Fw: My Instincts, or my delusions of grandeur?

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Sunday, October 17, 2004 10:12 AM

My Instincts, or my delusions of grandeur?

 

 

Without a Doubt

By RON SUSKIND

 

Published: October 17, 2004

 

 

 

 

ruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury

official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins,

there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The

nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one

raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and

fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

 

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off

for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always

talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has

told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described

libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional

Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why

George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist

enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that

they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's

just like them. . . .

 

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient

facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from

God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing

about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.''

Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

 

 

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate

floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story

about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into

Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' --

concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite

and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil

fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the

United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,'

I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the

facts?'''

 

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My

instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

 

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I

said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''

 

 

The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the

same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness

and inscrutability, opacity and action.

 

But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.

 

The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from

cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to

generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested

explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed

to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his

''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed

over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally

hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to

trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This

evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush

to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the

first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry

succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue

being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''

 

What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of

informed consent?

 

All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity

-connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on

debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the

personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also

shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded

unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his

kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly,

based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its

rightness.

 

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in

the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the

administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his

positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of

doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ

of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has,

in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has

guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May

2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental

Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our

case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush

has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the

president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)

 

he nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state

religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and

political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W.

Bush -- both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily, inexorably,

changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.

 

The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been

enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and

temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence

cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former

counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush

treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was like

''a blind man in a room full of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to the

White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans

calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and certainty.

These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to

talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought

George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he

wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue -- public

servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being

treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it.

But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many

requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a

letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with

this article in any way.