March 4, 2006
The New Presidential Equation
By David
M. Shribman
Taft + Wilson
+ Kennedy + Nixon = Bush 43. The political calculus is often unpredictable.
George W.
Bush inspires unusually passionate support and provokes unusually
passionate opposition. The gap between the two -- think of it
as the presidential passion gap -- suggests that future historians
will fight with unusual passion about his legacy and the meaning
of Mr. Bush's presidency.
But as his
presidency progresses -- as he does more and as his earlier actions
recede from current events into history -- it is becoming increasingly
clear that his decisions and initiatives are being drawn from
an increasingly broad palette of precedents and presidents. He
is more than an updated version of his father, or the product
of the natural maturation of the ideas of Ronald Reagan -- notions
that many analysts, including yours truly, have argued.
Now I am
not so sure that the simpler explanation works. Now, especially
in foreign policy, I think he is an enigmatic admixture of four
presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans, two peacetime presidents
and two wartime chief executives, two from early in the 20th century
and two from the post-war midsection of the 20th century.
His supporters
and detractors alike argue that the president is 100 percent George
W. Bush. But I am coming to the conclusion that he is one part
William Howard Taft, one part Woodrow Wilson, one part John F.
Kennedy and one part Richard M. Nixon. Here are the raw materials
of the diplomatic Bush:
Dollar diplomacy.
This was Taft's approach to foreign policy, but the memorable
phrase from the initiative, the substitution of dollars for bullets
in diplomacy, is somewhat misleading and narrow. What Taft promoted
was an Americanized version of the notion (borrowed from Palmerston,
the 19th-century British leader) that American foreign policy
should be motivated less by alliances and more by interests.
The heart
of this philosophy is the congruence of American diplomatic and
economic goals. Warning: This argument does not lead to the conclusion
that the Iraq war is, as the president's critics argue, a war
for oil. But it leaves open the likelihood that American interest
in Iraq would be substantially less ardent if there were not a
drop of oil in the country or in the region where Iraq plays so
important a role.
Self-determination.
This principle, so shiny in its idealism during the World War
I years, was at the heart of Wilson's Fourteen Points, and the
president, the son of a Presbyterian minister, converted it into
a secular religion and preached it from every rooftop. Wilson's
great conviction was that democratic procedures were so ennobling,
so empowering, so persuasive, that they could end centuries of
international contention and overcome generations of culture and
customs. That is precisely what Mr. Bush and some of his neoconservative
allies believe about the transformative potential of democracy
in Iraq. And that is why the president's skeptics, especially
on the right, deride his foreign policy as "Wilsonian"
-- a word that once meant starry but stubborn idealism, but recently
has become a harsh term of opprobrium.
Bear any
burden. President Kennedy's inaugural address is remembered for
its soaring, poetic language and for its invitation for Americans
to ask what they could do for their country. But embedded in the
fourth paragraph of that speech -- in a particularly lyrical passage
-- is another invocation: "Let every nation know, whether
it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any
burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe,
to assure the survival and success of liberty." That, in
a Ted Sorensen phrase, is the post-weapons-of-mass-destruction
Bush doctrine in Iraq. Kennedy simply said it better.
Vietnamization.
President Nixon did not invent the Vietnam War, he merely inherited
it. It is possible to argue that President Bush didn't invent
a crisis in Iraq, he merely inherited one. (How quickly we have
forgotten those Clinton-era confrontations over weapons inspectors
in Saddam Hussein's fortress nation.) Nixon's approach to the
distress of Vietnam was to pass on the burden of the fight, from
American GIs to Vietnamese soldiers.
The Vietnamization
process followed Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird's visit to
Vietnam six months earlier, a mission that led to an increase
in the training and equipping of South Vietnamese forces. The
president gave his big Vietnamization speech to the American people
almost exactly a year to the day after his election to the White
House.
An aside:
His remarks of Nov. 3, 1969, represent the apotheosis of the Nixon
genre; he constantly says there are easier ways out of the Vietnam
mess (but that he isn't looking for the easy way) and that there
are "popular and easy" policies he could pursue (but
that he was too big a person, too big a strategist, "than
to think only of the years of my administration and of the next
election"). Just scanning this speech a third of a century
later is enough to remind a reader that irritating presidential
rhetorical tics were not invented in the Bush years.
But the important
element of Nixon's 1969 speech -- and of his policy -- is that
it poses the question that both the administration and its Democratic
foes are wrestling with in 2006: "The question facing us
today is: Now that we are in the war, what is the best way to
end it?"
The Nixon
response is much like the Bush response: Pass on the responsibility
for the conflict to the people who have the biggest stake in its
outcome -- for Nixon, the Vietnamese; for Mr. Bush, the Iraqis.
Both presidents argued in favor of substituting native combatants
for foreign ones. Here is Nixon: "We have adopted a plan
... for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground troops,
and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly
scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength
and not from weakness."
Mr. Bush,
unlike his predecessor, is not a compulsive student of the men
who inhabited the White House in times far different from his
own. But all Americans are hard-wired with historical precedents
and with the folklore of the presidents. There is nothing new
under the sun, perhaps especially for a presidential son.
Copyright
2006 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
