Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Lazy Tuesday

Whatcha wanna talk about ? <~~~Original post New post ~~~>

Checking the news around the world, I can across a report from a former college professor of President Bush.

Bush's Biz School Prof Calls Him a Dunce
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (UPI) --

President Bush won't get an A-grade from his old Harvard Business School professor when he spells out his economic policies in New York this week. Yoshihiro Tsurumi, who taught Bush's first-year management class when the future president studied at HBS during the early 1970s, has told the Harvard Crimson newspaper that Bush was a dunce.
Tsurumi, now a professor of international business at Baruch College in the City University of New York, told the Crimson Bush only scored in the bottom 10 percent of students in his class. Bush's "always very shallow" behavior still stood out in his mind 30 years later, Tsurumi told the paper. Tsurumi told the Crimson he particularly remembered what he called Bush's right-wing extremism.
"I vividly remember that he made a comment saying that people are poor because they are lazy," he told the Crimson. "I remember saying, 'If you become president of a company one day, may God help your customers and employees.' "
The White House refused to comment to the Crimson on the interview and Tsurumi's allegations.

This is shaping up to be some mighty interesting debates. I hope both parties stick to the issues facing the country.

1 comment:

Just Dan said...

Great looking blog, Ron. I like the colors. I came across something you might find interesting, I cartainly did. It puts a different perspective on Bush, particularly as regards his intellect, And it comes from an objective source. There are also two links at the bottom. One is the book site if you want to know more about the author. The other is about a column he wrote for USA Today they wouldn't publish, after he had already published several negative toward Bush and his administration.

Normally, I wouldn't post such a long comment as below. But I figured I'd save you having to go and get it from the web. You're right about there being little difference on some positions. It is some key issues ... and real concerns about the broader implications of a Democrat administration that drive my decision to support Bush. As far as registration, I'm independent.

A Matter of Character

Inside the White House of George W. Bush

By Ronald Kessler



Bushie



By June 2003, the name George W. Bush inspired caricatures far beyond the domain of political cartoonists. According to presidential scholars attending a conference at Princeton University, Bush was a right-wing cowboy and religious zealot who appealed to “Joe Six-Pack” types who don’t read newspapers or magazines. In the jargon of substance abuse treatment, Bush was described as a “dry drunk” who substituted a child-like Christian faith for what he really needed, a twelve-step program. At a similar conference at the University of London, attendees portrayed him as a scheming warmonger who was refashioning America into a “garrison state.”

The caricatures amazed and perplexed Bush’s friends. Unlike Bill Clinton and other recent presidents, who were surrounded by new-found friends and hangers-on, Bush had dozens of genuine, close friends going back to childhood. If Bush were the hayseed the media portrayed, he had fooled all the sophisticated and accomplished people who remained loyal to him over the years. As Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote, “Tell me thy company, and I’ll tell thee what thou art.”

Bush’s friends from Yale’s Skull and Bones, a secret society, alone represented a Who’s Who in their respective fields. There were, for example, Dr. Rex Cowdry, a former acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health whose wife Donna Patterson had been a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration; Dr. G. Gregory Gallico, a surgeon and associate professor at Harvard Medical School who invented synthetic skin used on burn patients; Robert D. McCallum, Jr., a Rhodes Scholar who was the associate attorney general; and Don Schollander, an Olympic swimming champion.

After succeeding in their fields, some of Bush’s friends had taken public interest jobs. Dr. Cowdry became medical director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, an advocate for people with severe mental problems like schizophrenia and bipolar illness.

As Bush’s classmate at Phillips Academy at Andover and his roommate at Yale, Clay Johnson III was one of Bush’s closest friends. After finishing Yale, obtaining a master’s degree in management from MIT, and being president of Horchow Mail Order, Johnson became chief operating officer of the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1994, when Bush was Texas governor, he asked Johnson to be his appointments director, then chief of staff.

“I want someone whose primary interest is me—George Bush—and who doesn’t hope to parlay this into something and isn’t trying to curry favor with this one or that one,” Bush told Johnson and his wife, Anne, over lunch at a hamburger place in North Dallas.

Johnson fretted that he didn’t know enough about politics.

“I’ll take care of the politics,” Bush said then. “You go find the best people.”

While he was loyal to Bush, Johnson had a remarkable ability to give objective advice and a disturbing tendency to be right about almost everything. Asked how his wife coped with it, Johnson joked, “It’s not a strength of our relationship.”

According to Bush, after Johnson took the job, he acquired the nickname Icebox or The Refrigerator because no one could cozy up to him and convince him to lay aside his standards for a friend. A Texas state legislator once asked Johnson to appoint a few people from his district to some “insignificant” boards, just to “throw my area some bones.”

“I am not in the bone-throwing business,” the six-foot, four-inch tall Johnson told him.

Johnson’s reserve extended to his response to emails, usually limited to “yes,” “no,” “no opinion,” or “I don’t know.” If he responded “good,” it was the equivalent of “fantastic job—let’s celebrate at the Palm!”

After his election, Bush named Johnson executive director of his transition and then assistant to the president for personnel in the White House, in charge of putting together a staff to help the president select four thousand Cabinet and subcabinet officers, executives and middle managers, and part-time board members. As Bush’s friend since 1961, Johnson continued to have a role as an unofficial advisor. He was one of a half dozen administration officials who could see the president without an appointment, subject to Bush’s twenty-nine-year-old assistant, Ashley Estes, saying the president was free. Johnson was probably the only person to have spanked Barney, a Scottish terrier who is the presidential dog.

“Barney was on the oval carpet making a nuisance of himself,” Clay Johnson told me. “So I spanked him and told him ‘no!’ I put him on the sofa with me. I think that’s the only time he’s been spanked.”

“That shows what a close friend Clay is,” said Logan Walters, Bush’s personal assistant, who witnessed the event. “He’s the only person I know who could spank the president’s dog inside or outside the Oval Office.”

Like the rest of Bush’s friends, Johnson watched with a mixture of amusement and horror as the misimpressions of his friend blossomed.

“The idea that he is not smart I don’t understand,” Johnson told me. “He went to some of the finest schools in the world, Andover, Yale, and Harvard. You don’t get in if you’re not smart. Maybe he was in the top five percent instead of the top one percent. Okay, he wasn’t Phi Beta Kappa. But I just don’t get the ‘not smart’ thing.”

Associate Attorney General McCallum, Bush’s friend from Skull and Bones, said Bush was “extraordinarily intelligent” but was not interested in learning unless it had practical value.

“I am sometimes offended by his portrayal as not being intelligent because his brain works like my brain does,” said McCallum, the associate attorney general. “He’s not interested in how many levels of meaning you can find in a poem. That’s not going to pique his interest for a minute. He would do that kind of intellectual gymnastics if it had any consequence to it. Then he would be all over it because he has a very practical mind.”

In the same way, McCallum said, “I was not that intellectually challenged and motivated until I went to law school. The reason was what I was studying in law school had consequences. People went to jail or they didn’t. People either paid money or they didn’t. The government either acted or it didn’t, or you prevented it from acting or got it to act.”

On May 30, 2003, Bush held a reception at the White House for five hundred of his classmates as part of the thirty-fifth reunion of the Yale Class of ‘68. The reunion was supposed to be on the South Lawn, but rain forced it inside. On the menu were filet mignon, gulf shrimp with mango jalapeno salsa, bay scallops from Connecticut, and hominy and poblano casserole.

Bush reveled in greeting his classmates, who were impressed that he remembered their names. The event was supposed to end at 9 p.m., but Bush stayed up beyond his bedtime and continued the party until just before 11.

Johnson, who remembered how his roommate at Yale selected his dress for the day from dirty t-shirts on the floor, noticed that since becoming president, Bush had upgraded his suits. He figured that Bush considered dressing well part of the job. Other than that, Bush seemed to be the same person he knew at Andover and Yale.

“My roommate was Don A. Barrows, a Yale fullback and Ivy League Player of the Year,” said Tomlinson G. Rauscher, one of the guests. “He had cancer and couldn’t go to the reunion. After the reunion, I wrote a wrote a letter to Bush to thank him. I said, ‘By the way, could you send a photo to Dan.’ He died three weeks later. I spoke at his memorial service. It turned out Bush had written a handwritten letter to him. He wished him the best. His family was so appreciative. Bush did not know him personally. It shows he has lot of character.”

Because they were from out of town, Bush invited seven of his close Yale friends and their wives to stay over that night at the White House. The next morning, they had breakfast with Bush and Laura. The guests illustrated both the caliber and diversity of Bush’s friends. One of them, lawyer Roland W. Betts, was a former Democrat. After graduating from Yale, he worked for five years as a teacher at I.S. 201, a public school in central Harlem under local control. Betts became an assistant principal and also headed a not-for-profit teacher training program, which recruited Lois Phifer, an African-American teacher. After several months of having coffee together, they began dating and eventually married, to their parents’ initial distress. They lived in a basement apartment on West 102nd Street in Manhattan.

In 1975, Betts left Harlem and wrote Acting Out, a book about the frustrations of working in a big urban school. On his wife’s salary, he attended Columbia Law School and negotiated his own book contract. That led him, upon graduating, to become an entertainment lawyer with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Leaving to finance movies, he started his own company, Silver Screen Production, which devised a new strategy for pooling the resources of many investors. The company attracted the attention of Disney Co. executives, and Disney and Betts’ company wound up producing seventy-five films. Betts made sure his company retained the rights to the films, which included blockbusters like Pretty Woman, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. When Disney severed its ties to Betts’ company in 1991, it bought back the rights to the films, and Betts and his partner split $100 million. They created Chelsea Piers, the sports and entertainment complex on Manhattan’s West Side. When Bush wanted to take over the Texas Rangers, Betts became its largest investor.

Now Betts and his wife own the building where they once lived in the basement, as well as other homes in Connecticut, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Betts was one of the original Pioneers who raised more than $100,000 for Bush’s presidential campaign.

Donald Etra, another guest at the White House after the Yale reunion, was a lawyer in Los Angeles whose clients have included actors Eddie Murphy and Fran Drescher. An orthodox Jew, Etra was a liberal Democrat who co-authored the 1974 book Citibank when he was a Nader’s Raider. Another guest, Robert Dieter, was a professor at the University of Colorado Law School and a former Democrat. Bush appointed him to the board of the Legal Services Corp., which provides legal assistance in civil cases to low-income individuals. Muhammed Saleh, a Timex vice president, was a Moslem from Jordan. Clark “Sandy” Randt, Jr., a lawyer, was a Foreign Service officer and fluent speaker of Mandarin. Bush named Randt, an expert on Chinese law, ambassador to China. Dr. Kenneth S. Cohen was an Atlanta dentist. In addition, Bush invited the reunion chair, William H. Baker, to stay over.

Many of Bush’s friends had views that were polar opposite to Bush’s on particular issues. Betts, for example, supported abortion rights, while Bush was anti-abortion.

“I think he really enjoys [the conversations],” Betts said. “I think he enjoys somebody who is not saying the same thing.”

As a criminal defense lawyer, Etra was opposed to many of the provisions of the Patriot Act. Several times since 9/11, Etra had discussed his reservations with Bush. Etra said he thought that, rather than authorizing the FBI to wiretap an individual at any phone, a judge should have to approve each telephone number to be tapped.

“He listens carefully, and we agree to disagree,” Etra, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, told me. “That doesn’t inhibit our friendship. I’m a liberal Democrat. I was a Nader’s Raider. But he’s never held that against me.”

Etra attended Bush’s wedding in Midland, and Bush attended Etra’s wedding in Los Angeles. They toured the Holocaust Museum together, and two years later, Bush named him to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Like other Bush friends, Etra suffered with forbearance the portrayal of Bush in the press, a reflection of Bush’s own posture.

“He knows that in certain journalistic circles, he will never come out well,” Etra said. “That’s the nature of politics. You don’t want to see a friend hurt. But that’s part of the territory. His concern is accomplishing what he wants to accomplish.”

Because of the way they felt the press treated Bush and twisted their comments when he first became president, Bush’s friends rarely talked about him to the media unless urged to do so by the White House.

When Etra stayed at the White House, Bush made sure he was served kosher food. Back when Bush’s father was vice president, Etra was to attend a wedding in Washington on a Saturday. Bush invited him to stay at the White House so he could walk to the wedding. Orthodox Jews do not drive on the Sabbath.

“My four kids were his guests at the White House for dinner,” Etra said. “It was just our family and Craig Stapleton, who is ambassador to the Czech Republic and is married to Bush’s cousin Debbie. The president engaged the children, who ranged in age from nine to fifteen, in subjects from appreciation of art to mid-West politics to the joys and travails of public service.”

On a different occasion, at a lunch of pizza and grilled cheese sandwiches at the White House, Bush turned to Etra’s eleven-year-old daughter. Addressing her as Anna, he asked her opinion on the subject they were discussing. When Laura pointed out that the girl was Dorothy, not Anna, Bush said, “I am so sorry, Dorothy. I hope you won’t take offense that I called you by your sister’s name.”

Dorothy responded: “Mr. President, would you mind if I called you Jeb?”

Etra’s acquaintances sometimes tried to take advantage of his special access.

“People say, ‘Could you tell him this?’” Etra said. “I explain I am not the president. He is president. All we are is friends.”

“I’ve seen friends come to Camp David or for dinner at the White House,” Clay Johnson said, “and they will engage him on some policy issue, a bill or a foreign matter. He’ll stop sometimes and say, ‘Are you lobbying me?’ So I never initiate anything unless I declare up front, ‘I have a suggestion for you.’ If he wants my opinion, he’ll ask it. You don’t take advantage of the relationship. He’s very sensitive to what people’s motivations are,” Johnson said. “He doesn’t want to be used.”

“People in that position need friendships that are non-partisan,” said Dr. Cowdry, the psychiatrist who was Bush’s friend from Skull and Bones. “I don’t offer political opinions unless asked. But he always makes time for friends. In the busiest times, he’ll take time to call friends who have been hospitalized or had accidents. Being president is a preposterous way to live. That’s why he goes to Camp David and Texas.”

“He realizes that he lives in a bubble and that the position of president of the U.S. is quite awesome and is off-putting and scary to many people,” Etra said. “He tries to overcome that and make it clear to his friends he is the same person he was before he was president, and he hopes to be that same person when he is no longer president.”

Since Bush does not use email, friends keep in touch by phone.

“Most White House email is a presidential record, and he made a decision that he did not want to have an email record of communications likely to be very deliberative or personal,” White House Counsel Al Gonzales told me. “Communications to his two daughters, for example, would not be presidential records and therefore would be exempt from disclosure. But he decided he didn’t want to mess with it. He said, ‘I don’t want to worry about what a presidential record is and what it is not.’”

“I call Ashley Estes [Bush’s secretary], or he’ll call here at home,” Terry Johnson, another Yale roommate, said. “Or I send email to him through her. When he calls me at my home, it’s, ‘How many fish have you caught?’”

Laura Bush called her husband Bushie, and he called her Bushie as well, symbolizing an equality in their relationship. Like everyone else around Bush, Laura was direct. They discussed issues, and she would occasionally look at a speech and say, “Oh, I don’t think you ought to say that.”

“Laura is his greatest sounding board,” Gonzales said. “She doesn’t have an agenda other than being a good spouse and supporting the president. Obviously, like other first ladies, she has projects she is interested in, such as promoting literacy and libraries.”

“She’s a good barometer,” Clay Johnson said. “She offers advice. When he said bin Laden is wanted ‘dead or alive,’ she said, ‘Whoa Bushie!’ But she is not a meddler.”

Laura did not pretend to be in lockstep with her husband on every issue. On abortion, “If I differed with my husband, I’m not going to tell you,” she once said. Several times, Laura Bush has hinted at a strain of pacifism. After 9/11, she said, “I knew the president would do the right thing, but like a lot of women, I was hoping that was going to be nothing.” More recently, she said the decision to go to war in Iraq was “wrenching” but necessary to protect U.S. security.

“Laura reins him in,” Terry Johnson said. “She is a good foil for him. He is active and assertive and go get ’em.”

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who made a disparaging remark about being a homemaker and baking cookies, Laura cooked chili and shared her cookie recipes, which appeared on the White House website—www.whitehouse.gov. Her rich recipe for Cowboy Cookies included cinnamon, vanilla, coconut, pecans, oats, and chocolate chips.

In private, Laura wore blue jeans. In public, she wore suits designed by Michael Faircloth of Dallas, who met her when she was campaigning for her husband’s first term as governor. For formal White House events, she wore gowns designed by Arnold Scaasi. Her hairstyle has remained the same over the years.

“I’ve never really been that interested in clothes,” she has said.

Bush called Laura a great political wife—the “perfect complement to a camera hog like me.” While she was often described as shy, Laura was, in fact, a skillful, articulate host who made people feel comfortable. She liked to tease and make subtle, one-line comebacks, delivered with a wry smile. She preferred to be called by her name rather than the first lady. Asked by Larry King what the role of the first lady is, she said, “I think the role of the first lady is really whatever the first lady wants to do.”

Among other projects, Laura Bush helped to promote reading, libraries, and particularly Bush’s education initiative. When Bush traveled without her, he was not as chipper as usual. A former smoker of Kent cigarettes, Laura liked salt-rimmed margaritas. She performed traditional first lady duties like working with White House Executive Chef Walter S. Scheib III on White House events. But Laura Bush’s real interest was reading novels—her favorite was Fyodor Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov. Laura’s literary salons brought together conservative authors like George Will and Tom Clancy as well as gays and leftist black historians. While Bush political guru Karl Rove devoured historical works—even reading them between plays at football games—Laura was the top fiction maven in the Bush White House.

“The first lady undoubtedly is the most literate person in President Bush’s inner circle,” Business Week’s Thane Peterson wrote. “Those who snicker ‘that isn’t saying much’ may not realize she’s one of the most literate people associated with any White House in decades. Jackie Kennedy seems like a dilettante by comparison.” Laura Bush “has spent her life plunging passionately—and privately—into American and world literature....Anyone who doubts Mrs. Bush’s passion for literature could listen to an interview she did two years ago with Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio. Stamberg asks her to read a few lines, and the first lady thumbs through a well-worn copy of The Brothers Karamazov held together with a rubber band. As she reads and they talk, it’s quite clear she knows the dense and difficult eighty-page Grand Inquisitor section of the novel and its surrounding chapters almost by heart. You get the impression she would just as soon dispense with the small talk and keep on reading. I doubt that many literature professors know it as well.”

Bush was an avid reader as well. During the campaign, Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote in the paper that Bush was not a great reader of books. When Bush next spotted Bruni—whom he called Panchito, a Spanish derivative of Frank—in a parking lot, Bush drove his sport utility vehicle over to him. After rolling down the window, he asked how he was.

“Tired,” Bruni said.

“I got up early,” Bush said, “because I was in the middle of a really good book.” He snapped off a “touché” and drove off.

After that encounter, Bush would brandish books like Titan, a biography of John D. Rockefeller, and show how far he had read. He and Bruni exchanged recommendations on novels, including In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien (Bush’s) and The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly (Bruni’s). Based on Bush’s reviews of those books and others, Bruni concluded that Bush was, in fact, a “pretty steady consumer of books” and that his report in the Times had been wrong. In fact, Logan Walters, his personal assistant, said Bush was a “voracious reader” who constantly read books during his free time on planes, at night, and on weekends. They were a mix of non-fiction—usually history—and mystery novels. Often, Karl Rove recommended the history books.

At the same time, as someone who rarely watched TV and never read magazines like People, Bush was not up on pop culture. He did not know what the TV show Friends was or who Leonardo DiCaprio was.

Of all the recent presidents, George Bush had the simplest tastes. While his father relished barbecued beef brisket and would snack on pork rinds dipped in hot sauce, Bush preferred peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and would snack on Fritos. Logan Walters, Bush’s personal assistant, said that during the campaign, the word got around that those were his two favorite foods.

“Everywhere he went, there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Fritos,” Walters said. “At one hotel, there was a towering stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—enough for a dozen people—and a gigantic bowl of Fritos. He called for me and said, ‘Logan, enough with the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I don’t want to see any more of them.’”

But Bush soon returned to his two weaknesses. He liked creamy peanut butter—usually Jif or Peter Pan—with raspberry jam. While he preferred them on white, whole wheat was acceptable, as was grape jelly. Occasionally, he might have an egg salad sandwich. When visiting friends, he would often go into the kitchen and prepare it himself. Bush drank Diet Coke and unchilled bottled water. He liked his coffee black with an artificial sweetener like Equal.

To the extent he could, Bush guarded his personal life. In the Clinton administration, the White House likely would have leaked the identities of the friends who had stayed over for the Yale reunion, appealing to Jewish or Moslem voters. In the Bush administration, such details were off limits, especially the lives of the Bush’s twin daughters.

Bush, when he was governor, provided a rare glimpse in his parental philosophy when he spoke of frustrations familiar to most fathers.

“They’re interested in things foreign to me: bands I’ve never heard of and TV shows that disgust me,” Bush said of the twins, who were thirteen. “I’m constantly at war with them over that 90748,” he said, trying to come up with the zip code in Beverly Hills 90210. Bush told a reporter, “I don’t want my daughters listening to songs that demean women or have ugly words. Garbage is not allowed in our house. I’m sure garbage worms its way in, but a parent has to be a censor.”

Bush said he felt an obligation to force them to go to church.

“Certain Sunday mornings, it’s a struggle,” he said.

Looking back at his own upbringing, Bush said he survived his wilder years in part because his parents never withheld love when they were disappointed in him.

“The greatest gift a parent can give is unconditional love,” he said. “As a child wanders, finding his bearings, he needs a sense of absolute love from a parent.”

Bush took the same approach to bringing up his two daughters.

“You never see the president’s eyes light up quite so much as when he is with Jenna and Barbara,” said Mike Wood, Bush’s Andover and Yale friend.

The Bushes admired the way the Clintons tried to shield Chelsea from undue press scrutiny. When the Bush twins had a few brushes with underage drinking laws when they were younger, the White House made no comment. After Barbara had been ticketed for possessing a margarita at the age of nineteen, a reporter demanded that the White House talk about it because, after all, the press had reported it. But Ari Fleischer refused to take the bait. Exasperated, the press finally resorted to demanding that the White House critique the media’s coverage of the June 2001 episode, according to the pool report.

“Can you tell us if you believe that coverage of the episode yesterday is a legitimate occupation for the press?” a TV correspondent implored.

“I am not going to deem to tell the press at this juncture what the press should or shouldn’t do,” Fleischer said. “I think that's why you’re here. You’re here to make those judgments, and you’re the White House press corps. And I think you’re set apart from most press corps in America in terms of exercising that judgment. You’re not the internet.”

But Bush was happy to talk about Barney the dog, whom he described as “the son I never had.” Barney’s biographical information, complete with his favorite food, appeared on the White House website.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kessler200408160836.asp

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