The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush

Values, Strategy, and Loyalty

Alexander Moens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351889667
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Few presidents in modern times have seen their words and actions subject to such intense critical scrutiny as George W. Bush. His critics label him the 'Pariah President', personally inarticulate and at times politically incoherent; his supporters portray him as gifted and skilled, one of the most decisive, successful and popular leaders of our time. But if 'the person is now the policy' at the White House - and that person happens to be both activist and moralist - what kind of presidency and foreign policy flows from such a leader? How has Bush changed American politics and the role of the United States in the world? Alexander Moens offers the first systematic explanation of Bush's foreign policy by describing the complexities of the man and how his particular personality and style so heavily influence the final policy outcomes. Frank, engaging and insightful, it offers an original and carefully documented account of Bush's personality, his presidential style and his decision-making process, and how these three core ingredients in turn provide the key to understanding Bush's overall strategy and policy. The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush is an ideal reference for contemporary US foreign policy, international security, and diplomatic relations. With detailed and candid insights into the presidential leadership it will also make fascinating reading for those interested in the future of American politics.

Chapter 1

The Background and Personality of George W. Bush

Both Bush and Texan

Born on July 6, 1946, George Walker Bush is the oldest son of a President and a member of one of America's most famous political families.¹ It is a family that traces its roots to the Pilgrims coming on the Mayflower and who are distantly related to the Queen of Great Britain. The Walker's and Bush's were banking and steel magnates whose members included personal advisers to Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Bush's mother, Barbara Pierce, is a descendant of President Franklin Pierce. The Walker and Bush families stand for business accomplishment, Republicanism, conservative family values and service to the country both in terms of the military and politics.² Given the wealth, fame, connections and strong social code of such a powerful family, Bush in his early years gained a perspective on life that was larger than his immediate nuclear family and his boyhood surroundings in Texas.

Just as important, and especially in the period from 1950 to 1959, when his father was developing his Zapata Oil Company, Bush lived in Midland, Texas as a fairly average middle-class kid. At that time his father was neither rich nor famous. From age four to thirteen, Bush lived a predominantly ‘normal’ life in Midland. It consisted of going to a public primary school, playing little league baseball, and roaming around with other middle class kids. While there would be periodic trips to family gatherings at estates in Maine, Florida, New York or South Carolina, George W. Bush equally enjoyed going to summer camp in East Texas. When Prescott Bush, his grandfather and a US Senator from Connecticut visited the family in Midland, a political world would open to the young Bush. During trips to visit his grandparents in New York, Bush would see something of the old patrician way of life, including the opportunity to visit professional baseball players at spring training camp, as one of his father's uncles was co-owner of the New York Mets. So it was back and forth between the ‘bigness’ of the ‘Bush-Walker world’ and the ‘smallness’ of day-to-day life in Midland.

Midland is not a typical American town, but was then a booming small city in a large rural environment, having grown in spurts along with the oil industry. Most of the families of friends, both for young Bush and his parents, were connected to the oil industry. Bush's Midland experience was thus a mixture of the egalitarianism of backyard barbeques, church gatherings and sports activities, and the risk-taking, adventurous culture of oil drilling. Bush saw his father ‘making it on his own’ out in Texas with the help of ready investors from the family and its network of friends.

Bush's father had chosen the oil industry in the Western Texas area called the Permian Basin in 1948. He had been offered a job in one of his uncle's oil equipment industries and had literally started at the bottom of the totem pole in West Texas. When he formed his first company, called Bush-Overbey with one of his neighbors in 1950, he tapped back into the family network to gather some $350,000 in investment money, thereby blending his own accomplishment with the strength of the Bush-Walker family connection. The elder Bush soon merged his company with Hugh and William Liedtke, who later formed Pennzoil, to create Zapata Oil. The Liedtke brothers helped him find some of the most consistently producing wells in the area. By 1959, Bush's father branched out to try his hand at offshore oil drilling and moved the family to Houston.

The move to Houston in 1959 was a major change for the thirteen-year old George. Now the world of private schools, upper-class tony neighborhoods, and big downtown businesses opened up. The young Bush had only two years to make the adjustment as more changes were in store. Both his father and grandfather had attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and had gone on to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. That path had served them well and it was natural for Bush's parents to consider the same opportunity for their son. Being barely two years in Houston, the move to Andover was a complete shock for Bush as he did not know ‘Andover from Adam.’³ In his campaign biography, he later remembered it as ‘a hard transition.’⁴ Some friends thought he had done something terrible to be sent away to a school they jokingly nicknamed, ‘Bendover.’ It is of note that none of Bush's younger brothers (Jeb, Neil and Marvin) went to Andover after him. Perhaps, Bush's parents belatedly felt the fit between their Texas kids and Andover was not a good one.

The tenure at Andover and then Yale made him a stronger Texan at heart. Aside from his regular visits home, he helped his father campaign in Texas for a seat in the US Senate in 1964, in which the elder Bush lost to the Democrat Ralph Yarborough. He later helped him run successfully for the US House of Representatives in a Houston district in 1966 and again in 1968. His summer work was usually back in Texas and he dated Cathryn Wolfman in Houston in his last years at Yale.

After graduating from Yale in 1968, it was no surprise that Bush chose the Texas Air National Guard as his way to avoid being sent as an infantryman to Vietnam. It required a two-year full time and a four-year part time commitment. But for Bush it was a win-win situation: First, going back to Texas and becoming a pilot, as his father had been during World War II, was high on his wish list. Second, the six-year commitment was not a problem as Bush was unclear about what he wanted to do. Although he was repulsed by the ‘Sixties Generation’ and the counterculture movement his peers started, George W. was a member of the Baby Boomers. He did not rebel against the rigid discipline and academic demands of Andover, but he also did not get as much ‘structure’ out of it as had his father.

The next major change in Bush's early life came in 1970 when his father lost his second try at the US Senate to Lloyd Bentsen. Richard Nixon, who had pushed the elder Bush to run, then appointed him US Ambassador to the United Nations. That effectively ended the Bush parental home in Houston as the home base for George. After having been in and out of Texas on various training programs with the National Guard, he now was on his own in Houston. He moved into a large rental complex called the Chateaux Dijon, and for the next three years, he alternated between National Guard duty, short-lived jobs and working on election campaigns. Throughout, Bush was involved in a rambunctious social life with lots of parties, social drinking and girlfriends. These so-called ‘nomadic’⁵ years did not end until he enrolled in Harvard's Business School in September 1973.

His Harvard years again reinforced his identity as a Texan, both culturally and politically: he wore his bomber jacket and cowboy boots and spit tobacco into a Styrofoam cup. He stayed away from campus politics as he had done at Yale. In his last year at Harvard in 1975, he met up with his old Midland friend, Joe O'Neill, and seeing that oil prices had sky-rocketed after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, set out with the leftover $13,000 from his education fund to start in the oil business for himself. In the following eleven years, Bush reaffirmed his old Midland identity. He blended back into his hometown with some of his old friends, like O'Neill, with some old business friends of his father who were also eager to help him, and with the new generation of oil businessmen, such as Don Evans who later became CEO of Tom Brown Inc. Bush set up his own company and then pursued the Bush-Walker family connections to find investors, adding to this list the contacts he had made at Andover, Yale and Harvard.

After two years in Midland, George married Laura Jane Welch, the daughter of a developer and contractor, who had also grown up in Midland. Although they did not remember each other, they had been in the same junior high school, and had even lived in the same housing complex in Houston in 1970. Laura worked in Austin as a school librarian and would from time to time visit her parents and friends in Midland. They knew of each other as Laura's friend Jan Donnelly had married George's friend Joe O'Neill, but they had not actually met, and at first Laura was reluctant to do so. It was the O'Neill's that finally got them together on the last weekend of July in 1977. They were both 31 and were married three months later.

Most descriptions of Laura focus on how different she is in temperament and background to George W. Bush. ‘George is always bouncing off the wall,’ observed Anne Johnson, whose husband Clay had gone to school with him, ‘and Laura is so quiet.’⁶ An only child, she was very close to her parents and always focused. She admired her funny outgoing dad, Harold Welch, and in 1977 found the same boisterous character in Bush. The quiet girl was traumatized by the accidental death of one of her friends, Mike Douglas, when she ran a stop sign in November 1963 and hit his car. It was not till 1998 that she shared this accident with her daughters, fearing they may hear it in the media during Bush's upcoming campaign for president. Much has been written about Laura's calming influence on her husband, but her presence also served to deepen Bush's attachment to Midland and its values as they shared a hometown and childhood experience. Their twin daughters Barbara and Jenna, who were born on November 25, 1981, spent their early years in Midland, not leaving until 1986 when Harken Oil bought out Bush's third oil company, Spectrum 7. As a director on Harken's Board, George worked out of its Dallas office. Like his earlier transition to Houston when he was 13, Bush moved to a well-to-do area in the North part of the city. He was not to remain there long as Bush joined his father's 1988 presidential campaign and moved the family to Washington, D.C., for a few years.

Bush's final return to Texas also was his most significant. He had played a key role in his father's presidential campaign and could have been tempted to stay in Washington, perhaps as a ‘loyalty enforcer’ in the White House. Instead, after this important piece of ‘family business,’ George W. returned to make Dallas his home. As one of the managing partners in the Arlington-based Texas Rangers, he sealed his Texas identity once and for all.

The difference between the father and son is crucial. His father was and is a Bush who drew upon the opportunities offered by Texas as he pursued his life career in business and politics. But George W. Bush was and is a Texan who draws upon the opportunities offered from being a Bush.

Both Fun and Drive

There is a common theory in the Bush biographies that George became the family clown in order to cheer up his mother after the death of his three-year old sister Robin in 1953 when he was only seven.⁷ Robin died after a short illness with leukemia and though the young George was at first shocked his parents had not told him, the theory goes, he soon turned to comfort his mother as his father was often gone on business. The whole thing is an exaggeration: Robin's death did not form Bush's character, nor did he become more serious after the family got over mourning Robin. George W. Bush was born with a very sunny outlook on life, a propensity for frivolity, a healthy dose of sarcasm, and a big mouth. The string of nicknames given to him in his lifetime such as ‘The Lip, Bushman, and Bombastic Bushkin,’ tell the tale.

A few Bush family habits have acted as fuel for Bush's outgoing and outspoken temperament. The family is fiercely competitive and social, always interacting in games or sports, kidding around with each other, and invariably making new friends and maintaining old contacts. These friends and contacts, of course, are also part of the extended network of business partners and political supporters. So Bush's outgoing people-friendly personality was given unprecedented practice by the large number of people he encountered; he learned as a youngster to shake everyone's hand in the room as he came in and again when he left. He was taught by his father to keep little notes on people, to remember their names and the things discussed. For the young Bush it was a natural outlet as he had honed his memory skills on baseball names and statistics. He wrote to the baseball ‘stars’ for signatures, including cheery notes, return envelopes and stamps.

Bush became cheerleader and chief prankster at Andover, ‘lifting the spirits of his school.’⁸ He took the informal pick-up stickball game and fashioned it into a league with himself as Commissioner. He made legions of friends and acquaintances, and showed an early tendency to be inclusive even bringing ‘nerd’ kids into the stickball game. Later at Yale, he would include non-Whites with no trace of effort. It is no surprise that he became one of the most liked persons in the academy making lifelong friends such as Clay Johnson who accompanied him to the White House. Alongside the fun, there was strict discipline at the school and the days were filled with activities from early morning until lights out. Bush did have to work on his academics, especially his English, in order to keep second or third class standing. A discipline he had always struggled with, his mother helped him with it during the years he attended Kinkaid private school. Math was less of a problem and history was George's favorite. The history of leaders and of military affairs was especially dear to him. He would later share this interest with his close political adviser, Karl Rove, with Vice President Dick Cheney and with other influential advisers such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

At Yale, the combination of Bush's outgoing personality and his sophisticated people skills began to take on a professional quality. At his induction to the Delta Kappa Epsilon, he alone could name all fifty people in the room. He had come to campus and started at once meeting and entertaining people. By the time he graduated, Clay Johnson estimated Bush knew a thousand people.⁹ It was no surprise that Bush was invited to join the Skulls and Bones society, an old elitist club...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Background and Personality of George W. Bush
• 2 Running for President
• 3 The Bush White House, the Decision-Making Process, and the Priority of Domestic Policy
• 4 Foreign and Defense Policy before September 11
• 5 The War President
• 6 The Iraq Nexus
• 7 Bush's Style, Record, and Vision
• Index