The True Believer

I wondered why W plucked John Ashcroft out of the trashbin of history (Ashcroft had lost his Senate reelection bid to a dead man.) and made him Attorney General fo the United States. Now, I know why: both of these guys are born-again evangelicals. Ashcroft—son of an Assemblies of God pastor and ordained himself—and W (born-again Methodist teetotaler) are soulmates. They speak in the same code. They are both of the Christian Right. They are both in the Christian Right. These folks are humorless and unbending in their rectitude. With 4 more years of W, there is no telling how many monuments to the 10 Commandments will be installed throughout the United States. If this is (fair & balanced) affright, so be it.

FATHERS AND SONS
by DAVID GREENBERG
George W. Bush and his forebears.

Moments after enemy fire punctured the fuselage, smoke filled the cockpit of George Herbert Walker Bush’s plane, the Barbara III. The twenty-year-old Navy pilot and his two-man crew had not yet carried out their mission, which was to bomb the island of Chichi Jima. But the plane was plummeting, and flames were nearing the fuel tank. Finally, the payload was dropped, and Bush ordered his crewmen, Ted White and John Delaney, to bail. Hearing no reply, he jumped out himself—pulling the parachute’s rip cord early and banging his head on the plane, but recovering in time to hit the water safely. Swimming to an emergency life raft that had opened with his jump, he waited to be rescued. Around him, in the swells of the Pacific, White and Delaney were nowhere to be seen. “I cannot get the thought of those two boys out of my mind,” Bush confessed years later.

In 1999, Bush celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by jumping out of another airplane. (He jumped again last month, to celebrate his eightieth.) This time, he forgot to pull the rip cord; fortunately, another jumper had the presence of mind to do it for him. On landing, the former President was euphoric. Some noted echoes: it seemed that the birthday display of bravura had allowed him to revisit, perhaps even master, his Second World War trauma.

If George H. W. Bush had long viewed that wartime episode with dismay, his son George W. had always viewed it with awe. According to “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty” (Doubleday; $27.95), an admiring history of the family by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, George Walker Bush, as a child, had leafed through photograph albums of his father in uniform and stolen glimpses of his medals. “I want to be a fighter pilot because my father was,” Bush told Colonel Walter (Buck) Staudt, of the Texas Air National Guard, in 1968, and Staudt helped the new Yale graduate leapfrog the waiting list to enter the pilot program. Four months later, young Bush pulled off a neat trick for a draft-age man during the Vietnam War: he had his second-lieutenant wings, yet he faced almost no risk of having to go and fight. The only price was that he took home no medals like his father’s.

Three decades later, on May 1, 2003, George W. landed in an S-3B Viking jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, where he delivered a speech hailing the end of “major combat” in Iraq. For most of his life, he had followed in his father’s footsteps—Andover, Yale, military flying, the oil business, politics—only to come up short at each milepost. The father prospered when his company, Zapata Petroleum Corporation, struck oil in seventy-one Texas wells in 1953 and 1954; when the son, at roughly the same age, formed his own firm, Arbusto, not even infusions of family cash could keep it from tumbling into debt. “I’m all name and no money,” he said after it foundered. But last year, when he strode triumphant on the carrier deck, no one could dispute that, by chasing Saddam Hussein from his Baghdad palace, the son had finished one job his father had left undone.

Along with the Schweizers’ book, Kevin Phillips’s “American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush” (Viking; $25.95) and Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties” (Scribner; $26) seek to place the incumbent’s policies in the context of family traits. The word “dynasty,” readers will note, appears in all three titles, likening the son’s Presidency to a monarchical restoration, and all the authors draw lines of continuity between the two Bush Presidencies.

Phillips, taking the notion of dynasty literally, compares the Bushes to the Stuarts of Britain and the Bourbons of France, and warns that George W.’s assumption of the Presidency so soon after his father’s term—with Jeb Bush in the wings—could establish a family succession that would traduce America’s republican traditions. This dark prophecy is, to say the least, premature. The Bushes have held power for just seven and a half years, in the middle of which came eight years of the decidedly unaristocratic Bill Clinton. Compared with, say, the Kennedys, who have influenced state and national politics for half a century, the Bush clan has hardly earned the label “dynasty.” The family reign could well amount to two one-term Presidencies.

What really rankles Phillips, it’s clear, is the notion that a patrician class, as embodied by the Bush family, has come to dominate the Republican Party again. Some would argue, of course, that this moneyed élite never lost its grip on the G.O.P. But Phillips made his name trying to steer the Party in a populist direction. His first book, “The Emerging Republican Majority” (1969), outlined how the G.O.P. could capitalize on what he called “a populist revolt of the American masses who have been elevated by prosperity to middle-class status and conservatism . . . against the caste, policies and taxation of the mandarins of Establishment liberalism.” During the Reagan years, though, he began taking aim at the Republi-cans, whom he blamed for exacerbating economic inequality. For Phillips, the Bushes—steeped in family money, committed to regressive economics, and convinced that high public office is a virtual birthright—personify the Party’s worst tendencies.

That George W. grew up in Midland, Texas, and not Greenwich, Connecticut, shouldn’t deceive anyone, Phillips argues. He and Unger both remind us that Midland, in the fifties, was an affluent village populated by the oil-prospecting sons of Northeastern businessmen. City leaders named roads after Ivy League schools. Although George W. has boasted, in touting his common origins, of having attended San Jacinto Junior High School, his one year there was followed by stints at Houston’s tony Kinkaid School and at Andover. George W.’s Everyman act is more persuasive than his father’s, but it’s no less of an act. Indeed, Phillips sees the affectation of ordinariness as a signal Bush family trait. When the Schweizers look for such traits, they discover benign qualities like a gift for making friends, a bantering humor, a love of sports. But Phillips sees only the trappings of privilege. In his telling, for example, the premium that the Bushes place on personal loyalty issues from the exclusivity of the old-boy network; their playful antics derive from the ethos of the country-club locker room.

These family traits go way back. At the turn of the last century, both of George H. W. Bush’s grandfathers found themselves a place in the so-called Eastern establishment. Both parlayed great fortunes into national and global influence. His mother’s father, George Herbert (Bert) Walker, the son of a successful drygoods wholesaler, multiplied his family riches after he became president of the Wall Street investment house W. A. Harriman & Co. George H. W. Bush’s father’s father, Samuel Prescott Bush, a railroad-equipment executive during the steel-industry boom, was less wealthy than Bert Walker, but he nonetheless earned a handsome living. Samuel’s son, Prescott, became, at thirty-five, a managing partner at his father-in-law’s firm, after its 1931 merger with Brown Brothers, the old-line investment-banking company.

The Bushes and the Walkers cultivated friendships, deals, and political alliances that allowed them both to exert power and to make profits in the key sectors of the emerging military-industrial complex: finance, armaments, and, later, energy. In the mid-forties, when Prescott helped fund a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the spy organization staffed and run by his Ivy League associates, the worlds of intelligence and national security opened to the Bush family. In 1950, he ran for the Senate, and lost, but he was elected two years later, and electoral politics opened up to the Bushes, too.

To Prescott and his set, there was nothing presumptuous about running for high office without any political experience. The example of their fathers taught them that they were born to lead. It was a sense of family prerogative that both Prescott’s son and grandson inherited. The elder George had served only briefly as a Republican Party county chairman in Texas before running for the Senate in 1964; he lost his first race, too, before winning a House seat in 1966. The younger George, for his part, was struggling in the oil business when he first ran, also unsuccessfully, for Congress, in 1978.

For George H. W. Bush, as for Prescott, this sense of noblesse oblige was accompanied by a conception of politics and foreign affairs as matters for gentlemen to work out around the table or over drinks, and for most of his career he excelled by hewing to this ethic. Never a dazzling campaigner, he rose politically through a series of appointive offices—Ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China, head of the C.I.A.—in which he built friendships and mastered diplomacy. For all his foreign-policy experience, though, Bush never established or refined a set of principles on international affairs. Instead, he developed what Richard Ben Cramer has aptly called an “ideology of friendship.” Loyalty and personal relationships substituted for what Bush once, in frustration, dismissed as “the vision thing.”

During the first Gulf War, the politics of personal relationships served Bush well, helping him assemble the coalition that expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. At other times, however, he was led astray by his expectation that Americans would defer to élites. One contribution of Craig Unger’s book is to remind us of how much the elder Bush was a product of a bygone establishment—hence his engagement, as Vice-President and as President, in covert arms swaps and financial trades. “He knew the style, the diction,” Unger quotes Howard Teicher, a Reagan Administration official, as saying. “He was good at having diplomatic discussions. But he could be swayed by personal relationships with foreign leaders.” In addition to his role in the Iran-Contra affair, Bush, in what came to be called “Iraqgate,” secretly helped Saddam Hussein obtain weapons, loans, and military intelligence in his war against Iran. In the same category, Phillips adds Bush’s Christmas Eve pardons of several key Iran-Contra figures just before he left the White House. Whatever crimes these gentlemen committed, Bush’s pardons implied, they did them for honorable reasons and should be protected from undue scrutiny.

Like his father, George W. Bush is secretive about his policymaking in a way that can suggest a blithe sense of class entitlement. Often, in fact, he seems contemptuous of popular accountability. More than his father, he refuses to acknowledge dissenting views or offer explanations for his actions. Unwanted questions are brusquely waved away. Compromise is scorned.

One result has been an impression of a strong leader and a man of firm convictions—no wishy-washy compromiser like his father. But his political style also carries risks. Even apart from the disputed election of 2000, George W.’s career had led many people to view him as undeserving of the Presidency, at least as judged by the American ideals of equal opportunity and meritocracy. The invasion of Iraq, launched hurriedly and for what seemed (at least in part) to be personal reasons, has amplified those doubts. Whatever his other motives, a family grudge helped drive his decision. He repeatedly called Saddam Hussein “the guy who tried to kill my dad”; more broadly, George W. and his advisers, many of them veterans of his father’s councils, appeared to be using their power to complete the father’s agenda. According to Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack,” Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had served the elder Bush as Defense Secretary during the 1991 Gulf War, “harbored a deep sense of unfinished business about Iraq.” More than anything else, it is this use of Presidential power for private or family purposes that has encouraged the current talk about dynasty.

But a dynastic sense of “unfinished business,” though it may have partly motivated the Iraq war, doesn’t explain why George W. has waged it with an abandon wholly uncharacteristic of his father. Indeed, the differences between the Bush Administrations now loom larger than the continuities. Brashness, for example, isn’t a quality associated with the elder Bush, who always displayed the ingrained modesty of the old establishment. Politically, he was self-effacing to a fault. When the Berlin Wall fell and his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, urged him to make a speech, Bush seemed puzzled. “The last thing I want to do is brag about winning the Cold War,” he said. The trait could bleed into opportunism, too: he swallowed his pro-choice record and his scorn for “voodoo economics” (a phrase he coined) when Reagan tendered him the Vice-Presidential slot, in 1980.

George W. showed little of his father’s caution as he barrelled ahead with his controversial appointments and extravagant tax cuts, convinced that he was doing the right thing. The signature act of his Presidency, targeting Saddam, defied his father’s judgment that deposing the tyrant would alienate the Arab allies whose support had been essential to the first Gulf War. And, where the elder Bush struggled to articulate a well-defined world view, few doubt the younger Bush’s ideological consistency.

The difference between the Bushes is starkest in the area of religion. The father had the traditional Yankee unease about introducing religion into political life. During the 1988 campaign, when he recalled floating on the life raft in the Pacific after his wartime crash, he said, “I thought about Mother and Dad and the strength I got from them, and God and faith”—and then became so worried about the implications of his words that he added, “and the separation of church and state.” Even in avowing his faith he sounded strained. “If by ‘born again’ one is asking, ‘Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?’” he said, “then I would answer a clear-cut yes. No hesitancy. No awkwardness.”

George W.’s devotion to evangelical Protestantism, by contrast, is well known. Although Christianity didn’t play a strong role in his early life, he found God when he turned forty. At the time, he was drinking heavily and his marriage was collapsing. Laura told him that if he didn’t stop drinking she would leave him and take their daughters with her. For a year, Bush had been consulting with the Reverend Billy Graham—pastor to Presidents since Eisenhower—and he began exploring the evangelical message. He joined a Bible-study group—an especially significant commitment, in the Schweizers’ view, because it met at the same time as “Monday Night Football.” “With W. no longer drinking,” the Schweizers write, he and Laura “became intimate once again.”

The news media have been prone to underestimate the importance of George W.’s evangelicalism. Perhaps it’s because the religious right has perfected the art of what used to be called Mau-Mauing, rendering the press corps fearful of broaching the subject. Maybe reporters genuinely believe that George W. plays it up for political purposes; they often describe him as behaving cynically when he takes actions that please the Christian right. But this reading stems from an assumption of continuity between the son and the father, who did pander to evangelical conservatives. “I always laugh when people say that George W. Bush is saying this or that to appease the religious right,” his first cousin John Ellis told the Schweizers. “He is the religious right.”

George W. has been active in evangelical politics since his father’s 1988 campaign, when he served as the campaign’s liaison to the religious right. Working with Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God pastor and a longtime Bush associate, he forged personal alliances with influential ministers, broadcasters, and activists. In the Iowa caucuses, the televangelist Pat Robertson outpolled the elder Bush (who explained, comically, that his supporters were off that night golfing or at air shows and débutante balls). But the son’s aggressive networking paid off in the Southern primaries weeks later, when his father, once distrusted by born-again Christians, trounced even Robertson within that constituency. In the younger Bush’s own Presidential bid, in 2000, he got a minority of the over-all vote but eighty-four per cent of highly observant, white evangelicals. “For the first time,” Phillips notes, “a Republican presidential victory rested on a religious, conservative, southern-centered coalition.” For the first time, the President of the United States was also “the de facto head of the Religious Right.”

Phillips attributes Bush’s success to demographics, in particular the surge of evangelical Christian denominations as a proportion of the faithful. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans who attended weekly services fell from thirty-eight per cent to twenty-five per cent. At the same time, membership in the Southern Baptist Convention grew from ten million to seventeen million, and membership in the Pentecostal churches from less than two million to nearly twelve million. “Liberal religion was being routed,” Phillips concludes. Bush shared the values of this growing bloc and enjoyed its overwhelming support.

Bush has not been shy about displaying his faith. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the President came across Proverbs 21:15: “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” Soon, “evildoers” became his favorite term for Al Qaeda. Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, himself an evangelical, laces the President’s addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: “whirlwind,” “work of mercy,” “safely home,” “wonder-working power.” Phillips refers to a study by the religion scholar Bruce Lincoln, who identified, in Bush’s speech to Congress announcing the invasion of Afghanistan, allusions to Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew, and Jeremiah. In private, Bush has been even more explicit. “George sees this as a religious war,” a family member told the Schweizers. “He doesn’t have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.” Phillips says that Bush has spoken of himself as an instrument of divine will.

But what’s wrong with an infusion of religion into Presidential speeches or even policy? The Founders may have believed in a separation between church and state, but the Constitution’s secularism doesn’t prevent a President from drawing on his religious beliefs in making decisions. Nor has Bush somehow “imposed” his faith on others, however alienating some may find his spiritual language to be. The problem lies, rather, in the specific ways in which Bush uses religion. Abraham Lincoln, in his second Inaugural address, invoked God, but he did so in a spirit of humility, questioning his own certitude and thus inviting further questioning. Bush does the opposite: his use of religion seems designed to remove any doubt—first in his own mind, then in the public’s—about his course. It doesn’t assist Bush with his reasoning; it substitutes for reasoning. Instead of providing a starting point for careful judgments, it assures him that the instincts on which he has based his policy are unerring.

This kind of recourse to religion leaves citizens no grounds on which to question the President’s actions. If the inspiration of God or the Bible is purely personal or subjective, it’s not open to debate—and decisions based on it become immune from scrutiny. The result is to short-circuit political deliberation, since democracy rests on the ability of the governed to check their leaders through reasoned argument. Ironically, George W.’s religious beliefs bolster the manorial tendencies of the Bush family. God and family alike promote a sense of special dispensation. It’s what happens when the politics of personal relationships comes to center on a personal relationship with God.

Politically, Bush’s conspicuous religiosity offers him two advantages over his father’s Episcopalian reticence. Like the trappings of his Texas populism, his public piety allows him to connect with ordinary folk as his father never did. Talking Biblical talk, he can shuck off his social class’s perceived indifference to people’s everyday concerns. It’s a paradox, but a politically invaluable one, that his invocation of religion both places him beyond public accountability and conveys that he’s just like everyone else. Religion also provides the other key asset his father lacked: the vision thing. The religiously infused sense of mission that George W. reportedly found after September 11th now carries the burden of keeping his Presidency from veering off course the way his father’s did.

No one would suggest that George W. embraced evangelicalism for electoral advantage. But it’s easy to wonder whether his born-again faith might not represent a decision to break with his father, to escape from the culture of Wasp reserve and austerity. George W. came to his new creed at a time when his life seemed to have fallen short of family expectations. His younger brother Jeb was outperforming him in business and seemed more likely to excel in politics. George W. was, his brother Marvin has said, “the family clown.” Indeed, George and Barbara found their son’s conversion “a stretching experience,” the Schweizers report. “Some of that same brashness in his personality came out when he talked about faith. . . . It sparked disagreements within the family.” Rich Bond, an associate of the Bushes, told the Schweizers,“You might say it was almost exaggerated. . . . But George W. seemed to want to be defined differently from the beginning.”

When it came to war with Iraq, George W. told Bob Woodward that his father “is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” But, in denying his real father’s influence, George W. reaffirms its importance. The very decision to stage a celebration on the Abraham Lincoln flight deck can be read as a rebuke to his father, signalling that he forged ahead where his predecessor had held his fire. It was also at odds with the elder Bush’s self-effacing style. Today, as the Iraq adventure slogs on, that stunt is looking less like a moment of glory than like a moment of vainglory—and a mistake that George H. W. Bush, whatever his shortcomings, never would have made.

Copyright © 2004 The New Yorker