Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush, by Richard Ben Cramer

“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

Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York, by Kenneth D. Ackerman

“The fact is New York politics were always dishonest — long before my time. There never was a time you couldn’t buy the Board of Alderman…A politician coming forward takes things as they are. The population is too hopelessly split up onto races and factions to govern it under universal suffrage, except by the bribery of patronage or purchase.” – William M. Tweed, 1877

In the summer after I graduated from high school, I spent a tour of duty as an aide de camp at the Republican Party headquarters in Cleveland, then Ohio’s largest city. Having grown up in more rural Southwestern Ohio, this was my first exposure to the big city, its diverse ethnicity and hard-nosed politics. I’ve joked, “Before I moved to Cleveland, my concept of ethnicity was limited to asking whether or not one’s ancestors were from Kentucky.” Here I was tutored in the needlecraft of political tapestry-making, sewing from multi-colored strands of economic interest, race, ideology and national origin. I was but a young bhisti moving my masters’ water hither and yon with faithful dispatch. With the benefit of time and an improved sense of history, I now know that I was experiencing the waning days of an American political tradition: the machine.

My job was akin to what today we would call a headhunter or employment agent. Republicans occupied both the Statehouse and City Hall. No one, and I mean no one, from Cuyahoga County went to work for the state or city without first seeking the patronage of GOP headquarters. Whether it was to run a major state agency or sweep a Cleveland neighborhood street, one secured such an appointment with the endorsements of not only the Republican county chairman, but one’s ward leader and precinct committeeman. It was an operation that ran with impressive Roman military discipline. While my own entry-level responsibilities were limited to managing the paperwork around this vetting process for prospective employees, I was observant enough to understand that a separate, more sensitive operation ran in parallel to mine for those interested in obtaining government contracts.

The brokerage of political favoritism undoubtedly still exists. Like so many things it’s an industry that’s been consolidated, rolled-up, no longer the product of the more natural in-gathering of many smaller constituent parts and units. Cronyism is now an industry of big box retailers, no longer Mom ‘n Pops. Machine politics existed well before the late 19th century, but all powerful string pullers since referred to as a political bosses owe their appellations to the one first known as William Magear “Boss” Tweed.

In Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York, Kenneth D. Ackerman has given us a colorful, well-researched and delightfully readable biography of America’s quintessential machine politician and grand sachem of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s powerful network of influence in New York City and the statehouse in Albany, in the period during and immediately after the American Civil War. Though he never served in a public position above that of state senator or public works commissioner, Tweed ran the switches on the fortunes and livelihoods of everyone from impoverished immigrants, supreme court judges, Wall Street tycoons, legislators, even newspaper editors. In the process, according to Ackerman, “…Tweed and his city ‘ring,’ during a three-year period, had made off with a staggering $45 million from the local treasury — an amount larger than the entire annual U. S. budget before the Civil War.” Ackerman reminds the reader to multiply all dollar references by 20 throughout the book in order to appreciate the full magnitude of the ring’s production in contemporary valuations.

At the center of the story is Tweed and his Ring, including New York City Mayor Oakey Hall, City Comptroller Richard Connolly and City Park Commissioner Peter Sweeny. One might say that as these four represented all of the balances of the public treasury system, they were also able to keep most of the checks. At the periphery of the story is the vast and multi-faceted, late 19th century, City of New York, tethered to the ring by every dollar it supplied in taxes and that it consumed in public works and services. Antagonizing the powerful protagonists of this story were an handful of courageous reformers: George Jones, the first noteworthy editor of the the New-York Times; Samuel J. Tilden, the establishment lawyer and statesman who would ultimately “win” the presidential election of 1876 on the strength of his reputation as a corruption buster; and Thomas Nast, the Harper’s Weekly cartoonist who gave us the iconography of the Republican elephant, Democratic donkey, modern Santa Claus, and the obese, arrogant and conspicuously consumptive Boss Tweed.

Ackerman writes:

“It’s hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed’s system, though. The Tweed Ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury, and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing, and organization.”

In the end it took a combination of human frailty in the forms of fear and greed among a few of Tweed’s close cronies and the remarkable analytical skills of Tilden to bring the Tweed Ring down. Tilden’s famous table depicting the money as it flowed through Tweed’s labyrinthine facade and then into the personal accounts of the ring leaders can only be regarded as a masterpiece of big data analytics, without a computer. Many contemporary auditing best practices in fact have their genesis in Tilden’s table.

George Washington Plunkitt, the later Tammany Hall leader featured in William L. Riordan’s Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, and who was said to have coined the expression “honest graft” was also said to observe, “The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary; men who keep their promises and never lie…Some papers complain that the bosses get rich while devotin’ their lives to the interests of the city. What of it?”

Ackerman writes:

“At its foundation, Tweed’s system had an irresistible political logic: everyone benefited, rich and poor alike, and nobody seemed to get hurt. Money for graft as well as good came mostly from outsiders. Taxes stayed low; Connolly financed city operations mostly with debt, selling bonds and stock to investors in Europe and on Wall Street, pushing off payment until another day.

For the wealthy, Tweed produced dynamism and growth. His regime spent $10.4 million on Central Park up through 1869, and millions afterward. Wasteful and riddled with graft? Certainly. But during this time, the value of real estate in the three surrounding wards more than tripled, from $26.4 million to over $80 million between 1856 and 1866, generating millions in tax revenue, and the total property in the city rose 82.5 percent in the decade from 1860 to 1870 — Tweed’s fingerprints cannot be ignored.”

But Ackerman is no apologist for corruption.

“The problem was, Tweed’s system was based on lies. Stealing was wrong, even then, and Tweed and the others knew it perfectly well. A regime based on it could not last, nor deserved to last. Eventually, the bills came due, the creditors got nervous, and the house of cards collapsed. Meanwhile, democracy itself almost drowned in the process: self-government meant little when elections were won by the side that cheated best.”

The reader still has a hard time loathing Tweed. Though a rascal, Ackerman paints him as a fellow one would probably have enjoyed knowing. He is not the dark and sinister power broker of modern cinematic idiom. Tweed is presented here as man of his word, affable, generous and self-controlled. In the end, he was the only member of the ring to take a fall. Hall plead ignorance to the whole scheme. Connolly turned state’s evidence. Sweeny brokered a crooked “exoneration” for himself. Tweed died in a dank New York City jail dungeon: penniless, diseased and estranged from friends and family.

Boss Tweed loved public works investment. Every tile of new sidewalk, you see, required multiple contractors and suppliers, lawyers and bankers, policymakers and inspectors to effect its installation. In 2009, the Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act disbursing $831 billion to infrastructure, healthcare, education and renewable energy. Many Americans, like me, ask “What have we to show for it?” Could it be that amounts of Tweedian proportion still somehow evaporate through pocket lining, cronyism and favoritism, albeit exercised with even greater elegance and technical sophistication? Where did all that money go?

As Tweed was once inaccurately quoted by Nast as saying, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

Pater Familias