrinking away from his twilight unburdening to a sympathetic biographer — even though it severely complicates life for Jeb, who is sinking in dynasty quicksand — 41 seems eager to get the belated word out. His office in Houston is helpfully sending out bulletins about where Meacham is appearing on his book tour, including a signing hosted by H.W.’s library at A&M University.
At Yale, in military service and in politics, W. chafed at his father’s shadow. He drifted, drank and became what James Baker jokingly described to Meacham as “a juvenile delinquent, damn near.” He labored under the disapproval of his father. When he sobered up and found his path in politics, he presented himself as the heir of Ronald Reagan, not his own father.
That had to hurt, but Poppy kept it to himself.
W. became president by using his dad as a reverse playbook.
That had to hurt, but Poppy kept it to himself.
In the White House, Cheney brought in his old mentor, Rumsfeld, who had schemed against Bush senior and belittled him as a flighty preppy. W. went along with Cheney and appointed his father’s nemesis defense secretary, without asking 41’s advice about it. It was like hothead Sonny Corleone going over to the Tattaglia family.
As a young man, W. once got drunk, drove back to the family home in Washington, plowed his car into a neighbor’s garbage can and then challenged his disappointed father to go “mano a mano.”
Now the father, in belatedly putting W. over his knee, has taught the son the meaning of the phrase. If only it could have happened face to face. |
