Hell of a Ride
Podhoretz, John
BOOK REVIEWS j ohn Podhoretz is a sadist. Only someone who crushes toads with stones would want to make anyone re-live the Bush administration. Podhoretz spent a few months in the Bush...
...But there was jargon, gossip, and techno-glut in the Reagan White House too, and one could sketch death-dealing portraits of Mike Deaver or Nancy Reagan...
...But because in the Bush administration "nobody—including the president—knew what Bush believed .. . nobody knew what to do or what to think...
...But almost from the moment Skinner started working, people more senior than you were disappointed...
...his personal assistant must have handed it to him in the car...
...His protected status didn't last long, because he proceeded to break every rule in the Bush White House book...
...Somebody—you heard it was Marlin Fitzwater—came up with the notion that the president could bolster consumer confidence by going to a JC Penney near Camp David and buying some socks...
...For Bush, the right to life had no penumbras...
...But he has credentials that are even more useful for his purposes—a berth in beltway journalism and a place in the Washington baby boomer apparat...
...Finally, the speech was touched up some by Noonan, and it went...
...Then the French Breakfast Roll Man began wandering the halls...
...The oubliettes of the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building were stuffed with friends and acquaintances during the Bush years...
...These grandkids would not HELL OF A RIDE: BACKSTAGE AT THE WHITE HOUSE FOLLIES 1989-1993 John Podhoretz Simon & Schuster/320 pages / $21 reviewed by RICHARD BROOKHISER to watch events stalk the hapless Bush even as Podhoretz closes in on him analytically...
...CI Hell of a Speech / t wasn't just the president—everybody in the White House seemed to be losing it...
...What better time to kick them...
...There have been some questions raised about the draft that's circulating right now," he said...
...They want to send their kids to college and own a home and go away on vacation and have a car that runs...
...How could he not...
...This was the ultimate Washington black mark—Bush had gone outside to America's most famous speechwriter...
...I'd very much appreciate your ideas and concepts for beefing it up, and if you could have them on my desk in two hours, because I hear they've brought in Peggy Noonan to work on it...
...The prime mover of the Bush White House was George Bush himself...
...There wasn't anything wrong with Bush except his choice of career...
...the place had been in the doldrums ever since Sununu had gotten into trouble in the summer...
...Even the good news was turning into bad news...
...Nor did he deliver his draft until five days before the president was to read it before both houses of Congress...
...Which meant, given the buildup, that it was a failure...
...In the outer ring are the gophers of the Bush administration, as well as his anthropological tidbits of White House life: the cant, the rumors, the frivolous technology (at the Houston convention, one aide, who is unable to get the eye of another standing twenty feet away, dials the White House switchboard on her cellular phone and places a call to his beeper...
...Bush had met Thomas and liked him, so when that which hell hath no fury like broke loose, Bush stood by him—more firmly, in Robert Bork's opinion, than Ronald Reagan stood by Judge Bork...
...It was "all very well and good for [Bush] to talk about how this is the age of the outstretched hand, but most people in America make less than $40,000 and must support a family of four on that...
...Whereupon Tony called a rush meeting of his staff...
...The president took one look at the draft and disliked it...
...Podhoretz explains: "In successful administrations, there is always a dialectic...
...Bush threw away the moral momentum of the Thomas victoryby signing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, on the principle of not kicking enemies when they're down...
...The director of communications, Dave Demarest, has been fighting a cold war for months against chief speechwriter Tony Snow...
...Bush's abortion position baffled me, until a pro-lifer supplied the key: Bush's own son and daughter-in-law, Marvin and Margaret Bush, adopted two children during the eighties...
...The intellectual vacuum also 56 The American Spectator January 1994 exist unless their birth mothers had chosen life...
...The edict was canceled almost immediately...
...George Bush was not a cipher...
...How was it that an inconstant man picked these, of all places, to draw the line...
...First thing he did was announce that everybody in the White House was expected to work a six-day week—which was, first, deeply insulting, because most White House staffers worked at least sixty hours by the time Saturday and Sunday rolled around, and second, kind of stupid because it violated federal workers' rights law...
...Podhoretz spent a few months in the Bush administration, as an assistant to drug czar William Bennett...
...no president is punished undeservedly...
...p odhoretz's picture of Bush is not untrue, nor is it unfair...
...And Bush was so incapable of communicating the passion of his pro-life sentiments that, as Podhoretz details, his administration spent months pondering whether to grant Oregon a waiver from Medicaid rules that would have allowed it, in effect, to pull the plug on certain high-cost patients by rationing care...
...The energetic and cheerful and talented Snow, formerly the editorial-page editor of the Washington Times, is nominally Demarest's deputy but came in as Sununu's pet the previous spring...
...He wrote a University of Michigan commencement address attacking political correctness...
...You knew the president didn't even carry money with him and hadn't for years...
...so does the lack of them...
...This is their story: the valet's-eye view of how their master took the most lopsided military victory since Agincourt and the highest presidential polls since ever, and lost to the Masters of the Universe, Little Rock division...
...Skinner had, in essence, achieved a lifetime ambition of serving as the chief operating officer of the United States and he needed to hire someone who had never worked in politics to help him figure out how to organize his office...
...None of the silver linings of the Bush years came without an ugly black thunderhead attached...
...1993 by John Podhoretz...
...Ideas have consequences...
...What else was there for him to talk about...
...Almost everybody had been excited—and a little nervous—about the coming of Sam Skinner...
...Podhoretz concludes his indictment on a pitch of wrath and scorn...
...But his inclinations, habits, and virtues had almost no public dimension beyond such content-free traits as service and friendship...
...the speech made the front page of the New York Times, which was good, but Tony was named as its author above the fold, which was considered bad form...
...The structural pleasure of Hell of a Ride, which moves chronologically, is Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...warped Bush's personality (Podhoretz would say it truly exposed it), as a seemingly self-effacing man—remember all those I-less sentences in Peggy Noonan's 1988 convention speech—talked endlessly about his reactions and moodlets...
...And they [didn't] need some rich pantywaist from Maine telling them to volunteer their time as though they would just go to Elizabeth Arden all day if they didn't go ladle out soup at a homeless shelter...
...okay...
...But if he had described some of the times Bush shone, he would have made his case even stronger...
...But it was a supremely Bush-like reason for sticking by a position he had almost certainly adopted out of expediency...
...The speech was so closely held that he did not allow others in the office to make suggestions about sound-bites and ideas...
...This thoughtlessness made for confusion: everything was up for negotiation, and impasses dragged on for months...
...The American Spectator January 1994 57...
...The ideological fever is tempered by the realities of the political situation, but at the same time efforts are made to change the political dynamic to make it more receptive to the ideas...
...ergo . . . Ergo nothing, in strict logic...
...Bush put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, and never wavered, in four years in the White House, from the pro-life stance he adopted as Ronald Reagan's vice president...
...From Hell of a Ride...
...It was going to be a revolutionary State of the Union, Tony said...
...In addition, one careless phrase of Snow's uttered in an address in Ukraine warning against "suicidal nationalisms" created an international furor and came to be known as the "Chicken Kiev" speech...
...At the end of the year, Tony was called away to devote all his energies to the 1992 State of the Union address, which had become an incredibly important speech: All the administration spin doctors had told the press that the president was waiting until January 28, 1992, to announce all his great plans to stimulate the economy and save America...
...Peggy Noonan...
...No laundry list of proposals, but rather a "thematic" address about America and its future...
...The French Breakfast Roll Man was especially interested in the workings of your office, and you have to admit that things in speechwriting haven't been too great...
...The whole event had a Marie Antoinette, "Let them buy socks" quality to it...
...Tony told you and everybody else that he was one of only five people who actually knew what was going into the State of the Union—the others were the president, Skinner, Darman, and pollster Bob Teeter, who was soon to take over the reins of the re-election campaign...
...Working inwards, he introduces us to figures of higher and higher seniority, often stupid (Sam Skinner, Robert Teeter) and, when not stupid, vain and infantile (John Sununu, Richard Darman...
...They stretch their arms plenty—for their own kids and for the people they know...
...Ultimately, in politics, as in New Age religion, everyone makes his own karma...
...Why were the results so different...
...You and the rest of the staff wanted no part of this one, and gave him desultory help, not more...
...Podhoretz arranges the story in concentric circles...
...He also succeeded in angering national security adviser Scowcroft on Bush's swing through the former Soviet Union in the summer, because he was finishing speeches late...
...That was what people called Eugene Croisant, some efficiency expert Skinner brought in to help him restructure the White House...
...Bush's loyalty to Thomas can be explained by his loyalty to the idea of loyalty...
...He had a reputation as a can-do, no-bullshit manager, but that's not the impression he's been making...
...That really unnerved everybody...
...Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
