How Bush Stacks Up

Like Rorschach tests, a growing stack of Bush books reveals very different presidents—Evangelical Bush, Frat-Boy Bush, Weepy Bush—as authors try to explain his failure. There’s an even grimmer version—the story of his “success.”

James Wolcott
February 2008

Most people fear death. It’s something they’d prefer to skip, if possible, or at least put off to a later date. President George W. Bush entertains a more laid-back, come-what-may attitude toward the big D, and not, I suspect, because he’s assured of a pre-boarding pass to heaven. It’s because death provides the most unassailable of alibis, the perfect getaway. It lets him off the hook, providing an escape hatch for personal accountability while history deliberates on the lasting achievements and ruinous legacies of his presidency. No matter how lousy his approval ratings, how low America’s esteem sinks in the world, how hacktacular his political appointments, Bush takes comfort in the knowledge that posterity takes a long time to deliver its final draft (“There’s no such thing as short-term history as far as I’m concerned,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina), and by then he’ll be compost. It’s difficult to think of any modern inhabitant of the Oval Office who has contemplated his own mortality aloud more often than Bush, or drawn more consolation from its graveyard perspective. On the last page of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (2004), Bush, asked how history would judge the war in Iraq, verbally shrugs: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” And on the first page of Robert Draper’s Dead Certain (2007), Bush cautions, “You can’t possibly figure out the history of the Bush presidency—until I’m dead,” then inserts a piece of cheese into his mouth. This exit clause isn’t something he invokes only to reporters. In Bill Sammon’s The Evangelical President (2007), an aide confirms to the susceptible author that Bush doesn’t brood about the petty setbacks that bedevil less serene souls: “His attitude is a very healthy one. He says, ‘Look, history will get it right and we’ll both be dead. Who cares?’ ” If only the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis displaced by the war and driven into Syrian exile could adopt such a healthy outlook, maybe they too would learn how not to sweat the small stuff.