But Enough About You: Essays (22 page)

For someone who seemed gangly or physically awkward, he was quite comfortable in his own skin, as the French say. A later speechwriter of his who put into his mouth many golden words—as well as one problematical pledge involving lips—hit exactly the right note in his 1988 convention speech when she had him say, “I may be awkward at times, but there is nothing awkward about my love of country.”

Being comfortable in his manhood may in fact have been one of his greatest assets as president. When the Soviet Union collapsed—on his watch—Mr. Bush took pains not to bang the drum and thump the national chest, lest it provoke a rump element of the Red Army. He was criticized for that, but history has since vindicated the wisdom of that reticence.

He was criticized, too, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, for not publicly excoriating the Chinese Politburo and demanding heads
on pikes. But he understood the Chinese mind, and that grandstanding would only be counterproductive. He undertook quieter measures, and history has since vindicated those, as well.

Mr. Bush conducted what may have been America’s most efficient war, against a desert despot, assembling a historic coalition of twenty-six countries including Syria. And when that war was swiftly consummated, he withdrew—mission accomplished, to deploy a phrase that would haunt another Bush in later years. The senior Bush was criticized by a great many armchair warriors in 1991—notably by the neocons—for not “going all the way.” But he understood the terrible prospects involved in door-to-door warfare in Baghdad.

To be sure, he and his advisors made a tragic miscalculation when he encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam. Those who did rise up were mercilessly cut down by Saddam, whose helicopters had been inexplicably given permission to continue flying. This mistake gnawed at Mr. Bush. But his wisdom in not “going all the way” has been ratified. In time, George Bush 41 may be well regarded by historians, as Eisenhower now increasingly is, as much for what he did not do, as for what he did.

For all his physical grace as an athlete—captain of the Yale baseball team; formidable doubles partner at tennis—Mr. Bush was on occasion thwarted by his own physical karma. There was the time he “vomited copiously”—as the news reports insisted on putting it—on his host, the premier of Japan, at that dinner. Years later, Mr. Bush was still shaking his head and blushing. How ironic that this should happen to the most polite person on earth.

Then there was the pro-am tournament at Pebble Beach after he retired from the presidency. Mr. Bush sliced his drive off the tee at a murderous velocity, into the skull of an unfortunate lady spectator. He rushed over to apologize and comfort her as the medics applied pressure bandages. Hours later, lining up his putt on the final hole, he saw a woman spectator in a wheelchair with her head bandaged. Remortified, he rushed over to renew his apologies, only to be informed that it was a different woman, who had been hit by Clint Eastwood’s ball.

One dimension the historians surely will be wrestling with is his
relationship with his son the second President George Bush. Bob Woodward has provided the indelible moment when he asked Bush 43 in the Oval Office if he had consulted with his father prior to going into Iraq. Forty-three replied that he had “consulted a higher father.” What can his earthly father have thought upon reading that? I never mustered the courage to ask him.

Interviewing Bush 41 onstage, just as his son’s Iraq war was revealing itself to be something far different from a “slam dunk,” I asked him what it was like, watching his son take hit after hit.

Mr. Bush shrugged, unperturbed by the question. He replied simply that your children are your children, whatever their age. “When they’re kids and they come home from the schoolyard after getting beat, you hug them. It doesn’t change. You’re still their father.” He said he was proud of his son; and then immediately added that he was proud of all his children. That was George Bush, Have-Half.

I would never have traded my own father for any other, but I’ve always thought that George Bush is the father we all wish we’d had. His love was unconditional and total. He embodied Shakespeare’s admonition that “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” His soul was always visible on his sleeve. And in his pocket there was always a handkerchief, usually damp.

I was present in 2004 at the National Cathedral in Washington when Mr. Bush, struggling through his eulogy to Reagan, came close to breaking down. I’d seen him do that so many times. He’d get choked up during a playing of the National Anthem. As for the Navy Hymn—forget it. Cataracts. For a flinty New England blueblood, Mr. Bush had the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.

In November 1992, I phoned him at Camp David, a few days after his mother, Dorothy, passed away. A few weeks before, he had lost the presidency to a governor of Arkansas. Into the bargain, a hurricane was on its way to ravage his beloved house on the coast of Maine. Talk about a Melvillean “damp, drizzly November of the soul.”

Mrs. Bush’s funeral was the next day. I asked if he was going to give a eulogy.

“God no,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I would choke up. I would be permanently ensconced as a member of the Bawl Brigade.”

The Bawl Brigade is the Bush family term for members who cry easily; by my count, it constitutes a majority of Bushes.

He explained: “I’ve had trouble paying my respects to the fallen soldiers on the
Iowa
, or the dead out of Desert Storm, without getting emotional. I’d love to, but I know my limitations. I even choked up here at Camp David last night. We had our choir singing. We had a little vespers program with Amy Grant. It was so beautiful, and I found myself choking up. We had a bunch of friends up here and ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘please hold back the floods.’ ”

Most people have an absolute-all-time-favorite
New Yorker
cartoon that they came across at some crucial moment in their lives, bearing with it the reassurance that they were not alone in the universe. I still have mine, from twenty years ago. It’s faded from sunlight, the back is torn and sticky from a dozen applications of Scotch tape, the top is perforated from pushpins as it moved with me from house to house, bulletin board to bulletin board.

I was a White House speechwriter at the time, with an office that looked out unimportantly on a sun-deprived courtyard that seemed permanently under construction. My most enduring memory of my time in the fabled corridors of power is that of jackhammers.

The chief of staff in my department was a retired four-star admiral, who, though a fine and decent man and a genuine patriot, remained every bit a four-star admiral. Which is to say, he looked upon New York writer types (always in need of a haircut, tie always
loosened, shoes always unpolished, always ten minutes late) with a military despair that he was at pains to suppress. And come to think of it, did not suppress. Our relationship was similar to the one I now have with my twelve-year-old daughter, who when I ask her to clean her room, replies, “Whatever.” So in retrospect, my heart goes out to Admiral Daniel J. Murphy. At last I feel his pain.

It fell to Admiral Murphy to vet my prose. Any relationship between editor and writer is a minefield. Ours was a federal disaster area. Once in a speech I quoted the Greek historian Thucydides, which ended up causing the vice president of the United States to become so tongue-tied when he got to the name that he sounded like John Hurt in the movie
Alien
just before that dreadful alien thing burst from his rib cage. Admiral Murphy came up to me afterward, glowering—I was cowering under the table in a fetal position—and jabbed me in the chest and said, “Next time say Plato!”

A week or so later, still rubbing the bruise in my sternum, I found my treasured cartoon in that week’s
New Yorker
. What a 700-volt shock of recognition it gave me! The cartoon was of a politician and his speechwriter going over a draft of a speech. The Capitol Building is in the background, so we know we’re in Washington. The speechwriter has that thousand-yard stare of a wretch with artistic pretensions who knows—
knows
—that his exquisite couplets are about to be turned into road kill. The politician is telling the writer:
“O.K., but change ‘Her tawny body glistened beneath the azure sky’ to ‘National problems demand national solutions.’ ”

I clipped it and taped it to my lamp. I would look at it and sigh whenever my gorgeous arpeggios on foreign policy came back from the committee looking like a blacked-out Freedom of Information request document, along with comments like “Put more here re: historic
synergy
betw. U.S. and Brazil.” The cartoon spoke to me. It whispered:
It’s all right. I understand.

What a surprise, then, not to find it here. [
The New Yorker Book of Political Cartoons
] But how nice to find more than a half dozen cartoons on the theme of speechwriters and speeches, making it by my count the fourth-largest category here. The next largest is Republicans, about which, more in a moment. The second-largest number
of cartoons are about spin. The biggest, consisting of twenty-three cartoons, is campaigning.

Whatever high absurdities and low syllogisms are foisted upon us every four years in the name of getting our votes, it is highly—
highly
—unlikely that they will be as funny, or as uplifting, or enduring as the moments depicted by
The New Yorker
’s cartoonists.

We live, happily and paradoxically, at a time when it is more or less safe not to pay too much attention to politicians. (Such a bold statement must surely tempt the gods. Let me explain.) Surely this is why the television show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
attracts 23 million viewers while the presidential debate on another channel attracts one-tenth as many.

We can indulge ourselves in this fashion—even to the extent of not voting on Election Day, as indeed 51 percent of us chose not to in the last general election, confident that we will not wake up on the first Wednesday in November to find armored tanks in the street and someone with sunglasses and a mustache standing on the Truman balcony at the White House giving a three-hour-long speech in which he refers to us as “my children.”

True, we might wake up to find that Congress has approved $217 billion for a four-lane-wide tunnel connecting North Carolina and Bermuda. Or that we now have soldiers stationed in a country no one—even the CIA—can locate on a map. Or that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected governor of California. Dire as these eventualities might be, they’re nothing, really, that we couldn’t handle. One way or the other, we’ve already been there and done that.

This note of preternatural calm is the voice, or, if you want to put a fancy word to it, the ethos—
Say Plato, damnit!
—of
New Yorker
political cartoons. They are to the noise and bruit of daily political life what a Zen fountain is to a roaring tsunami. They soothe. They make us all—liberal, conservative, libertarian, vegetarian—smile in recognition. Yes, that’s
us
they’re talking about. How—sigh—ridiculous we must seem sometimes. And yet . . . and yet . . .

. . . we do
care
about politics. We must. Politics is—also—fanatics flying planes into our buildings. We may have learned to turn the channel in search of a more soothing reality (show), but in an election
year, politicians are hard to avoid. We become agitated. We argue with each other—even with our loved ones. We fume, we hurl our napkins down on the dinner table like characters in Henry James novels. We pronounce each other invincibly ignorant.

But in
New Yorker
cartoon land, such asperity is banished.
Sturm
becomes a bright summer day.
Drang
is defanged, a junkyard dog turned Pekingese; pomposity is deflated and even the Orwellian machinations of spin doctors—so awful in real life—appear for what they are: posturings from commedia dell’arte. Here we find a man pleading his case at the Pearly Gates before an unamused-looking St. Peter:
“Wait, those weren’t lies. That was spin!”
Distilling all this fury into a tone of gentle wit and piquancy is no mean achievement, considering the antecedents in American political cartooning. The ur-political American cartoonist was of course Thomas Nast (1840–1902), whose scathing depictions of William Marcy “Boss” Tweed of New York City’s Tammany Hall and of his cronies Peter “Brains” Sweeny and Richard “Slippery Dick” Connolly—why can’t our politicians have nicknames like that?—helped to bring down Tweed. Tweed is (apocryphally) said to have ordered one of his associates to “Stop them damned pictures . . . I don’t care what the papers say about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!” Not to press the point, but according to polls, significant numbers of people today get their
only
political information from our late-night comic hosts.

The Bavarian-born Nast was himself no lovely piece of work. He was fiercely bigoted, a virulent anti-Catholic and Irish-baiter—among his
other
prejudices. Many of his most celebrated cartoons would stand no chance of being published today in the mainstream press. The Nast-iness that characterized his work was prevalent in much of the other cartooning of the day, which depicted Negroes and Jews and Native Americans in racist caricature that would today arouse gasps and contumely. Those days are happily behind us, but the anger of the American cartoonist lives on.
The
Washington Post
’s Herblock was capable of pretty rough stuff. Professor Roger A. Fischer’s
Them Damned Pictures
is a catalogue of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual invective. He quotes
The Chicago Tribune
’s
Jeff MacNelly’s revealing comment that “Many cartoonists would be hired assassins if they couldn’t draw.”

New Yorker
cartoonists may too, deep down, be spitting mad, but they do a good job of channeling their anger and ontological disappointment into exquisite generic commentary on the old human condition. The events of the past several years, for instance (the Clinton years), have been harrowing and very nearly cataclysmic. And yet I could find only one cartoon out of 118 that specifically referred to the whole mess, and even then it managed to do so with an obliqueness and deftness utterly sublime. A White House aide is knocking on a door emblazoned with the enormous, great seal of the president of the United States, asking,
“Are you decent?”
Fifty years from now this cartoon may be more relevant and—to use that inelegant word—accessible than the hundreds of sputtering editorial cartoons that appeared during the years of Clinton scandal.