As the
alcoholic George Bush approached his 40th birthday in 1986, he had achieved
nothing he could call his own. He was all too aware that none of his educational
and professional accomplishments would have occured without his father. He felt
so low that he did not care if he lived or died. Taking a friend out for a
flight in a Cessna aeroplane, it only became apparent he had not flown one
before when they nearly crashed on take-off. Narrowly avoiding stalling a few
times, they crash-landed and the friend breathed a sigh of relief - only for
Bush to rev up the engine and take off again.
Not long afterwards, staring at his vomit-spattered face in the mirror, this
dangerously self-destructive man fell to his knees and implored God to help him
and became a teetotalling, fundamentalist Christian. David Frum, his
speechwriter, described the change: "Sigmund Freud imported the Latin pronoun id
to describe the impulsive, carnal, unruly elements of the human personality. [In
his youth] Bush's id seems to have been every bit as powerful and destructive as
Clinton's id. But sometime in Bush's middle years, his id was captured, shackled
and manacled, and locked away."
One of the jailers was his father. His grandfather, uncles and many cousins
attended both his secondary school, Andover, and his university, Yale, but the
longest shadow was cast by his father's exceptional careers there.
On the wall of his school house at Andover, there was a large black-and-white
photograph of his father in full sporting regalia. He had been one of the most
successful student athletes in the school's 100-year history and was similarly
remembered at Yale, where his grandfather was a trustee. His younger brother,
Jeb, summed the problem up when he said, "A lot of people who have fathers like
this feel a sense that they have failed." Such a titanic figure created mixed
feelings. On the one hand, Bush worshipped and aspired to emulate him. Peter
Neumann, an Andover roommate, recalls that, "He idolised his father, he was
going to be just like his dad." At Yale, a friend remembered a "deep respect"
for his father and when he later set up in the oil business, another friend
said, "He was focused to prove himself to his dad."
On the other hand, deep down, Bush had a profound loathing for this perfect
model of American citizenship whose very success made the son feel a failure.
Rebelliousness was an unconscious attack on him and a desperate attempt to carve
out something of his own. Far from paternal emulation, Bush described his goal
at school as "to instil a sense of frivolity". Contemporaries at Yale say he was
like the John Belushi character in the film Animal House, a drink-fuelled
funseeker.
He was aggressively anti-intellectual and hostile to east-coast preppy types
like his father, sometimes cruelly so. On one occasion he walked up to a
matronly woman at a smart cocktail party and asked, "So, what's sex like after
50, anyway?"
A direct and loutish challenge to his father's posh sensibility came aged 25,
after he had drunkenly crashed a car. "I hear you're looking for me," he sneered
at his father, "do you want to go mano a mano, right here?"
As he grew older, the fury towards his father was increasingly directed
against himself in depressive drinking. But it was not all his father's fault.
There was also his insensitive and domineering mother.
Barbara Bush is described by her closest intimates as prone to "withering
stares" and "sharply crystalline" retorts. She is also extremely tough. When he
was seven, Bush's younger sister, Robin, died of leukaemia and several
independent witnesses say he was very upset by this loss. Barbara claims its
effect was exaggerated but nobody could accuse her of overreacting: the day
after the funeral, she and her husband were on the golf course.
She was the main authority-figure in the home. Jeb describes it as having
been, "A kind of matriarchy... when we were growing up, dad wasn't at home. Mom
was the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline." A childhood friend
recalls that,"She was the one who instilled fear", while Bush put it like this:
"Every mother has her own style. Mine was a little like an army drill
sergeant's... my mother's always been a very outspoken person who vents very
well - she'll just let rip if she's got something on her mind." According to his
uncle, the "letting rip" often included slaps and hits. Countless studies show
that boys with such mothers are at much higher risk of becoming wild, alcoholic
or antisocial.
On top of that, Barbara added substantially to the pressure from his father
to be a high achiever by creating a highly competitive family culture. All the
children's games, be they tiddlywinks or baseball, were intensely competitive -
an actual "family league table" was kept of performance in various pursuits. At
least this prepared him for life at Andover, where emotional literacy was
definitely not part of the curriculum. Soon after arriving, he was asked to
write an essay on a soul-stirring experience in his life to date and he chose
the death of his sister. His mother had drilled it into him that it was wrong
when writing to repeat words already used. Having employed "tears" once in the
essay, he sought a substitute from a thesaurus she had given him and wrote "the
lacerates ran down my cheeks". The essay received a fail grade, accompanied by
derogatory comments such as "disgraceful".
This incident may be an insight into Bush's strange tendency to find the
wrong words in making public pronouncements. "Is our children learning?" he once
famously asked. On responding to critics of his intellect he claimed that they
had "misunderestimated" him. Perhaps these verbal faux-pas are a barely
unconscious way of winding up his bullying mother and waving two fingers at his
cultured father's sensibility.
The outcome of this childhood was what psychologists call an authoritarian
personality. Authoritarianism was identified shortly after the second world war
as part of research to discover the causes of fascism. As the name suggests,
authoritarians impose the strictest possible discipline on themselves and others
- the sort of regime found in today's Whitte House, where prayers precede daily
business, appointments are scheduled in five-minute blocks, women's skirts must
be below the knee and Bush rises at 5.45am, invariably fitting in a 21-minute,
three-mile jog before lunch.
Authoritarian personalities are organised around rabid hostility to
"legitimate" targets, often ones nominated by their parents' prejudices.
Intensely moralistic, they direct it towards despised social groups. As people,
they avoid introspection or loving displays, preferring toughness and cynicism.
They regard others with suspicion, attributing ulterior motives to the most
innocent behaviour. They are liable to be superstitious. All these traits have
been described in Bush many times, by friends or colleagues.
His moralism is all-encompassing and as passionate as can be. He plans to
replace state welfare provision with faith-based charitable organisations that
would impose Christian family values.
The commonest targets of authoritarians have been Jews, blacks and
homosexuals. Bush is anti-abortion and his fundamentalist interpretation of the
Bible would mean that gay practices are evil. But perhaps the group he reserves
his strongest contempt for are those who have adopted the values of the 60s. He
says he loathes "people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others
were suffering".
He has always rejected any kind of introspection. Everyone who knows him well
says how hard he is to get to know, that he lives behind what one friend calls a
"facile, personable" facade. Frum comments that, "He is relentlessly disciplined
and very slow to trust. Even when his mouth seems to be smiling at you, you can
feel his eyes watching you."
His deepest beliefs amount to superstition. "Life takes its own turns," he
says, "writes its own story and along the way we start to realise that we are
not the author." God's will, not his own, explains his life.
Most fundamentalist Christians have authoritarian personalities. Two core
beliefs separate fundamentalists from mere evangelists ("happy-clappy"
Christians) or the mainstream Presbyterians among whom Bush first learned
religion every Sunday with his parents: fundamentalists take the Bible
absolutely literally as the word of God and believe that human history will come
to an end in the near future, preceded by a terrible, apocaplytic battle on
Earth between the forces of good and evil, which only the righteous shall
survive. According to Frum when Bush talks of an "axis of evil" he is
identifying his enemies as literally satanic, possessed by the devil. Whether he
specifically sees the battle with Iraq and other "evil" nations as being part of
the end-time, the apocalypse preceding the day of judgment, is not known. Nor is
it known whether Tony Blair shares these particular religious ideas.
However, it is certain that however much Bush may sometimes seem like a
buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone who
challenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a significant slice
of his citizens - in surveys, half of them also agree with the statement "the
Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word".
Bush's deep hatred, as well as love, for both his parents explains how he
became a reckless rebel with a death wish. He hated his father for putting his
whole life in the shade and for emotionally blackmailing him. He hated his
mother for physically and mentally badgering him to fulfil her wishes. But the
hatred also explains his radical transformation into an authoritarian
fundamentalist. By totally identifying with an extreme version of their strict,
religion-fuelled beliefs, he jailed his rebellious self. From now on, his
unconscious hatred for them was channelled into a fanatical moral crusade to rid
the world of evil.
As Frum put it: "Id-control is the basis of Bush's presidency but Bush is a
man of fierce anger." That anger now rules the world.
· Oliver
James's book They F*** You Up - How to survive family life is published by
Bloomsbury, priced £7.99.