The Bush Tragedy

Bush's evangelical politics: An excerpt from The Bush Tragedy.

This is the first of three excerpts from Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg's new book, The Bush Tragedy.

In his 1999 campaign autobiography A Charge to Keep, George W. Bush describes a soul-searching conversation with the Rev. Billy Graham that prompted him to re-evaluate his life, accept Jesus, and give up drinking. In the summer of 1985, as Bush tells it, his father, the vice president, invited the famous evangelist to Kennebunkport for a weekend visit. Graham spent an evening taking questions from members of the family about faith. The next day, Graham took a walk along the beach with Bush's eldest son and asked if he was "right with God." Bush said he wasn't, but that he'd like to be.

"Something was missing in my life, and Billy Graham stimulated my heart - ”I would like to say planted the mustard seed which grew, and started me on a journey, a walk, to recommit myself to Jesus Christ," was how George W. put it in one interview during the 2000 campaign. The terms "heart," "walk," and "mustard seed" occur in every telling. The mustard seed is a parable from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus tells his disciples that the kingdom of heaven is like the tiny mustard seed that grows into a huge plant. According to Bush's story, the conversation with Graham took a year or more to germinate. But it was this conversation that prompted his change of heart, which in an evangelical Christian context means accepting Jesus as his personal savior. This born-again experience led him to begin "walking," or leading a righteous life. Finding God enabled him to quit drinking, gave his life meaning and direction, and made possible the successful political career that followed.

Graham and Bush surely did have conversations in Maine that subsequently took on meaning for George W. But on closer examination, this story too turns out to be a parable, crafted to convey an idea about the subject rather than to relate the literal truth of what happened. Like almost every other detail about his spiritual life that Bush has chosen to reveal, it shows evidence of being shaped and packaged.

A version of the Billy Graham story first appeared in 1988, in a book called Man of Integrity, which was distributed by his father's presidential campaign of that year. It was compiled by Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God minister whom Vice President George H.W. Bush began using as an emissary to evangelical leaders in 1985 and who grew close to the younger George Bush around the time of his religious conversion. In that book, which George W. helped write, the story goes somewhat differently:

I remember one night when Dad asked Billy if he would sit around with the family and answer questions and just talk about his life and his view of things, his spirituality. It was one of the most exciting nights I have ever spent in my life. The man is powerful and yet humble. That combination of wisdom and humility was so inspiring to me individually that I took up the Bible in a more serious and meaningful way.

As you know, one's walk in life is full of all kinds of little blind alleys. Sometimes life isn't easy, and so Billy redirected my way of thinking in a very positive way. He answered questions of all types.

The next year when he came, he made it a point to call me aside and ask how things were going. He took a real interest in me individually, and for that I am forever grateful.

In this version, there is no walk on the beach, no pointed question about the son's relationship with God, no admission by Bush that he felt "lost." The private conversation with George W. happens a full year later, which would have been in the summer of 1986 - ”after Bush had spent nearly a year attending a weekly men's Community Bible study group in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church in Midland every Monday night.

Other evidence suggests that Bush's religious turn really began 15 months earlier. If someone planted a mustard seed, it was likely not Billy Graham in 1985-6 but Arthur Blessitt in April 1984. Blessitt - ”yes, that is his real name - ”is an evangelical preacher who has walked throughout the world lugging a 12-foot tall, 70-pound cross. His website boasts that he holds the Guinness World Record for the world's longest walk, most recently tallied at 37,352 miles.

Blessitt keeps a careful diary. On April 3, 1984, he noted: "A good and powerful day. Led Vice President Bush's son to Jesus today. George Bush Jr.! This is great! Glory to God." Over the previous week, thousands of people had been coming to hear Blessitt tell stories of dragging his cross through the Amazon at a sports stadium in Midland. Bush heard Blessitt's sermons, which were carried live on local radio, while driving. Though he didn't feel comfortable coming to the Chaparral Center, Bush arranged through an oilman friend named Jim Sale for the two of them to meet with Blessitt and talk about Jesus. In an empty restaurant at the Midland Holiday Inn, Bush looked Blessitt in the eye and said: "I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow Him." According to Blessitt's account:

I slowly leaned forward and lifted the Bible that was in my hand and began to speak.

"What is your relationship with Jesus"? I said.

He replied, "I'm not sure."

"Let me ask you this question. If you died this moment, do you have the assurance you would go to heaven?"

"No" he replied.

"Then let me explain to you how you can have that assurance and know for sure that you are saved."

He replied, "I'd like that."

After telling him how to know Jesus, Blessitt asked:

"Would you rather live with Jesus in your life or without Him?"

"With Him," Bush replied.

"Would you rather spend eternity with Jesus or without Him."

"With Jesus."

The three men held hands and prayed together. Blessitt proclaimed, "You are saved!" Jim Sale attests that he remembers this event precisely the way Blessitt does.

There are other discrepancies in the "official" version of the 1999 tale. When Bush related the story in public, a religious reporter contacted Graham, who had no memory of a meaningful encounter with George W. Graham later did his best to get onboard with the story that laid the cornerstone of his relationship with yet another American president but even so seemed unable to confirm it. "I don't remember what we talked about," he told Time journalists Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy in 2006. "There's not much of a beach there. Mostly rocks. Some people have written - ”or maybe he has said, I don't know - ”that it had an effect, our walk on the beach. I don't remember. I do remember a walk on the beach."

Something is going on here beyond the tricks memory plays. Years later, in 1999, when the political purpose was the son's own, rather than the father's, George W. reshaped the anecdote to give it greater resonance and political value. Multiple encounters are telescoped into a single one, a process that took place over at least two years is collapsed into a single "defining moment," the setting is made more dramatic (the beach in Maine rather than a living room) and more personal (a one-on-one conversation, rather than a family question-and-answer session). And the dialogue that two eyewitnesses remember taking place with Blessitt - ”"What is your relationship with Jesus" - ”"I'm not sure" - ”is transmuted into a dialogue with Graham - ”"Are you right with God" - ”"No, but I'd like to be."

One can understand why a mainstream politician might wish to do this. Blessitt, a kind of madman-Messiah, comes out of hippiedom's Christian branch, the Jesus people or "Jesus freaks." In the 1960s, the "psychedelic evangelist" began preaching in a strip club in L.A. and ran "His Place," a ministry-coffeehouse-nightclub, with appearances by bands like the Eternal Rush. Blessitt's book Life's Greatest Trip includes some of his poetry: "Get loaded on Jesus,/ 24 hours a day,/ you can be naturally stoned/ on Jesus!" In 1969, Jesus told Blessitt to start walking. He has kept on truckin' ever since. In 1976, he declared that he was running for president, though it wasn't clear which party he belonged to.

Finally, the "mustard seed" reference in the later version is calibrated to resonate with evangelical Christians without sending the wrong signals to the Biblically ignorant, who might pause to wonder why it's not a more common herb or vegetable or just an unspecific "seed." Often, the precision of Bush's religious language cuts in the other direction, making references more generic. He avoids such evangelical terms of art as "born again" and "saved" in his journey-to-faith narrative - ”and even "Jesus" as opposed to "God." He similarly avoids using the specific terminology "evangelical" or "alcoholic" in reference to himself. The vagueness frees Bush from the assumptions people make when they hear the more conventional terms. According to Doug Wead, Bush's break with the bottle came after he and Laura read an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet that emphasized the need for help from a higher power. "The tract brought a lot of things together," Wead said. Bush has never spoken of reading A.A. literature; following 12-step guidance would make him sound like an alcoholic.

What his faith stories have in common is the way they put George W. Bush's religious experiences to political use. The beliefs themselves may be entirely genuine. But Bush does not appear to surrender himself to the will of God in the way a conventionally religious person does. If we look closely at his relationship to religion over a period of two decades, we see him repeatedly commandeering God for his exigent needs. His is an instrumentalist, utilitarian faith that puts religion to work for his own purposes. Faith made it possible for Bush to order his life and emerge as a plausible leader. Once he became president, it helped him cope more effectively than his father had with the monumental pressures of the job.

This is the second of three excerpts from Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg's new book, The Bush Tragedy.

What are George W. Bush's religious beliefs? The question, which would seem central to understanding his presidency, comes up again and again and never receives a satisfactory answer. When religiously inclined writers try to describe Bush's faith, they invariably end up talking about how Bush uses religion, how he relates to other religious people, and what faith means to him. But they seldom say anything about its content. They described all the things his faith is not - ”fiery, judgmental, dogmatic, exclusive - ”but don't discover positions on even the most basic theological issues that divide and define denominations, such as whether the Bible is literally true, whether Christians should evangelize, or whether salvation comes through faith alone. They overlook the curious detail that he seldom goes to church. Often, they end up projecting their own beliefs and assumptions onto his blank screen.

After reading a certain amount of what might be called Godly-President Literature - ”The Faith of George W. Bush by Stephen Mansfield, God and George W. Bush by Paul Kengor, A Man of Faith by David Aikman - ”the recognition begins to dawn that Bush's faith has no specific theological content. When a Houston reporter asked Bush about the difference between the Episcopal Church he was raised in and the Methodist one he began attending after he was married, he replied, "I'm sure there is some kind of heavy doctrinal difference, which I'm not sophisticated enough to explain to you." His religion has often been best described as evangelical, but in various respects it appears not to conform to the definition. Unlike most other evangelicals, Bush blithely uses profanity and as governor would play poker. He doesn't tithe. He didn't try to convert others - ”one of the central obligations in most evangelical denominations - ”even before he resumed a political career. He didn't raise his daughters in his faith. On issues that divide evangelical Christians from nonevangelical Christians - ”and varieties of evangelicals from each other - ”Bush does not need to feign ecumenical neutrality. He isn't hiding his beliefs; he simply doesn't have many of them.

A better term for Bush's faith is Self-Help Methodism. What Bush clearly does believe in is the personal, transforming, and sustaining power of belief in God. "Faith gives us purpose - ”to right wrongs, preserve our families, and teach our children values," he told congregants at Second Baptist, a mega-church in Houston, on the Sunday he announced his presidential exploratory committee in 1999. "Faith gives us conscience - ”to keep us honest even when no one is watching. Faith changes lives. I know, because it changed mine." Having a personal relationship with God, praying, and reading the Bible daily were the tools Bush used to get control of his life; they supported a transformation that made it possible for him to control his drinking, keep his family together after Laura had threatened to leave him, manage his aggressive behavior, cope with the burden of his successful father, and attain success in business and politics. Finding God made his life "easier to understand and clearer," as he put it.

If Bush proselytizes, it is not for his denomination or even for Christianity, per se, but for the power of "faith" itself. Bush believes that everyone who prays to God prays to the same one, and that there is "truth" in all religions. He told the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, "You believe in the almighty, and I believe in the almighty. That's why we'll be great partners." He had a similar reaction to the Orthodox cross he saw hanging around the neck of Vladimir Putin on their first meeting. According to former staff members, Bush had a problem figuring out how to relate to secular European leaders like Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder. As Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker: "I can see him struggle with other world leaders who don't appear to be grounded in some faith." He added, "The President doesn't care what faith it is, as long as it's faith."

This instrumental view of religion is inseparable from the way Bush came to it, through a midlife crisis on the verge of 40. Community Bible Study was an ecumenical movement just catching on in 1984, when a group of men from Midland traveled to California to learn the method. When I visited in the fall of 2007, the Bible study had grown to more than 200 regular participants, but still worked the same way: After all meeting together for a few songs, the men broke into groups of 12 or 15 to consider the passage they had read for the week. Wealthy oilmen sat side-by-side with jumpers who worked on their million-dollar rigs for $20 an hour. Each participant had filled out a questionnaire that asked him to relate the week's verses from the Gospel of Mark to his own life and feelings. In some places, Bible study is more like a religious book group. In Midland, it is more like a support group with some business networking thrown in. When I attended, oil had just crossed the $80 level, and Midland was booming as it hadn't since the early 1980s. But when Bush began reading the Gospel of Luke with the group in September 1985, the price of oil had just fallen to $9 a barrel. Many of the participants in his Bible study had gone bankrupt or were on the verge of doing so. Some were suffering from substance-abuse problems, and many had been through or were on the verge of family breakups.

This was Bush's story. Laura was losing patience with her husband's drinking and he was deeply worried about losing her and his daughters. According to various accounts, she gave him an ultimatum: me or Jim Beam. He was resistant to the change at first. Several attendees recall his sarcasm at sessions. One version of the history has Bush following his drinking buddy Don Jones, the president of a Midland bank, into the group. According to another legend, Bush's parents asked Graham to lead an "intervention" after an episode of boorish behavior in Maine. In any case, the Midland Bible study supported the behavioral changes Bush adopted in the summer of 1986. In this sense, it functioned as therapy for someone who doesn't believe in therapy, more A.A. meeting than religious exploration. Prayer - ”which, as a friend of Bush's who is still in the Bible study told me, just means talking to God - ”gave him a sense of serenity and control that enabled him to redirect his stalled career.

The relevant context for Bush's embrace of sobriety was not just Laura's ultimatum and his 40^th birthday, but his father's run for president. At one level, finding God was an act of rebellion against the arid, high-church Episcopalism of his parents. His father said that when he was marooned in a lifeboat after being shot down over the Pacific, he thought of his family, God, and "the separation of church and state." That principle is perhaps the last one his son would think of in extremity. Fervent, popular faith helped him establish his independent identity. But this was loyal defiance: His new religious identity also enabled Bush to become closer to his father, who needed someone to help him navigate the evangelical shoals of a Republican primary. In 1980, when religious leaders asked if he was a born-again Christian, Bush senior had made the mistake of simply saying, "No" (before learning to say that though he hadn't had a single born-again moment, he accepted Jesus as his personal savior). With his behavior under control, the younger Bush now began to win his father's confidence as someone who could help with the problem of the evangelicals. By outdoing his father in religiosity, he could effectively represent the family's political interests, as opposed to being a liability for the family to manage.

Faith produced in Bush a series of positive second-order effects as well. Religion also supplied George W. with a richer emotional vocabulary, allowing him to express feelings in a way he hadn't previously been able to do. Over time, his religious outlook tempered his aggression and made him nicer, at least some of the time. It added humility to his repertoire. A religious framework made him more accepting of others, less cutting and judgmental - ”something he frequently refers to with reference to the parable of the mote and the beam: "Don't try to take a speck out of your neighbor's eye when you've got a log in your own." Bush ultimately answered his parents' doubts about his capabilities with an exertion of sheer will. With religious help, he showed he could accomplish feats they thought him incapable of. And so willpower became his instinctive way of dealing with doubt, criticism, and opposition of all kinds. Rather than prompt him to consider or reflect, skepticism about what he could do provoked him prove his doubters wrong.

This is the third of three excerpts from Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg's new book, The Bush Tragedy.

If Bush's theology is free of content, his application of it to politics is sophisticated and artful. Evangelical politics is a subject on which he has exercised his intellect, and perhaps the only one on which he qualifies as an expert. Bush began his study in 1985 on behalf of his father's effort to become president. George H.W. Bush regarded televangelists like Pat Robertson as snake handlers and swindlers. Reflecting his parents' attitude, Neil Bush referred to evangelical Christians in a speech for his father in Iowa as "cockroaches" issuing "from the baseboards of the Bible-belt." For their part, the evangelicals felt no affinity for Bush Sr. They found his patrician background off-putting and suspected the sincerity of his conversion to the pro-life cause.

To help him with this problem, Bush Sr. brought in Doug Wead as his evangelical adviser and liaison. Wead had been involved in a group called Mercy Corps International, doing missionary relief work in Ethiopia and Cambodia, and gave inspirational speeches at Amway meetings. He was also a prolific memo writer. The most important of his memos is a 161-page document he wrote in the summer of 1985 and a long follow-up to it known as "The Red Memo." Wead argued for "an effective, discreet evangelical strategy" to counter Jack Kemp, who had been courting the evangelicals for a decade, and Pat Robertson, whom he accurately predicted would run in the 1988 primaries. Wead compiled a long dossier on the evangelical "targets" he saw as most important for Bush. ("If Falwell is privately reassured from time to time of the Vice President's personal friendship, he will be less likely to demand the limelight," he wrote.) Wead made a chart rating nearly 200 leaders for various factors, including their influence within the movement, their influence outside of it, and their potential impact within early caucus and primary states. Billy Graham received the highest total score, 315, followed by Robert Schuller, 237; Jerry Falwell, 236; and Jim Bakker, 232.

Unbeknownst to Wead, Vice President Bush gave the Red memo to his oldest son. After George Jr. pronounced it sound, George Sr. closely followed much of its advice. For instance, Wead recommended that the vice president read the first chapter of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, a book that had become a popular evangelical device for winning converts. "Evangelicals believe that this book is so effective that they will automatically assume that if the Vice President has read it, he will agree with it," Wead wrote. Vice President Bush made sure that religious figures saw a well-worn copy on top of a stack of books in his office when they visited the White House and cited Lewis' condemnation of the sin of pride as one of the reasons "we haven't been inclined to go around proclaiming that we are Christians." He also took Wead's advice on how to answer the born-again question; in courting the National Religious Broadcasters with three speeches in three years; in inviting Falwell, James Dobson, and others to the White House; in cooperating with a cover story in the Christian Herald, the largest-circulation evangelical magazine at the time; and in producing a volume for the Christian book market.

George W. Bush became the campaign's semiofficial liaison to the evangelical community in March 1987. "Wead, I'm taking you over," he said at their first meeting, over Mexican food in Corpus Christi, telling him to ignore Lee Atwater, whom Wead had been reporting to. Wead recalls how anxious George W. was in political conversations with his dad. "He was a nervous wreck," Wead told me. "He wanted his father to be proud of him." Wead also recalled the son's expressions of his own political interest. The campaign had prepared state-by-state analysis of the primary electorate in advance of Super Tuesday in 1988. "When he got the one on Texas, his eyes just bugged out," Wead remembered. "This is just great! I can become governor of Texas just with the evangelical vote."

The crucible of the campaign forged a close relationship between the two men. Wead, whom George W. called "Weadie," says the candidate's son spent an inordinate amount of time talking about sex. But he was so anxious to avoid any whiff or rumor of infidelity that he asked Wead to stay in his hotel room one night when he thought a young woman working on the campaign might knock on his door. "I tried to read to him from the Bible, because by that time he was sending me these signals," Wead told me. "But he wasn't interested. He just rolled over and went to sleep."

Having Wead put him to bed was a way to advertise his marital fidelity, and to reinforce a distinction with his father, who was facing rumors about the Big A. Wead said Bush also liked having him around as an alternative to the company of drinking buddies from his pre-conversion period. But Bush resisted religious overtures as firmly as sexual ones. "He has absolutely zero interest in anything theological - ”nothing," Wead said. "We spent hours talking about sex - ¦ who on the campaign was doing what to whom - ”but nothing about God. And I tried many, many times."

The Wead-George W. effort yielded spectacular political results: Poppy beat back the primary challenge from Pat Robertson and won 81 percent of the evangelical vote in 1988, exceeding the 78 percent share Ronald Reagan won in 1984. After the election, George W. turned to his evangelical friend for advice about how to handle having a father in the White House. Wead returned with a 44-page memo entitled All the Presidents' Children, which he later developed into a book of the same title. The precedents were not encouraging. Burdened by impossibly high expectations, many sons of presidents struggled unsuccessfully to "complete" the work of their fathers. As a group, they disproportionately fell prey to various forms of failure, alcoholism, divorce, and early death. Bush, who was planning to move back to Texas and run for office, groaned when Wead told him that no presidential child had ever been elected governor of a state.

With the various roles he played in Bush's life - ”life counselor, political adviser, spiritual companion - ”Wead became in the late 1980s the first in a series of what might be described as surrogate family members to George W. Like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, the two others who subsequently played this kind of role, Wead originally worked for the old man before transferring loyalties to his son. Like them, he aided Bush with a crucial transition in relation to his father. What Rove would do in helping Bush launch his political career in Texas, and Cheney in helping him define his presidency, Wead did in Bush helping him assert and establish his independent identity as a person of faith. But the experience left Wead troubled about the sincerity of Bush's beliefs. "I'm almost certain that a lot of it was calculated," he says. "If you really believed that there's some accountability to life, wouldn't you have Billy Graham come down and have a magic moment with your daughters? Are you just going to let them go to hell? You have all these religious leaders coming through. If it changed your life, wouldn't you invite them to sit down in the living room and have a talk with your daughters? Or is it all political?"

Envy over Rove's closer relationship with Bush may have pushed Wead toward an act of betrayal he tried to portray as a service to history, his secretly tape-recording nine hours of his private phone conversations with Bush in 1999 and 2000. Wead played portions of these tapes for the New York Times and a few other journalists at the time his book All the Presidents' Children was published in 2003. He later apologized and signed a legal agreement to turn the tapes over to Bush's lawyers and not discuss their content. These tapes, of which I've obtained a partial copy (not from Wead), provide a glimpse of the man behind the public mask. They capture Bush thinking aloud and rehearsing answers to questions he expected to get on the campaign trail. On one, he acknowledges illegal drug use decades back: "Doug," Bush says, "it doesn't just matter [about] cocaine - ”it'd be the same with marijuana. I wouldn't answer the marijuana question. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried. - ¦ I don't want any kid doing what I tried to do [pause] 30 years ago."

But the more interesting revelation is how politically Bush thinks about religion. Speaking of an upcoming meeting with evangelical leaders, he notes: "As you said, there are some code words. There are some proper ways to say things and some improper ways. I am going to say that I've accepted Christ into my life. And that's a true statement." On another tape, he rehearses his dodges. He goes over with Wead what he plans to tell James Robison, an evangelical minister in Texas who wanted him to promise not to appoint homosexuals in his administration: "Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?" For those interested in the details about what kind of sinner he was, Bush has another line: "That's part of my shtick, which is, look, we have all made mistakes."

The tapes reveal how calculated George W. Bush's projection of faith is. Wead said that during the countless hours the two spent talking about religion over a dozen years, they discussed endlessly the implications of attending services at different congregations, how Bush could position himself in relation to various tricky questions, and how he should handle various ministers and evangelical leaders. But the substance of Bush's own faith never came up. Wead told me he now struggles with the question of how sincere Bush's expressions of devotion ever were. He often goes over their conversations from 1987 and 1988 in his mind, having grown more skeptical about what Bush was doing. "As these memos started flowing to him, he started feeding back to me what his faith was," Wead said. "Now what is interesting for me, and I'm trying to understand, is, was I giving him his story?"

To say that Bush's religious persona is a calculated projection does not mean that it is fraudulent. For practiced politicians, the question of whether any behavior is genuine can seldom be answered. For them, calculation and sincerity are not opposites. The skillful leader harmonizes them, coming to truly believe in what he needs to do to succeed. Piety, like any other political mask, tends to become the genuine face over time.

The secular misunderstanding of Bush is that his relationship with God has turned him into a harsh man, driven by absolute moral certainty and attempting to foist his evangelical views onto others. Many of those who know Bush best see the religious influence in his life cutting in precisely the opposite direction. As one of the evangelical staff members in the White House told me over lunch near the White House in the summer of 2007, Bush's religion has made him more genuinely humble and less absolutist in the way he defends his views. Believing that he too is a lowly sinner, Bush learned to be more tolerant of the faults of others.

But if his eternal perspective improves Bush's personality, it diminishes any ability he might otherwise have to take in ambiguity or complexity. Early in his presidency, Bush told Sen. Joe Biden, "I don't do nuance." That line was probably spoken with irony, but it captures a truth about the intellectually constricting lens of his faith. Bush rejects nuance not because he's mentally incapable of engaging with it but because he has chosen to disavow it. Applying a crude religious lens that clarifies all decisions as moral choices rather than complicated trade-offs helps him fend off the deliberation and uncertainty he identifies with his father.

But closing one's mind to complexity isn't mere intellectual laziness; it's a fundamental evasion of freedom, God-given or otherwise. A simple faith frees George W. from the kind of agonizing and struggles his father went though in handling the largest questions of his presidency and helps him cope with the heavy burden of the job. But it comes at a tragic cost. A too-crude religious understanding has limited Bush's ability to comprehend the world. The habit of pious simplification has undermined The Decider's decision-making.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2186343/