by John Howard
That discussion occurred one day after the death of Don Bradman. Well briefed, Bush referred to this event at the beginning of our discussion; responding competitively, I said that Babe Ruth had been the Don Bradman of the United States. Apart from appreciating his courtesy and punctuality — his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, had come onto the telephone five minutes before our conversation was due to take place to apologise for the fact that he might be a few minutes late as he was finishing off a meeting with a congressional delegation — I had not formed any opinion of him.
I had no occasion to speak to him again until those momentous days in September 2001. My impressions, on meeting George Bush in person for the very first time on Monday, 10 September 2001, were all positive. He was friendly, courteous, well briefed, and fully understood the historic warmth of the relationship; he gave every indication that he would make the requisite time commitment as befitted a friendship as old and as close as that between our two nations.
On our first day together, which included the impressive Naval Dockyard ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the ANZUS treaty, Bush and I spent some four hours together.
At every stage Bush was unhurried and relaxed. His mind was on our talks. He did not pretend to be an expert on Australia, but he knew a lot about our country. There was nothing artificial in his reactions. He was well across his brief and spoke easily and definitively on each subject in our discussions. He impressed me as a highly intelligent man with a well-organised mind. He had little patience for intellectual pretensions and did not waste his time airing his knowledge on subjects irrelevant to the topic under notice. He was self-confident, but, so far from being arrogant, I detected at our first meeting a tendency to humorous self-deprecation. I would experience a lot of this likeable character trait over the years ahead.
Back in my hotel, after my dinner with Rupert Murdoch, I reflected that, when added to the turnout at the ambassador’s barbecue the previous day, and the meetings I had had with Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, the latter at the Pentagon, after my discussion and lunch with the President, I was entitled to feel that not only was the alliance in good shape but that our American friends had gone out of their way to make me feel welcome. And, at that stage, there was an address to a joint sitting of congress still to come. Such a reception went way beyond the normal courtesies extended to visitors to Washington, even from the ever-cordial Americans. This had been driven from the top. At this early stage in his presidency, and only hours before events which would change the world in our lifetimes and drive our nations even closer together, the President of the United States had signalled that he placed a premium on his and his country’s links with Australia.
This is a crucial understanding. There has been far too great a readiness on the part of commentators to see the closeness of my relationship with George Bush exclusively in terms of September 11 and its aftermath, with the implication that without it the relationship would not have received any special emphasis from Bush himself. The truth is that the President had decided to lift the relationship several notches, quite independently of the terrorist attacks. It was coincidence, and nothing else, that this occurred on the very eve of those attacks.
Why was this so? Some of the explanation lies in the personality of the President himself and some was due to his world-view. Although George Bush was far less of the unilateralist than his critics claimed, he correctly believed that we still lived in a world of nation states. He always had more faith in cooperative effort between like-minded nations than in the processes of multilateral movements or organisations. Dismissed by its critics as American arrogance, this approach had the history of the 1990s on its side.
The United Nations stood by or, worse still, ignored the Rwandan slaughter. Its Kosovo mandate had been so limited that NATO forces helplessly watched the Bosnian Serbs systematically kill thousands of Muslim men, in what many described as Europe’s worst ethnically driven atrocity since the Holocaust. In 1999 NATO countries properly ignored the Security Council’s impotence (due to a threatened Russian veto) to bomb Serbia, thus finally breaking the Milosevic regime. In strict legal terms, there had been less authority in international law for this action than that of the Coalition of the Willing when it invaded Iraq in 2003.
Then there had been the dilemma of the first Gulf War in 1991. The President’s father had assembled a mighty coalition to speedily eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Yet he had stopped short of rolling on to Baghdad and removing the hated Iraqi dictator altogether. Constrained by the limitations of a UN mandate which only extended to the liberation of Kuwait, George H.W. Bush would, in the eyes of many, particularly Americans, be seen to have only half completed the job. The Shi’ite population of southern Iraq felt betrayed, having risen against Saddam in the expectation of getting American help, only to be bitterly disappointed when it did not come. Even worse was the belief that the limitations imposed on Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War regarding the use of his forces permitted activation of enough of them which were needed to re-assert his authority over the Shi’ia and Kurds, then in revolt.
Throughout his presidency George Bush talked of his freedom agenda. He believed that the greatest benefit that the United States could bring to the world was to use its immense power to spread political freedoms to those many countries which did not have it.
His raison d’être was expanding freedom; if that could be realised with cooperation through bodies such as the United Nations, then all well and good. If, by contrast, that were not forthcoming he would look to kindred spirits amongst other nations in pursuing his freedom agenda. He was not prepared to surrender to the United Nations the ultimate authority to determine international right or wrong or the circumstances in which the use of force by nations might be justified, especially when the use of that force might result in large numbers of people gaining their freedom.
To many this was defiance of the international rule of law and a repudiation of the lofty ideals on which the United Nations had been founded. The world had put its faith in international order as an alternative to the horrors of two catastrophic wars. The rule of law, applied universally, would save the world from such disasters in the future. What was needed was for all nations, powerful and weak alike, to play by the rules and submit themselves absolutely to the adjudication of the United Nations.
There was another view, which I shared. Few credible historians would argue that the existence of the United Nations in the 1930s — or, more precisely, the old League of Nations, with greater authority and with the United States as a member — would have stopped World War II. Rather it was the failure of nations such as Britain, France and the United States to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s that emboldened the Germans. If a coalition of the willing had resisted Hitler when he re-occupied the Rhineland, the course of world history could have been very different. The enduring lesson from the 1930s was the folly of appeasement, not the need for new procedural architecture for the international world order, desirable though that may have been in its own right.
Moreover, improvement though it may have been on the League of Nations, the United Nations was anything but an ideal arbiter of the disputes of nations. Its permanent veto-wielding members reflected a bygone power structure, with Europe massively over-represented. For all of its existence, many of its member states have not had democratically elected governments. That has not prevented them sitting in judgement on some of the world’s oldest continuing democratic states.
George Bush never saw multilateralism as an end in itself. His goal was the expansion of democracy. By contrast, the international centre-left and some Europeans and Americans of the centre-right put much of their faith in international organisations.
Bush also disturbed the so-called realists within his own Republican ranks. Gathered around such figures as Brent Scowcroft, it included many who had been close to his father. Henry Kissinger by instinct was a realist, although on Iraq, which prov
oked public criticism from them, he held his peace, displaying loyalty to Bush. In 2008 Kissinger would say that even though he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration had rested too much of the case for invasion on the supposed existence of WMDs. Kissinger also argued that there had been too few American troops in the invasion and that the Iraqi Army should not have been disbanded.
The realists had little faith in multilateral institutions. On that point they shared Bush’s attitude, and that of the so-called neo-conservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, close to Bush. The realist view was that the world was too complex and dangerous a place for powerful democracies (meaning in practical terms the United States) to proactively impose their will on other nations in the name of spreading freedom. Rogue states should be contained. The United States should stop short of trying to topple rogue regimes, acting only to repel open aggression, as had happened when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991. The weakness of this argument was that the threat posed by rogue states possessing WMDs, was not of the border-crossing variety, and therefore a different approach might be needed.
Republicans and Democrats alike had been impressed by our initiative in East Timor. It might have been UN-sanctioned, but it was Australian leadership which pulled things together. Against this background, and Australia being a longstanding ally, Bush may well have thought that I would lend a receptive ear to his freedom agenda.
Bush instinctively liked Australia. Then most Americans do. To some it is the common pioneer experience; both were settler and immigrant societies. Many Americans remain deeply appreciative of the fact that Australia has fought beside the United States in every major conflict in which she has been involved, since America entered World War I in 1917.
Many Americans and Australians alike overstate the similarities between our two peoples. We are close, but there are real and important differences. Our senses of humour sharply diverge. Americans are often thrown by Australian irony. In many parts of the country Americans are more formal than many Australians expect. Australian over-familiarity can sometimes jar. My experience has been that the similarities are more evident amongst Texans and Californians, less so amongst northeasterners.
George Bush was infinitely curious about differences, as well as similarities, between the US and Australian political systems. In 2006, at the end of an official visit to Washington, during a private dinner in the family quarters of the White House, he told me that he proposed announcing the appointment of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the United States the very next day. He enquired about the procedure for appointing judges in Australia, and when I told him they were entirely executive decisions, without any requirement for parliamentary approval, he expressed wistful envy for such a system.
The most perplexing characteristic, to me, about George Bush was the big difference between his persuasive, well-informed, attentive and charming presence in private and his often stilted and unpersuasive presentation style in public. He was not good on television, which made his communication task all the greater. In relation to Iraq he faced vocal hostility to his policy from the start, and this would grow almost exponentially as time went by. Therefore cogent and compelling arguments, directly communicated, were at a premium.
Bush’s limitations here compounded a reality, common to all American presidents. Their job specifications required them to propound and declare, but not to argue and persuade. In this there is a marked difference from prime ministers in a Westminster system, such as Tony Blair and me. The adversarial parliamentary environment, so often derided by those who experienced it, at least required its principal participants to argue their case and often on a daily basis. I can testify, from long experience, that nothing compelled me quite like preparing for question time to crystallise in my own mind the reasons why my Government had adopted a particular policy. That was a priceless discipline. The absence of it as well as the infrequency of presidential press conferences means that no American president is ever subjected to such a discipline.
In the environment of a hotly contested policy decision, such as involvement in military conflict, American presidents are both less disposed and less well prepared to argue their case regularly and persistently. They don’t appear repeatedly on talkback radio; they don’t appear as frequently as do Australian PMs on television talk shows.
Bill Clinton was a good speech maker, but mainly of the grand-occasion variety such as at political conventions or State of the Union addresses. Even his superior media skills — to those of George Bush — would not have more effectively carried the day on an issue like Iraq, simply because American presidents don’t see their role as involving day-to-day advocacy of the type regularly engaged in by Westminster PMs. They mistakenly think that much of the legwork can be done by others. This attitude completely misunderstands the attitude of the modern electorate towards the responsibilities of their leaders. In their minds, the man at the top made all the big decisions (and they are right about that), and they want to hear from him as to why he made those decisions.
George Bush recognised his communications shortcomings. He was much better in one-on-one TV interviews than in press conferences. I thought that he should have done lots more of the former, as they allowed the warmth and candour of his personality to come through.
Bush was interested in people, their lives and families, and what drove them. He was curious about history and widely read on that subject. His religious faith was evident, but in no way overbearing or sanctimonious. Immediately before our Friday evening meal during our weekend visit to the Bush ranch in Crawford in May 2003, the President invited all present — about a dozen — to join hands while he said grace. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to do, but it was carried off in such a way that any non-believer in the group would not have felt uncomfortable. He was frank about having given up drinking and seemed at ease with his subsequent more disciplined way of life.
Although highly intelligent, he had no pretensions to being an intellectual. In fact a lack of pretension was a Bush hallmark. He dealt in principles and broad concepts. This infuriated the liberal elite in the United States, who adopted a condescending attitude to anything which they saw to be conservative populism. For many of them, national politics was a far too serious and complicated area to be left to ordinary people.
To so many Australians, whose only acquaintance with Bush was the nightly TV news grab, he was a brash Texan who sometimes mangled words. They were never exposed to a person who had easy conversational skills, genuinely listening to what other people said to him.
Socially engaging, he worked a room effortlessly. Neil Mitchell, the Melbourne radio journalist, was one of my guests at the Lodge barbecue in October 2003 honouring George Bush. He told me afterwards that, measured by responsiveness in a brief personal encounter, Bush was amongst the most impressive political figures he had met. Mitchell wrote glowingly of his encounter with Bush several days later in the Herald Sun.
How strange therefore, that the relaxed, engaging and personable interlocutor, in the flesh, became taut and tense on television. It was something that he understood only too well. Sometimes he joked about it. As so much of modern politics is bound up in the quality of electronic media presentation, the communication deficit suffered by George Bush affected his presidency.
I have already mentioned that he frequently engaged in self-deprecation. Asked once why he called me ‘a man of steel’, he replied that he had simply drawn on ‘my extensive vocabulary’.2 To use an Australian expression, he did not take himself too seriously. The fact that his religious faith was not something that he frequently thrust into conversation added to the authenticity of the man. When Janette and I travelled with him for two hours, en route to his ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2003, on Air Force One, we realised just how central his family, and not just Laura and their twin daughters, was to his entire life. He spoke to us with genuine feeling and affection about the whole Bush clan.
George Bush displayed in
tense loyalty to people who stuck by him or who shared his values and belief system. Likewise he did not take kindly to those who let him down. He never forgot the way in which the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who promised support over Iraq, backed off once the domestic going got tough. His continued regard for Tony Blair was due in no small part to the fact that Blair persisted in supporting Bush on Iraq despite tremendous domestic political opposition and personal hostility, which endures to this day. To him that was the mark of a true friend and political ally.
His affection for Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, and Alvaro Uribe, the President of Colombia, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with Tony Blair and me, were examples of the Bush gratitude towards world leaders who had stuck by him over hard issues or shared his values. Koizumi had kept military engineers in Iraq despite domestic disquiet. Uribe had waged a courageous fight against the drug barons in his country. Bush detested the drug trade; Colombia was the source of over 90 per cent of the cocaine entering the United States and a significant source of the heroin on American streets.
His loyalty to me was plentiful. The better-known examples were his warm personal remarks as well as the Medal of Freedom, the latter being so much a compliment to Australia. Less well known was the fact that the four nights he spent in Sydney during APEC 2007 was the longest period he spent in a foreign city during his entire presidency. It was in part a personal gesture to me. He knew that the particular gathering was the most important Australia had ever hosted. He wished to fully honour that fact. This was despite crucial military testimony being given in Washington at that time concerning Iraq.
My being out of office during his last year in the White House did not affect our relationship. He hosted a dinner for me and several members of my family when I went to Washington in March 2008 to receive the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. In discussing contemporary issues, our old intimacy continued over that dinner.