February 4, 2006
A Lesson In Getting Along With Your Ex
By David
M. Shribman
At their
prime, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were vicious rivals with
sharply divergent visions of the kind of nation America should
be. Their exchange of letters and thoughts in their dotage is
one of the great collections of correspondence in all of history.
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter so disliked each other that the tension
at their presidential debate 30 years ago was palpable. Once out
of office, the two grew so close that it became hard to know what
the fuss in 1976 was all about.
Now George
H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, rivals in 1992 and, in a proxy war
between one man's son and another's vice president, in 2000, have
drawn so close that President George W. Bush last week referred
to his predecessor as "my new brother."
It wasn't
always that way, of course. Mr. Clinton used to refer to the president's
father as "old Bush" and portrayed the 41st president
as an out-of-touch, out-of-his-element symbol of privilege. The
tension between the two families only increased as the younger
President Bush sought to regain the office that Mr. Clinton forced
his father to relinquish. Both Bushes spoke vaguely of the need
to preserve the dignity of the office of president, and no one
mistook their meaning, which was that the Bushes moved to the
strains of classical music while the Clintons lived their lives
to the twang of a country-western ballad.
Once in the
office that he repeatedly suggested Mr. Clinton had callously
defamed, the new president almost never referred to Mr. Clinton
by name. In the first several months of the Bush 43 era, it seemed
as if the president were more concerned about not being Bill Clinton
than he was about being George W. Bush.
In truth,
the Bush presidency defined itself by not being the Clinton presidency.
Every meeting started on time. (Mr. Clinton's had started on time
only if the margin of error was 90 minutes.) The president went
to bed early. (Mr. Clinton stayed up late talking politics and
talking to politicians.) The White House was leakproof. (Mr. Clinton's
was a colander.) The first lady was quiet, unopinionated, secure
in her Texas roots. (Mrs. Clinton tried to take control of one-seventh
of the American economy and, that having failed, ran for the Senate
from a state she had hardly visited before.) The president was
monogamous. (Mr. Clinton believed in marriage but was not a fanatic
about it.)
Then there
was the substance. In the Clinton years, taxes went up. In the
Bush years, taxes went down. In the Clinton years, the United
States made a point to consult with allies and with international
organizations. In the Bush years, the allies and the United Nations
found out about White House intentions by tuning into CNN. In
the Clinton years, the end of the era of big government was proclaimed.
In the Bush years, the government, bloated by the Department of
Homeland Security and then the belated response to Hurricane Katrina,
grew like mad. (Nobody said that either man stayed on the script.)
Indeed, it
is difficult to think of contiguous presidencies that have been
so different, at least since Warren Harding, who was no intellectual,
followed Woodrow Wilson. As president of Princeton, Wilson behaved
as if he were president of the United States; but when he became
president of the United States, he behaved as if he were the president
of Princeton. Franklin Roosevelt was substantially different from
Herbert Hoover, of course, but it is hard to say that the Reconstruction
Finance Corp. that Hoover fashioned to fight the Great Depression
did not foreshadow the New Deal. (Can't wait to get the angry
e-mails on this one.)
So why has
the Bush family drawn so close to the Clinton family -- and vice
versa? It is not only because Mr. Clinton both followed and preceded
a President Bush and because it is now possible that President
Bush could both follow and precede a President Clinton. (Think
about it.) Nor is it because Mr. Clinton never had a father, or
rather never knew his father, who died before he was born, and
never had a full brother. (Imagine what Fawn Brodie, the historian
who psychoanalyzed Thomas Jefferson, would have to say about William
Jefferson Clinton.)
Mr. Clinton
and the elder Mr. Bush were thrown together when the younger President
Bush asked them to work together to assist the victims of the
Asian tsunami. Once they became the 21st-century version of Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they got together again when the
twin hurricanes hit the American Gulf Coast last year. They realized
that they shared a bond and a burden that fewer than four dozen
Americans have shared in more than two centuries.
"I can
understand why ex-presidents are able to put aside old differences,"
the president said in a CBS interview last week. He also said:
"One of these days, I'll be a member of the ex-presidents'
club. ... I'll be looking for something to do."
George W.
Bush's passage from president to ex-president will test the theory
that presidents (with the exception of Harry Truman and Dwight
Eisenhower, wary of each other from the start, and Theodore Roosevelt
and William Howard Taft, whose relationship and succession drama
was worthy of Greek literature) eventually regard each other as
members of one big happy family. Will three be a crowd? Will the
bookish Mr. Clinton (a Rhodes Scholar) and the thoughtful President
Bush 41 (a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale) welcome President
Bush 43 (a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon at Yale)? And, if it
comes to this, how will Bush 41, Bush 43 and Clinton 42 respond
if they get the call to duty from ... Clinton 44? The possibilities
in this family drama are endless.
Copyright
2006 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
