Poetry

Political leadership is an art, not a science. No one knows who may have its special gifts; the best trained and brainiest often don’t have it. (Johnson and Nixon didn’t have it; neither did Bill Clinton.) Among those who did have it were a failed haberdasher, a faded former film star, several generals, and some privileged kids with famous last names. On a cruelly beautiful day in September, George W. Bush was faced with the worst test since Pearl Harbor and the Cuban missile crisis, respectively 60 and 40 years earlier. He reacted exactly as had FDR and John Kennedy. He was not ashamed to use words such as “evil” and “justice” and “victory”; he spelled out the stakes, rallied the nation, and summoned appropriate force.

Noonan interviewed Bush for this book before September 11, but it was clear he was already thinking large thoughts. He referred back to Reagan, and the consensus executives, as models of how to behave. He singled out Truman (to whom Noonan compares him) as a singular solver of problems. He praises Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt for single-handedly changing the concept of government, and pulling the country out of the sloughs of malaise and the Depression. “A president’s job is to define the spirit of the nation,” he said to Noonan. September 11 defined Bush and the nation, and he in turn defined the struggle to the world. In this, of course, he sounds rather like Reagan, whom Noonan quotes as follows, from a 1983 speech: “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong.”

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Political leadership is an art, not a science. No one knows who may have its special gifts; the best trained and brainiest often don’t have it. (Johnson and Nixon didn’t have it; neither did Bill Clinton.) Among those who did have it were a failed haberdasher, a faded former film star, several generals, and some privileged kids with famous last names. On a cruelly beautiful day in September, George W. Bush was faced with the worst test since Pearl Harbor and the Cuban missile crisis, respectively 60 and 40 years earlier. He reacted exactly as had FDR and John Kennedy. He was not ashamed to use words such as “evil” and “justice” and “victory”; he spelled out the stakes, rallied the nation, and summoned appropriate force.

Noonan interviewed Bush for this book before September 11, but it was clear he was already thinking large thoughts. He referred back to Reagan, and the consensus executives, as models of how to behave. He singled out Truman (to whom Noonan compares him) as a singular solver of problems. He praises Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt for single-handedly changing the concept of government, and pulling the country out of the sloughs of malaise and the Depression. “A president’s job is to define the spirit of the nation,” he said to Noonan. September 11 defined Bush and the nation, and he in turn defined the struggle to the world. In this, of course, he sounds rather like Reagan, whom Noonan quotes as follows, from a 1983 speech: “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong.”