PEOPLE AND PRESIDENTS do not come without weaknesses, which differ in nature and kind. Richard M. Nixon’s persecution fixation, which surfaced famously in 1962 when he lost the governorship of California to Pat Brown–“you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”–led in a straight line to Watergate. Bill Clinton’s first evasions in the 1992 campaign–“I didn’t inhale”–led directly to “sex with that woman” and all that came after. George W. Bush, it seems clear, does not have anything in the class of these problems, but he does have a weakness, which has since become evident. He keeps too many secrets for too long. We saw this side of Bush during the last week of the 2000 campaign, when his long-ago arrest for drunk driving surfaced just in time to blanket the airwaves on the weekend before Election Day. We saw it again on May 15, when CBS broke the news that the terrorist attacks of September 11 had not come as bolts from the blue. Bush had been shocked, but not as surprised as the rest of us: All summer the government had been buzzing with rumors of mayhem, so much so that a plan for a preemptive strike against al Qaeda had been ready for the president’s okay. The first slip, back during the campaign, did not destroy Bush, but it did feed into a last-minute swoon that permitted Al Gore to tie the election. The second (so far) has not brought down Bush’s numbers, but it has led to several nasty days of contention, and a slow drip-drip of revelations in the press. File both these episodes under “wounds, self-inflicted.” And wonder what slips may come next. To all appearances, Bush could have avoided both problems. It would not have been hard for Bush in late 1999 to have folded the arrest story into the redemption saga that became his campaign biography, tucked as a footnote into the chapter of his life that was over, as one of the things overcome. The facts as they were were not all that disastrous (Bush had been with his sister; he was driving too slowly). Likewise, it would not have been difficult to tuck into one of the post-attack speeches a reference to the previous threats. There had been some warnings. He had taken precautions. In the face of a vast flood of non-specified data, he was planning a strike at the source of the problem. Nothing he saw pointed at anything like the September 11 attacks. Discussing these things might have caused some discomfort. But it would have been prudent and right. Bush at times seems fixed upon secrecy, as if that were the whole point of the exercise. But there are some things that one should tell the public, and also something to be gained. Spring things yourself, and you control the time and setting, and can pick out the things to be emphasized. Cede this to others, and they frame things themselves. Keeping a secret can put you at the mercy of anyone else who might know it, and might use it in turn to hurt you. Enter public life and you assure yourself of a large corps of enemies, with many public and personal reasons to want to see you weakened, among them a number of well-paid professionals–well paid to make you look terrible. It was one of those who leaked Bush’s drunk-driving story, at the moment of maximum jeopardy. As Jeff Greenfield writes in his campaign memoir, Bush aides think that this may have lost him both Maine and the popular tally. “Karl Rove, who oversaw the Bush campaign from start to finish, thought the story cost Bush anywhere from half a million to a million votes.” Of the seven presidents preceding Bush, four were crippled by personal failings and were weakened, forced out, or impeached. Bush seems to be far more stable and grounded. The flaws of his predecessors stand as warnings of the failings that the smart and the powerful sometimes fall prey to, as well as the well-known human propensity for shooting oneself in the foot. Damage control may be all very well, but damage prevention is better. A straight line runs from the drunk-driving story to the garish headline, “Bush Knew.” If Bush and his aides have their eyes on survival, they will see that the line stops right there. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
