Intense rivalry between father and his wayward son has given way to mutual concern about the family legacy
The Sunday Times
THE White House was in no mood this week to discuss President Bush’s psychological state after an election defeat that he himself had described as “a thumping”.
Tony Snow, Mr Bush’s press secretary, said: “The President is not a guy who — he doesn’t get on the couch — what he does is [say], ‘What it is, is what it is’ ”.
But if the President ever did lie down on a therapist’s couch, any psychoanalyst worth the name would begin by asking about his relationship with his father, George H. W. Bush. The 41st US President is a figure that his son, George W. Bush, the 43rd President, has variously ignored, clung to, sought the approval of and competed with. Some commentators have long since taken to describing an oedipal struggle between them.
“You want to go mano a mano right here?” Bush Jr demanded after being told off by his father for drink-driving in the Seventies, after an incident when he had dragged a neighbour’s rubbish down the street behind his car.
His brother, Jeb (always regarded by his parents as the brighter one and more likely to succeed in politics) tried to defuse the row, telling his father that George had got into Harvard Business School. “Oh, I’m not going,” said the wayward son, “I just wanted to let you know I could get into it [he did go].”
When he first ran for Congress (unsuccessfully) he would pull out his birth certificate at campaign appearances to prove his full name was not the same as his dad’s.
But Bush Sr has always been there when times are bad. And the father’s inner circle from his White House years now appears to be riding to the rescue of the son. The appointment this week of Robert Gates as Defence Secretary, together with the looming report from James Baker’s commission, are together supposed to be signalling a new direction for the Iraq war.
It was ever thus. When the attempts of Bush Jr to follow his father into the oil business were floundering, it was the friends of Bush Sr who bailed him out. In 1986 Harken Oil & Gas bought out Bush Jr’s holding in Spectrum oil in an over-the-odds deal, an apparent favour to the son of the Vice-President’s son. “His name was George Bush,” said Phil Kendrick, Harken’s founder, and “that was worth the money they paid him.”
Such kindly interventions must inevitably include a stab of humiliation for his son, not least because Bush Jr, whose fiery impetuosity is thought to come from his mother rather than his father, has tried so hard to beat his father, in politics and in war.
The elder Bush, an airforce hero in the Second World War, had led America to victory in the first Gulf War, liberating Kuwait but then balking at going on to Baghdad. The younger Bush, who stayed safely in America during the Vietnam war, was determined to do better.
It is surely significant that before the troops went into Iraq in 2003, the President justified the invasion by saying it would be impossible to negotitate with Saddam because, “after all, this is the guy who tried to kill my Dad” — a reference to a plot in 1993 linked with Iraq, to blow up the Bush family on a visit to Kuwait.
But Dad himself is thought to have harboured grave reservations about the wisdom of this course. Although he would never speak out in public, a sense of his true feelings can be found in comments he made in 1999 seeking to justify his decision against going to Baghdad. It would have meant putting soldiers’ lives on the line in fruitless “urban guerrilla warfare”, he said, and being “an occupying power — America in an Arab land — with no allies on our side”. He added, presciently, that it “would have been disastrous”.
None of this mattered when the President’s star was in the ascendant. He once told Senator John McCain: “I don’t want to be like my father. I want to be like Ronald Reagan.”
A few months after invading Iraq, he appeared to scorn his father, telling an interviewer: “I really don’t spend a lot of time hashing over policy with him. He knows that I am much better informed than he could posibly be.”
The President said that he did not need to turn to Bush Sr for strength or advice, because “there is a higher Father I appeal to”.
Even when his plan for Iraq had already begun to go badly off-course, Bush Jr was still able to beat his earthly father by winning a second term. Bush Sr had failed to do this in 1992 when he was beaten by Bill Clinton. His son and Karl Rove, his chief strategist, believed that this had been because the father had alienated core Republicans by reneging on his “no new taxes” promise — and stubbornly refusing to listen to the squeals of anguish. They vowed not to make the same mistake and appeared to have been vindicated when their army of “values voters” helped them win the White House again in 2004.
But this right-wing coalition was not enough to halt the Democrat tide this week. The wheels have come off Mr Rove’s “rolling realignment” which was supposed to usher in a lasting dominance over Democrats.
The record at home and abroad of Bush Jr had galvanised Democrats and independents but also upset some of his own base, unhappy with high federal spending and the successive ethical scandals in Washington. In 2004 only one in five white Evangelical Christians voted Democrat. This week it was more like one in three.
As he approaches the final two years of his presidency, it may be time to reflect how Bush Jr has more in common with his father in failure than he did when it was all going so well. Both men have a rigid belief that they are right, even when those around them tell them they are not.
Back at the White House this week Mr Snow said that while Iraq might have been a factor, there were many others that had nothing to do with Bush Jr. “The President doesn’t absorb a rejection,” he added like an amateur therapist who has unwittingly diagnosed a patient in denial.
