A First-Rate Madness (32 page)

Five years later, Bush took the step that was his best success: he joined a group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team. By then his father was president, no doubt a helpful fact; Bush put up much less money, most of it borrowed, than his fellow investors. But because of his high profile, Bush became the face of the Rangers, the most active and publicly visible leader, hiring and firing personnel, attending games, interacting with players and fans. He helped arrange for a new stadium, partly taxpayer-funded, that attracted more fans, and by the time Bush and his investors sold the team a decade later its value had risen greatly, making him a multimillionaire. By then he had also won the governorship in 1994, defeating the popular incumbent Ann Richards. Bush ran as a self-made businessman, in the oil business, but more important, in the sports business. His baseball success was key to establishing his political value: It “solved my biggest political problem in Texas,” Bush would later say. “My problem was, ‘What's the boy ever done?'”

Here's what he did. Born to a wealthy and politically connected family, which gave him excellent private schooling, he nonetheless started life with little personal income beyond a small inheritance. He married a local librarian and had two girls, whom they raised in middle-class comfort. He entered the oil business and did well during a boom and poorly during a bust. He ran for Congress and was a popular figure in his community. His family connections helped him segue into the baseball business, and he turned a financially faltering team into a profitable one. He then ran for governor and won. All in all, an impressive track record. Even without becoming president, he would be considered a success in life.

 

 

BUSH'S RISE WAS NOT EASY, but it was not very hard either. The key period was the 1980s, when his oil company failed, but he survived. His father's political power was central to the son's progress. The homoclite does not fail often, and when he does, he learns little. If he fails too much, he disintegrates rather than grows from the experience. Rarely having been tested in his youth, he hasn't had a chance to develop the resilience that might see him through later hardships. Having suffered little, he can't empathize with those who do. Having lived a secure life, he cannot recognize and react to hazards.

A homoclite makes a good friend, but a risky leader.

When the Twin Towers fell in 2001, Bush responded as the average subject in Grinker's study might have responded. They attacked us; we must attack them. They threatened us; we must invade them. As discussed in chapter 1, one sign of creativity is “integrative complexity,” the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. The typical homoclite does not think this way; he tends to see things more simply, as Grinker argued. If someone attacks you, you strike back. This is simple logic; it is not inherently vindictive. It is straightforward, not empathic or complex. In his memoirs, Bush reflects little on his thought processes after 9/11, beyond the basic notion that we were attacked and we had to respond. Tony Blair, describing that period, emphasizes Bush's lack of complexity (albeit admiringly): “I would be at a press conference with him, in the epicentre of those world-changing events, and I would think ‘George, explain it; don't just say it.'” But Bush felt little need to explain. In
Decision Points,
he only takes about two pages to describe the aftermath of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, and even then he only describes his feelings briefly: “No one was more shocked and angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. . . . I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.” His rationale was one-track: “I remembered the shattering pain of 9/11, a surprise attack for which we had received no warning. This time we had a warning like a blaring siren. Years of intelligence pointed overwhelmingly to the conclusion that Saddam had WMD. He had used them in the past. He had not met his responsibility to prove their destruction. He had refused to cooperate with the inspectors, even with the threat of an invasion on his doorstep. The only logical conclusion was that he was hiding WMD. And given his support of terror and his sworn hatred of America, there was no way to know where those weapons would end up.” Blair, in contrast, devotes more than a hundred pages in his memoir to describing his thoughts about the matter, and though he agrees with Bush, he does acknowledge other ways of thinking about the risks of invading Iraq.

Bush's administration strove to rationalize an invasion of Iraq; when this rationale proved wrong, we invented other reasons to stay. When we started to lose, we tried harder, consistent with Santayana's dictum that fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts after losing sight of your goals. Bush showed no evidence of the complex integrative thinking that characterized the better generals of the Civil War. He did not empathize wth his enemies, as King and Gandhi (and even Sherman) had. He did not realistically assess the dangers of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He did not prepare (as Kennedy had during the Cuban Missile Crisis) a creative response that avoided war as a last resort. Bush made all options other than war untenable.

Bush's defenders will offer more complex rationalizations for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, some of which might be valid. But the invasion of Iraq clearly was based on false claims. Rather than admit error, as Kennedy had in the Bay of Pigs, and withdraw, Bush did what Kennedy refused to do: send in even more troops and stay even longer.

This is quite normal. In psychological terms, Bush can't be faulted for thinking this way. Most of us think and act similarly. Most people have a hard time admitting error, apologizing, changing our minds. It takes more than a typical amount of self-awareness to realize that one is wrong and to admit it.

At least George Bush wasn't lonely. In his unshakable certainty, the conservative American homoclite was joined by his liberal British counterpart.

 

 

A HOMOCLITE PERSONALITY is not uniquely midwestern, or Texan, or American; nor is it exclusively conservative. Homoclites can also be liberal, cosmopolitan Europeans. Tony Blair and George Bush differed in political belief and personal style, but they were similar in psychological makeup.

Blair was a classic British amalgam, born to an Irish mother and an English father in the capital of Scotland. His father, Leo, taught law, and for a few years the family followed Leo's career to Australia. Leo came from a poor background, a foster child raised in Glasgow. He joined the army in the Second World War and then obtained a law degree. He worked hard all his life, attaining solid middle-class status, and, as a self-made man, identified with the Conservative Party. Eventually he settled in the city of Durham, and even planned to run for Parliament as a Tory, before he suffered a stroke in his mid-forties. Leo survived and recovered, but he had to give up his political hopes. Tony Blair's mother, Hazel, was a religious woman who took her children every summer to her ancestral home in Donegal, Ireland, for vacation; she was apparently extremely pleasant, shy, and a devoted mother. When Tony was twenty-two and at Oxford, his mother died of cancer, the first blight on an otherwise stable childhood. Leo Blair gave his three children all the advantages that he had never enjoyed: private schooling and a healthy family life. Tony attended Fettes College as a teenager, Scotland's premier boarding school. He did not enjoy the strict rules at Fettes, and he rebelled mildly, but not much. He excelled most in acting, and he enjoyed rock music. When he got to Oxford, he became a leader in his social circle and, like Bush, was highly amiable and sociable. He sang and played guitar in a rock band, the Ugly Rumours, studied hard, apparently never tried marijuana (which was de rigueur during his college years in the early 1970s), and talked plenty of politics and religion with his classmates. A circle of friends influenced him greatly, including an Australian Marxist who would be a lifelong friend, and an Australian priest who strongly influenced the young Blair in the direction of embracing his mother's religious example rather than his father's secular one. Blair was introduced to the writings of a Scottish liberal Christian theologian, John MacMurray, a man he would credit throughout his life as a major intellectual guide. With this background, Blair essentially came to a mild Labour socialism from the perspective of Christian ethics. It was fair and just, spiritually and ethically, to fight poverty. This became Blair's road to leftist politics, a different end, but similar rationale to that which lay behind George Bush's compassionate conservatism. Like many homoclites, both men saw religion as a central feature of who they were.

In sum, Blair came from classic homoclitic stock, solidly middle class, soundly religious. He worked his way up productively and successfully in peacetime, as healthy people do, winning leadership with moderate Labour policies by means of appreciable interpersonal charm and oratorical gifts. After graduating from Oxford, Blair became a lawyer and married Cherie Booth, also a lawyer, who had been raised in working-class Liverpool in a religious Roman Catholic and highly pro-Labour family. In 1980, just when Margaret Thatcher had buried Labour in elections the previous year, Tony Blair joined the Labour Party and began looking for a place to run for Parliament. The party took him as a sacrificial candidate in a safe Tory district; Blair lost. Then, in 1983, he approached Labour leaders who were vetting candidates for a new constituency in Sedgefield, one that was considered to be a safe Labour seat. Many candidates wanted the plum; when Blair knocked on the doors of the local party offices, he was greeted by a half dozen men engrossed by European Cup soccer matches. As one of them, John Burton, recalled much later, Blair settled down to watch and enjoy the sporting event; beer and snacks were shared.

Blair won the seminal political contest of his career by
literally
passing the having-a-beer test.

Said Burton, “It was his manner that won us over. He had a presence about him that I knew instinctively could win elections. There was a kindred spirit.” Homoclites recognized one of their own, and they knew that the homoclite masses would respond to him as they had.

Once Blair had his safe Sedgefield seat, he could focus on internal Labour politics. He worked his way up quickly, especially after Neil Kinnock became Labour leader and began to modernize the party. Instead of trade unionists who focused on workers only, Kinnock began to move Labour toward meeting the needs of the middle classes more broadly. Blair and another new young MP, Gordon Brown, became Kinnock's posse, the new leaders in waiting. Labour kept losing, and Blair and Brown kept rising through the ranks, until finally, after the sudden death of Labour leader John Smith in 1993, Blair was elected the new leader. In 1997, his party finally won.

Like Bush, Blair won power from the opposing party in a time of peace and plenty, convincing the British public through his likable persona and moderate politics. Labour had been out of power for almost two decades. Margaret Thatcher had remade British society, making classic welfare policies unpopular. Blair found a way to make “New Labour” attractive. Much as Bill Clinton had co-opted some of Reagan's rhetoric (“the era of big government is over”), Blair conceded on some policies, while arguing for a compassionate support of those aspects of the welfare state that Britons valued (like the National Health Service). Blair was likable, polite, centrist, even religious—all homoclite traits. He succeeded beyond expectation, the only Labour leader in modern times to be elected three times, leader of Great Britain for ten full years (1997–2007). And he used this electoral success to achieve important political successes, most notably finally attaining, through the kind of tireless negotiation he would later display in the Middle East, a durable peace in Northern Ireland. As his press secretary Alastair Campbell aptly summarized in his memoir, “Progress in Northern Ireland alone should stand as historic testimony . . . but there were many others—an independent Bank of England, a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, elected mayors, a reformed House of Lords, regenerated cities, something close to full employement, a minimum wage, improved investment in reformed schools and hospitals.” And he goes on and on, legitimately.

Like many other homoclite leaders, Tony Blair was—before the greatest crisis of his political life—a notable success story.

 

 

ALL THIS CHANGED after 9/11. Here we have extensive evidence of Blair's homoclite mindset, because, as mentioned, he provides over a hundred pages of introspection on the topic in his memoir (in contrast to Bush's two).

The key issue is how he responded to the crisis of 9/11. At least as he explains it in his recent memoir, Blair was not completely unrealistic; he could at least fathom rational attitudes other than his own (something that George Bush has not explicitly allowed). Blair admits “only” two ways of dealing with 9/11: one was to “manage” the problem, leaving the Taliban and Saddam in power, maintaining and strengthening economic and military sanctions. Blair calls this “softpower”; Gandhi and King might have called it nonviolent resistance. To his credit, Blair admits its rationality: “Some indeed advocated this strategy (though not many did so on 12 September), and I do not dismiss it. It is the true alternative to what we actually did. . . . So we would have been provoked to war; and resisted the provocation.” Isn't that exactly what King preached over and over again? (This reminds us, despite the January holiday hagiography, how hard it is for us to truly follow King's principles in foreign policy.)

The other option was the “hard-power” approach, most forcefully and purely advocated by Dick Cheney; that was the route Blair and Bush took. Says Blair now, “The other way, the way we chose, was to confront it [terrorism] militarily. I still believe that was the right choice, but the costs, implications and consequences were far greater than any of us, and certainly me, could have grasped on that day.” Blair goes on to say that he now knew that this was not a merely or purely military decision; it required “geopolitical” context; it required “nationbuilding,” something Bush had previously ridiculed, something that Blair now fully accepts.