Frank Rich on the Bush presidency since 9/11

And so the Clinton-Bush boomer generation turned a nominally selfless tribute to its fathers’ generation not only into a lucrative branch of show business but also into an implicit, cost-free celebration of its own worthiness. By exulting in our parents’ wartime service, we could practice what the writer John Gregory Dunne labeled a “virtual patriotism” that made us look noble by association. Seeing Pearl Harbor or giving The Greatest Generation as a Father’s Day present could become the cost-free moral equivalent of going to war. We never imagined that America might actually have to go fight another real one.

Our virtual patriotism also helped us repress more recent memories of the war our generation was asked to fight, Vietnam — a debacle that, not so incidentally, was cooked up by dogtag-wearing members of the greatest generation, including JFK, and that both boomer presidents had ducked. No matter how much Americans doted on World War II, it was still the Vietnam ghosts who lurked in the shadows. They leapt out again during the spring of 2001, when The New York Times published revelations about Bob Kerrey’s anguish over the women and children who died in a 1969 SEAL raid he led on a peasant village in Vietnam But hardly did the Kerrey story emerge than boomer politicians and journalists rushed to lock it up again — by throwing up our hands and saying, “Who are we to judge?” and “War is war.”

We didn’t want to go there if we could help it. Newsweek, which had had the Kerrey scoop before the Times but dropped it, ran a twelve-page cover story promoting Pearl Harbor. At the movie’s five-million-dollar Hawaiian premiere, Kerrey’s old outfit, the Navy SEALs, parachuted down from the skies to entertain the celebrity guests — a cheerful, Disneyfied inversion of the Playboy Bunnies’ USO show in Apocalypse Now. The new president, whose political supporters had tried to smear John McCain as a crazed vet during the 2000 primaries, returned to his alma mater, Yale, to deliver a jokey commencement address to the class of 2001. Though Bush’s class was riven by Vietnam, and Yale lost a few men there, his reminiscences included no mention of that war or any other.

By then, a half year into his term, George W. Bush was on his way to becoming a forgettable chief executive with no driving agenda beyond traditional Republican tax cuts and a Reagan-bequeathed defense-spending boondoggle (the “Star Wars” missile shield). Unlike his father, a bona fide greatest-generation hero, the forty-third president had ridden out his own war by obtaining a hard to secure slot in the Texas Air National Guard, aka the “champagne unit,” a well-known parking place for well-heeled and well-connected Texans who wanted to make certain their Vietnam War service was spent safely stateside. Bush was at best a profile in peacetime courage: as a politician, he was determined to say and do nothing that might disturb the country during one of its longest-running naps. He was so unexceptional that That’s My Bush!, a satirical series on the cable channel Comedy Central, created by the scabrous and highly popular team behind South Park, expired at the start of September after a brief run that incited neither laughter nor the expected controversy.

The standard rap on Bush from Democrats in the 2000 campaign deemed him an airhead — or, more commonly, an idiot, a moron, a monkey. Asked by a South Carolina elementary school kid at a campaign photo op to name his favorite book as a child, Bush responded, “I can’t remember any specific books.” When he seemed to stand up bravely to his party’s right flank with a speech referring damningly to the title of Robert Bork’s best-selling screed Slouching Towards Gomorrah, his spokesman said that the allusion was inadvertent. (“He may not even have realized he was referring to a book,” cracked Bork.) Slate magazine fastidiously collected the many Bushisms of the malaprop-prone Republican standard-bearer. In March 2000 David Letterman summed up the prevailing bottom line: “This guy, to me, looks like he could be a colossal boob.”

That indictment had only gained in vociferousness and decibel level after the bitter battle of Florida, during which James Baker’s legal shock troops outwitted their Al Gore counterparts, tossing the recount into its foregone conclusion before a partisan Supreme Court. But there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush was no dunce. His mediocre grades at Yale—which he tried to keep private — were indistinguishable from those of the showily wonky Gore at Harvard. The problem with Bush was not that he was stupid but that he thought everyone else was stupid.

Excerpted from “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” by Frank Rich. Copyright Frank Rich, 2006. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from the publisher.

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