Bush on The American Experience

Part 2.

George Herbert Walker Bush is strangely remembered as a good President. One reason is obvious: anyone standing next to his son George W. is bound to look good. But another reason is the forgiveness we offer over time to celebrities, drunks and Presidents of the United States. Nixon, for instance, went from utter disgrace to a reputation of "good at foreign policy" or "he just got caught doing what they all do." Jimmy Carter, the everyman's candidate in '76, but repudiated four years later by a 10 to 1 electoral vote spread, is now revered as an American moral example.

Another reason, as I wrote earlier, is that worshipful biographies like Austin Hoyt's from The American Experience: The Presidents give Bush an uncritical free pass. His life becomes exemplary in this program, a man whose vision and values heroically tussle with the uncouth realities of an unenlightened world. In the end, he's a guy like you and me, only better. Obviously—he could not possily have become President otherwise.

The problem with such a shallow portrait, in Nixon's case, is that the destructiveness of his years in office can be sidestepped. Fortunately, there is enough in the public record to keep such a whitewash at bay: Nixon was a venal man whose ambitions were unsatisfied even as Leader of the Free World. It's safe to say that Nixon, even had he wiped away all opposition, would still have been unsatisfied. For a guy like Carter, a rhapsodic biography as Bush got on The American Experience would emphasize his high character, but probably overlook his inability to organize an effective executive team and act, an unfortunate side effect of moral nobility.

There are two troubles, then, with Austin Hoyt's hagiography passing as portrait. First, it glosses over Bush's weaknesses as President; second, it gives him an aura of goodness that he simply does not have. He was a wholly deficient President, dismissed like Carter after a failed term. And he is a man who gleefully bathes in the blood of innocents, and has throughout his grownup life.

Bush came to the Presidency after a sterling career of appointments. He was elected to Congress in the early 60s as a moderate Republican—meaning, in those years, business friendly, spend a little on infrastructure and resist Civil Rights at all costs. To his credit, Bush challenged his constituency when he voted for open housing; he turned a livid public meeting in his Texas district completely around by appealing to their sense of fairness and modernity, no small feat in the Jim Crow South. Nevertheless, his Presidency was won in 1988 by appealing to the very same intrinsic racism he poetically waved away in the 1960s. His "Willie Horton" ad continued the scurrilous tradition of coding racism within capaign messages. Plainly, Bush's plea for racial equanimity 20 years earlier was not sincere. If it was, that basic decency was trashed in 1988.

In 1970, Bush gambled away a secure House seat to run for the Senate at Nixon's urging, and as Nixon's man. He lost, but was made Ambassador to the United nations, then Chairman of the RNC (responsible for fundraising and getting others elected). When one juxtaposes his devotion to Nixon in one circumstance, and to Johnson in the Civil Rights cause, one wonders about Bush's predilection for pleasing men in power. During Gerald Ford's 15 minutes in office, Bush was sent to China, then headed the CIA while a Senate investigation punished it for spying on Americans. Bush's first-hand experience as Director probably helped his descendants reinvigorate illegal spying on domestic targets.

When in the 1980 Republican primaries it became clear that Ronald Reagan would be the party's champion, Bush as Reagan's loudest critic became his running mate instead and served Reagan with devotion for the next eight years. If for position or security, or because of his penchant for serving Presidents, Bush was continuing to get as close to the top as he could. This had served Gerald Ford well: it could serve an observant Bush in turn.

As Commander-in-Chief, Bush rounded up a coalition of world partners to turn back the "naked aggression" of Saddam Hussein's Kuwait invasion. Conversely, after young activists in Tiananman Square had demanded democratic reforms, embraced an American model of government and even erected a statue of liberty in homage to ours, they were steamrolled in the middle of the night by a totalitarian Chinese government.

Bush's response was total silence—not a word of acknowledgement of the movement, nor of regret over the loss of life. As a former (momentary) envoy to China, Bush insisted that allowing the murder of an organic democracy movement in a totalitarian state was the best response for all concerned. Within weeks, Bush family operative Brent Scowcroft was sent to Beijing to toast fascists in the name of the American people.

The tally: On one hand, a moralised world response to a small-scale economic skirmish; on the other hand, a secret and supportive response to the immoral, wanton murder of people begging to ally with our ideology and traditions. More simply, oil tussle expanded to world event; tectonic shift in human history averted. This in brief is the Presidency of George Herbert Waker Bush.

But the life in brief of George Herbert Waker Bush is more...well, ordinary, thus more purely evil. The "banality of evil" thesis is that great evils are not generally executed by sociopaths, but by regular people who accept certain basic truths and do horrible things with the view that their actions are normal. Germans in the Nazi era, for instance, went along with atrocities because they were simply following orders. This thesis works aptly in Bush's case, and is supported by Hoyt's mash note to him in The American Experience. Bush was born an aristocrat and therefore above the law just enough, because laws don't exist to limit aristocrats: laws exist in the main to protect aristocrats from ordinary folks. When and if ordinary folks attain aristocracy, they too will enjoy immunity from limitation. So in essence, aristocrats like Bush have no legal restraints on them, except those agreed upon amongst themselves.

Now to be fair, spending one's life in such a protective zone as this might preclude understanding it as unequal, as privileged. But all these cats do go to good schools and get classical educations, where the great questions and concepts of the world are studied. They know what they're doing. So in this entitled sphere, being better than you is simply how it is when you wake up each day as Bush.

In this sphere, then, it is not cynical to appeal to the patriotism and racism of the masses because these are simply fuels that power voting behaviors. What ordinary people do and think is simply the landscape in which Bushes work through their lives, activate their higher calling. Using Willie Horton ads, or emphasizing oil wars over deomocracy movements is the means of doing business. Advancing the interests of the Bush family is automatically in the best interests of the United States, because, well, they're Bushes and that's that.

There's your banality of evil—just doing business. This is why George Herbert Walker Bush has no compunction about allowing his son to become President of the United States, even while it's clear that the son is retarded. Because even as that son destroys the known world, there is world enough left for Bushes and their kin to inhabit. Comfortably, too.

Bush was an ineffectual President because he had too little talent. He is an historical monster because he is unable to see the cruelty and irresponsibility in standing by while a fool has dismantled America. Bush could not have been a good President, even if he were a good person, and he cannot be a great person because he was President. He does not understand the humanity in people he sees as a lesser species, really, whether through his upbringing or through some other callousness. He has allowed the greatest tragedy in modern history, the Presidency of George W. Bush, by not ably fathering son or country.

There is nobility in a father sacrificing the world for his child. But that nobility comes from recognizing the consequences and taking the punishment. George W. Bush became President because his father ignored the obvious consequences of his son's incapacities. Likely seeing the world as belonging to the child, George Herbert Walker Bush demonstrated his utter disregard for basic citizenship. He has taken no punishment—indeed, pap like Hoyt's veers in the opposite direction. It's probable that Bush's eulogy, like Gerald Ford's, will salute an exemplary life thanks to efforts like Hoyt's.

When so many fathers have sacrificed their sons for the country, George Herbert Walker Bush sacrificed the country for an idiot son. If a statesman, as Bush has styled himself, there is no greater crime.

Bush on American Experience

Part 1.
On PBS last week, the American Experience series on "the Presidents" did their bit on George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President of the United States (1989-93). It was the very worst of PBS—shmaltz honoring a man who is infamous for his conscious efforts to debase our political culture to the benefit of his own family.

The whole two night piece cast Bush as a heroic figure, the sort of guy who easily fell into leadership because of his natural charm and superior talents. This may have been true for the schoolboy, but the man Bush more likely benefited from his pedigree.

The blue-chip Bush family was headed by George's father Prescott; industrialist, Wall St. banker and nazi regime investor. His dealings with Hitler's Germany were 86'd in 1942 by the Trading With the Enemy Act. Earlier that year, "On his eighteenth birthday, January 12, 1942," Tom Wicker writes, George "was sworn into the U.S. Navy, in a speedup program to train flyers. After earning his wings in less than a year, he became the youngest aviator in the navy."

Bush flew a lot of missions and was decorated, but his whole political career was about connections, not talents, and I can't help but wonder if his commission at 18 was not related to his father's social position and that dicey business with the nazis.

Bush became a successful oil man in Texas after the war. His son George W. followed that lead but was a "duster," a guy who couldn't strike oil. Was it luck that distinguished the two men, or talent? Maybe neither: oil is found by diligent scientific work, acquiring lands and rights and such. In the late 40s and early 50s, these components were possibly easier to assemble than in the late 70s, and the younger Bush's propensity for bungling everything is a matter of record indeed. But I believe that the elder Bush was able to assemble a successful business with good contacts because he had money and youth and the post-war might of "Wise Men" political culture. American Experience, though, glosses Bush's oil career as momentary good fortune that most importantly shaped his political ambitions.

These ambitions were portrayed by Producer and Writer Austin Hoyt as the forward motion of a family dedicated to national public service. This dedication was the hallmark of the economic lords Hoyt terms, "Wise Men." Generally, the careers of these stewards of American finacial culture include some time on Wall St. before grandly taking the reins of American public life. But the sage leadership Hoyt depicts cannot overcome basic contradictions in the record of men like the Bushes. Like, how is it wise and selfless public service to maintain investments in Nazi Germany for over two years after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain? How is the interest of these men in running the government, thus the economy, congruent with running finance? Why is it selfless and wise to be in charge of everything, rather than selfless and wise to remain free of the burdens of power?

I have to think that it is banal ambition, borne of aristocratic superiority, that motivates these men to wealth; to pedigrees closed to common people; to control of the economic destinies of anonymous millions, and then control of the social destiny of the entire national community. These "Wise Men" are obliged to control the world: it's what they do. It's the tradition passed from monarchy to plutocracy.

Hoyt's and PBS's Bush is a man of pure grace who was about to enter a world of command that would challenge that grace. Through it all, according to this yarn, Bush's greatest struggles were ultimately those involving his inate nobility.

I am much less enamored of this monster. As a counterweight to Hoyt's teary praise, I feel the greatest challenge to Bush was to maintain his privileged footing in the tug between larger human forces and the fortunes of his family.