Like us, Yuval Levin notes with interest Matthew Mosk’s piece on George W. Bush’s prescient push, back in 2005-06, to prepare the nation to confront a pandemic. However, unlike us, he doesn’t believe that Bush’s effort is best understood as a rebuke to the presidents (most notably Trump) who have followed him.
Instead, argues Levin,
I think it is better understood as a story about the immense array of problems and threats that every president has to face, and the enormous difficulty, indeed near-impossibility, of being prepared for freak events.
The fact is that many of us involved in the Bush-era effort wondered why we were doing it, and whether it was a good use of time and energy.
Fran Townsend, who was Bush’s chief Homeland Security advisor, has this to say in that ABC story about her first reaction when Bush approached her about pandemic preparedness:
“My reaction was — I’m buried. I’m dealing with counterterrorism. Hurricane season. Wildfires. I’m like, ‘What?’” Townsend said. “He said to me, ‘It may not happen on our watch, but the nation needs the plan.’”
I have to admit that a lot of us more junior folks involved in the effort had the same sense.
The work was very intensely driven by Bush himself. He had read John Barry’s then-new book The Great Influenza, about the 1918 Spanish Flu, and was focused on the challenges an outbreak like that would pose to a modern government, and on the sorts of hard decisions he as president would face if it came.
Character Counts. But isn’t that exactly the point? Bush was substantively and intellectually engaged in a way that Trump is not. Bush was sober-minded and conscientious in a way that Trump is not. He took seriously his responsibilities as president in a way that Trump does not.
Bush recognized that, as president, he was the custodian of an institution that has a deep and praiseworthy historical pedigree and a profound sense of moral purpose.
Trump recognizes only that, as president, he is able to command the daily news cycle and show up simultaneously on all of the cable news channels. The only morality that he recognizes is that which aggrandizes his own inflated ego, and history is utterly foreign to him.
Levin acknowledges
that attitude, that sense of profound personal responsibility for decision-making in a crisis, is one of the things that stands out most to me about Bush, particularly now in retrospect. It was enormously impressive.
Yet, he refrains from drawing the obvious conclusion, which is: we need presidents—and political leaders more generally—who are more like Bush than Trump.
We need presidents with a sense of history, intellectual curiosity, and engagement with the wider world. Most important, we need presidents more devoted to duty than to self-aggrandizement.
Levin surely recognizes this. Yet, he writes:
I think a more reasonable reading of the evidence is that it’s practically impossible to guess correctly about what sudden emergency our government will need to be prepared for, and it makes sense to gird for the unexpected and build as much all-purpose mobilization capacity as reasonably possible.
More than anything, it’s a lesson in how difficult and daunting the president’s job, regardless of who occupies the office, really is.
Devotion to Duty. This is silly. Of course the president’s job is challenging and difficult. But no one expects the president to “guess correctly about what sudden emergency our government will need to be prepared for.” That’s a red herring.
What we do expect, and should expect, is that the president is sufficiently engaged such that he is alert to potential dangers that threaten the health and safety of the American people; and that he acts to confront those threats.
That’s what Bush did after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and in the Global War on Terror more generally. And it is why he insisted that his administration prepare for a pandemic—despite everything else that was going on at the time, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the response to Hurricane Katrina, dealing with the California wildfires, et al.
Moreover, with regard to the coronavirus, no great powers of clairvoyance were required. As Business Insider’s John Haltiwanger and Sonam Sheth reported March 31, 2020:
A series of media reports over the last several weeks revealed that Trump ignored multiple warnings about the prospect of a devastating pandemic that would overwhelm the country’s healthcare system and later publicly downplayed the virus after it reached the U.S…
US intelligence officials were warning Trump about a pandemic as early as January, the Washington Post reported, as more information emerged on the respiratory virus spreading in China.
The president was receiving the briefings at the same time that he publicly downplayed the risk of the virus.
By the end of January and beginning of February, a majority of the intelligence contained in Trump’s daily briefings was about the coronavirus, the report said.
“The system was blinking red,” one US official with access to the intelligence told The Post. “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it.”
My point, though, isn’t that Trump failed to anticipate and confront the coronavirus in a timely manner which would have saved many American lives. That much is obviously true. But failure, as Levin rightly points out, is inevitable—and, I would add, forgivable.
But what is utterly unforgivable is failing to do your job well and conscientiously, so that you can minimize the likelihood of failure.
Indeed, Trump’s sin isn’t that he failed; it’s that he never adequately tried because of character defects and intellectual deficiencies that render him incapable of fulfilling his duties as president.
George W. Bush wasn’t a genius, and no president need be a genius. But he cared deeply about his obligations as president; and he put the nation’s welfare above his own political self-interest.
Bush paid a heavy political price for his unwavering devotion to duty. History, though, will view him much more kindly as a result. And make no mistake: we need more like him in the Oval Office.
Feature photo credit: USA Herald.