Policy Review, October 5, 2018—George W.
Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, died today at Methodist
Hospital in Houston, Texas. He was 72. The cause of death was announced
as heart failure.
Mr. Bush’s always controversial presidency left behind a changed
nation and a changed world. Taking office in 2001 after a disputed
election settled only by a 5-4 decision by a bitterly divided Supreme
Court, and decisively reelected in 2004, President Bush led the United
States into four wars, oversaw the dismantling of Social Security and
Medicare, and enforced a drastic shrinking of elementary, secondary, and
collegiate education. He spearheaded the transformation of President
Bill Clinton’s budget surpluses of 1999 and 2000 into permanent deficits
of more than a trillion dollars a year, thus profoundly reducing the
amount of capital available to address the needs of the vast majority of
citizens and inhibiting the creation of new jobs with any promise of
advancement or financial security, while at the same time pursuing tax
reductions that increased the differences between the income and assets
of, in his own terminology, “owners” and “pre-owners” of “the American
ownership society” to extremes almost beyond measure. When he left
office, taxation of personal and corporate incomes, while still legally
extant, had been effectively replaced by a new payroll tax, so that
almost all investment, inheritance, and interest income was left
tax-free. “Those with the greatest stake in America,” President Bush
often said throughout his second term, “have the greatest stake in
defending it. Thus we as a nation must do all that we can to ensure that
the commitment of those with the greatest stake to the rest of us, a
commitment on which our freedom and security rests, only grows greater.”
Adding to Mr. Bush’s statutory and administrative economic policies
were a series of decisions by the “Bush Court,” as the Supreme Court was
known after 2005, when in that year Mr. Bush replaced three retiring
members with very conservative justices (a fourth was replaced in 2006),
depriving government regulation of corporations and the environment of
any legal basis—decisions which many analysts considered more
significant than the repudiation by the Bush Court of previous decisions
upholding a woman’s right to privacy in the matter of abortion and
certain applications of affirmative action. Even with the Bush Court
seated, however, the Republican-controlled Congress that Mr. Bush
enjoyed throughout his presidency repeatedly passed legislation removing
issue after issue from the purview of the state and federal courts,
including questions of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the
right to assemble, and the right to trial by jury. Despite these
prohibitions of judicial review, the government, under Mr. Bush, did not
press for any legislation curtailing what had previously been referred
to as “First Amendment freedoms,” but simply refrained from challenging
such legislation passed by many states, rather filing supportive briefs
before the Supreme Court when such measures were contested. Ultimately
the reversal of the series of 20th-century Supreme Court decisions
subjecting the states to the Bill of Rights, long-sought by certain
conservatives, was achieved not de jure but de facto. “The press is legally free,” the former New York Times columnist Frank Rich put it in 2007, writing in his online journal Thatsrichbrother.com.
“It merely refrains from practicing freedom.” Some said the same of the
nation as a whole; others said the country was freer than it had ever
been.
Mr. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1946, and
raised in Houston and Midland, Texas, where his father, the former
President George H. W. Bush, began his careers in oil and politics. Mr.
Bush attended Andover Academy and graduated from Yale University in
1968. During the Vietnam War he was a member of the Texas Air National
Guard, known at the time as a safe haven from combat duty; whether Mr.
Bush did in fact fulfill his military obligations became a subject of
dispute during his second election campaign. In 1975 Mr. Bush graduated
from Harvard Business School and began careers in oil and politics in
Texas; neither flourished. Though he married the former Laura Welch in
1977 and fathered twin daughters Jenna (named for Mrs. Bush’s mother)
and Barbara (named for Mr. Bush’s mother) in 1981, Mr. Bush’s life
through his early 40s was characterized by business failures,
accusations of insider trading, reports of silent bailouts, and
self-confessed “drinking.” (Mr. Bush claimed to have renounced
drinking—the word alcoholism was never used—the day after his 40th
birthday, as the result of divine intervention and an act of will.) He
became a public figure in 1989 when, through a questioned investment, he
became part of the consortium that bought the Texas Rangers baseball
franchise; his title as managing partner produced an impression of
competence and good humor. In 1994 Mr. Bush ran for governor of Texas
and proved himself a first-rate campaigner. When he was elected, Texas
was a bipartisan state; as Mr. Bush’s advisor Karl Rove once said, “He
charmed Democrats into riding on his strong back as he forded the river
of discord.” When Mr. Bush left office as president, the Texas
government was all Republican.
Mr. Bush was a politician opponents underestimated at their peril,
and throughout his career his opponents did just that. He cultivated an
aura of know-nothingness, of “a fine disregard” of inconvenient facts or
opinions, but he was devastating on the attack, able to present himself
as an ordinary man outraged by the self-superiority of whoever might be
opposing him at any time and on any issue. Even as president, before
the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York City,
in 2001, he was not always taken seriously by political commentators or
the public at large; after that event he became a heroic figure,
standing in defense of the United States as if that historic
responsibility were his alone.
He launched an assault against Afghanistan, where al Qaeda had its
headquarters and training grounds, weeks after the 2001 attacks, leading
to the immediate fall of the totalitarian Islamic regime of the
Taliban, which had given al Qaeda sanctuary. Though Osama bin Laden, the
leader of the worldwide Islamist movement, escaped capture, his forces
were severely weakened and scattered; during Mr. Bush’s first term there
was, against all expectations and predictions, no further terrorist
attack on American soil. Arguing that Saddam Hussein’s government in
Iraq was a center of terrorist plotting and a repository of terrorist
weaponry, from what turned out to be nonexistent chemical and biological
arms to equally chimerical nuclear technology, Mr. Bush in 2003 led a
limited international coalition into Iraq and replaced Mr. Hussein with
an occupying force, which over the next year was pushed back into
consistently shrinking enclaves in the face of a fierce insurgency.
Following his reelection in 2004, Mr. Bush ordered the destruction of
the cities where the insurgents were thought to be concentrated; though
the cities were destroyed, the insurgency continued. Mr. Bush then
pressed on to Iran and North Korea, which he had identified as “rogue
states.”
With U.S. Armed Forces tied down in Iraq, Mr. Bush turned to what
critics called a “private army subject to no law and operating at the
whim of a single individual”—that is, to large numbers of private
contractors employed by U. S., Serbian, Nigerian, and Saudi
corporations—to launch land, sea, and air attacks meant to destroy
nuclear facilities in both Iran and North Korea. While the Afghan and
Iraqi armies and governments had collapsed almost at the first sign of
American assault, the Iranian and North Korean invasions were beaten
back by sustained resistance and, in North Korea, the use of explosives
that Mr. Bush denounced as “tactical nuclear weapons,” though this was
later proved not to be the case.
Nonetheless Mr. Bush then ordered what
he described as “pinpoint” nuclear attacks on the nuclear sites in Iran
and North Korea, which, while achieving their goals, also led to the
One-Day War, a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan that left
Bombay and Karachi in ruins and led to the fall of the governments of
both countries, and to the withdrawal of the American-led coalition
forces from Iraq. The result was the series of still-continuing civil
wars throughout the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent that, while
involving no unconventional weapons since 2006 have, according to the
United Nations, caused the deaths of 12 million people and the
displacement of millions more. Mr. Bush’s claim in action if not in
words that the United States retained an international monopoly on the
legitimate use of force left allies such as Great Britain and alliances
such as NATO crippled; it also left the United States at least formally
unchallenged.
It was often said, during Mr. Bush’s first term, that he saw himself
as a messianic figure, ordained by God to carry the flag of freedom
(“God’s gift,” in Mr. Bush’s words, “to every individual”) to the
corners of the earth, and that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at
least, were part of a crusade of transcendent significance. After Mr.
Bush’s reelection, it was increasingly argued that his wars were a
diversionary and obfuscatory tactic meant to raise Mr. Bush’s standing,
and the power of the Republican Party both in Congress and in the
states, solely for the benefit of Mr. Bush’s domestic agenda, and that,
as the poet Donald Hall wrote, “it was the United States itself that was
the true object of conquest.” While that is a matter for history to
settle (when, as Mr. Bush himself once put it, “we’ll all be dead”), few
would dispute that Mr. Bush left the United States if not conquered
then irrevocably changed—and, according to the American novelist Philip
Roth, who in 2008, cited by the Swedish Academy as “the voice of a lost
republic,” was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, “less a nation
governed by its citizenry, where each of us has one vote, than a stock
exchange owned by its shareholders, according to the number of their
shares.”
Mr. Bush’s Republican Party had, during his time in office, so
effectively marginalized the opposition Democratic Party that it all but
ceased to function in many states. After the suspension of the
filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate, the remaining 45 Democratic senators
were unable to block any of Mr. Bush’s appointments to the federal
courts or the executive branch of government. The Republicans had so
successfully supported Mr. Bush as an infallible and irreplaceable
leader that he came to seem, in fact, irreplaceable. There was no figure
in the party who did not appear diminished as soon as his or her name
was mentioned alongside of his, and the notion of any ordinary
Republican actually succeeding Mr. Bush became, in the words of William
Kristol, editor of the conservative journal the Daily Standard,
“unthinkable.” Thus was the strategy devised to introduce a
constitutional amendment to remove the requirement in Article 1 that no
one could be elected president were he or she not native born,
supposedly to permit the presidential candidacy of the native-born
Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger, the enormously popular and skillful
governor of California and the one Republican other than Mr. Bush who
did sometimes appear larger than life. It later transpired that the
amendment was a ruse: When Democrats attempted to “poison” the amendment
by proposing that all restrictions on who might become president be
removed (the requirement that a president be at least 35 years old, the
two-term limit), the Republicans immediately acquiesced, and as a result
of the passage of the 28th Amendment in 2006 and its ratification by
the states the next year, in 2008 Mr. Bush announced his candidacy for a
third term. He was overwhelmingly defeated that November by former
President Bill Clinton.
Mr. Bush’s life after his presidency was marked by misfortune. He
soon lost interest in his status as the standard-bearer of his party and
its chief fundraiser; many believed he had again begun drinking, and in
any case he seemed to spend most of his time at private clubs in
Houston, where he established residence in 2010 after selling his
property in Crawford, Texas. (“At least I won’t have to cut that f—
brush again,” Mr. Bush was heard to say after his last election.) Then
on May 1, 2011, Jenna and Barbara Bush were killed in a drunken driving
accident in New York City, an incident that also took the lives of seven
other people, four of them friends of the Bush daughters. Rumors that a
Bush family friend attempted to bribe the police to report that a
person other than Jenna or Barbara Bush was driving (the body of Barbara
Bush was in the driver’s seat) were never confirmed. Four years later,
in 2015, Laura Bush, like her father, died of Parkinson’s disease; she
was 68. After a period of mourning, Mr. Bush announced that, to find his
way back into “productive service” and “do God’s will,” he would
welcome the opportunity to act as commissioner of baseball. But while
Commissioner Bud Selig said that he would be honored to yield the
position to Mr. Bush, he cautioned that the exigencies of the job would
probably require him to remain in office “for another year, or maybe
two,” and the question was not raised again.
Mr. Bush was preceded in death by his sister Robin Bush, his brothers
John “Jeb” Bush, the former governor of Florida, Neil Bush, and Marvin
Bush, and his sister Dorothy Bush Koch. He is survived by his parents.