Ambling Into History The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush by Frank Bruni HarperCollins, 224 pp., $23.95 The Big Enchilada Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics by Stuart Stevens Free Press, 298 pp., $25 SOMETHING STRANGE has happened to books about George W. Bush begun before September 11: They have become more important and less conclusive; more interesting and less definitive; not about a man as he is but about a man as he was, a shadow of his present self. Future historians, when they refer to “Bush I” and “Bush II,” may not mean the father and the son. They may mean just the son–George W. Bush as he was before his war started, and George W. Bush as he is today. Bush I is the amiable man who ran two years ago in a peaceable country and seemed eager to narrow the scope of the government. Bush II is the war leader, grim and proactive, revving up the new warfare state. Two books about Bush have appeared so far in his presidency: “The Big Enchilada” by Stuart Stevens and “Ambling Into History” by New York Times reporter Frank Bruni. The books’ problem–and, oddly, their value–is that they describe a man who has vanished completely. They are thus a benchmark, a baseline from which to track changes, tools of value to armchair psychologists who will want to ask: How did Bush change? Why did he change? And can he change yet again? Bush I–the Bush of these books–is an affable fellow, laid back and funny. He trips on his words but has a razor keen form of emotive intelligence. He loves his country, loves his ranch, and, even during the campaign, reveres the office he is fighting to occupy. At the same time, he has contempt for many political rituals and for some politicians–the source, Bruni thinks, of his numerous antics. At times, Bruni pictures him with a “thought balloon” over his head reading, “Do we really have to take all of this seriously?” He describes Bush as “rolling his eyes as he emerged from pro forma sessions” with standard political types. One type he found unappealing was his major political rival, whom he dismisses, in one quirky assessment: “The man dyes his hair. What does that tell you about him? He doesn’t know who he is.” From Stevens, we learn that Bush’s campaign team took it as a given that Gore would break the rules he agreed to and that much of their preparation for the candidates’ debate consisted of training Bush to confront these diversions. Judd Gregg and Rob Portman, who played Gore in rehearsals, prided themselves on being duly obnoxious. In a late rehearsal for the third debate, Portman left his stool, walked over to Bush, and glared at him while he was speaking. As Stevens recounted, “Portman just stood there, staring, until finally the governor threw his arm around him, and kissed him on the head.” It is precisely this strange streak of feyness that endears Bush to both Bruni and Stevens, although it also forces Bruni to wonder about his ability to sustain any gravity. Not that Bush made extravagant claims for himself. “He told us more or less that he wasn’t claiming to be the perfect president,” Bruni notes, only “the best of the limited choices.” About this, Bush seemed to have no doubts whatever. He knew he was better than Gore. Yet there were visible from time to time the bones of Bush as he now is. He was not, it turns out, all that indifferent. As Stevens says: “He hated delays, couldn’t stand wasting time, and was always the one urging everybody to move faster, get it done, . . . let’s go. He ran fast, worked fast, got up at dawn, and had a restless energy that seemed irrepressible. He liked to joke around and loved to laugh and tease anything or anyone even vaguely pretentious. But try showing up at 8:10 A.M. for an 8 A.M. meeting . . . or talk about something in vague generalities . . . you’d find out how laid back he was.” Stevens also noted his sense of proportion. “Bush was graced with the two qualities that help good pro quarterbacks–he could see a lot of the field at once, and he understood the natural rhythm of the season. He knew when to lay back and when to pour it on.” He chose to pour it on in his acceptance speech before his convention and painstaking rehearsals for his debate with Gore, which he correctly fingered as the make or break moments. Bruni, too, notes his capacity for intense, if sporadic, hard work. He points out that Bush was a steady consumer of serious books, and he attacks the picture of Bush as a dunderhead, a judgment “willfully selective, and oblivious to a contradictory body of fact.” Bush scored higher on his verbal SAT scores than did Rhodes scholar Bill Bradley, and his college grades, while not distinguished, ranked with John McCain’s and Al Gore’s. Bruni also notes that Bush was extremely impressive in one-on-one settings (he seemed to grow worse with the size of the audience), and that campaign settings showed him off at his worst, “the exact opposite of how a politician–in order to succeed–should be.” The newly elected Bush, as Bruni draws him in “Ambling Into History,” is a conflicted figure, awed and impressed by his role and his office, yet resisting much of its trappings, cutting it back to life size. He made it, Bruni says, “the punctual presidency. The perfunctory presidency. The parsimonious presidency” when it came to expending himself. The tone was set at the inaugural balls, at which Bush and his wife danced twenty-nine seconds at the first ball, forty-six seconds at the second, and never more than sixty-seven seconds at any of the seven more that followed, coming home to the White House at 11:37, “more than an hour ahead of the schedule.” Bush held his first news conferences in the modest pressroom, without the towering podium. “Hail to the Chief” was not played at his entrances. He retreated often to Texas, making clear his preference for it. His wife spent two of her first four weeks as first lady in Crawford. His speeches seldom ran more than fifteen minutes, and in them he often made fun of himself. To Bruni, this seems of a piece with his early ambivalence, both in the campaign and before it. Bush was a man who had been pointed to politics by his father and family, and then drafted to run by the other Republican governors, pushed along by the choices of others. Here was a man who constantly told us how little he needed the presidency and how happy he would still be if things turned out badly. He had accepted the decision to run, but questions of commitment remained. In 1946 John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in the place left open by his dead older brother, beginning a decade or more of of his own ambivalence, alternating periods of concentration and serious work with life as an absentee, playboy, and dilettante. It took ten years before he fully possessed his ambitions, on the eve of his own run for president. This happens sometimes when a legatee and draftee has to pick his own way through the thicket of others’ ambitions. The result was the same but the time frame was different: What happened to Kennedy over his brief years in office happened to Bush in one day. On September 11, Bush felt he began a new life. A friend of the president told Bruni in a “hushed, grave voice” that Bush realized that everything else in his life now paled in importance. “People close to him said that he felt, after a life initially filled with false starts and sloppy behavior that he had inherited his true purpose, and the task by which he would be judged and defined.” Bruni admits he is amazed at the transformation. He was surprised by the patience shown by the president, which he described as “remarkable,” and by his flexibility in assembling a diverse coalition. But what astonished him most is the way that Bush, who always before craved the old and familiar, reacted to shock. This was the man who was openly homesick, who loved old friends, old routines, and safe places, who ate the same comfort food over and over, and took his own pillow with him on the road. He seemed to structure his life t
o cut down on surprises. But September 11 was the surprise of surprises, and Bush adapted to it without skipping a beat. The phrase “ambling into history” may describe Bush in his stroll toward power. But Bush isn’t ambling anywhere now. Nor does the word “non-committal” still fit. (“Possessed” seems the better description.) “The Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler,” says Bruni, “a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster, an adult with an inner child that often brimmed to the surface or burst through.” Stuart Stevens’s “The Big Enchilada” and Frank Bruni’s “Ambling Into History” were conceived when Bush seemed an affable creature, headed for a a caretaker presidency in a country still on its vacation from history, fated to make his mark in compassionate increments. Then September 11 changed his presidency into one of the big ones and Bush himself into one of our more interesting leaders, whose psyche will be repeatedly prodded. If the drama of John Kennedy’s life is the way in which he internalized and transformed his father’s ambition, the drama of Bush is this sudden compression, one of the greatest before-and-after stories of all time. Neither Stevens nor Bruni could have foreseen how quickly his book would become both terribly outdated and exceedingly interesting. But then, of course, neither could we. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
