What George H. W. Bush Got Wrong
George W. Bush tends to deflect questions about his legacy by saying that only history will be the judge of his Presidency, and “I’m just not going to be around to see the final verdict.” Yet his father, George H. W. Bush, at ninety-one, is living long enough to see the verdict on his own Presidency—and he has to like the results. The forty-first President is being treated to a rolling tribute that is no doubt bittersweet, but certainly more sweet than bitter for a one-term President who left office being blamed for a recession, charged with indifference to the struggles of ordinary Americans, and vilified by the right for breaking his campaign pledge of “no new taxes.”
Today there is a consensus across much of the political spectrum that George H. W. Bush was a President of some consequence, a man of conscience and reason, a steady hand at a time of geopolitical instability. There is even an argument to be made that Bush is, as Mark Updegrove, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, contends, “our most revered living president.” Some of that reverence, to be sure, stems from Bush’s near-total withdrawal from the political arena—even, or especially, during his son’s troubled tenure as President. (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, by contrast, have been more publicly engaged as post-Presidents, and more willing than Bush to accept the risks in that.) During those difficult years, 41’s reputation rose as 43’s sank. In part, it rose because 43’s sank; the son’s liabilities tended to magnify the father’s better qualities: his pragmatism and restraint, his multilateralism.
But George H. W. Bush’s brand of leadership stands up well enough in its own right. It was not empty flattery when, in 2013, President Obama praised him at a White House celebration of civic voluntarism, a cause long championed by Bush. “Given the humility that’s defined your life,” Obama told Bush at the East Room ceremony, “I suspect it’s harder for you to see something that’s clear to everybody else around you, and that’s how bright a light you shine.”
When we rank, reconsider, laud, or denounce past Presidents, living or dead, we are taking stock of our own times. In that sense, the vindication of George H. W. Bush is a reflection of what we know we’ve lost. Jon Meacham’s new biography of Bush, “Destiny and Power,” makes that plain from its very first pages. “Americans unhappy with the reflexively polarized politics of the first decades of the twenty-first century will find the presidency of George H.W. Bush refreshing, even quaint,” Meacham writes in his prologue. “He embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price.” Meacham lists achievements that any Democratic President would be happy to claim: the Americans with Disabilities Act, the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, an expansion of tax credits for families with children. But, on the domestic front, Bush’s reputation rests, principally, on his tax-pledge apostasy—his retreat, by the summer of 1990, from the showy supply-side absolutism of 1988, and his resulting agreement with congressional Democrats to cut spending and raise taxes. “Our people were running and screaming, and I can understand why,” Bush wrote in his diary after striking the deal. “I guess this is the biggest test of my Presidency.”
By “our people,” Bush meant the most religiously anti-tax, anti-government conservatives—the G.O.P.’s bitter-enders. Vice-President Dan Quayle and others urged Bush to make his case to them and the nation for raising taxes, but Bush refused; he told Quayle that the results of the budget deal would speak for themselves. Meacham attributes this reticence to Bush’s discomfort with speeches—Bush had been cowed, Meacham believes, by “the Reagan rhetorical legacy” and the slings of the news media. But there is more at work here than Meacham acknowledges, and it has to be weighed in any full accounting of Bush’s life and leadership. Bush shrank from defending the tax increase, in part, because he had always shrunk from challenging, in any principled, public way, his party’s right wing. ...