PARMET’S LAST GENTLEMAN

This is the first comprehensive biography of President George Bush by a respected historian, and it’s pretty good. Also, pretty bland. Given the subject, what else would you expect? We do learn an awful lot about Bush, however, including many things I didn’t know after having covered Bush’s national political career rather extensively. “Pets were very important to George and Barbara,” according to author Herbert Parmet, professor emeritus of history at City University of New York. Bush frequently got massages at the White House, with nurses concentrating on chronic tightness in his shoulders and neck. I’m not poking fun at this trivia, only pointing out how encyclopedic Parmet’s biography really is. There are big revelations too, such as how skeptical Bush truly was about seeking reelection in 1992. His personal diary, to which Bush gave Parmet access, makes that clear, as well as Bush’s almost instant qualms after picking Dan Quayle as his running mate.

What’s amazing about Parmet is that he actually seems soft on Bush. He doesn’t have a fresh theory about Bush’s life or presidency, accepting the conventional view of Bush as a moderately conservative patrician who rose spectacularly to the occasion in Desert Storm. And Parmet doesn’t credit Bush with great accomplishments, aside from winning the Gulf War. But he does portray Bush as a highly competent, sometimes wise leader who did his best while confronted with two huge and insurmountable problems. One was having to please Republican right-wingers while getting along with a liberal Democratic Congress. The other was cleaning up after what Parmet casts as the failed presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Parmet’s dislike of Reagan is stronger than his sympathy for Bush. He goes out of his way to trash Reagan and the folks who supported him, and he does so unconvincingly. Reaganites are “declasse fanatics, ideologues, crude, even vicious and bigoted.” Worse, they’re raving nativists. George and Barbara Bush, Parmet writes, regard them as “extremists who were intolerant of opposition, a culture to be suffered and, if possible, to be overcome.” As for Reagan, Parmet buys the line popular among liberals and journalists in the 1980s but now being revised, even among them: Reagan was a boob, manipulated by his staff, who didn’t restore economic health to America. After Reagan’s “injudicious” tax cuts in 1981, “Americans lived happily with the illusion of a healthy economy,” Parmet says.

So Bush inherited a very tough economic situation, at least as Parmet sees it. And raising taxes was unavoidable in 1990. “What with the budget impasse in facing mandatory spending cuts under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings cap, which could further weaken an already uncertain economy, Bush knew he had little choice,” Parmet writes. Those who said otherwise, like Newt Gingrich, were only helping his enemies, Bush confided in his diary.

Did Bush really have no choice but to break his pledge not to raise taxes? Of course he had a choice, just as he had one when confronted by Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait. It wasn’t mandatory that Bush deploy half a million American troops in the Persian Gulf and oust Saddam. Bush chose to do that, and carried it off brilliantly. Parmet makes exactly this point: It was Bush’s call. Yes, he left reporters with the mistaken impression he was unsure about what to do and was stiffened in his resolve by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But he didn’t need stiffening, Parmet says, since he’d decided within days, maybe hours, of Saddam’s invasion that the United States would have to respond militarily. Then he methodically put together a coalition to back his decision. It doesn’t occur to Parmet, but should have, that Bush had the option of doing something similar on the economy: deciding against a tax hike and organizing a coalition behind him.

Parmet is worth reading despite his wrongheadedness about Reagan and Bushonomics. His scoop, the Bush diary, clicks in as Bush is preparing to run for president in 1988. (Starting in late 1986, Bush spent five to ten minutes each evening dictating to the diary.) Bush is not very introspective or reflective, but his musings are often revealing without being explosive. Perhaps Parmet was not given full access to the diary. To acquaintances, Bush has read aloud portions in which he’s biting in his assessment of colleagues, appointees, and friends like James Baker, his secretary of state. Little of this appears in Parmet’s book. But we do find that Bush loathed the press even more than he let on publicly (“sniping, carping, bitching . . . the newsboys of the world”), feared Mikhail Gorbachev’s demise would be a world disaster, and didn’t like GOP Senator Al D’Amato of New York.

My favorite diary jotting is from March 13, 1991. Bush was riding high, basking in the success of Desert Storm. Yet he felt victimized by “the cynical liberalism” of the Washington press corps. He means liberals who’re lost faith in liberalism but still loathe conservatism, even in mild Bushian forms. Bush got that right.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.