KATRINA WAS JUST ONE OF George W. Bush’s domestic woes as his second term played out. Cheney’s chief of staff and closest adviser, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, resigned in the fall of 2005 after being indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice and sentenced to thirty months in prison resulting from a twenty-two-month CIA investigation around the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. In early 2006, Cheney accidently shot a hunting companion while hunting quail in Texas, angering Bush by not disclosing the accident for a day and a half. Gas prices soared and the economy, hampered by debt, sputtered.
Even Bush’s domestic successes came under fire. No Child Left Behind effectively held public schools accountable for achievement, putting in place standardized tests in reading and math, as fourth-grade literacy and math skills and eighth-grade math skills climbed to their highest levels in history. Critics, however, held that schools were “teaching to the test,” leaving students behind in other areas of study. The Medicare Modernization Act, signed by Bush at the end of 2003, gave the thirty-eight-year-old federal health insurance program a much-needed overhaul that offered sweeping new benefits including prescription drug coverage, but costs were far greater than anticipated. “By the end of 2005,” Bush wrote later of the ebb of his presidency, “much of my political capital was gone.”
Abroad, the rebuilding of Afghanistan was tough going. Insurgency and the failure of multilateralism in stabilizing the country necessitated an expansion in U.S. troops from twenty thousand to thirty thousand, along with a twofold increase in funding the effort. Likewise, the rebuilding of Iraq continued to be a drain on U.S. military and financial resources. In December 2005, Americans were warmed by the news that nearly two-thirds of Iraq’s registered voters went to the polls in a free election to determine members of the nation’s 275-seat parliament, many voters proudly lifting purple ink-stained index fingers as a symbol of the exercise of their democratic right. It was a positive sign that democracy had taken hold. But as violence continued to plague the country with no exit strategy in place for U.S. involvement, Americans were increasingly losing patience.
So was Bush. For two years, he thought about asking for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. Twice he had been talked out of it by Cheney, Rumsfeld’s closest ally in the administration. In the fall of 2006, though, Bush had firmly made up his mind—it was time for Rumsfeld to go. Cheney and Rumsfeld had been close since the Ford administration, when Cheney had served as deputy chief of staff under Rumsfeld, whom he supplanted as chief of staff when Rumsfeld moved to the Pentagon in his first turn as secretary of defense. “I disagree with your decision, Mr. President,” Cheney told Bush. “But it’s your call. You’re the president.” When Bush held firm, Cheney offered to be the one to break the news to Rumsfeld. “I owe Don an awful lot and he should hear [it] from me,” he said.
Bush’s first choice to replace Rumsfeld was Jim Baker—and it was 41 who paved the way. “[Forty-one] called and asked me, ‘Would you consider this?’” recalled Baker. While the seventy-five-year-old erstwhile secretary of state and secretary of the treasury agreed to talk to 43 about the position, he ultimately demurred due to “the toll” he knew the job would take. Eventually, 43 settled on a like-minded alternative, Robert Gates, who had served as director of the CIA in 41’s administration and went on to become dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, then president of the university at large. Gates was “strongly advocated” by 41 and Baker, whose pragmatic, multilateral approach to foreign policy aligned with that of Gates, an implicit departure from the unilateralism favored by Cheney and Rumsfeld. During a conversation with Bush about the job, Bush preemptively addressed the elephant in the room—the issue of Cheney’s influence on his foreign policy going forward. “Cheney?” he asked on Gates’s behalf, answering, “He is one voice, an important voice, but only one voice.”
In fact, while Bush heard Cheney’s voice throughout the balance of his second term, he often passed it over for the more moderate voice of Condoleezza Rice. Rice would become Bush’s most prominent adviser, leading a chorus of other like minds including Gates and Hadley that one National Security Council official called the “revolt of the radical pragmatists.” It showed in decisions Bush made contrasting those he had made in the first term. He was receptive to European involvement in Iraq and was willing to make diplomatic overtures—ultimately unsuccessful—to Iran and Syria relating to Iraq’s future. Both were signs that 43 was taking a different course as he became more settled in the presidency and more confident in his own ability to read foreign affairs.
While the course 43 took in his second term, by extrapolation, looked a lot more like the pragmatic, diplomatic line his father would have walked in his place, they didn’t see eye to eye on everything. In an interview with Time magazine just prior to the end of calendar year 2004, 41 was asked to express his hope for his son’s second term. “Peace,” he replied. “Clear, positive solutions to Iraq and the Middle East. What I’d like to see is the President’s view of a Palestinian state.” But the views between father and son on how to achieve peace differed discernably, representing generational and ideological differences. Conservative thinker William Kristol, who worked in the Bush 41 administration as chief of staff for Dan Quayle, said, “Bush the father was from a certain generation of political leaders and foreign policy establishment types. He had many years of dealings with leading Arab governments; he was close to the Saudi royal family.” As president, 41 opposed Israeli settlements on occupied land—even if a less pro-Israeli stance further hurt his cause with Christian conservatives at home—and maintained close ties with Arab leaders, using his diplomatic facility and stature in the region after the Gulf War to help broker negotiations in nuanced regional disputes.
Bush the son had far greater affinity for Israel, sparked on a formative expedition as governor of Texas in 1998. During a helicopter tour of the country with Israeli foreign minister Ariel Sharon, Bush was taken by how small and vulnerable it was, a narrow slice of rugged land a shade larger than the state of New Jersey. We have driveways in Texas bigger than that, he thought. Just after becoming president, in a private March 2001 Oval Office meeting with Sharon, who had advanced to become Israeli prime minister, Bush gave him his unsolicited assurance that if necessary he was prepared to use U.S. force to protect Israel. Bush’s determination intensified after 9/11. Bolstering his support among evangelicals, Bush stuck by Israel during a military conflict with the Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon lasting just over a month in the summer of 2006, despite international calls for a cease-fire and wide condemnation of Israel after a bomb attack on a Lebanese apartment complex killed twenty-eight civilians.
“How’s the first Jewish president doing?” Barbara Bush greeted her son in a phone call at the time, reflecting skeptics in the Bush 41 camp who held 43’s Israeli policy in question. “[My parents] were concerned—and the chattering class was concerned—about how I was handling the Israeli situation,” 43 said, “because they just weren’t that informed about my strategy, which was first and foremost making it clear to the Middle East that the United States would not abandon Israel—and that’s necessary to get Israel to consider peace and for the Arab world not to exploit differences.” He added, “Frankly, what I never got credit for among the chatterers was [convincing] Ariel Sharon that the two-state solution was the only solution for peace.” In 2014, Bush looked at the state of Israel as vindication of his policy. “To the extent that the debate has changed considerably in Israel, the strategy worked,” he said.
Arab leaders would occasionally use their relationship with Bush’s father to try to change 43’s policy—including using 41 as an intermediary to lobby on their behalf. “I suspect that some of these leaders would send messages trying to get me to change my foreign policy,” 43 said. “I guess they didn’t understand my nature. I had made up my mind.” Among them was Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who had held the office since 1981 and had resisted 43’s pressure for Egypt to hold open elections. Forty-three related a conversation in which the Egyptian president invoked his relationship with the elder Bush.
With President Mubarak, for example, it was a fairly typical line, “Well, your father and I are very close,” or, “Your father this,” or, “Your father that.” And, of course, he was uncomfortable with my change in policy. And basically, it was this:
[Bush]: “Why don’t you have open elections?”
[Mubarak]: “Because the Muslim Brotherhood will win.”
[Bush]: “Oh, really, well why don’t you find out why the Muslim Brotherhood will win and do a better job of appealing to the people as a change in foreign policy?”
Shortly after the exchange with Mubarak, 43 heard from his father that the Egyptian president was “unsettled.” If 41 was relaying Mubarak’s feedback as an indirect means of challenging 43’s Middle East policy, it fell on deaf ears. “Look,” he told his father, “this is what we’re doing in order for there to be peace.” Forty-three wasn’t looking to him for advice or approbation. “When I would discuss this with Dad,” he explained, “it wasn’t like I was trying to feel my way along after I made policy decisions, it was that I believed it was the best course for the country. It unsettled people, but when you really think about what unsettled them, it betrays our values. ‘How dare you think people can self-govern?’” He saw in 2011 Mubarak’s ouster by popular uprising, spurred by the Arab Spring movement, as vindication of his stance toward the oppressive Egyptian president. “Turns out I might have been right because he then gets overthrown because he didn’t listen to the people on the street,” 43 said. For that matter, Bush saw the Arab Spring, the independent antigovernment movement that swept through the Arab states starting in 2010, as being “influenced” by the kindling of democracy in Iraq.
Still, dissention between Bush and his parents was a rarity. The bulk of their interaction was not about politics but family; it’s what had always bound them together. Early in Bush’s second term, Jean Becker, 41’s chief of staff, placed a call to Marvin Bush in which she told him about a health matter affecting his mother that had eluded her doctors. “I think your mother is really struggling right now,” she said. Less than fifteen minutes later, she received word that the president was on the line from a flustered receptionist who connected them. “He was calling to tell me that he was the oldest and if there was ever anything about his parents of concern, that I need to call him [first],” she recalled. Knowing the enormity of the demands he shouldered, she gently pushed back.
“Mr. President,” she said, “as long as you’re in the Oval Office, I’m not going to call you because you’re so busy. I would call Andy Card, but I’m not going to call you.”
“Yes, you will,” the president said firmly. “You will call me.”
Even during his eight years in the White House, George W. Bush never stopped being the First Son.