The big news on the Bush-bashing front is that Papa Bush, #41, has a biography coming out next week, and section released by the publisher shows that he didn’t care much for his son’s (#43) staff, as well as containing other critiques.
To begin with, Bush I is a selfish jerk for allowing his biography to be released during the 2016 campaign, when it can only be used as a weapon against his sons and his party. His publishers want that, of course, because it means sales, and other than the campaign controversy angle I cannot imagine a one-term President whose biography anyone but family members would be less interested in reading. Benjamin Harrison, maybe. (But I’ve actually read not one biography of Ben, but three: Harry J. Sievers’s three-volume biography of Harrison, published between 1952 and 1968. It wasn’t my idea.) Bush, however, doesn’t need the money. His ego has obviously swallowed his common sense and loyalty, or he is being manipulated in his dotage.
That’s one obnoxious feature of the book. The worst, however, is this passage from the Times story describing a section in which Bush confesses that nearly didn’t run for re-election:
On March 13, 1991, just two weeks after Iraq capitulated in the gulf war, Mr. Bush fantasized in his diary about calling it quits after a single term. He would “call a press conference in about November and just turn it loose,” he said in the audio diary. “You need someone in this job” who could give his “total last ounce of energy, and I’ve had” that “up until now, but now I don’t seem to have the drive.”
“Maybe it’s the letdown after the day-to-day” 5 a.m. calls “to the Situation Room; conferences every single day with Defense and State; moving things, nudging things, worrying about things, phone calls to foreign leaders, trying to keep things moving forward, managing a massive project,” he said in the diary. “Now it’s different, sniping, carping, bitching, predictable editorial complaints.”
Anyone paying attention from that moment in Bush’s administration on could see that the President was acting and sounding tired, disengaged, disappointed and phoning it in. Blessed with a momentary 90% plus approval rate that would have allowed him to do, or at least attempt to do, great and difficult things at a less partisan time in our history, Bush filled space. He even had his chief of staff, John Sununu, tell the press at one point that there was nothing more that needed to be done, one of the most irresponsible messages ever heard issue to issue from a White House.
Everyone remembers Bush looking at his watch during the “town meeting” debate with Ross Perot and Clinton in the 1992 campaign, both of whom seemed to really want to be President of the United States while Bush made it clear that it was all such a bore. Bush obviously didn’t like the job: he didn’t like speaking in public, and he had no natural leadership skills. He initially ran for President on his resume as a career bureaucrat—it was said at the time that he ran for the office because there was no job left in government that he hadn’t done already–artificially posing as a true-blue Reagan conservative when he was at heart a moderate follower who was most comfortable when someone else was pointing the way. Then H.W. ran out of energy, ideas and enthusiasm before his first term was over. His own words confirm what his conduct suggested.
If a President feels like that for very long, his ethical obligation to his nation and his party is not to run for re-election. (What he really should do is resign, if his Vice President isn’t Dan Quayle, but then, that was Bush’s fault too.) When Donald Trump says that Jeb Bush is too low-energy to be President, it is not an entirely unfair criticism, not after what we saw with his father.
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Pointer: Althouse
Facts: New York Times
Graphic: Politico
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts, and seek written permission when appropriate. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work or property was used in any way without proper attribution, credit or permission, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
I wonder what the thought process here was? I can’t imagine that the Bush family doesn’t have an army of PR people saying this will torpedo Jeb… So is this a declaration that they know he can’t win, but they want to cash in? I feel like I’m missing something.
I doubt that I’ll buy Bush’s book. Probably, the most interesting part for me would be his career as a Naval aviator where he was shot down and rescued from a likely grim fate. I think that the book will not do the Republican candidates much harm except possibly Jeb Bosh.
The Bush family really possesses an uncanny knack for bringing its own members down. Heyyyy…did Poppy get shot down, or just bail out??
I really don’t know what point you are attempting to make here. Bush was piloting a Avenger torpedo bomber on a glide bombing attack on a radio installation and his plane was hit by shellfire. The plane caught fire and he ordered the crew to bail out. By accounts he stayed at the controls as long as he could before bailing out himself. His courage in making the attack is undeniable.
Well, I was not intending to cast aspersions on George H.W. Bush’s courage, if that makes you feel better. Hell, even some deserters show some courage.
IF there was a point I was trying to make – my sarcasm, like my homophobia, is not a choice, you see, so sometimes that cup runneth over – it was that we all know, or can have access to, “the story.” But what we too often miss, not for lack of wanting it or hunting for it, is “the truth.” So any combat aviator, any combat observer, any writer of a military medal commendation, can recount any war story, true in toto or not, and still the fog of war makes anything possible.
From the time of the end of Gulf War ’91, I projected that GHW was not just done for, but done, period. I warned numerous people he was going to lose re-election, just 21 months later. Their incredulity brought me to laugh every time. But I knew. Don’t ask me how I knew, or why. I just knew. The Perot campaign (following the Anderson campaign(s)); the breaking of the no-new-taxes pledge; the alleged economic downturn; the overwhelmingly partisan, pro-Democrat Party press (rabidly anti-Bush and anti-Republican, even in those days), and Bush’s anemic ’88 campaign made the future dazzlingly, almost blindingly foreseeable to me. (I could have been blind, and still have predicted accurately.) Bush ran in ’92 like so many burned-out federal bureaucrats coast into retirement. (Believe me, I have had to deal with plenty of those, the burned-out, I mean; I can spot ‘em by one of their e-mails, or two minutes into a meeting with one of them. I’m not even one of them, and I have to check myself constantly against not becoming like one of them.) I am grateful to read that Bush confessed his tepid interest in re-election in his book. I have to agree with Jack; there’s some selfish jerkishness in that man.
My least favorite President of my lifetime, until Obama, who has lapped him.
I still hold Johnson as next-to-least favorite to Obama in my lifetime. Bush 41 might tie with Johnson, for all the disappointment he brought.
ACK! I forgot Carter. (almost!) Carter and Bush 41: tied for third-to-least favorite in my lifetime.
Just yesterday, I was sharing with my better half how, in 2008, all I could keep saying, over and over, in a mix of incredulity and denial, was, “THIS is the best we can do?!” (with McCain vs. Obama) Those times marked the beginnings of the evolution of my shocked, grieving disappointment with the controllers of the American political system into angry, violent contempt – from there, to a resigned, “let it burn” attitude, to, “I’m gonna get some matches and a whole heap of accelerants, and burn down the U. of Missouri, along with certain students and student ‘leaders.’ FUCK those protesters and their demands, and the ashes of their burned skins, too!”