Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (2015) — a Mini Book Review

© 2016 Peter Free

 

09 February 2016

 

 

Very well done — but arguably lacks (a) fleshed out historical context, as well as (b) less favorable (but objectively taken) opinions of the former president’s performance

 

Jon Meacham’s Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House, 2015) is an essentially authorized version of President Bush’s life. Meacham was granted repeated interview access to the former President, as well as to his personal diaries.

 

Although the author claims that the Bush family required no approval right before publication, the tone of book is clearly favorable and lacks the kind of contextual bite that a historically more objective account would have adopted:

 

 

This book was written with the cooperation of the forty-first president and of his family and of many of his lieutenants, but it is an independent work. No one, including President Bush, had right of review or of approval. There was a single exception, Mrs. Bush allowed me to read her diaries . . . . Her only condition was that I clear direct quotations from those papers with her.

 

© 2015 Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House, 2015) (at Author’s Note, page 603)

 

Despite sounding like a criticism, this is not one. It would be difficult to exhibit the thoroughness that Meacham exercised with granted access to a living subject, without making an effort to remain personable, understanding and supportive.

 

The value of the book lies exactly in its completeness regarding who the President thought he was and why he did what he did. Meacham’s account should serve as an apparently reliable source of President Bush’s own thinking for future historians. The book is thoroughly footnoted.

 

On the other hand, there is an objectivity argument to be made for writing definitive history only long after everyone involved in making it is dead.

 

 

Clearly written — except for occasional opacity when H.W. acted in ways objectively subject to criticism

 

The most major of these lapses is Bush’s “cloaking” of his complicity in the Iran Contra Affair.

 

Admirably loyal to President Ronald Reagan, it is reasonably clear that H.W. (then Vice President) did what the President wanted done — but tried to mask knowing unlawfulness behind double-talk justification:

 

 

The record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages as part of an initiative to reach out to moderate elements in Iran.

 

“I’m one of the few people that know fully details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there,” Bush told his diary on Wednesday, November 5, 1986. “It is not a subject we can talk about.”

 

The truth, which Bush was to acknowledge (though with varying degrees of straightforwardness and differing shades of emphasis), was that he had known that, working through Israel, the United States was trading arms for hostages.

 

Bush’s initial denial of the details of the Iranian arrangement and his subsequent efforts to minimize his knowledge about the arms sales was an instance in which duty (in this case, to the president and to the secrecy he believe essential to the conduct of some foreign relations) and ambition (he wanted to protect his own political future) conflicted with and trumped his obligation to the full truth. To the mystification of Schulz and Weinberger, Bush would later claim that had he known of their strong objections he might have opposed the initiative.

 

Bush was an old spymaster and a realist. That his first impulse was to hide the truth, however, and that he continued to maintain, on occasion, that the deal was not about arms for hostages but was, rather, “strategic,” was unworthy of his essential character.

 

© 2015 Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House, 2015) (at pages 299-303) (extracts)

 

These extracts make the moral tone of Meacham’s treatment of this episode clearer than it actually is in the book. The author’s uncharacteristically rambling and incomplete account of Iran Contra obscures then Vice President Bush’s contribution to it. People unfamiliar with the arms deal will have little idea what went on, even after reading Meacham’s abbreviated, wandering account of it.

 

This opaque quality marks virtually every other incident in Bush’s life that might reasonably draw significant criticism from objectively minded outsiders. It is as if President Bush were masking — from himself — (i) his towering ambition and (ii) his willingness to do whatever Machiavellian thing that needed to be done.

 

Most of us can relate (at least occasionally) to this trait in ourselves. We only rarely acknowledge our feet of clay. We can understand why an autobiographer might get sucked into obfuscating clarity regarding those events, under circumstances that his primary sources do not want exposed.

 

It is not that Meacham does not call H.W. on his arguably shady doings during Iran Contra and perhaps other things. It is that he does so in what one can fairly think of as too mild and too unclear a fashion. A little outside digging might have presented a clearer, maybe more accurate picture.

 

 

Book’s strength — George H.W. Bush’s sense of himself

 

The strength of Destiny and Power lies in its very clear picture of what George H.W. Bush strived to be.

 

After losing to President-elect Bill Clinton in November 1992, H.W. thought:

 

 

“Be strong,” he told himself in his living room musings, “be kind, be generous of spirit, be understanding, let people know how grateful you are, don’t get even, comfort the ones I’ve hurt and let down, say your prayers and ask for God’s understanding and strength, finish with a smile and with some gusto, do what’s right and finish strong.”

 

© 2015 Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House, 2015) (at Prologue, page xvii)

 

It is difficult to disrespect a world leader who thinks this way.

 

Meacham’s biography returns to the 41st president’s sense of self and his perception of his mission repeatedly. George H. W. Bush was the last of our noblesse oblige commanders in chief. The United States is now significantly weaker for their passing. An untrammeled train of self-seeking narcissists has taken their place.

 

 

The moral? — A respect-worthy man, an easily defensible record, and an excellent biography

 

In the end:

 

 

The farther the country moved from his presidency the larger Bush loomed, and the qualities so many voters found to be vices in 1992 came to be seen as virtues — his public reticence; his old-fashioned dignity; his tendency to find a middle course between extremes.

 

He lived long enough to see the shift, and he appreciated that people were taking a more benign view of his record.

 

© 2015 Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House, 2015) (at Prologue, page xvii) (paragraph split)

 

If you read Destiny and Power, you may come away with the same opinion, if you did not hold it already.

 

Recommended.