Bush, Then and Now

...He liked to joke around and loved to laugh and tease anything or anyone even vaguely pretentious...

...Bush I—the Bush of these books—is an affable fellow, laid back and funny...

...One type he found unappealing was his major political rival, whom he dismisses, in one quirky assessment: "The man dyes his hair...

...This happens sometimes when a legatee and draftee has to pick his own way through the thicket of others' ambitions...

...A friend of the president told Bruni in a "hushed, grave voice" that Bush realized that everything else in his life now paled in importance...

...Bruni admits he is amazed at the transformation...

...He Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...He doesn't know who he is...

...What does that tell you about him...

...Bush was a man who had been pointed to politics by his father and family, and then drafted to run by the other Republican governors, pushed along by the choices of others...

...He seemed to structure his life to cut down on surprises...

...Bush II is the war leader, grim and proactive, revving up the new warfare state...

...Bush was graced with the two qualities that help good pro quarterbacks—he could see a lot of the field at once, and he understood the natural rhythm of the season...

...This was the man who was openly homesick, who loved old friends, old routines, and safe places, who ate the same comfort food over and over, and took his own pillow with him on the road...

...If the drama of John Kennedy's life is the way in which he internalized and transformed his father's ambition, the drama of Bush is this sudden compression, one of the greatest before-and-after stories of all time...

...Possessed" seems the better description...

...He knew when to lay back and when to pour it on...

...Here was a man who constantly told us how little he needed the presidency and how happy he would still be if things turned out badly...

...On September 11, Bush felt he began a new life...

...The parsimonious presidency" when it came to expending himself...

...Two books about Bush have appeared so far in his presidency: The Big Enchilada by Stuart Stevens and Ambling Into History by New York Times reporter Frank Bruni...

...Yet there were visible from time to time the bones of Bush as he now is...

...The perfunctory presidency...

...The tone was set at the inaugural balls, at which Bush and his wife danced twenty-nine seconds at the first ball, forty-six seconds at the second, and never more than sixty-seven seconds at any of the seven more that followed, coming home to the White House at 11:37, "more than an hour ahead of the schedule...

...From Stevens, we learn that Bush's campaign team took it as a given that Gore would break the rules he agreed to and that much of their preparation for the candidates' debate consisted of training Bush to confront these diversions...

...He chose to pour it on in his acceptance speech before his convention and painstaking rehearsals for his debate with Gore, which he correctly fingered as the make or break moments...

...Bruni, too, notes his capacity for intense, if sporadic, hard work...

...He was not, it turns out, all that indifferent...

...Stevens also noted his sense of proportion...

...But then, of course, neither could we...

...He was surprised by the patience shown by the president, which he described as "remarkable," and by his flexibility in assembling a diverse coalition...

...The newly elected Bush, as Bruni draws him in Ambling Into History, is a conflicted figure, awed and impressed by his role and his office, yet resisting much of its trappings, cutting it back to life size...

...He retreated often to Texas, making clear his preference for it...

...But try showing up at 8:10 a.m...

...Future historians, when they refer to "Bush I" and "Bush II," may not mean the father and the son...

...He told us more or less that he wasn't claiming to be the perfect president," Bruni notes, only "the best of the limited choices...

...He had accepted the decision to run, but questions of commitment remained...

...not about a man as he is but about a man as he was, a shadow of his present self...

...At the same time, he has contempt for many political rituals and for some politi-cians—the source, Bruni thinks, of his numerous antics...

...It is precisely this strange streak of feyness that endears Bush to both Bruni and Stevens, although it also forces Bruni to wonder about his ability to sustain any gravity...

...Bruni also notes that Bush was extremely impressive in one-on-one settings (he seemed to grow worse with the size of the audience), and that campaign settings showed him off at his worst, "the exact opposite of how a politician—in order to succeed—should be...

...meeting . . . or talk about something in vague generalities...

...Judd Gregg and Rob Portman, who played Gore in rehearsals, prided themselves on being duly obnoxious...

...The result was the same but the time frame was different: What happened to Kennedy over his brief years in office happened to Bush in one day...

...Neither Stevens nor Bruni could have foreseen how quickly his book would become both terribly outdated and exceedingly interesting...

...BY NOEMIE EMERY Something strange has happened to books about George W. Bush begun before September 11: They have become more important and less conclusive...

...His wife spent two of her first four weeks as first lady in Crawford...

...He trips on his words but has a razor keen form of emotive intelligence...

...In a late rehearsal for the third debate, Portman left his stool, walked over to Bush, and glared at him while he was speaking...

...But September 11 was the surprise of surprises, and Bush adapted to it without skipping a beat...

...you'd find out how laid back he was...

...And can he change yet again...

...He ran fast, worked fast, got up at dawn, and had a restless energy that seemed irrepressible...

...The books' prob-lem—and, oddly, their value—is that they describe a man who has vanished completely...

...Not that Bush made extravagant claims for himself...

...Bush held his first news conferences in the modest pressroom, without the towering podium...

...He knew he was better than Gore...

...They are thus a benchmark, a baseline from which to track changes, tools of value to armchair psychologists who will want to ask: How did Bush change...

...But what astonished him most is the way that Bush, who always before craved the old and familiar, reacted to shock...

...About this, Bush seemed to have no doubts whatever...

...As Stevens recounted, "Port-man just stood there, staring, until finally the governor threw his arm around him, and kissed him on the head...

...for an 8 a.m...

...The Bush I knew was part scamp and part bum-bler," says Bruni, "a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster, an adult with an inner child that often brimmed to the surface or burst through...

...Bush scored higher on his verbal SAT scores than did Rhodes scholar Bill Bradley, and his college grades, while not distinguished, ranked with John McCain's and Al Gore's...

...In 1946 John E Kennedy was elected to Congress in the place left open by his dead older brother, beginning a decade or more of of his own ambivalence, alternating periods of concentration and serious work with life as an absentee, playboy, and dilettante...

...Bush I is the amiable man who ran two years ago in a peaceable country and seemed eager to narrow the scope of the government...

...At times, Bruni pictures him with a "thought balloon" over his head reading, "Do we really have to take all of this seriously...

...He describes Bush as "rolling his eyes as he emerged from pro forma sessions" with standard political types...

...To Bruni, this seems of a piece with his early ambivalence, both in the campaign and before it...

...He points out that Bush was a steady consumer of serious books, and he attacks the picture of Bush as a dunderhead, a judgment "willfully selective, and oblivious to a contradictory body of fact...

...But Bush isn't ambling anywhere now...

...He made it, Bruni says, "the punctual presidency...

...loves his country, loves his ranch, and, even during the campaign, reveres the office he is fighting to occupy...

...His speeches seldom ran more than fifteen minutes, and in them he often made fun of himself...

...It took ten years before he fully possessed his ambitions, on the eve of his own run for president...

...The phrase "ambling into history" may describe Bush in his stroll toward power...

...Why did he change...

...Hail to the Chief" was not played at his entrances...

...As Stevens says: He hated delays, couldn't stand wasting time, and was always the one urging everybody to move faster, get it done, . . . let's go...

...They may mean just the son— George W. Bush as he was before his war started, and George W. Bush as he is today...

...People close to him said that he felt, after a life initially filled with false starts and sloppy behavior that he had inherited his true purpose, and the task by which he would be judged and defined...

...Stuart Stevens's The Big Enchilada and Erank Bruni's Ambling Into History were conceived when Bush seemed an affable creature, headed for a a caretaker presidency in a country still on its vacation from history, fated to make his mark in compassionate increments...

...Then September 11 changed his presidency into one of the big ones and Bush himself into one of our more interesting leaders, whose psyche will be repeatedly prodded...

...more interesting and less definitive...

...Nor does the word "noncommittal" still fit...