What’s Important to President Bush?
I’m learning more about what makes Bush tick, and I’m disturbed by what I’m finding.
Let’s start with the conventional wisdom, which I believe is accurate, but incomplete. It describes his top down, highly insular management style and general lack of curiosity:
While President Clinton consumed vast amounts of daily reading, President Bush has established a much more hierarchical White House with information moving up the ranks, analysts say. “Presidents vary in how curious they are and how far down they reach in terms of the advice they get,” says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. “President Bush has a top down management style…” - Christian Science Monitor, 4/15/04
He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be. - David Frum, former Bush speechwriter
DIANE SAWYER: First of all, I just want to ask about reading. Mr. President, you know that there was a great deal of reporting about the fact that you said, first of all, that you let Condoleezza Rice and Andrew Card give you a flavor of what’s in the news.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes.
DIANE SAWYER: That you don’t read the stories yourself.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes. I get my news from people who don’t editorialize. They give me the actual news, and it makes it easier to digest, on a daily basis, the facts.
DIANE SAWYER: Is it just harder to read constant criticism or to read -
PRESIDENT BUSH: Why even put up with it when you can get the facts elsewhere? I’m a lucky man. I’ve got, it’s not just Condi and Andy, it’s all kinds of people in my administration who are charged with different responsibilities, and they come in and say this is what’s happening, this isn’t what’s happening. - ABC interview with President Bush, 12/16/03
“I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.” - Fox News interview with President Bush, 9/22/03
Looking a little deeper, there is more to it than this, however. Bush is capable of curiosity and doing his own investigation, but only when he encounters something that intrigues him. I have only been able to find two instances of this - stem cell research, and his campaign:
Ironically, Greenstein says that Bush was beginning to move outside that hierarchical style in the summer of 2001 - but directed his attention toward stem cells, and not a historic terrorist threat. “There was a lot of concern about whether George W. was really up to speed in the eight months leading up to 9/11,” Greenstein says. “One of the signs that he was locking into the job and not winging it and treating it as if he were still a C student at Yale was his interest in stem cell research. He did what you don’t associate with him: reaching out to other people. When they talked to him about other subjects, he asked them about stem cells.” - Christian Science Monitor, 4/15/04
Several aides said Mr. Bush viewed this as the campaign of his life and had intervened on matters as large as the themes it should strike and as small as particular shots of him in his television advertisements. In particular, aides said, Mr. Bush has, along with Mr. Rove, been a driving force behind the attacks that have become a hallmark of his campaign since Mr. Kerry emerged from the spring primaries as the Democratic candidate…
As Mr. Bush was flying from Texas to New Mexico on Thursday, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, turned to him on Air Force One and suggested that Albuquerque was heavily Democratic, White House aides said. Mr. Bush responded by saying the city was split politically, and he talked about the importance of its suburban counties…
On weekdays, aides say, the campaign essentially begins in the White House residence, where Mr. Bush rises at 5 a.m. to read the newspapers and check on the political news. By 7 a.m., when he is in the Oval Office, aides say, Mr. Bush will frequently tell them about an article they have not seen and tell them to call the reporter and complain. - New York Times, 8/29/04
But he still has his limits:
Rove said he typically went to Mr. Bush in the morning with a list of as many as two dozen topics and political questions scrawled in longhand. Mr. Bush is very engaged at the beginning of the conversation, but begins to flag before long, Mr. Rove said. “He’ll say, ‘You’re running out of airspeed and altitude,’ ” Mr. Rove said. - New York Times, 8/29/04
What’s maddening to me is that Bush did not choose to get involved with acquiring a similar degree of knowledge and expertise in understanding what was really going on in Iraq, before the invasion:
The [CIA's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq] had concluded (wrongly) that Hussein had WMDs, but it also contained information contrary to that finding. Anyone who read the full NIE - which was only 90 pages long - would have seen that the case was not a slam dunk and that analysts within the intelligence community disputed key portions of the case.
Did Bush bother to read the NIE before deciding to launch the invasion of Iraq? No. Who says so? The White House. The day it declassified parts of the NIE, a senior administration official held a background briefing for reporters, who were not allowed to reveal this official’s name. Here is an excerpt from that July 18, 2003 briefing:QUESTION: When did the President read this NIE?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I’m sorry. The President has been briefed on more than - countless conversations with his national - with intelligence community about the contents of the NIE. I don’t think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it. But he’s familiar, intimately familiar with the case because he based his decisions on the case that is both included in this and information that probably was not included in this.
QUESTION: So this would have been read, presumably, by the National Security Advisor [Condoleezza Rice], and then she would have briefed the President on it?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Again, we have experts who work for the National Security Advisor who would know this information, who understand this information. He relies upon his administration, the CIA, themselves, as well, to give their best judgments. And that’s what took place.
QUESTION: Can you square the one circle? Last week, the National Security Advisor told us that neither she, nor the President were aware of any concerns about the quality of the intelligence underlying this allegation. Given that it is a footnote, it’s one of six opinions, but the fact that in this NIE there is expressed concern that this is of dubious quality, how is it possible that the National Security Advisor and the President would not have been aware of those reservations?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document.
Bush did not read the NIE on Iraq. Neither did Rice. And the reference to “footnotes” is misleading. When NIEs are produced, analysts from different intelligence services come together to try to draft a consensus document. If a service disagrees with the conclusions reached by others, it “takes a footnote.” These “footnotes” are not necessarily buried at the back of the document. Often they are highlighted. Anyone who reads an NIE seriously cannot avoid the “footnotes.” Had Bush and Rice read the NIE on Iraq they would have come across several “footnotes” that should have caused them to question the overall findings. - David Corn, 7/8/04 (and here’s the complete transcript)
According to the New York Times, [Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee] was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush’s decisions. After reviewing it, Graham requested that the Bush administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the administration’s resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq.
But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet’s letter only addressed “findings that supported the administration’s position on Iraq,” and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion.
Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decision making process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggest manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that “[t]he country swims on a sea of oil.” - CNN.com Law Center web site
Having a leader who receives information solely from an insular group of advisors - who themselves cherry-pick information sources that suit their preconceptions - sounds more like what you’d expect from an oligarchy or a dictatorship, not a democracy. (In regard to Iraq, here are some more sources for this argument: Was Bush fixated on ‘getting Saddam’?, The Manipulator, Did one woman’s obsession take America to war?, and Going into Iraq.)
Obviously Bush has the ability to step outside of the hierarchy he created and obtain information however he chooses. But, as far as I can tell, he has only displayed such initiative on the stem-cell research issue (which I imagine piqued his interest due to its religious implications) and his own presidential campaign. Where was his curiosity and information-gathering initiative when he was weighing the evidence to justify invading Iraq?
