The Prudent Professionalism of George Herbert Walker Bush

The Presidency of George Bush. By John Robert Greene (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2000) 245 pp. $35.00

All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings. By George Bush (New York, Scribner, 1999) 640 pp. $30.00

A World Transformed. By George Bush and Brent Scowcroft (New York, Knopf, 1998) 590 pp. $39.95

The pre-presidential Bush was often described as the public figure with the perfect resumé, but he was also known as "the man who left no footprints," because there was little evidence of what he had accomplished in his many public capacities. Given Bush's failure to persuade the American electorate that his achievements warranted a second term, it is tempting to conclude that his presidency also left few tracks. Nevertheless, scholars cannot afford to ignore the record of a chief executive who presided over the largest United States military venture since the Vietnam War and the termination of the four-and-a-half decades of potentially lethal confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and the demise of that nation.

The three books under review will be important assets to historians and others who seek to come to terms with the presidency of George Bush. In The Presidency of George Bush, Greene provides a perceptive, well-documented account of Bush's White House years, grounding it in a sketch of his life and political rise. Greene makes good use of the archives lodged at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, and draws on extensive interviews with members of the Bush administration and Bush himself. The author has a disconcerting tendency to state the views of the American public without supporting evidence, as in his declaration, "After Reagan, America eagerly welcomed a man who did not wax grandiloquent" (185). Apart from this flaw, however, he has written an exemplary work.

The other two volumes are broadly autobiographical. Departing from the practice of every post-World War II president except the assassinated Kennedy, Bush has chosen not to write a memoir of his presidency, but in A World Restored, he and Brent Scowcroft, his former national security advisor, set forth instructive recollections of the endgame of the Cold War and the prosecution of the Gulf War. The book consists of three groups of narratives: jointly narrated, first-person plural, context-setting overviews of each of the episodes covered and individual first-person accounts by each of the authors. This remarkably frank and detached work does not break much new substantive ground, but in laying out their perceptions of events at the time that they occurred, as well as their afterthoughts, the authors make a valuable contribution to the historical record. The book also provides strong evidence of the high degree of skill and professionalism with which Bush and his national security team addressed their global responsibilities.

In All the Best, Bush has assembled a selection of the countless personal letters that he has written over the years, along with a number of official memoranda and entries from his unpublished personal diaries. The collection, which dates from Bush's service as a World War II naval aviator and continues into his postpresidential years, includes a great deal of trivia but also provides informative glimpses into historically significant events in which Bush was involved. Like A World Restored, All the Best is significant for the light that it sheds on Bush himself, showing him to be a thoroughly decent and unpretentious public servant, albeit one with a conventional mind and little political imagination.

The entries for the truncated second term of Richard Nixon are particularly compelling. During that period, Bush was Republican national chairman. As Watergate unfolded, he stumped the nation in support of the increasingly beleaguered president, averring that it was not in Nixon's character to cover up a crime--until he was proved wrong by the "smoking gun" tape. The agonized personal journal entries...