Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Bush by Jon Meacham

Whether one casts George Herbert Walker Bush, 41^st President of the United States, as a great Republican or a sell-out to the conservative cause, whether one ascribes to him the ‘wimp factor’ or views him as a public figure who modeled selflessness and service, the author gives enough of a reasonably objective perspective on Mr. Bush that most readers will find this book to their liking.  It is chock full of information on HW’s life, and, with copious quotes from HW’s diaries, plenty of Bush’s own thoughts. 

What a career the man had!  At age eighteen and fresh out of high school, George Bush enlisted in the Navy and earned his pilot wings.  Showing considerable grit, Bush saw action during the war and was shot down in Japanese waters over the island of Chichi Jima.  He parachuted out of his burning plane and was rescued (though the loss of his crew members affected him considerably).  With the end of the war (and already married to Barbara Pierce Bush) he completed his undergraduate degree at Yale in two and a half years.  

He left the East Coast and took his young family to Texas to work his way up in the oil business.  He entered Texas politics in 1966 and served in the U.S. House of Representatives.  He was the UN ambassador under Richard Nixon, chaired the Republican National Committee during the heady Watergate years, served as China envoy and CIA director during the Ford administration, completed two terms as Vice President under Ronald Reagan and went on to the presidency for four years from 1988 to 1992.  HW presided over a family of 5 living children (having lost his oldest daughter to leukemia at the age of 4) and numerous grandchildren.  He lived until the age of 94 and died in 2018 the same year as his wife. 

George H. W. Bush came from wealth and pedigree no question.  On his father’s side, Bush’s ancestors were so long-established in America that one of them, Dr. Samuel Prescott, rode with Paul Revere.  The Bush family was originally from the East Coast but HW’s grandfather, Samuel Prescott Bush, traveled to Columbus, Ohio at the suggestion of a Rockefeller friend to there make his fortune in the manufacturing of railroad parts.  S. P. Bush did well.  Bush’s own father, Prescott Bush, eventually left the manufacturing business and the Midwest and moved East to join the investment firm of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.  He later pursued a career in Connecticut politics and served as U.S. Senator from that state for eleven years.  

On his mother’s side the Walker family hailed from St. Louis and had a dry goods business.  When George Herbert “Bert” Walker decided to walk out on that, he started an investment firm.  Bert was the father of Dorothy Bush, HW’s mother.  Dorothy’s life was not plain.  She had nannies, a childhood filled with the fine arts, athletics and she attended an East Coast finishing school.  The Walker family summered in Kennebunkport at the now well-known Walker’s Point, a parcel of land that Dorothy’s father and uncle had invested in.  There was also a ‘plantation’ in South Carolina. 

HW grew up in comfortable Greenwich, Connecticut, attended Phillips-Andover and Yale and he had an abundance of the right kind of social and political connections.  The stereotype or cliché that he was an out-of-touch elite, however, is neither accurate nor fair.  Bushes were expected to make their own way in the world and do so with honor, hard work and, by the way, don’t forget to make a valuable contribution to society while you’re at it.  George H.W. Bush lived up to the family standard more than admirably.  

HW was high energy and gregarious.  Both tall and handsome, he was a good athlete, an average scholar, he had a good mind though he was not a great speaker.  He liked people and entertaining.  He was at ease with himself and others.  His childhood nickname of Have-Half was an early indicator of a natural affinity for diplomacy.  He directed his abilities and talents to mesh well with the demands of most everything he did.  His knack for getting along served him particularly well during his years as Reagan’s Vice President in my opinion. George Bush was careful and intentional about serving Reagan while also carving out a position for himself that kept him relevant and in the action. 

The book covered all of Bush’s various careers.  His presidency and two presidential campaigns occupied the bulk of the book I’d say, and for those years the author provided a good brush-up on both recent international and domestic history.  Mr. Meacham included enough information on most topics to either refresh one’s memory or provide enough of an outline to follow along.  Gorbachev, Noriega, Thatcher, Mitterand, Helmut Kohl, Lech Walesa (curiously, absolutely no mention of Pope John Paul II comes to mind) frequently populated the international issues.  On the home front, it was fascinating to read about the early careers of, not only HW, but Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.  And remember Gary Hart and Donna Rice?  

The defining issues of the Bush presidency were the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent dealings with Russia and the international community, the invasion of Panama, Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War (after which Bush’s popularity ratings skyrocketed) and the domestic budget deficit and taxes which he raised despite his campaign promise to the contrary (after which Bush’s popularity ratings plummeted).  Bush also appointed two justices to the Supreme Court, David Souter and Clarence Thomas, with the confirmation of the latter causing considerable controversy.  

The defining tension of the Bush presidency, and perhaps of the man himself was his tendency toward compromise and conciliation as opposed to a self-promoting leadership style.  Perhaps there was also an element of “doing good” that will most always end in some mushy goal or unintended consequence.  In addition, the perspective Bush had on leadership and the traditional values he espoused were becoming increasingly outdated as the closing decades of the 20^th century unfolded.  

Here is how HW characterizes himself as a leader, referring to Newt Gingrich’s criticism of the Bush compromise on taxes.  HW wrote in his diary that the media had been “hitting me for being kind and gentle, instead of confrontational, juxtaposing my views against Newt’s, my style against Newt’s.  I was elected to govern and to make things happen, and my view is, you can’t do it through confrontation.”  p. 365 

And here is the author’s summation of how Bush viewed political office.  “Bush acknowledged that he was neither wonk nor ideologue.  He saw politics more in terms of consensus than of ideology.  One ran for office—and did what partisanship required to win elections—in order to amass power to serve the larger good.  For Bush, the work of government was less about radical reform than it was about careful stewardship.  P 211

This summation, accurate and fair, is in my opinion the best light in which to evaluate George H.W. Bush as a political figure and President of the United States.  Too firmly steeped in gentlemanly decency and too convinced of the value of practicing modesty, he may have been a President better suited to a less combative and morally divided culture.    

Jon Meacham’s biography of HW is a very readable book though his writing can tend toward the lackluster.  He aims to give “Just the facts, ma’am” though see note below.  Meacham never seems to delight in either his subject or the historical context about which he’s writing.  One could argue that this gives his books greater gravitas, but I find his style to be a little drab.  With this book, Mr. Meacham becomes my champion of Notes.  You will recall that Mr. Bergamini’s 1,200-page, two-volume Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy had virtually a book of Notes, 150 pages.  In this 607-page, single-volume biography, Mr. Meacham has 170 pages of Notes!  There are also plenty of photos organized in two sections. 

I had planned this book as a skimmer, but became so invested in George Herbert Walker Bush and his family with each passing chapter that I was compelled to read every word.  Politics and his presidency aside, who wouldn’t want to be best friends with this extremely talented and principled man who would have a party if you visited him and take you for a fast ride on his speedboat, Fidelity?  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again.  I certainly know the family well enough now with this book under my belt, and I remain convinced.  If we stay in Texas long enough, I’m going to be hanging out with Laura and “W” at somebody’s ranch someday.  Just you wait and see.  

Note:  In discussing the controversial budget deficit and tax issue, it was pointed out to me that Meacham presented a one-sided view that reflected either the author’s ignorance of or bias against Reagan’s economic policies.  Similarly, Meacham listed as achievements a number of Bush’s actions that were unpopular with conservatives such as the Americans with Disabilities Act.  On foreign policy, the author generally covered Bush in a favorable light.  However, as with Bush’s decision not to go after Saddam Hussein once Kuwait was taken care of, there were often a lot of direct quotes from Bush’s diary so the President explained himself more often than not. 

Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton

 Hillary Clinton’s book Living History might be better titled, Diary of a Mad First Lady for Hillary Rodham Clinton is certainly that.  She is an intelligent woman who, had she had the presence of mind not to throw her lot in with a charlatan, would have likely done very well on her own.  That she somehow thought her star could rise with Bill’s was her tragic downfall.  

When she and Bill Clinton met during their law school years at Yale, it was clear that he planned to go into politics.  Hillary, through her mentor Marian Wright Edelman, looked to be on track to undertake what Hillary characterizes as her life-long advocacy for children’s rights (to which she later added women’s rights).  She and Bill lived together, traveled together and campaigned for McGovern together. Hillary Rodham was busy with research projects, writing articles and clerking.  She led a voter registration drive in Texas and was a member of the impeachment staff investigating Richard Nixon. She appeared to be making her own way. 

Hillary says that Bill Clinton was determined to marry her. Yet it was she who trailed him to Fayetteville, AK.  After all she wrote, if the relationship was to succeed someone had to “give ground.” It must not have occurred to her to ask why it wasn’t him. 

Soon after marriage, Bill became Attorney General in Arkansas and Mrs. Clinton became a member of the Rose law firm. Not that she wanted to work for such a prestigious firm. She had always “resisted” private law but now she felt it made sense because Bill’s salary as AG was so paltry. When he became governor it was the same problem.  With a salary of just $35,000 a year she felt the need to “build up a nest egg.”  That’s when Mrs. Clinton began dabbling in commodities and she and Bill invested in Whitewater Estates. 

At page 76, the chapter entitled Little Rock, is when questions about Hillary Clinton’s emotional intelligence really kick in.  Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to self-awareness and good judgment about herself and others.  In short, Hillary Clinton doesn’t ever seem able to figure anything out.  On the one hand, she tells us she’s sharp as a whip, a self-assured take-charge type.  In the next paragraph she is mystified and aflutter with conflict. As a single woman, she was dedicated to children’s rights advocacy and following her heart to Bill, but she was “utterly confused” about where her life was headed.  As a married woman, she was worried about making ends meet though “we lived in the Governor’s Mansion and had an official expense account.”  When the Clintons got involved with Jim McDougal, they knew he had “reassuring” credentials and a “solid reputation.”(pg. 87) After all, Bill Clinton had known McDougal for ten years.  Later, Hillary just couldn’t understand how she and Bill misjudged him.   

When she became the nation’s First Lady, her troubles multiplied. Right off the bat, President Clinton named his wife chair of the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Both the issue and Hillary were immediately controversial. Again, Mrs. Clinton seems to have had no idea what lay ahead.   She recounts that, after her appointment, then-governor of New York Mario Cuomo approached her asking what she had done to make her husband so mad. Hillary drew a blank.  What was Cuomo talking about?  Cuomo replied that her husband would “have to be awfully upset about something to put you in charge of such a thankless job.”  The slap in the face didn’t register with Hillary. She barreled ahead. 

Hillary claims she was quite comfortable with the non-traditional role she planned to take as First Lady.  “To me, there was nothing incongruous about my interests and activities.” She liked improving health care just as much as she liked working on table settings (paraphrase)!   In the next sentence she writes, “…through my own inexperience, I contributed to some of the conflicting perceptions about me.”  It took her “awhile to figure out” that not everyone would see things her way.  At one point she complains that the governorship didn’t properly prepare her and Bill for the national stage. (pg. 141) 

In addition to a seeming inability to understand herself and those around her, Mrs. Clinton is always in crisis mode.  She characterizes her life as one muddled dilemma after another. It’s not clear whether this is dramatic posturing on her part or whether it’s an accurate reflection of a woman constantly in conflict.  Hillary isn’t exactly a liar. She’s a dissembler. She prevaricates.  She deceives herself first and seems to think others will follow suit.  

Amidst the fury over her role in health care reform, Hillary describes herself as a First Lady who would lead the way in an “era of changing gender roles.”  She would help accustom people to seeing women occupy positions of power.  Some two years and 120 pages later, however, she depicts herself in the middle of a maelstrom, a good wife trying to support her husband.  She suggests that it was her staff who inspired her to be a pioneering female role model.    

It happened after the crushing mid-term elections that ushered in a Republican Congress.  Hillary went into full crisis-mode behavior.  As she met with her all-female staff (pg. 261), she describes her despair in the face of the election results.  “Fighting back tears, my voice cracking, I poured out apologies.  I was sorry if I had let everyone down and contributed to our losses.  It wouldn’t happen again.”  She was “considering” leaving her political work behind, she was cancelling appearances, she didn’t want to hurt her husband’s administration.  Hillary claims that silence fell over the group.  Then, her loyal posse gave it to her straight.  They brought her out of her stormy crisis and into the sunshine of a new day.  Now she understood. She couldn’t quit.  “Too many other people, especially women, were counting on me.”  Pg. 261 

The book continues with contradictions and elaborations that alternately depict Hillary as confident leader or struggling victim. As the confident leader, it is Hillary who calls Dick Morris to discuss strategy.  It is Hillary who enlightens when normal minds are stumped.  It is Hillary who is forever at Bill’s side being “a helpful partner for him.”  It is “Bill and I” who consider policy.  In an almost delusional passage, Hillary tries to convince us that she was even involved in the Mid-East peace negotiations.  She writes that she often took calls from Leah Rabin and Queen Noor of Jordan when their respective husbands---that is, the Prime Minister of Israel and the King of Jordan---wanted to get information to the President through “informal channels.” (pg.315) Meaning her? Embarrassing. 

As the victim, Mrs. Clinton devotes a considerable number of pages to defending herself and her husband against the scandals and accusations that hounded them during Clinton’s eight years in office. In fact, other than welfare reform and a few scattered chapters on foreign policy, the Clinton years seem nothing but scandal---Vince Foster, Travelgate, Whitewater, her commodities trading, the McDougals.  She aggressively lambasts her adversaries and covers for herself and Bill.  She casts herself as victim of the political right wing and as loyal advisor and soulmate to the man she loves.  Can you imagine?  And we haven’t even gotten to Monica Lewinsky. 

Up until page 439, the chapter entitled ‘Soldiering On,’ Hillary Clinton explains away every other instance of her husband’s serial sexual exploitation and degradation of women.  Monica Lewinsky is the affair she finally couldn’t re-write.  Once again, Mrs. Clinton can’t understand how it all happened. She is in crisis.  When Bill finally told the truth, she was “gulping for air...crying and yelling….”  She couldn’t believe “he would do anything to endanger our marriage and our family.” (Huge eye roll.)   In the end, she says she stood by him because he was the President and, as President, he had done nothing wrong.  

The book rollercoasters on.  In one bizarre chapter, ‘Conversations with Eleanor,’ she describes her mystical, reverential connection to Eleanor Roosevelt.  In similar fashion in another chapter, she recounts an afternoon spent with Jackie Kennedy in Jackie’s NYC apartment.  With the sycophantic adulation of an outsider courting the in-crowd, Hillary portrays herself and Jackie as kindred spirits whose souls meshed into a perfect friendship.  It’s pathetic really. 

There are a few chapters that read more normally such as those that cover her travels to Central Europe, Africa and South Asia; the content is fairly interesting.  Her final chapters are devoted to her rancor about the 2000 election that Gore lost and her campaign for senator of New York.  Regarding the former, she lays out a no-holds-barred aggressive attack on the courts and the Republicans.  Regarding the latter, it’s mostly self-congratulatory fluff about everyone wanting her to run for the Senate.  

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tragic figure.  Her decision to marry Bill Clinton led to one failure after another, and, in the end, to a demise that even she didn’t deserve.  One has to feel for her. After the humiliations she suffered as First Lady, she scrambled and scraped only to get a dreary stint as a senator. Then she lost a presidential nomination to a younger black man who outdid her in both arrogance and posturing. Obediently accepting it all, she settled for fourth fiddle as his Secretary of State but only as the final springboard that would certainly garner her the well-deserved gold ring of the presidency.  Alas.  She lost out again, this time to a smart-aleck white guy who treated her as badly as her husband always had. 

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a humiliated wife, an alternately exploited and dismissed political appendage to her deviously self-absorbed and emotionally shallow husband.  She is a remnant discarded by the Democrat Party and the feminist movement whose mascot she briefly was. For better or for worse, she has written about all of it in this book. 

Patriots, The Men Who Started the American Revolution by A.J.Langguth

This book is a natural follow-up to one’s high school American history lessons that may have been mostly highlights in the first place, but might also be largely forgotten in the second. As the author wrote in his acknowledgements, he intended his book for the reader who “knew that Washington had crossed the Delaware but didn’t know why; that Benedict Arnold had betrayed his country, but didn’t know how.”  Exactly.  

This book is thematically similar to Langguth’s book on the war of 1812 in his use of topics, as opposed to a chronology of events, to tell the story of the beginnings of the American Revolution.  The approach works well. 

A closer-up look at familiar firebrands like Samuel Adams, James Otis, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and John Hancock shows them to be lesser lights when it comes to intellect and brain power and more accurately seen as dreamers and instigators; they are a collection of rather self-serving and unappealing individuals on closer reading.  They were all much as John Adams described Thomas Paine.  They, like Paine, had… “a better hand in pulling down than building.” (p. 340)  I conjecture that the work of building up was done by the likes of Adams (John), Jefferson, Washington, Madison and Hamilton.   

On the British side, King George III and some of the British appointments like Hutchinson and Bernard come across as neither so vile nor so tyrannical.  Even the British generals Howe, Burgoyne and Clinton are more bureaucratic than they are cutthroat.    

Benjamin Franklin is one of the most elusive characters of all. He is in his 60s as the colonies begin their quest for independence.  He is neither the firebrand that I thought he was nor is he particularly in the forefront of the movement for independence.  He is in Europe during most of the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary period and operates behind the scenes. For my taste, John Adams stands out from the crowd as a surprising model of prudence and statesmanship and he is easily the most level-headed of the patriots.   Adams was not showy or particularly impressive in any way.  He wasn’t a great orator, he wasn’t a great writer and he was not a physically commanding presence.  Yet he unceasingly read the big picture with insight and clarity. His lack of stage personality may be what gave him the ability to be so consistently honest and balanced.    

The Revolutionary War endured until 1781 with the British surrender at Yorktown. It took until 1783 to establish the terms for peace. If Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is the document that served as the colonies’ formal declaration of war (and there is no other that I remember reading about), then many of the familiar events associated with the American Revolution occurred either prior to the actual beginning of the war or within its first year! 

Thus, the Stamp Act and associated rioting 1765, the Boston Massacre 1770, the Boston Tea Party 1773, the convenings of the Continental Congresses 1774 and 1775, the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, all 1775, the establishment of a continental army with George Washington at its command 1775, even Washington’s first bloodless victory in Boston (March of 1776) all preceded Jefferson’s penning of the Declaration.   

What followed that same year were the American defeats in the battles in New York (Brooklyn and Kips’ Bay, the retreat to Harlem Heights and then White Plains for the Americans), then Washington’s retreat to New Jersey and Pennsylvania from which point he made his Christmas Day crossing of the ice-packed Delaware River to stage his successful attack on the Hessian soldiers in Trenton.  December of 1776 ushered in the battle of Princeton prior to which Washington made his impassioned plea to his soldiers to give him six weeks more service to the cause. They did and the colonies were triumphant at Princeton.  The year of 1776 was just completed!  

I have copious notes on the battles that followed as well as other aspects of the war.  I confess to having skipped over three chapters in this lengthy book.  They were chapters on the battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Yorktown.  My ability to process and digest the strategies and particulars of battles seems to be shamefully limited whether through a lack of brain power on my part or disinterest I’m not sure.  Probably both.  After a point, I just want to know who and when and was it a win or a loss. 

I recommend this book.   The depth and breadth of this subject in which all Americans should be well-versed requires more reading on the subject.  A good follow-up will be Angels in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick.