Episode 26: George W. Bush

Show Notes

Overview

Today’s episode is all about George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States.  Full disclosure for those who don’t know, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum resides on SMU’s campus, about a mile as the crow flies from our offices here at the CPH. We’ve already discussed Willie Horton and the politics of race on a previous podcast, and the politics of the early 2000s were hardly less partisan and ferocious than the late 1980s. But one of the things we pride ourselves on here at the Center for Presidential history is learning how to speak candidly, yet respectfully, about some of the most difficult issues past and present. We want to show, as my mother always says, that it’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable, and frankly, our current political climate could use a bit more civility and shared citizenship even among political rivals, and yes even among rival historians. So, we’re looking forward on this episode to unpacking the past, without undermining it as well, and we’ve got just the guests to do it. 

Here’s your brief primer on George W. Bush. Perhaps unnecessary to say given that you’ve already met his father, but yes, W was born to wealth and privilege, and spent his first years in Connecticut while his father finished up at Yale after World War II.  But they didn’t stay in Connecticut for long, or even in the East. West Texas was where the action was, for those seeking a fortune in the potentially lucrative potentially ruinous oil industry. So, Bush 43 spent most of his childhood out in Permian Basin region, a place arguably as far removed from New England Wasp Society, and as representative of Texas, as any. George W. Bush wore cowboy boots a lot as a toddler, and it didn’t seem strange to the locals at all. 

He grew up in a tight family, and one that knew tragedy, too. His younger sister, Robyn, passed away when she was only three from childhood leukemia, and young George remembers having to comfort his own mother from her grief.  His father, in truth, was on the road a lot, building a business and then political career. “I got my daddy’s eyes, and my mother’s mouth,” he still jokes to this day, and his mother’s words typically had a bit more bite.   

So too did George W’s, who had himself a good time in boarding school and then at Yale, where he did a bit, ok a lot, more partying than studying. “To those of you who are graduating this afternoon with high honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, ‘well done,’” he told a Yale commencement years later. “And as I like to tell the C students: you too, can be president.”           

The partying didn’t stop there, and indeed Bush has been open about the reckless drinking and carousing that characterized his first decades. He gave up drinking at age forty, and subsequently found god. It’s always hard for historians to judge just how devout an historical actor truly is.  Just as with race, we can’t actually peer into someone’s heart to assess their faith. But one thing is for certain: George W. Bush ranks as one of the most outspoken about his Christianity as perhaps any president we’ve ever had. It influenced his daily life, and his policies, best epitomized by his call for a “compassionate conservatism.” 

It wasn’t a smooth path to the presidency. Twice elected Governor of Texas, he came to office in 2000 by the narrowest of margins. A mere 537 votes separated Republican George Bush from Democrat Al Gore in the battle for Florida’s electoral college votes, and it was only a month after election day that Americans could even be sure whom their next president would be. Bush took office in 2001 planning to focus on education, tax-reform (he was a Republican after all), and immigration. 

Then, the world changed. September 11, 2001. That day traumatized the country, and put everything else besides the War on Terror on the back burner for the remaining seven and a half years of his presidency. He was a war president, albeit one who was careful to make plain that loyal Americans shouldn’t be targeted for wartime abuse just because of the color of their skin, or their religion. Bush famously visited a mosque merely days after the 9/11 attacks, and stressed throughout his presidency that the Islam of the jihadist terrorists who launched the attack was not the Islam most Americans knew. 

Bush’s wars went great, until they didn’t. He held a nearly 90% approval rating in the weeks after 9/11. Indeed, that’s the highest ever recorded. By 2009, however, after ongoing frustration with the war in Afghanistan, a reckless invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and closer to home a crushing financial crisis by 2008 that produced the worst economic downturn since the Great Recession, Bush left office at the other end of the popularity spectrum. He also left exhausted.  Some former presidents wake up every day wishing they were still in the White House. Bill Clinton leaps to mind. No one wakes up happier to have shed the Oval Office’s awesome burdens than George W. Bush, whose popularity has in fact risen in recent years as time fades memories, and as Donald Trump’s presidency riled passions.   

We first spoke to Professor Gary Gerstle, the Paul Mellon Professor of American history at Cambridge University, author of numerous works of political and social history including American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. We then talked to award-winning journalist, Peter Baker, of the New York Times, who has covered the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and now President Biden. He is also the author of Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House. 

Together our conversations highlighted two themes: 

• How unforeseen events regularly have a racial component.

• The complicated relationship between religion, race, and “compassionate conservatism” in Bush’s presidency.

Guests:

Dr. Gary Gerstle arrived in Cambridge in 2014 after a three-decade career in the United States, most recently at Vanderbilt University where he was James G. Stahlman Professor of American History. He is currently Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is a social and political historian of the twentieth century, with substantial interests in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.

Gerstle has received many fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, and a Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and as Visiting Professor at the Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. In 2012-2013, Oxford elected him to the Vyvyan Harmsworth Professorship in American History. He has lectured throughout North America and Europe, and in Brazil, Israel, Mexico, Japan, South Africa, and South Korea. He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2006 and named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2007. He has testified before the US Congress on immigration matters and served as an advisor and on-screen commentator for the 2013 Public Broadcasting Service documentary, Latino Americans. He is the creator and presenter of a four-part radio programme, America: Laboratory of Democracy, broadcast on BBC World Service in October-November 2017, and rebroadcast on multiple National Public Radio stations in the US in early 2018. His writings have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. 

Publications

A Cultural History of Democracy in the Modern Age, coedited with Eugenio Biagini (Bloomsbury 2021) 

States of Exception in American History, coedited with Joel Isaac (Chicago, 2020) 

Beyond the New Deal Order, coedited with Nelson Lichtenstein and Alice O'Connor (Pennsylvania, 2019) 

Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015), winner of the 2016 Hawley Prize; 2016 Editors' Choice, New York Times Book Review; Spanish translation published in 2017 

Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (co-authored), Seventh Enhanced Edition (Cengage, 2019) 

American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), winner of 2001 Saloutos Prize, best book award given by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.  A expanded edition appeared in 2017, with a new chapter on race and nation from Obama to Trump. 

Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, co-edited with Steve Fraser (Harvard, 2005) 

E Pluribus Unum? Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, co-edited with John Mollenkopf (Russell Sage, 2001) 

America Transformed: A History of the United States Since 1900, co-authored with Emily Rosenberg and Norman Rosenberg (Harcourt Brace, 1999) 

Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge, 1989) 

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, co-edited with Steve Fraser (Princeton, 1989) 

Follow Professor Gerstle on Twitter.

Peter Baker is the Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC. He has covered five presidents and currently writes about President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his administration. He previously covered Presidents Donald J. Trump and Barack Obama for The Times, which he joined in 2008, and Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for The Washington Post, where he worked for 20 years. While at The Post, he also served as Moscow Co-Bureau Chief chronicling the rise of Vladimir Putin and covered the opening months of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He is the author or co-author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, published in September 2020 with his wife Susan Glasser of The New Yorker and named one of the books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Fortune magazine and Bloomberg News. 

Buy Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House on Amazon. 

Peter Baker’s articles on the NYT. 

Follow Peter Baker on Twitter.