The ghost following Bush
ON AN Autumn night 300 years ago, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, hero of the British Navy, was approached on his quarterdeck by a sailor with a warning. According to the sailor's calculations, the fleet was headed straight for disaster. But Sir Clowdisley was a bold leader unburdened by doubt. He was dead certain he was headed in the right direction.
"Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy," according to Dava Sobel in her brilliant book "Longitude," and so "Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot."
The 57-year-old Sir Clowdisley stayed the course, oblivious in his ignorance and upright in his optimism, until, one by one, his ships wrecked in the Scilly Isles with great loss of life, including his own.
Sir Clowdisley kept coming to mind as I was reading Robert Draper's "Dead Certain, the presidency of George W. Bush." Dissenters were not hanged in the Bush White House, but their exclusion from the quarterdeck was the bureaucratic equivalent of the long drop. At least Admiral Shovell had a man in uniform willing to bring him bad news.
In the Bush White House, no one said: "Let's slow down and rethink this," Draper writes.
"I made the decision to lead," Bush told Draper. "And therefore there'll be times when you make those decisions; one, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance. And that may be true. But the fundamental question is: Is the world better off as a result of your leadership?"
Sir Clowdisley might have made the same statement and asked the same question. For an essential part of leadership is not just dead certainty, but finding the right course, and being flexible enough to change it when the circumstances warrant.
Iraq may be more stable now, but it was an unnecessary war in the first place and there is no end in sight. It is destined to drag on long after Bush has left the stage, perhaps longer than the Vietnam War, radicalizing another generation of Muslims, and immeasurably empowering Iran. And under Bush's leadership, the war in Afghanistan may be lost too. It will be hard to argue that Bush has left the world in better shape than when he found it.
As for the American people, Bush, "the First Optimist, made pessimists out of them," Draper writes. A few Bush lieutenants sometimes wonder if, in the end, was "his compulsive optimism . . . worth the sacrifice of credibility?"
Draper poses the question: Was his plain speech just intellectual laziness, the strategic vision merely disrespect for the process, the boldness really recklessness, the strength an unreflective self-certainty? Draper doesn't answer the question.
The villain may be, however, Bush's "elemental compulsion" to "accomplish big things." Draper quotes Condoleezza Rice as saying: "This is a time when the US has unparalleled power and you can try and sit on it and husband it and use a little bit here and a little there . . . or you can try to make big strategic plays that will fundamentally alter things in the way that the US did after 1947."
It is Bush's big, strategic moves that have gotten us into so much trouble, making one look nostalgically upon the less ambitious, but infinitely more competent, moves of his father's administration.
There are some indications, however, that this administration, in its 11th hour, is shedding some of the "almost petulant heedlessness to the outside world" that Draper ascribes to George W. Bush. His letter to North Korea's Kim Jong-il would not have been conceivable when the old we-don't-talk-to-evil theology reigned in the White House. Inviting Syria to the recent Middle East summit was another indication. There is a new flexibility that is helping to dispel some of the hubris of the last seven years.
According to Draper, Bush is thinking hard about his legacy. He is "consuming history books," Draper writes, with the "same voraciousness" with which he pounds back hot dogs. "His presidency now all but consigned to history, Bush (is) immersed in the past, and gleaning from its portents what the future would say about America's 43rd president, " Draper writes. Karl Rove gave him a biography of the young Churchill.
Bush looks to the ghosts of Churchill, and Harry Truman too, as heroes who were at one time considered failures, upon whom history now smiles. But, sadly, it's too late. It is the ghost of Sir Clowdisley that crowds the Oval Office.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
