Virgil

This is a fascinating read from The American Scholar: http://theamericanscholar.org/dubya-and-me/. It's about the relationship between President GW Bush and this journalist Walt Harrington that started back in 1986 and matured through W's presidency and now beyond. The piece is called "Dubya and Me." It's long but captivating, especially if you are a fan of President Bush #43. I am a big fan, despite some of my differences. This piece shows a little known side to the president. It shows Bush's relationship to books and the impact they had on him and his presidency. Here are a few excerpts.

Here is their first meeting.

Midland, 1986: George W. and I met in the 13th-floor office of his oil exploration business. He looked fit, had run 10 miles the day before—his 40th birthday. An open-collared light-blue shirt, sweat rings, shadow of a beard, nice tan, handsome, macho. He tenaciously lipped an unlit cigarette, and I could feel his incendiary impatience. Even then, he broke his sentences, got them jumbled, his thoughts careening. He was blunt and indiscreet, and he made intensely disparaging off-the-record remarks about some of his father’s political rivals.

George W. talked mostly about his dad, admiringly, of course. About how GHWB had been a World War II fighter pilot who, upon graduating from Yale, left the safety and comfort of the eastern establishment for Midland and the oil works. As an aside, we also talked about W., how he, too, had gone to Yale, learned to fly fighter jets, and moved to West Texas to make it in the oil biz. He wasn’t exactly bragging, but he was letting me know that he, too, was accomplished, although he seemed well aware that his life so far was one writ small compared with his dad.

As it turns out Harrington met Bush at a critical time in Bush's life.

What I couldn’t have known, of course, was that July 1986 would be a watershed moment in the life of George W. Bush, who was then having a running contest with too much drink. He had embarrassed his parents by asking a female dinner guest what sex was like after 50. He had cursed out a reporter in a restaurant in front of the reporter’s child. Three weeks after my visit, while on a morning jog and suffering from still another hangover, W. decided to stop drinking, which he did, cold turkey.

In Midland all those years ago, the normal distance between prominent source and reporter didn’t apply, and W. invited me out to a Mexican restaurant with Laura and their four-year-old twin daughters, who got in trouble for throwing chips, were threatened with a spanking, and went home without dessert. He also invited me to his house, where I found books by John Fowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gore Vidal lying about, as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Queen Victoria. A few years later, I might even have thought they had been purposely left there for the eyes of a reporter, but not on that unstaged evening. Laura would eventually write that even then, George read every night in bed.

I also found an open Bible in the house. “I’ve read it cover to cover, and it wouldn’t hurt you, Walt, to do the same,” Bush said, laughing. Within the last year, W. had begun a new lifetime regimen of daily Bible readings, as I and all of America would later learn.

And then later he asks Bush about his life outside the presidency to find the central part of Bush's leisure life. No, not golf, but reading.

Twenty-five years later, George W. Bush looks great. Two years as a civilian have been good to him. His feet clad in golf shoes and up on his desk, he leans back in his chair, a well-mouthed, unlit cigar as a prop. At 7:45 A.M., he’s talking golf.

“I didn’t play golf during my presidency except the first two years. So I came back out here, and then I decided I was going to get better at golf, not just play golf.”

“And have you?” I ask.

“I have gotten better. The problem is I’m never good enough. That’s the problem with the game. It requires discipline, patience, and focus. As you know, I’m long on”—and he hesitates, smiling, losing the sentence—“well, a couple areas where I could use some improvement.”

Same W.: sentences broken and jumbled, thoughts careening.

He certainly enjoys reading and talking about books. And his friends know it. On his desk is a stack of books that have come as gifts: All Things Are Possible Through Prayer;Basho: The Complete Haiku;Children of Jihad; and Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. To the pile, I add my own gift, Cleopatra by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff. Right now, Bush is reading Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life, a biography of the first president. “Chernow’s a great historian,” Bush says excitedly. “I think one of the great history books I read was on Alexander Hamilton by Chernow. But I also read House of Morgan,Titan, and now I’m reading Washington.”

Bush continues on reading, "the wonder of the moment":

He mentions David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, a book about the Korean War that he read before a visit last year to Korea, to give a speech to evangelicals. “I stand up in front of 65,000 Christians to give a speech in South Korea … ,” he says, “and I’m thinking about the bloody [battles] fought in the Korean War.” Halberstam’s book—coupled with earlier readings of David McCullough’s Truman and Robert Beisner’s Dean Acheson, a biography of Truman’s secretary of state presented to him by Bush’s own secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice—gave the event deeper resonance. The decisions of the unpopular President Harry S Truman, he realized, made it possible for a former U.S. president to speak before freely worshipping Koreans 60 years later. “So history, in this case, gave me a better understanding of the moment, and … put it all into context—the wonder of the moment.”

I tick off a partial list of people Bush has read books about in recent years in addition to Washington, Truman, and Acheson: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Huey Long, Lyndon Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Mellon, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ulysses S. Grant, John Quincy Adams, Genghis Khan.

“Genghis Khan?” I ask incredulously.

“I didn’t know much about him. I was fascinated by him. I guess I’ve always been fascinated by larger-than-life figures. That’s why I’m looking forward to reading Cleopatra. I know nothing about her. … But you can sit there and be absorbed by TV, let the news of the moment consume you. You can just do nothing. I choose to read as a form of relaxation. … Laura used to say, ‘Reading is taking a journey,’ and she’s right.”

And Bush explains how this love came about.

“So what is it about history that grabs you?” I ask.

“I’m fascinated by people,” Bush says, “and a lot of history is the study of individuals making a difference. … I haven’t really sat and tried to figure out why I was interested. All I can tell you is I have been for a long period of time.”

In high school, at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Bush had an American history teacher, Tom Lyons, who brought the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression to life. “He made history so interesting and exciting,” recalls Bush, who was no star pupil, either at Andover or at Yale, where he majored in history. One of his favorite professors at Yale, Wolfgang Leonhard, had fled Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union, only to see his mother arrested under Stalin. Leonhard defected and ended up teaching the young Bush about the horrors of Soviet-era oppression. Professors such as Leonhard created in Bush, even if he was a C+ student, a lasting impression: “what it was like to live under a society in which a few made the decisions for everybody.”

“When I became more sober about life”—and Bush chuckles here—“a philosophy, a kind of clarity began to take hold. … I think, as I matured, the seeds that had been planted during college began to take hold. In other words, the lessons I’d learned, which fascinated me at the time, actually became part of a philosophical foundation.” Bush would eventually come to describe this foundation, starkly and simply, as “the struggle between tyranny and freedom.”

And Bush connects his presidency to another president with trying times.

Bush remained calm and confident during his tumultuous presidency. Critics saw him as delusional; defenders saw him as self-assured. Bush believes that one of the most important stage requirements of the presidency is indeed never to signal weakness or self-doubt or confusion: “One of the things you learn about great leaders is that they never project the burdens of responsibility on others.” He remembers Richard Carwardine’s Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (one of 14 Lincoln biographies Bush read while he was president), which recounts the 16th president’s perseverance through not only military defeat after defeat, stupefying troop casualties, and public ridicule, but also the death of his son Willie and the debilitating emotional turmoil of his wife.

“You’re not the only person that’s ever gone through hard things,” Bush says of the lessons he has learned from history. “In other words, can you imagine the signal I would have sent had I said, ‘Ah, why me? Why am I thrust in the middle of all this stuff?’ And they had kids on the front line of combat who were actually having to do all the work.”

“You faced some vicious personal attacks,” I say.

“I did. But so did Abraham Lincoln.” He recalls opening the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. “There’s an exhibit, and the voices of opposition to Lincoln were being played. I said, ‘Wow!’ This guy, America’s—remember now, I got Lincoln’s portrait on the wall at the White House and I got a bust of Lincoln—and I hear the people calling him a baboon, just vicious.”

And then after some time, the two got together again because of a book.

A book got me back together with President W. after a decade, my own book The Everlasting Stream, a memoir of my many years of rabbit hunting with my Kentucky father-in-law and his good-old-boy buddies. In it, I also mentioned my back-and-forth negotiations with GHWB, and my publisher thought it would be great to have a book cover blurb from the former president, who graciously agreed. When the book appeared in the fall of 2002, I sent GHWB a signed copy, along with a signed copy for W. Soon, I got a handwritten note from President W.

“Old #41 gave me your book (which I will soon read),” the president wrote. He gave his best to my family and ended with, “Come by sometime.” Then, I got another handwritten letter from the president dated four days later: “I just finished The Everlasting Stream and liked it a lot. I told Laura, ‘The boy can still write.’ … Should you ever come back to see what you are missing, check in at the Post or rub elbows with the powerful, please call Ashley”—and he gave me his White House secretary’s direct dial. “I really enjoy my job,” he also wrote. “The only problem with this place is there aren’t enough rabbit hunters up here.”

When they finally met in the White House, he found W a different man from the first meeting.

I rolled my little ’95 Toyota Camry up to the back door, where mine was the only car. A polite Secret Service agent met me, and up I went again in the White House elevator. When the doors opened, there was President W., wearing, as I recall, a rather garish flower-print shirt and casual cream-colored slacks.

“Walt, how are you?” I remember him asking as he hugged me with one arm.

“I’m well, Mr. President. And you?”

The president had two cigars in the other hand, and he offered me one. “You still smoke cigars?” he asked.

“I thought you had gotten rid of all your bad habits,” I said, as we walked through the long, elegant center hall in the second-floor residence.

“I still curse a little bit, too,” he said, laughing. “Let’s go out on the balcony,” meaning the Truman Balcony, which overlooks the South Lawn and the Washington Monument.

The president gestured for me to sit facing the beautiful, sunny vista, and he sat facing me, his back to the yard. We lit up, puffed on our cigars, caught up on family news, talked briefly about my memoir and my column in the Post-Dispatch, which he had read. I could think of only one question to ask him: “What is it like to be president of the United States?”

President Bush leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and stared at me intently. “Are we off the record?”

“Yes.”

And he began to talk—and talk and talk for what must have been nearly three hours. I’ve never told anyone the specifics of what he said that night, not even my wife or closest friends. I did not make notes later and have only my memory. In the journalism world, off the record is off the record. But I have repeatedly described the hours as “amazing,” “remarkable,” “stunning.”

President Bush—and he was, no doubt, by then a real president—talked expansively about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, China, Korea, Russia. He talked about his reelection strategies, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, WMD and how he still believed they would be found, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Vladimir Putin. He talked about his aides and how tough their lives were, the long hours and stress and time away from their families, about how difficult it was for his daughters. He said that compared with everyone around a president, the president had the easiest job. He was the same confident, brash man I had met years ago, but I no longer sensed any hint of the old anger or the need for self-aggrandizement.

A great Bush quote: "Reading books means you're not lonely."

President Bush has just about lipped his cigar to death, but still he keeps working it. “The job of the president is to be strategic in thought and to look over the horizon,” he says, waving the soggy cigar. “And history helps a president look over the horizon.” In the White House, Bush sometimes read for pleasure in the Treaty Room, the president’s private office, lounging back in its comfortable chair with his feet up on the desk, or while exercising on the elliptical machine. But mostly, he read, as he had in Midland, at night in bed. “Reading books,” Bush says, “means you’re not lonely.”

In Decision Points, Bush cites book after book that influenced his thinking in the White House. The Bible, for one, and he quotes Lincoln, who called it “the best gift God has given to man.” After 9/11, he thought of Lincoln’s declaration that the battle between freedom and tyranny was “an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory”—words, he says, that framed his policy toward the war on terror. He cites Supreme Command by Eliot Cohen, a strategic studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, who argued that a president must hold his generals accountable for results. And Dereliction of Duty by Colonel H. R. McMaster, who argued that the Vietnam War military leadership had not done enough to correct the flawed strategy adopted by President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. In Iraq, the counterinsurgency strategy of “clear, hold, and build” employed by McMaster, who had become commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry regiment, replaced the failed strategy of ?“train-and-withdraw” used by Bush’s generals at the start of the war.

And what has Bush distilled from his reading of history?

I ask what he believes is the most important quality in great leaders.

“Willingness to stand on principle, the notion that public opinion changes back and forth and that you shouldn’t chase public opinion. … Lincoln had a set of principles that were important to him. ‘All men are created equal under God’ is the ultimate. It’s the ultimate principle for America’s freedom. … But Lincoln acted on it in a difficult political environment. People forget that he was in a very tough reelection campaign, and it wasn’t until Sherman makes it to Atlanta that his prospects brightened. Secondly, Lincoln had a strategic vision for the country. One of the great presidential decisions ever was to keep the country intact. … The question oftentimes in history is what would have happened if a different decision were made. We’d have been Europe.”

And the principles he developed from his reading...

I ask, “What did you see as your principles?”

“One of them was ‘freedom is universal,’ which was unbelievably controversial for a period of time during my presidency, which, frankly, astonished me, given my reading of history.” He paraphrases his Second Inaugural: “We’ll resist tyranny at all times, all places, basically. Well, to me, you could say that was inspired by Lincoln. … Based upon the principle that deep in everybody’s soul is the desire to be free. And what’s interesting is, it’s playing out right now,” he says, referring to the populist uprisings in the Middle East.

“The interesting thing about Egypt was that of all the countries in the Middle East, Egypt had a great chance to become an example of democracy. And President Mubarak, after ’82, chose not to head that way. Eventually, though, the young, educated, unemployed said, ‘Wait a minute! We’re tired of it!’ I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t surprised when the people of Iraq went to vote. I really wasn’t. And took enormous risks to vote. Or the people in Afghanistan. Unbelievably inspirational moments as far as I was concerned. Others didn’t see it that way, I fully understood. But, to me, it was validation of the concept that all want to be free.”

From what's been written elsewhere, it's been reported that Bush reads over a 100 books per year. And that's when he was busy being president.