Vanity Fair: No Man Hurt Georgie. No Man!
Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum writes about the relationship between President G.H.W. Bush and G.W. Bush, concluding that the best way to understand them is to understand either one of them. There's not much news in the profile, but it does offer a counterintuitive interpretation of the President, who is generally described as rebelling from his father and reveling in his mother.
“As I have said over and over again, I support the policies of the President without question,” the elder Bush e-mails me from Kennebunkport, politely declining my request for an interview. “But, whenever I try to say that publicly, reporters look for even the hint of a nuance, for a way to drive a wedge between myself and the President. So I have decided, for now, it is better for me not to talk about it … not to you, not to anyone. It does amaze me that what no one seems to understand is that our relationship is about a loving relationship between a very proud father and his son.”
The notion is just a number: 84. That’s 41 plus 43. The whole that sums up the parts. The common characteristics that bind this father and this son, so diff erent in so many ways. The shared traits and talents that helped take them both, by such apparently diff erent approaches, to the pinnacle of power. And the shared shortcomings of substance and style—the stubbornness, the reticence, the ruthless expediency, qualities perhaps best summed up as Bushiness—that by this spring had helped bring the son to the same humiliating historical benchmarks of repudiation that the father had reached: a 31 percent approval rating and a public eager for leadership by anybody else.
For if the father and son’s private relationship with each other remains hard to penetrate, how father and son stand in relationship to each other seems increasingly apparent. They share one creed above all: Bushes know best.
“Forty-three is an absolute split of DNA between his mother and his father,” says Mark McKinnon, his veteran media adviser. “He gets his ‘pop’ from his mother, and his emotional core from his father.”
Distill 41 and 43 into 84 and you get an awkward amalgam of unblushing private enthusiasms and suppressed public impulses. Eighty-four’s code of the road is not so diff erent from Dorothy Walker’s: Never let ’em see you sweat; never show how much it hurts; never tell ’em what you really think, except in elliptical ways; remember that your mother raised you right...