The New Yorker THE REDEMPTION Everything went wrong for George W. Bush, until he made it all go right. By Nicholas Lemann January 2000 “It’s quite fascinating,” said Joe. “This big honor, the biggest in the world, can happen to a man almost overnight. What was Coolidge when he was nominated for the vice-presidency? He’d been governor of Massachusetts and settled the police strike. What was Harding? Well, Harding isn’t a good example, because he’d not only been governor of his state but United States senator as well. But look at the other side, the Democrats. Wilson, a governor and a college president. Cox? Nobody. Franklin Roosevelt, the fellow that ran for vice-president, I used to know him slightly. At least I met him at dances when I was in college. A typical New York snob, I always thought.” --John O’Hara, “Ten North Frederick.” I met George W. Bush once by accident back in the early seventies, at Harvard. I must have been a freshman or a sophomore. Some home-town friends of mine from New Orleans, Grant and Margot Thomas, were in Cambridge for a few years because Grant was getting a master’s degree, and I used to drop by their apartment all the time. To me, it was a warm island of Southern gaiety in a sour sea of ambition and after-the-revolution ill will. Life had a light and charming cast there. The Thomases had a dog named Layla, and their neighbors, who were the authors of the Curious George books, would appear occasionally to deliver fond mock-chastisings in a Mittel-europa accent. One afternoon when I was there, the doorbell rang and a guy came up the stairs: George Bush. I remember having two thoughts. One was that he looked like a standard-issue boarding- school boy turned business-school student. He was wearing wide-wale corduroy trousers, an Izod polo shirt with the collar turned up, a crew-neck sweater, and Sperry Topsiders-- the uniform of the day for his group. He had curly brown hair worn just a little longer, but not much, than you could wear it at your first job. The second thought was that he must be the son of the head of the Republican National Committee. This was, on the one hand, just about the worst credential you could present in Cambridge at that moment, but, on the other hand, being the son of a definite somebody always registered as a plus at Harvard. One of the things you were socialized to do there was to notice that kind of signifier of position, and affect not to notice. So we greeted each other with meaningful blankness. I, in my Army fatigues, T-shirt, long hair, and big round glasses, would have come across to him as being as deeply not his type as he did to me. The famous Bush charm was not on display. After a few minutes, I said I had to go. I mention all this because it was very much at the top of the agenda the next time I came face to face with George Bush, which was a few days before Christmas, in the hamlet of Derry, New Hampshire. At one end of town, outside the office of the local newspaper, sat a big bus, which had been got up in the manner of the conveyance of a travelling musical act, with a painting of an eagle on one side and a landscape on the other. A small clutch of people, some of them members of a Texas Rangers security detail, stood outside. Soon Bush emerged from the newspaper office, and I introduced myself. He gave me an appraising look. “You’re Henry Thomas’s friend,” he said. “I saw him last night, at the Christmas party at the Page 1 Mansion”--the Governor’s Mansion, in Austin. “Didn’t you teach with him at the Chinquapin School?” What Bush does with people is establish a direct, personal connection--a vector of just-you- and-me. One aspect of it is that everybody gets a nickname, which thenceforth becomes the fixative in the relationship, the instant way of establishing that there’s this special thing going on between Bush and the other person. My friend Grant Thomas was born Henry Grant Thomas, Jr., so, somewhere back in the mists of time in the private-school and country- club world of Houston, where they first met, he became, to Bush, and to Bush only, Henry. Chinquapin was a school in Texas for poor kids where Grant taught for a year, during the period when Bush was in the Air National Guard. I had registered, therefore, as an old friend of Grant’s, probably from the South, probably a liberal, but possibly at least the kind who goes beyond hypocritical preachiness. Not exactly right, but in the ballpark. He motioned for me to get on the bus. Inside, the long channel of space had been divided into two parts, a dressing room in back and a living room in front, where eight or ten people could sit on upholstered couches. A few aides were inside, and a few local Republican politicians, and another reporter, from the newspaper in Nashua. I was going to interview Bush as the bus travelled from Derry to Manchester, a few miles away, where he would give a speech at a high school. Bush looked great. He was wearing a wool jacket that perfectly hugged his back and shoulders, a white shirt with some kind of crosshatched texture in the fabric, black ostrich- skin cowboy boots emblazoned with his initials, and a belt with a nicely worked silver buckle. The curly dark hair of long ago had matured into a close-cropped gray pelt like a Roman emperor’s. He was trim and golden. His face had that middle-aged patrician’s quality of being creased in a way that somehow connotes success. He began the interview by questioning me. Hadn’t I recently published a book on education and testing? It was obvious that in his mind this book had been filed under “Respectable but Too Liberal.” Didn’t I want people’s S.A.T. scores to be readjusted to account for their backgrounds? I said I didn’t. Well, then, what did I want? He was looking to identify the thing that he knew he disagreed with. I said I was for a national achievement test, based on national curriculum standards. That was it. “You’ve got your opinion, I’ve got mine,” he said, and then he went on to explain that a national test was unnecessary because of a long-running government-financed program called the National Assessment of Educational Progress--a program that everybody inside the education world and almost nobody outside of it knows about. He grinned. “And now that I’ve won that argument...” He and the appreciative audience in the bus broke out laughing. He stretched out and put his boots up on the couch. The interview, in other words, began with the quality of an amiably competitive game. Bush wasn’t just going to sit back and let me ask him questions; he was going to take the initiative, establish a teasing, givin’-you-shit vibe, and score a quick point off me, as if to show that he wasn’t an easy mark for the kind of tricky public-policy questions that I had probably come to ask. Now that all that had been established, we could begin. But, even then, that competitive feeling hung heavy in the air. Sometimes Bush would answer a question by going into what I knew to be a well-used string of sentences from one of his speeches--the unspoken part of the answer being “See, I stayed on message and didn’t let you trip me up.” Or he’d jump in, mid-question, with a quick, triumphant answer, as Page 2 if to say that he’d been ready for that one. When a question began with a premise, he’d often challenge the premise. When he detected an allusion to a public criticism of him, he’d declare his critics to be wrong. While he was answering, he was also ascending a rising curve of nomenclatural informality which began with “Nicholas” and quickly made its way to “Nick.” He seemed happiest when he could come in with a quick, sure answer. Once, I asked what he’d want written on his Presidential tombstone. Instantly: “He came, he said, he accomplished.” There was something jarring between the tone of Bush’s prospective Presidency, as he sketched it out--in which he would lead by the example of his personal probity, heal the partisan sickness that grips Washington, and solve problems in a practical, positive way-- and his aggressive, ironic manner. Or, when there wasn’t this curious dissonance, there was instead a nearly instantaneous switching back and forth between serious and comic modes. The feeling was: We don’t really have to be all official and sombre with each other, do we? Can’t we be real--which inevitably means a high quotient of kidding--instead? Here’s an example: Me: What do you do about the pure, horrible human-rights-abuse case happening in some corner of the world with no real strategic import to the United States? Bush: And Rwanda’s a great example of what you’re referring to. There will be times when the United States can lend its prestige and help and wealth to help ameliorate a situation.