Bush's Mom And Dad, Cheney, Powell, God, Saddam, And Freud

[DrFunkenstein]

From the convention speech - it reminded of some other stuff I read. Tell me what you think.

He conceded in unusually personal terms that "some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called 'walking,' " and that "now and then I come across as a little too blunt," he suggested that those traits were bred in the bone and unlikely to change at 58. "For that," the president said, referring to his mother, Barbara, "we can all thank the white-haired lady sitting right up there."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/politics/campaign/03assess.html

As to Saddam Hussein, the irrational reason for Bush's irritation with him may have something to do with his oft publicized statement: "That man tried to kill my Dad." Although this has been bandied about a lot, no one has pointed out the secret subtext for this statement, which is: " No one can kill my father except me," that is no one can surpass Bush Senior by going beyond what he was able to accomplish except Bush Junior, who can thereby prove that he is more powerful than his father.

http://www.bartcop.com/032403shrink.htm

The great untold—indeed, untouchable—story of Bush II is what might as well be called the Oedipal angle. The father was a statesman of aristocratic mien and moderate inclinations, a mainstream Episcopalian who served, with varying degrees of distinction, in Congress, the C.I.A., the diplomatic corps, the Vice-Presidency, and, finally, the Presidency itself.

The son, a rebel against his father’s seriousness, was an aimless near-wastrel turned fervent evangelical who, beginning at the age of forty-eight, found himself propelled, largely on the strength of his family name, into the governorship of Texas and then into the White House, just eight years after his father had left it. It stands to reason that these circumstances might create a dynamic worth looking at.

Yet, for good reasons and bad, that dynamic has gone mostly unexamined. In the age of Prozac, psychoanalytic reasoning, particularly of the armchair variety, has become deeply unfashionable. Like the theory that the Iraq war will transform the Middle East, the theory that the relations between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush might somehow affect the policies of the United States government exists purely in the realm of speculation. It is empirically unprovable. No one is more of an empiricist than Bob Woodward. Yet “Plan of Attack” is full of tantalizing hints that “father issues” (in the current phrase) might present a problem.

When, in the summer of 2002, Brent Scowcroft—the senior Bush’s national-security adviser, close friend, and coauthor—writes an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal headlined “don’t attack saddam,” one can be forgiven for imagining that the father was sending a message to the son. The son’s Administration was full of people who had served in the father’s, people who had known the son when he was hanging around the White House in the shadow of his cleverer brother Jeb.

It is surely suggestive, at the very least, that the two embodiments of the struggle over Iraq policy within the second Bush Administration were a pair of father figures who had played central roles in the first Bush’s war against Iraq. Cheney, who, like the son, had avoided military service in Vietnam, was ostentatiously submissive in the young President’s presence, but outside it he called the shots. He called the young President “the Man.” Cheney was not especially popular, and his delicate health ruled out further ambitions. For all his scowls and mumbles, he was unthreatening. Powell, a war hero like the senior Bush, was by far the Administration’s most popular figure (the President included). It was known that he often disagreed with his boss. Their relations were awkward.

Early in the Administration, Powell decided to ask for a little quality time with the Commander-in-Chief. They spent half an hour alone together. As Woodward describes the meeting, it sounds like nothing so much as a divorced dad trying to relate to his sullen teen-age son. “I think we’re really making some headway in the relationship,” Powell told Armitage afterward, according to Woodward. “I know we really connected.” Perhaps. But, when Woodward asked Bush about the brief meeting in which he told Powell that he had decided on war, the President replied—with a touch of anger, perhaps?—“I didn’t need his permission.”

The most astounding passage in “Plan of Attack” comes in the epilogue, when Woodward is recounting one of his tape-recorded interviews with the President:

I asked about his father in this way: “Here is the one living human being who’s held this office who had to make a decision to go to war. And it would not be credible if you did not at some point ask him, What are the ingredients of doing this right? Or what’s your thought, this is what I’m facing.”

“If it wouldn’t be credible,” Bush replied, “I guess I better make up an answer.”

Bush struggles to remember a “poignant moment” with his father. He comes up empty. “I can’t remember a moment where I said to myself, maybe he can help me make the decision,” he says. “I’m trying to remember,” he says. “I don’t remember,” he says. “I could ask him and see if he remembers something,” he says. And, finally:

“The discussions would be more on the tactics. How are we doing, How are you doing with the Brits? He is following the news now. And I am briefing him on what I see. You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.”

Bush’s talk of a higher father is one of the reasons that the Bush-Cheney campaign (like the John Kerry campaign) has recommended “Plan of Attack” to its supporters. That kind of talk, after all, is sure to please the base. But if the son is capable of so thoughtlessly blurting out, in effect, that his earthly father is weak—that the boy is determined, at long last, to show his dad a thing or two—then there may be something stranger and darker at the root of our present difficulties than a noble effort to change the world.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040510crbo_books