Timothy Noah: Does Bush Know What Neocon Means?

Near the end of his new book, Rumsfeld: His Rise, His Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy—an unfriendly but persuasive portrait of the former secretary of defense—journalist Andrew Cockburn relates a story about an encounter between Bush père et fils that I put in the category "remarkable if true." It is August 2004, and the president is taking time off from his re-election campaign to visit his parents at their summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to the elder Bush, and also a public critic of the younger Bush, has written the president a memo on Iraq. Scowcroft has asked the father to give this memo to the son. Bush père uses Dubya's visit as an occasion to do so. I'll let Cockburn take it from here:

The president glanced at it disdainfully for a few seconds before tossing it aside, reportedly with the words "I'm sick and tired of getting papers from Brent Scowcroft telling me what to do, and I never want to see another one again." With that, he exited, slamming the door behind him.

This part of the story could very easily be true and wouldn't be all that remarkable if it were; there's very little love lost between Scowcroft and the president. But then Cockburn continues:

Notwithstanding this episode, Bush 43 still sometimes drew on his father's wide knowledge of the world. Though he refused to read newspapers, he was aware of criticism that his administration had been excessively beholden to a particular clique, and wanted to know more about them. One day during that holiday, according to friends of the family, 43 asked his father, "What's a neocon?"

"Do you want names, or a description?" answered 41.
"Description."

"Well," said the former president of the United States, "I'll give it to you in one word: Israel."

Let's set aside the question of whether it's fair to describe neocons as caring only about Israel. (My own view is that it would have been unfair, and possibly anti-Semitic, 20 years ago, but that the neocon agenda has since dwindled to such an extent that by now it's an acceptable shorthand, if slightly risqué.) Instead, let's focus on the anecdote's suggestion that as recently as two and a half years ago, the president of the United States didn't know what neocon meant.

Can this possibly be true?

Cockburn is a good reporter who has covered national security for decades. He wouldn't make it up. ...