“George H. W. Bush has a firm idea about holding public office. He tried to do what was right. By the time he held any jobs where the decisions were his, this was an old and outmoded idea.”
While journalism seems to have lost much in 2013, one of its greatest losses this year was in the passing of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Richard Ben Cramer. While he wrote on a range so expansive that it extended from Middle East conflict to the pitcher’s mound at Yankee’s stadium, perhaps his best know book was What It Takes, the Teddy White-style, making-of-the-president story of the 1988 election. In that book, Cramer did a nearly anthropological immersion into the lives of the several Republicans and Democrat contenders. The original manuscript of What It Takes was said to have filled a bathroom in Cramer’s home from floor to ceiling. While the tome was ultimately lifted from the bathroom floor, much of Cramer’s writing was then regrettably left by editors on the Simon & Schuster cutting room floor.
Being Poppy adapts the best of the George H. W. Bush chapters from What It Takes with other observations and anecdotes that didn’t make the first cut, to provide a very enjoyable, short biography of the 41st President of the United States, at least up to the surrender of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. For longtime Bush watchers, like yours truly, there is little here that is new or revealing, only a very pleasant reminder of what a good and decent man George H. W. Bush is and has always been, a man of civic virtue too little in current supply.
While the title Being Poppy is appropriate, an allusion to the nickname he earned in early adolescence when he evidenced in a family tennis math an intense competitiveness reminiscent of his maternal grandfather, Pops, it could just as well been called The Coin of His Person, an expression Cramer uses only in passing way toward the end of the book. Here is a man who has lived a life of extraordinary political accomplishment and service with a seemingly superficial ideology, nominal religious faith and a longstanding lack of interest in the substance of policy, but with an internal gyro that seemed to always guide him unwaveringly toward being a good man and to do the right thing.
Cramer’s direct access to Bush in the preparation of this book is made obvious in the ways his writing so often takes on 41’s helluva regular guy familiarity, as if Bush himself were telling the story. It’s that famous syntax, if one can call it that, that kept Dana Carvey in the SNL line-up. Cramer writes:
“Bush — well, he wasn’t much on the stump. He’d get cranked up, dive into a twisty river of a sentence, no noun, a couple or three verbs in a row, and you wouldn’t know where he was headed — sometimes for minutes at a stretch, while his hands sawed and pulled at the air, smacked the podium, drew imaginary lines and boxes without a name, without apparent reference to what he was talking about, which you couldn’t exactly tie down, unless you caught a key word, now and then like ‘Sukarno,’ or ‘taxes,’ or ‘lib-rull.’
One might say that George H. W. Bush lacked substance or that his approach to life and public service were superficial. It was all just so personal; so coin of his person. Bush has lived a life of ambition without self promotion, competitiveness without cruelty, accomplishment without (heaven forbid) credit-taking. His life has evidenced the true noblisse oblige, the notion that a man who has been blessed is obliged to return such blessing in the form of his service. Though Poppy would never permit you to say so, in him there is much to admire.
Being Poppy may well be a better book on the subject of winning friends and influencing people than Dale Carnegie could have ever hoped to write. George H. W. Bush built a vast network of real, authentic, intimate friendships. He has been a living, breathing, in the flesh, social media app. Much of his accomplishment can be attributed to his selfless investments of the coin of his person in other people. He has lived an other-focused life. When he faced Dukakis in ’88, he and wife Barbara could reach out to the 8,000-plus closest friends to whom they sent Christmas Cards each year. This was not a mailing list or database, but a collection of index cards featuring hand-written notes about real friends they had made, all around the world. At the time, no one could name even Michael Dukakis’ best friend.
Cramer died before completing this book. His wife, Joan, found a note from him that she supposed had been meant to be part of its opening:
“George H. W. Bush has a firm idea about holding public office. He tried to do what was right. By the time he held any jobs where the decisions were his, this was an old and outmoded idea.”
In the run-up to the ’88 election his advisors pressed him to be more specific in defining himself and give people a clearer picture of what he believed in. Cramer writes:
“‘I don’t know,’ Bush said. ‘I don’t get the feeling people want that.’
They argued…but Bush just wouldn’t believe it. Personal quality was his ‘thing.’ He thought people would see it…once they took a look at him.
The fact was, he hasn’t a clue how to define himself. Some people saw him as a moderate…some conservative — that was fine! He didn’t want to rope himself into positions.
Why should he?
The fact was, he wanted to be President. He didn’t want to be President to do this or that. He’d do…what was sound.”
Movement conservatives like me will say this was Bush’s “Achilles’ Heel,” that he lacked sufficient ideological constitution or even genuine Christian faith; that he was not a man who knew neither what he believed nor why he believed it, making him an easy target at re-election in ’92.
But when you consider his life in full, it is easy to see a man with sufficient faith to offer prayers to God for deliverance from a lonely raft in the South Pacific after having been shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft artillery, or for comfort for himself and his family after the death of his four year old daughter. He was a man of sufficient backbone to be among the first of Nixon’s inner circle to tell the Watergate-disgraced President that he must resign. And though Cramer’s book doesn’t reach far enough into the full life story, he was a President with enough moral courage to be the first post-Vietnam President to commit significant American troops to action abroad as he considered Sadam Hussein’s rape of Kuwait and declared, “This will not stand!” We right-wingers have not given him his due.
I was given this book by my son for Father’s Day, this year. This son and his wife also gave me my first grandson, last year. To this little guy, I’ll be known as “Poppy,” so my consideration of this book promised to be as much instructive as informative. It was. If at the end of my life, or my sons’, or my grandsons’, any of us can be counted half the man George H. W. Bush has been, not so much by way of his success or accomplishment, but in terms of the coin of his person, then ours will have been lives well spent, for our benefits and that of others.
Pater Familias
From the Corner of Laurel and Elmo 