POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

Jon Meacham

Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

Random House

Ebook, 978-0-81299-820-7 (also available in hardcover, large print paperback, as an audio book, and on Audible), 864 pgs., $17.99

November 10, 2015

When George Herbert Walker Bush was five years old his school report cards included the category “Claims More Than His Fair Share of Time and Attention in Class.” His parents didn’t worry about this category. Bush’s nickname was “Have-Half” because he split everything he had with friends. Eighty-five years later he is much the same.

Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush is Jon Meacham’s account of the life of the forty-first president, “a child of one generation’s ruling class, the head of another’s, and the father of yet a third.” Meacham presents Bush as a man of humility and compassion as well as ambitious and deeply competitive, a believer in compromise, diplomacy, and the power of personal relationships.

A well-balanced account, Destiny and Power progresses briskly and never belabors a point. Meacham provides insightful analysis of family dynamics in Bush’s formative years, a recitation of the facts liberally leavened with anecdotes, and a good mix of formal and candid photos. Meacham had access to Bush’s diaries that he spoke into a hand-held recorder which provides a sense of immediacy—Bush’s thoughts in real time.

Meacham is fond of his subject and writes thrillingly of the “dazzling, epochal news” of the fall of the Berlin wall and chillingly of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bush’s diary allows us to watch his thinking develop as he struggles toward “This will not stand.” But Meacham doesn’t mince words regarding controversies such as Iran-Contra, deemed “unworthy of [Bush’s] essential character.”

Meacham reinforces the point throughout the book that “with Bush one got both hardball and high-mindedness, with the former being played in order to give him the power to put the latter into action.” However, Meacham doesn’t address the damage done to American political discourse resulting in polarization. Bush’s personal story is the larger story of how the Republican Party moved to the right in Texas and nationally.

Meacham explores the relationship between Bush and George W.’s presidency, including personal correspondence between them as George W. prepares to invade Iraq, as well as what Bush thought of “axis of evil” rhetoric and his estimation of Dick Cheney’s vice presidency. Bush “returned on several occasions to the subject of Dick Cheney, whom he believed . . . had his own empire there.” Cheney, upon reading the transcript, smiled and said, “Fascinating.”

Bush’s legendary life is conveyed with profound details such as telling his diary on the eve of Operation Desert Storm, “The face of war looks at me,” and Gorbachev’s gift to Bush Christmas morning, 1991, when he called “to announce the end of the experiment in Communism born in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.” Meacham humanizes that legendary life with charming details: Bush’s “Merry Christmas” socks, his staff stocking hotel rooms with pork rinds and Dr. Pepper, and the occasional shower with Millie, the springer spaniel.

Bush may be, as Meacham says, “the last gentleman” who used “privilege to build, not to consume or to coast.” If so, the nation will be poorer for it.

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