◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Wouldn't Be Prudent I am George Bush. The forty-first president. Not the son, the father. Born in Massachusetts in 1924, died in Texas in 2018, ninety-four years old, married to the same woman for seventy-three of them. I was the last president who fought in a war he did not start. Shot down over the Pacific at twenty, the only man in my crew to come up out of the water. I have thought about the ones who did not, every day, for seventy years. That is the root of everything you are about to find insufficient about me. They made a joke of me while I was alive. A comedian did an impression — wouldn't be prudent, not gonna do it — and the country laughed, because prudence had already begun to be a punchline. I want to talk to you about that word, because you are living in the country that finished laughing at it. Prudence is not cowardice. It is the discipline of a man who has held life in his hands and watched it end, and therefore does not spend it cheaply. I had the most powerful military on earth, and when I had won — when Saddam's army was routed and the road to Baghdad lay open — I stopped. Everyone wanted me to go on. Take the capital. Finish him. Have the parade. I did not go, because taking a city is easy and holding a country is a generation of blood, and a war without an end is worse than an enemy left standing. I know I was right, because I watched my own son learn it the hard way, in the same sand, thirteen years later. When the Berlin Wall came down, the whole Cold War cracking open in my first year, I was asked why I would not stand on the rubble and gloat. And I said I would not dance on the Wall. Because Gorbachev was a man in an impossible position, and if I humiliated him, I made his fall harder and the world more dangerous. The single greatest American victory of the century arrived, and your president declined to celebrate it, to make the other man's defeat survivable. That is the thing you have forgotten how to value: a leader who does not spike the ball, who denies you the pleasure of going too far, because the point was never his glory but the world's safety. Try to imagine it now. You cannot. In the second of these I will tell you what that restraint cost me, and the one thing I did that I cannot defend, and who you chose in my place. PART TWO The Opposite of Me I am George Bush again. In the first of these I told you about prudence — the restraint the country learned to laugh at, and how I stopped short of Baghdad and declined to dance on the Wall. That was the discipline abroad. Now the harder half, at home, where it cost me everything, and where I did the thing I cannot defend. I did the thing that ended me. I had promised — read my lips, no new taxes — the best line I ever delivered and the worst promise I ever made. In office I saw the deficit was devouring the country's future, and the only honest fix required breaking my word and raising taxes. My own party warned me it would destroy me. It did. I did it anyway, because the country needed it and my career was the smaller thing. I traded my second term for a budget. They gave me a courage award for it years later, which is what they give you instead of the election. Now do not carve me into a hero, because I will not have it. I ran an ugly ad in 1988 — a Black man's face used to frighten white voters — and it worked, and I have no clean way to explain it except that I wanted to win and I let them do it. I have heard men in my position blame the consultants. I hired the consultants. I was not a pure man. I was a limited one who knew he was limited, and that knowledge was the whole of what I had to offer you. So weigh both. The man who traded his presidency for an honest budget, and the man who bought four years of it with a lie about a Black stranger. They were the same man. I never found a way to make them two. But here is what I want you to see, because it is the reason I came back. The thing being mocked out of your public life is not my party, and not my policies. It is the temperament. The man who doubts himself. Who stops before the capital. Who declines the parade. Who keeps his word until keeping it would harm the country, and then breaks it and pays the price himself instead of handing it to you. You replaced me with the opposite of me. Not a different party, a different soul. The man who never doubts, never stops, never declines a triumph, never pays a price he can make someone else pay. You looked at everything I was, called it weakness, went looking for strength, and found a man with no prudence in him at all. I hope the water is warmer for you than it was for my crew. I came up alone, and I never got over the ones who did not, and that is what made me careful with your lives. Be a little careful with them yourselves.