Reading and Writing in the White House

As you may recall, another Texas governor not too long ago – someone who actually did wind up in the White House – also was known to occasionally commit syntactical violence when speaking in front of big crowds with cameras, among other situations and places.  “Sentences broken and jumbled, thoughts careening,” is how journalist Walt Harrington, late of the Washington Post Magazine, recently put it in the autumn 2011 issue of The American Scholar . . . in what nonetheless was one of the most insightful, respectful, and properly admiring pieces I’ve ever read about George W. Bush. 

“I have told various George W. haters,” Harrington wrote previously, “that they best not underestimate the man,” as he is “smart, thoughtful in a brawny kind of way and, most of all, a good and decent man.”

Early in “Dubya and Me,” Harrington, by no means a political conservative, writes of how he had just read Bush’s 2010 book Decision Points, and was “struck by his many references to history.”  In the back of his mind “was an article that Karl Rove had written for the Wall Street Journal in 2008, which revealed (much to the consternation of the president’s derisive critics) that Bush had read 186 books for pleasure in the preceding three years, consisting of mostly serious historical nonfiction.”   

A few pages later Harrington cites a “partial list” of leaders that Bush (who was a history major at Yale) had read books about in recent years in addition to George Washington, Harry Truman, and Dean Acheson:  Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Huey Long, Lyndon Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Mellon, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Ulysses S. Grant, John Quincy Adams, Genghis Khan.

“Genghis Khan?” Harrington asked incredulously.

“I didn’t know much about him,” Bush said.  “I was fascinated by him.  I guess I’ve always been fascinated by larger-than-life figures.”  (If it’s the same book I read several years ago – Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Macalester College’s Jack Weatherford – I can vouch that it’s exceptionally good.  Then, again, it’s the only book I’ve ever read about any Mongol conquerors.)  

A few pages after that, while noting that Bush had read 14 Lincoln biographies during his eight years in the White House, Harrington quotes him talking about how history had given him a chance to study “the decisions of my predecessors” both as governor and president.  One book was a biography of Sam Houston, The Raven, by Marquis James.

I was fascinated by the story of Houston voting against secession, and reading a description of him basically being driven out of town by angry citizens. . .  . My only point is that one lesson I learned, if they’re throwing garbage on Houston, arguably Texas’s most famous politician . . . if they’re throwing garbage on him, they can throw garbage on me.

I should note that my aim here is not to draw some kind of complimentary connection between George W. Bush and Rick Perry, the latter of whom continues having serious problems in expressing himself which, in turn, is leading various folks to question his intellectual horns.  With all due respect, the current governor of Texas needs to defend his lonesome self in this matter.  Rather my aim is in tying President Bush to President Reagan, both of whom have been mocked intellectually by frequently far less bright, albeit monumentally rude critics, professional and otherwise.

Having Rove note that Bush had read precisely 186 books (how many pages?) over a very busy three-year period comes across as a little too campaign-staged for my taste.  Then, again, and in fairness, 186 books ain’t literary chopped liver.  Very impressive. 

Also very impressive was the way in which Reagan read, wrote and edited constantly, both during his time in the White House (particularly on Air Force One) and for a long time prior.  Suffice it to say, it’s impossible to write clearly and well unless one first also thinks in those ways.  To their credit, many journalists and scholars, especially historians have come to better appreciate and acknowledge that Ronald Reagan did in fact write clearly and well, unusually so.  My bow to Walt Harrington, as well as the American Scholar, for their early and effective  efforts to cleanse George W. Bush’s good name and reputation of the same kind of offensive nonsense—as in Texas-sized garbage—wildly thrown at Reagan.