W
by Spencer Warren
Issue 120 - November 19, 2008

A shallow and simple, if earnest, man, in over his head, resulting in tragic consequences. That is basically the theme of Oliver Stone’s W, his potted film biography of George W. Bush.

The film was expected to be a hatchet job, but it is better than that. Stone and his screenwriter, Stanley Weiser, take us through the first part of W’s (James Brolin) presidency --- up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 -- with frequent flashbacks portraying “highlights” of W’s earlier years. These begin with his fraternity hazing at Yale and proceed through his heavy drinking and carousing, his aimless wandering from one job to another (oilfield worker, helping in his father’s 1988 presidential campaign), and the conflict with his father inspired by his boozing, direction-less life. (“You’re a Bush, not a Kennedy,” the father scolds him.) Finally, he meets the proper Laura Welch (Elizabeth Banks) and then goes through his born-again experience, as a result of which he forswears drinking and turns his energy to public service -- as governor of Texas, then president.

The presidential years focus not on 9/11 but the decision to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. We see this hatched in the White House situation room, with a supporting cast including Vice President Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), Secretary of State Powell (Jeffrey Wright), National Security advisor Condoleeza Rice (Thandie Newton), CIA Director “slam dunk” George Tenet (Bruce McGill), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and Deputy Secretary of Defense and neoconservative supremo Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris). Cheney not surprisingly plays the eminence grise through the film, manipulating the out-of-his league W and bending him to Cheney’s will. Later, Cheney reveals his ultimate reason for war, one sure to please every conspiracy nut (such as Stone): oil. Stone’s villains are Cheney and Rice, who is depicted as the ultimate yes-woman and doormat. Powell, of course, is the hero.

These scenes are reasonably convincing, even though the process inevitably is boiled down for dramatic purposes. The acting is quite good, especially Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney, shedding his adolescent air and convincing as the heavyweight of the group (aided by superb make-up). Stone suggests W is motivated in part by a desire to prove himself the equal or better of his doubting father (James Cromwell, who plays the elder Bush with dignity and substance, perhaps more than he deserves) by finishing the job in Iraq that his father shied away from in the 1991 Gulf War. W also is influenced by what the film presents as Cheney’s falsifications of intelligence, with the acquiescence of Tenet. Stone further portrays W as needing to find personal meaning and vindication in the applause of the crowd – he suggests this with a rather clumsy image of W pretending he is making a spectacular catch in an empty baseball stadium. (W was an owner of the Texas Rangers team, although this is not featured in the film.)

This brings us to the heart of the film: W himself. Who and what is George W. Bush? Is he an unintelligent preppy with a Napoleon complex whose position in life is due entirely to the accident of birth, as many critics fanatically believe? Is he an “inarticulate semiboob” as others insist? Or is he a good, decent Christian being unfairly maligned by his legion of enemies in the press and the Democratic Party, whose reputation will recover and be viewed decades from now, through the lens of history, as far-sighted, courageous and statesmanlike – just as President Truman’s reputation has risen sharply?

A motion picture is not the medium for such complexities. As portrayed in the film, W is unintelligent and something of a boob who is utterly unqualified to make judgments about initiating a war and sending men to their deaths in combat. Yet he also is portrayed as well-meaning and, after his born-again experience, decent. (W’s religious experience, taking place under a tree on his ranch, is an unimaginative, weakly directed scene by the non-believer Stone). Indeed, at the end of the film he is seen in a somewhat sympathetic light, the victim of larger forces and of the scheming Cheney and inept Rice.

Before we can know the real George W. Bush, there will have to be more memoirs, including his own (if, unlike his father, he ever writes them), as well as de-classification of national security documents decades from now. But seen from this vantage point, in the wake of an electoral debacle for which W bears most of the responsibility, one can take note of certain facts. One is the widely reported story that in the run-up to his 2000 election campaign, W is reported to have told Texas evangelist James Robinson: “I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can’t explain why, but I sense my country is going to need me.” (Is this the talk of an intelligent, humble Christian?) A second is W’s complimentary comment, the first time they met in June 2001, about Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, the former communist KGB functionary: “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” A third is W’s long sponsorship of the incompetent Alberto Gonzalez, who was forced out as Attorney General when Republicans in Congress as well as Democrats recognized he was scarcely up to the job, and apparently untruthful as well. A fourth is W’s attempt to ram through his counsel and crony Harriet Miers as a Supreme Court justice, an extremely consequential position for which she was totally unqualified, not to mention she was not the conservative he promised voters he would appoint. A fifth is his stunt, landing on an aircraft carrier in a fighter jet, as if he had been a combatant, to celebrate victory in Iraq; instead, due to his lack of knowledge and the Defense Department’s incompetence, the easy invasion turned out to be the prelude to a horrible guerrilla war that undermined support for his policy.

The question arises: Can one take such a person seriously, particularly as President of the United States? In this connection, W’s appalling lack of leadership skills and his exceedingly banal limitations with the English language – this from a graduate of Yale and Harvard – are revealing. Indeed, they call to mind a perceptive observation about W and his father by Lawrence Auster of the View from the Right website: both are “crude and unconvincing.” Remember Bush senior’s “kinder and gentler" rebuke to President Reagan in 1988, and his remark about his inferiority to President Reagan when he spoke about “the vision thing”? Again, one has to wonder how such well-born Ivy Leaguers could manage to be so pedestrian with words; this certainly seems to reflect their lack of conviction and philosophic depth.

This lack is clear from the failed presidencies of both men. History will record that it is the Bush family – seekers after power, like a kid running for high school president, just because they wanted to be somebody, rather than actually achieve something – who destroyed, with the invaluable assistance of the big spending and unprecedented earmarking by the Republican Congress of 2001-06, the handsome legacy bequeathed by Ronald Reagan. The years 2001 to 2006 were the first time since the 1920s that Republicans enjoyed practical working control of Congress with their own man in the Presidency – and they blew it, opening the door to the election of the first left-wing radical in American history as president, and discrediting the good name of conservative, for how long we do not know.

With W, we appear to have a shallow man, unmoored from any solid political grounding, who turned out to be, unthinkingly (no doubt), not a conservative, but a neoconservative, i.e. conservative liberal. He blackened the conservative brand that had been so popular thanks to Ronald Reagan’s historic achievements. Indeed, he moved his party well to the left. The evidence lies in his liberal policies: his record domestic spending increases; his expansion of federal power in education and pricing of prescription drugs (the first new entitlement since the Great Society); his refusal until later in his term to enforce border security while sending our men to die in Iraq and Afghanistan, also resulting in hundreds if not thousands of American civilians being murdered by illegal aliens and recent legal immigrants, or killed by them in drunk driving accidents – this too is the responsibility of Bush and his allies in Congress like Senators McCain and Kennedy. There is also Bush’s support, against the majority of his party and a majority of public opinion, of amnesty and virtually unlimited Hispanic and third world immigration that will over time destroy our country’s historic national identity, not to mention making liberalism a permanent majority – Bush and McCain thus tied the Republicans’ hands, preventing them making this a major winning issue in the 2008 campaign.

We also have Bush’s adoption of liberal Woodrow Wilson’s utopian policy of promoting democracy worldwide, even with U.S. military intervention, regardless of America’s interests and capacity, not to mention the suitability of other countries for democracy; his failure to use his office to mobilize public opinion on revolutionary social/cultural issues such as the suppression of freedom of speech at universities and the attack on marriage, as well as the promotion of these and other radical changes by liberal judges’ usurpation of democratic legislative authority; his failure also to use his office to focus public attention on the growing left-wing and radical homosexual-rights assaults on Christian institutions; his endorsement of multiculturalism (including his ban on profiling of Muslims in airline travel, even though, in hindsight, this would have prevented 9/11, not to mention sparing American travelers huge burdens); his support of liberal affirmative action in the Grutter University of Michigan admissions case; and his signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign spending law with its restrictions on freedom of speech.

W’s great achievement is that the country has not experienced another terrorist attack since 9/11. He appointed John Roberts and, under duress, Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. And W can be proud of his courage in backing General Petraeus and ordering a major force increase in Iraq – the surge -- in the face of a rising chorus of surrender and the contrary recommendations of the fatuous Baker-Hamilton report. To date, W’s order has turned the war around from the failure of the preceding four years. This failure, alas, also is W’s responsibility, due to his evident lack of grip over strategic decision-making as commander-in-chief. But the surge equals the aftermath of 9/11 as his finest hour.

In conclusion, liberals and radicals like Stone owe gratitude to W because he helped make their Obama possible and buried the Reagan revolution. It is the real conservatives who have the biggest gripe with W and his neocon policies; it is they, for the sake of their future and our country’s future, who have to examine and come to terms with the real W and what he has wrought.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline On Line’s media critic.