What Bush Learned From Reagan
From: Michael Isikoff
To: Oliver Stone, Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and Jacob WeisbergPosted Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008, at 9:54 AM ETThis week, Slate is featuring a conversation about George Bush's presidency, prompted by Oliver Stone's film W. Participants are Oliver Stone; Bob Woodward, author of The War Within; Ron Suskind, author of The Way of the World; and Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy.
Special W. Dialogue Bonus: After reading this discussion, Michael Isikoff, co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, was moved to respond. His post is below.
Oliver, Bob, Ron, and Jacob:
After reviewing this discussion, I'd like to weigh in on the debate over the core question: When and why did President Bush decide to go to war in Iraq? It is, when you think about it, rather amazing that there isn't a consensus on this. It was, after all, the defining moment of Bush's presidency.
My old and esteemed boss Bob Woodward contends he fully answered the question in his book Plan of Attack and places the moment when Bush chose war in January 2003. My new Newsweek colleague Jacob Weisberg demurs and places it sometime in the summer of 2002. My neighbor Ron Suskind argues the decision was already made by early 2002.
At the risk of being self-referential, I'd point Slate readers to one of the scenes Stone lifted wholesale from Hubris, the book David Corn and I co-authored in 2006 about the selling of the Iraq war. It appears, slightly modified, in the movie; Stone tinkers a bit with the actual dialogue. But he's got the essence of it right. I think it tilts the scale toward Suskind.
The scene in question takes place May 1, 2002. Bush, while whacking tennis balls to his dogs on the White House lawn, is being briefed by press secretary Ari Fleischer and another communications aide, Adam Levine, for a History Channel interview he is about to give that afternoon about the life of Ronald Reagan. (That's the real setting as reported in Hubris. In the movie, Stone substitutes Karl Rove for the somewhat obscure Levine, and Fleischer walks in midway through the discussion.) Fleischer relates the pesky questions he was getting at the press briefing that day from Helen Thomas about why Bush seems so intent on starting a war and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Bush lets a loose with a string of expletives.
"Did you tell her I don't like motherfuckers who gas their own people?"
"Did I tell you I don't like assholes who lie to the world?"
"Did you tell her I'm going to kick his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Mideast?"
Fleischer replies: "I told her half of that."
In the movie, Stone actually tones down the expletives and substitutes a different line—"Did you tell her I don't like assholes who try to kill my father?"—in the middle of this tirade. (Bush actually did make a crack about Saddam trying to kill his father, but that was at a Texas fundraiser for John Cornyn on Sept. 26, 2002.) But the rest of the movie dialogue is pretty much as Bush said it. And there wasn't much doubt about what Bush had in mind. "You know where we're going here," Levine recalled thinking at the time.
There are two obvious points to make about this. The first is that Bush's outburst was early—well before Congress authorized the war resolution in October 2002 and before the November 2002 U.N. Security Council resolution giving Saddam one last chance to come clean on his supposed weapons of mass destruction. It also came before Bush, according to Woodward, made the decision to wage war the following January. Woodward may well be right about the formal decision. But under the operating assumption that diplomacy isn't the customary way to kick a foreign leader's ass across international borders, I think the May outburst is fairly indicative that Bush had pretty much made up his mind about what he intended to do long before the final sign off.
My second point speaks to motivation, and here's where the Ronald Reagan interview that day sheds some light. While researching Hubris, Corn and I got hold of the actual written memo prepared for Bush in which the White House communications staff had written out the likely questions the president would get from the History Channel interviewer. Bush then wrote on it, scribbling his thoughts about the points he wanted to emphasize. The memo with Bush's jottings is a fascinating document. It offers a pretty good window into not just what Bush admired about Reagan but also how he saw himself in the spring of 2002. "Optimism and strength," Bush scrawled at the top of the memo. Also, "decisive" and "faith." Next to a question about Reagan's direct, blunt style, Bush wrote "moral clarity." He drew an arrow next to the word forceful. Alongside a question about the 1983 suicide-bombing attack on the U.S. Marines barracks in Lebanon (which killed 241 U.S. troops), Bush wrote, "There will be casualties."
When it came time for the actual interview, Bush hit these points and used an interesting analogy that Stone includes in W.: Recalling one of the iconic speeches of the Reagan era, one that the late president's admirers have long pointed to as a decisive moment in the fall of the Soviet Empire, Bush said that Reagan "didn't say, 'Well, Mr. Gorbachev, would you take the top three bricks off the wall?' He said, 'Tear it all down.' … And the truth of the matter is, I spoke about the Axis of Evil, and I did it for a reason. I wanted the world to know exactly where the United States stood."
We can debate endlessly what really motivated Bush in making the audacious decision to invade Iraq—the threat of WMD, the cooked-up evidence about connections between Saddam and al-Qaida, the need to be pre-emptive in the post-9/11 era, the desire to secure Mideast oil supplies. But I think the "tear it all down" line captures the essence of Bush's worldview. Why monkey around with diplomacy, U.N. inspections, and halfway measures? And the search for one key moment to pinpoint the "decision" time is probably illusory. Bush the Decider didn't actually decide in Cabinet or war-council meetings. His White House didn't thrash out option memos and debate them endlessly. He decided on what his gut told him, and his gut instincts were that he had had enough of trying to "box in" Saddam Hussein and that it was time to kick his ass and remove him through military force.
The enormous consequences of such gut decisions—the human and financial costs of the war in Iraq—may be one reason another Republican presidential candidate known for making gut decisions may be having such a difficult time in the polls right now.
What Bush Learned From Reagan
From: Michael Isikoff
To: Oliver Stone, Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and Jacob WeisbergPosted Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008, at 9:54 AM ET
Michael Isikoff is an investigative correspondent for Newsweek and the author of Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story. Oliver Stone is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter and the director, most recently, of W. Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author, most recently, of The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy. Follow him at http://twitter.com/jacobwe. Bob Woodward is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter and the author, most recently, of The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008. Photograph of Oliver Stone with Josh Brolin on the set of W. in Entry 2 and still of Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush and James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush in W. by Sidney Ray Baldwin. Courtesy Lionsgate Films. Entry 10: Photograph of Oliver Stone and actors on the set by Sidney Ray Baldwin.
Movies are all about drama, not history-by-the-books.
Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser get it exactly right by focusing on Bush's character, not on trying to capture the verbatim history of events. There was a lot of good reporting, particularly by Bob Woodward, but no stenographers were in any of the important meetings. Therefore, everything is subject to speculation. And here is where Oliver and Stanley gave a fabulous, real, large, and acutely accurate psychological reading of W. and the events and people who surrounded him.
This film will be studied for generations. Not only is it fair to the subject, "W.", it is also fair to the real, underlying truth of the characters and the events. Which is a major-league accomplishment by the writer and the director. Kudos to both Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone.
--radlib1
(To reply, click here.)
While W's drinking and carrying-on didn't result in him getting fined, tossed in jail, etc., when he did achieve he didn't (literally) get the pat on the back either. Whatever W did was meaningless to him, whether it be crash the car into the front door or get elected to positions of incredible power and status.
--brewcrew2008
(To reply, click here.)
This all reminded me of the reviews I read of one of the biographies of Ronald Reagan, I believe it was "Dutch" by Edmund Morris. After being at Reagan's side for years and interviewing everyone he could who ever met Reagan he couldn't believe what he had found. He learned that Reagan was essentially a stuffed shirt, a kind of empty vessel who, like Bush, was incurious about the world and didn't really know how to fix any problems. But Morris could not believe this. Surely there must be more to Reagan. Thus he chocked it up to Reagan be a mysterious, inscrutable person of endless depth. Despite his closeness to Reagan Morris never found the bottom of the man, at least he couldn't believe that he had. Thus to explain Reagan Morris had to make up stories about Reagan and insert himself into events he wasn't a part of.
Suskind believes that some future writer will get a better and truer grasp of Bush. But if there is nothing else to grasp then Suskind is sounding or acting like Morris.
--doughdee222
(To reply, click here.)
One thing Mr. Woodward left out: yes, it was believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and, yes, we tried to make a case of it. And in the end we were wrong, but let's not forget, Saddam was less than forthcoming until the U.S.A was knocking at his door.
We can get all over the weapons-of-mass-destruction argument and bash Bush, Powell, and all the others who were wrong. But Saddam closed his doors to regular inspections by the U.N. (until the last minute) and kept his entire country under his thumb.
-Pachomius
(To reply, click here.)
A big part of his election campaign in 2000 was that he was the "CEO president" - that he would surround himself with advisers who were experts and would give him advice, and then he would make the decision. A huge problem with a "CEO" president who takes no time to understand any issue is that he is completely dependent on his advisers, and in this case, they were all some combination of delusional, insane, ideologically corrupt, incompetent, or gutless. Of course Bush decided to invade, he was fed information that could only lead him to one conclusion.
And this bit about Bush telling Cheney he's the boss - that had nothing to do with Cheney's control over policy, Bush just didn't want Cheney to appear to be making the decisions, and he wanted Cheney to be deferential to him. The whole Bush presidency was about him looking presidential, and being elected twice, and making big decisions to be remembered by. He had no real plan that he wanted to implement, he just wanted to look like he was in charge, and he didn't want Cheney to alter that perception.
--kgsbca
(To reply, click here.)
The points missing from the discussion are, first, the way people process information, and second, the fact that the political climate at the time created tangible benefits to Bush which disposed him towards war.
Intelligence assessments, the existence or not of WMD, possible links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda--all of the available facts and interpretations of facts available to Bush were heavily laced with ambiguity. When faced with decisions in the presence of even minimal ambiguity, almost no human beings can analyze them completely objectively, and most tend to be strongly disposed to make the interpretation that is most advantageous to them. This happens to all of us to some degree, without our awareness. We will interpret available facts, and even bend them, if necessary, in order to interpret them in a way consistent with our pre-dispositions, without even thinking about it.
Bush is clearly either less able or less willing to set aside his pre-existing beliefs than most people, and most people aren't very good at it. This must be considered against the fact that, during the spring and summer leading up to the Iraq invasion, in a political sense, war was working for Bush and Cheney. […] Although most people agreed that action against the Taliban in Afghanistan was justified, many doubted whether it would be effective. However, by early in 2002, the skeptics looked wrong. […] It was a huge political success for Bush at the time, and defining himself as The Anti-terrorist became the strategy used to help Republicans gain in the 2002 elections.
I don't know if Weisberg is right that a decision was made to go to war in Iraq in mid 2002. But a psychology disposed toward war was strongly entrenched, and continued to be further fortified by the political advantage the Republicans gained from exploiting the conflict. The result may well have been that no single over-riding reason was needed. Between all of the players involved, a group-think took over in which each could assemble their own justifications from a long list of possibilities.
When you have a democracy governed by a collective dominated by a group-think that has been re-enforced by tangible benefits to the leaders resulting their interpretation of sketchy data, and when that same collective has great control over the presentation of the available datta to everyone else, the only reasons that really matter are the ones that will sell the idea to the public.
--not_abel
(To reply, click here.)
I wish I had the date of the speech so I could go back and listen to it again. During the 2000 campaign, I heard a snippet of Bush speaking on the radio in which he said something to the effect of, "We don't have a monolithic enemy like in the days of the 50s, we have instead this vague unstructured threat field" What struck me about it was that he sounded wistful, disappointed that he missed all the fun of facing down an evil empire, going toe to toe against Kruschev. He was right, of course, about the vague unstructured threat field, but I think he wanted to test himself against the consolidated forces of evil. So I think he was predisposed to look for a monolithic enemy, to see the actions of a terrorist cabal as one face of evil incarnate. He wasn't content to fight Al Qaeda, he needed to be god's warrior and declared a global war on terror.
--Swampdog
(To reply, click here.)
(10/28)
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Movies are all about drama, not history-by-the-books.
Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser get it exactly right by focusing on Bush's character, not on trying to capture the verbatim history of events. There was a lot of good reporting, particularly by Bob Woodward, but no stenographers were in any of the important meetings. Therefore, everything is subject to speculation. And here is where Oliver and Stanley gave a fabulous, real, large, and acutely accurate psychological reading of W. and the events and people who surrounded him.
This film will be studied for generations. Not only is it fair to the subject, "W.", it is also fair to the real, underlying truth of the characters and the events. Which is a major-league accomplishment by the writer and the director. Kudos to both Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone.
--radlib1
(To reply, click here.)
While W's drinking and carrying-on didn't result in him getting fined, tossed in jail, etc., when he did achieve he didn't (literally) get the pat on the back either. Whatever W did was meaningless to him, whether it be crash the car into the front door or get elected to positions of incredible power and status.
--brewcrew2008
(To reply, click here.)
This all reminded me of the reviews I read of one of the biographies of Ronald Reagan, I believe it was "Dutch" by Edmund Morris. After being at Reagan's side for years and interviewing everyone he could who ever met Reagan he couldn't believe what he had found. He learned that Reagan was essentially a stuffed shirt, a kind of empty vessel who, like Bush, was incurious about the world and didn't really know how to fix any problems. But Morris could not believe this. Surely there must be more to Reagan. Thus he chocked it up to Reagan be a mysterious, inscrutable person of endless depth. Despite his closeness to Reagan Morris never found the bottom of the man, at least he couldn't believe that he had. Thus to explain Reagan Morris had to make up stories about Reagan and insert himself into events he wasn't a part of.
Suskind believes that some future writer will get a better and truer grasp of Bush. But if there is nothing else to grasp then Suskind is sounding or acting like Morris.
--doughdee222
(To reply, click here.)
One thing Mr. Woodward left out: yes, it was believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and, yes, we tried to make a case of it. And in the end we were wrong, but let's not forget, Saddam was less than forthcoming until the U.S.A was knocking at his door.
We can get all over the weapons-of-mass-destruction argument and bash Bush, Powell, and all the others who were wrong. But Saddam closed his doors to regular inspections by the U.N. (until the last minute) and kept his entire country under his thumb.
-Pachomius
(To reply, click here.)
A big part of his election campaign in 2000 was that he was the "CEO president" - that he would surround himself with advisers who were experts and would give him advice, and then he would make the decision. A huge problem with a "CEO" president who takes no time to understand any issue is that he is completely dependent on his advisers, and in this case, they were all some combination of delusional, insane, ideologically corrupt, incompetent, or gutless. Of course Bush decided to invade, he was fed information that could only lead him to one conclusion.
And this bit about Bush telling Cheney he's the boss - that had nothing to do with Cheney's control over policy, Bush just didn't want Cheney to appear to be making the decisions, and he wanted Cheney to be deferential to him. The whole Bush presidency was about him looking presidential, and being elected twice, and making big decisions to be remembered by. He had no real plan that he wanted to implement, he just wanted to look like he was in charge, and he didn't want Cheney to alter that perception.
--kgsbca
(To reply, click here.)
The points missing from the discussion are, first, the way people process information, and second, the fact that the political climate at the time created tangible benefits to Bush which disposed him towards war.
Intelligence assessments, the existence or not of WMD, possible links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda--all of the available facts and interpretations of facts available to Bush were heavily laced with ambiguity. When faced with decisions in the presence of even minimal ambiguity, almost no human beings can analyze them completely objectively, and most tend to be strongly disposed to make the interpretation that is most advantageous to them. This happens to all of us to some degree, without our awareness. We will interpret available facts, and even bend them, if necessary, in order to interpret them in a way consistent with our pre-dispositions, without even thinking about it.
Bush is clearly either less able or less willing to set aside his pre-existing beliefs than most people, and most people aren't very good at it. This must be considered against the fact that, during the spring and summer leading up to the Iraq invasion, in a political sense, war was working for Bush and Cheney. […] Although most people agreed that action against the Taliban in Afghanistan was justified, many doubted whether it would be effective. However, by early in 2002, the skeptics looked wrong. […] It was a huge political success for Bush at the time, and defining himself as The Anti-terrorist became the strategy used to help Republicans gain in the 2002 elections.
I don't know if Weisberg is right that a decision was made to go to war in Iraq in mid 2002. But a psychology disposed toward war was strongly entrenched, and continued to be further fortified by the political advantage the Republicans gained from exploiting the conflict. The result may well have been that no single over-riding reason was needed. Between all of the players involved, a group-think took over in which each could assemble their own justifications from a long list of possibilities.
When you have a democracy governed by a collective dominated by a group-think that has been re-enforced by tangible benefits to the leaders resulting their interpretation of sketchy data, and when that same collective has great control over the presentation of the available datta to everyone else, the only reasons that really matter are the ones that will sell the idea to the public.
--not_abel
(To reply, click here.)
I wish I had the date of the speech so I could go back and listen to it again. During the 2000 campaign, I heard a snippet of Bush speaking on the radio in which he said something to the effect of, "We don't have a monolithic enemy like in the days of the 50s, we have instead this vague unstructured threat field" What struck me about it was that he sounded wistful, disappointed that he missed all the fun of facing down an evil empire, going toe to toe against Kruschev. He was right, of course, about the vague unstructured threat field, but I think he wanted to test himself against the consolidated forces of evil. So I think he was predisposed to look for a monolithic enemy, to see the actions of a terrorist cabal as one face of evil incarnate. He wasn't content to fight Al Qaeda, he needed to be god's warrior and declared a global war on terror.
--Swampdog
(To reply, click here.)
(10/28)