From: jhoskins@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (James M Hoskins)
Subject: A Visit with George Bush
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 21:36:53 GMT


I recommend the article "A Visit with George Bush (When asked 'Can George Bush
think?' his current and former associates all, in effect, say no)" appearing in
the August, 1992, Atlantic Monthly.  Richard Brookhiser reports on an interview
session he had with GB during the Spring.  The article in too long to
retype--here are portions.  It is worth searching out, for it paints a more
complex portrait of the president and the Bush presidency than these quotations
would indicate.

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When Bush talks about foreign policy, he has his examples at hand, and he can
present them in a nutshell or tease out their details, as he likes.  When
surveying domestic issues, Bush tends to cruise at low altitude over a blur of
programs, without elaboration, sometimes giving them only numbers, like Chinese
slogans, rather than names:  "the five objectives we have in terms of
reforms...our six educationals goals..."  During my interview he alighted on
only three issues.  In four years he expected to be "well on the way to
accomplishing victory" in the war on drugs.  He mentioned "encouraging
statistics" on the number of teenage users of cocaine, though the number of
addicts has "not improved at all," he admitted.  "So we've still got a big
job."  His second issue was the Administrations's efforts to contain the
litigation explosion--"not a frivolous subject, because when you look at health
care costs," litigation "costs us from twenty billion to forty billion a year."
His goal was to "put some caps on these liabilities."  Last was regulation, a
problem he had partly caused.  "We've had two major pieces of legislation that
flooded the system with some regulation--the ADA [Americans With Disabilities
Act] and the Clean Air Act"--both of which he had supported.  "But we're trying
very hard to see that we get that under control."  In fairness, I should say
that we spoke just before the LA riots.  Since then Bush has discovered Jack
Kemp's "urban agenda."


George Bush has been in public life for twenty-five years, and over that
time--indeed, over his entire life--his character has barely changed.  "What
you see is what you get," says Peter Teeley, his former press secretary.
"There is no sleight of hand.  He is not a person who is complex."  If anything
in his presidency surprises us, it is our own fault for not seeing him clearly.


People who have known and worked with Bush describe him in virtually identical
terms, to a striking degree.  Where they diverge is in the value they assign to
the characteristics they all see.  Everybody who knows him stresses his
graciousness, and everybody appreciates it.

He has an intense desire to win.

Bush's hesitations and silences might seem charming, even admirable, a kind of
WASP reticence, if they did not recall another reluctance of his; the
reluctance to define himself, or, indeed, to define anything.

George Bush is dealing with what he has to deal with.  His presidency is
custodial, because that is what he sees on his desk every day when he gets in.
If a crisis comes up, he'll be a crisis President."  "Bush would be a splendid
vestryman," one former staffer says.  "Can he think in an organized, linear way
about problems?  Can he pose thesis and antithesis, and draw a synthesis?
No.  He is the least contemplative man I've every met."  [former speech writer
Victor Gold]

Whatever the reason, Bush conducts himself like a man who has a glass ceiling
in his head which prevents his great personal virtues from rising to the level
of abstraction, or from impinging consistently on public business.  He falls
back, by default, on experience.  If he has had a relevant experience, such as
grandchildren or the Second World War, he may know what to do.  If not, he is
guided by the mood and pressures of the moment.  "He is less than the sum of
his parts, [Christopher] Buckley told me.  Then he paused and added, "Some
magnificent parts."


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