Not Easily Led: The Presidency of
George H. W. Bush

Martin J. Medhurst

John Robert Greene. The Presidency of George Bush. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. ix + 245 pages. $35.00.

John Robert Greene is a noted student of the American presidency. His earlier books on Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon are well known and have been generally well received. The University Press of Kansas series on the American presidency is, quite simply, the best such series in the entire nation, boasting such authors as Forrest McDonald, Phillip S. Paludan, Burton I. Kaufman, and Robert Allen Rutland. Add to this the fact that Greene had special access to the Bush Papers and to many of the principals in the Bush administration and one might expect The Presidency of George Bush to be a first-rate piece of scholarship. It is not.

Greene has produced a workman-like book that marches through the high and low points of the one-term Bush presidency, seldom producing new insights or unknown facts. The problems begin on the first page when the author announces that "the heart of the Bush presidency lay in its attempts to deal with the economic instability and cultural anxiety that the Reagan years had also created" (1). If Greene is to be believed, the biggest obstacle faced by George Bush was Ronald Reagan and the policies put into place under his two-term administration. Indeed, the entire book is a thinly disguised attack on Reagan and Reagan-era policies.

It is, of course, true that in certain policy areas George Bush and Ronald Reagan disagreed. It is also true that the budget deficits and national debt left Bush with precious little room to maneuver budgetarily. But to lay all of Bush’s problems at the feet of Reagan is both disingenuous and flat-out wrong. Perhaps Greene spent too much time interviewing those members of the Bush administration responsible for the peculiar policy that no member of the Reagan administration could continue in the same office under Bush or the equally odd policy that required all Reagan appointees to have their resignations on Bush’s desk by noon on January 20, 1989, despite the fact that Bush had no way to fill those positions immediately and no one ready to fill them. For whatever reason, Greene has adopted the Bush political mandate as his own scholarly theory to explain the failures of the Bush presidency. In short, it was all Reagan’s fault. That is the thesis of chapter 1, "The Legacies of Ronald Reagan."

Chapter 2 traces Bush’s early life from his birth in Milton, Massachusetts through his upbringing in Greenwich, Connecticut, his service in World War II, his entry into the oil business in 1948, his first run for public office in 1964 (when he lost the U.S. Senate race in Texas to Ralph Yarborough), his election to Congress in 1966 and re-election in 1968, his loss to Lloyd Bentsen in 1970 in his second try for the U.S. Senate, his subsequent appointments as Ambassador to the United Nations, head of the Republican National Committee, American envoy to the People’s Republic of China, Director of the C.I.A., and, finally, his election and service as vice president of the United States from 1981-1989. This is quite a territory to cover in a mere 15 pages, but Greene does an adequate job. Those wishing more detail on Bush’s early life should consult Herbert S. Parmet’s George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee.

Greene then turns, in chapter 3, to Bush’s 1988 election campaign. The strongest part of this chapter is Greene’s insight into the relationship between George Bush and Lee Atwater. He also provides an interesting discussion on the selection of Dan Quayle as Bush’s vice presidential running mate. In the process of discussing the Quayle selection, Greene makes one of his more interesting—and important—observations: "For many observers the vice-presidential choice was the first opportunity to notice an important Bush trait—that of letting virtually no one in on important decisions until the last minute" (34). Greene, following Bob Woodward, attributes this habit to Bush’s instinct toward compartmentalization of information—something he ostensibly learned at the C.I.A. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the 1988 ad campaign, the use of Willie Horton, and the election results. Although he won the election, "Bush’s victory was hardly a mandate. For the first time in twenty-eight years, the Democrats gained seats in both houses of Congress while losing the presidency. Indeed, the Democrats controlled both houses: in the Senate they outnumbered the Republicans 55 to 45; in the House, 262 to 173" (42).

Most of chapter 4 deals with Bush appointments to the executive branch, with special attention to the failed nomination of John Tower to become Secretary of Defense. Instead of admitting that Bush used poor political judgment in nominating Tower in the first place, Greene places emphasis on Bush’s legendary loyalty—which is true enough. But loyalty can only be one factor among many that make up political judgment. Bush’s judgment was clouded by his sense of loyalty. That is not a presidential strength.

Chapter 5, "A Limited Agenda," notes that Bush never claimed to have a domestic agenda. Most of what he accomplished on the domestic front was done through judicious use of the veto power. As Greene notes, "in four years, Bush vetoed forty-four bills, and his veto was upheld forty-three times" (62). Ten of those forty-four vetoes concerned abortion. Those who may still think that George Bush is not really anti-abortion might do well to ponder that statistic. The chapter touches on Bush’s education, drug, and environmental policies, including the startling claim that Bush was the most pro-environment president since Teddy Roosevelt. And according to Greene, "the claim is justifiable" (75).

Chapter 6, "Paying for Reaganomics," examines the Bush budget and the process that led, eventually, to President Bush breaking his campaign promise ("Read my lips; no new taxes"). According to Greene, Bush knew right from the beginning that he would not be able to honor his pledge. Whether that is true or not, it is certainly true that Bush delegated most of the budget negotiations to Richard Darman and John Sununu and that those fine gentlemen, in one single stroke, cost Bush any chance of a second term. Greene does a fair job of describing the budget negotiations. For a better description of the rhetorical disaster and political train wreck that ensued the reader should consult Marlin Fitzwater’s Call the Briefing.

The relationship with the Soviet Union, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the invasion of Panama are examined in chapter 7. Greene finds Bush to be a master of Realpolitik in his handling of the Soviets, a skillful diplomat in his relations with the Chinese, and a gung-ho Commander-in-Chief in his dealings with General Noriega. Only in this last instance could Bush muster even the semblance of rhetorical indignation. Despite operational snafus, Panama was seen as a military success and it boosted Bush’s approval rating to 76 percent by the end of his first year in office. It was a number that would later fall, then rebound in the wake of the Gulf War, then plummet for good at the beginning of 1992.

Chapters 9 and 10 examine "Desert Shield" and "Desert Storm." Greene provides an adequate context for the run-up to the war and the war itself. He places a good deal of emphasis on Bush’s speeches in these chapters, though he does not engage in any substantive rhetorical criticism beyond the following: "By the end of 1990, he [Bush] was making regular comparisons between Saddam (whose name he continually mispronounced, a serious slight to an Arabic male and one that it is possible Bush did deliberately) and Adolf Hitler. He also frequently used terms like ‘rapist,’ ‘evil,’ and ‘madman’ to describe the Iraqi leader. Bush used the Wilsonian rhetoric of righteousness; in his 1991 State of the Union Address, he bluntly asserted, ‘Our cause is just. Our cause is moral. Our cause is right’" (122). Greene rehearses the now-standard arguments of the Bush administration as to why Saddam Hussein was not removed from power. He does not comment on why the invasion force allowed Saddam to keep intact his helicopter forces, forces subsequently used to maim and kill Kurdish civilians. There may have been valid reasons for not taking out Saddam; there can be no reasons for leaving his military capacity at anything near its level at war’s end.

Chapter 10, "George Bush," is the best in the book. Greene clearly understands the public dimensions of the man he is profiling. He is a man with deep New England roots who nonetheless truly loves Texas, country music, pork rinds, and wildcatters. He is a man who knows himself and is not easily (and here one can supply any number of terms) led, manipulated, coached, advised, massaged, re-tooled. Bush hates image-making. He hates rhetorical manipulation. He strongly dislikes being coached on his speech or delivery because he thinks that by doing it in anything other than his "natural" way, he would be faking it. Hence, Greene’s judgment seems sound: "successful presidents were successful persuaders. If one uses this as a barometer, Bush’s grades are mixed. In his one-to-one dealings with people, Bush was a master of the persuasive art. . . . Yet, in the area of the public presidency—that part of leadership that requires the president to connect with the citizenry at large—historians will find Bush wanting" (145). So, too, will rhetoricians.

Chapter 11 looks at the year immediately preceding the re-election campaign which Greene accurately describes with the title "About as Bad as It Can Be." The chapter touches on the "Air Sununu" fiasco, the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and the resulting testimony by Thomas and Anita Hill before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the aborted coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, and the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union. All the while Bush’s approval ratings continued to slip—from 51 percent in November 1991 to 29 percent in July 1992.

Chapter 12 investigates the 1992 re-election campaign, a campaign in which Bush started late, failed to field a top-notch team of campaign operatives, and generally conducted one of the more lackluster campaigns in American history. As Greene puts it, "The problem was with the campaign itself. From the start, it lacked any focus, discipline, or conceptual strategy" (176). Greene does a good job of outlining many of the problems. In point of fact, the situation was even worse than Greene allows. In the end, "27 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Independents voted for Bill Clinton" (179).

In the final chapter, Greene tries to pull together some generalizations about the Bush presidency. It is not easy. About as close as Greene can come to a conclusion is that "Bush did the best he could with a weak hand" (183) and that "Bush’s basic honesty and sense of government service brought no discredit to the office of the presidency, and his careful stewardship bequeathed to his successor a nation more stable than he had inherited from his predecessor" (186). Presumably Greene means more financially stable, the tax increases having been approved. It is a strange book indeed that credits the death-blow of an adminstration as its greatest accomplishment.

Nevertheless, Greene’s book ought to be read. He had access to many insiders, including President Bush himself. This should have resulted in a first-rate book full of new insights and bold interpretations. Instead, it resulted in a merely adequate book based on a flawed beginning premise. The book is well produced and with one glaring exception where Robert Gates is identified as Richard Gates (120-21), it is well edited. Along with Parmet’s book, it is the best we currently have available. Greene is to be commended for a very useful bibliographic essay (215-29).