Bush White House Research Articles

The Presidency of George W. Bush by John Robert Greene

Reviewed by: The Presidency of George W. Bush by John Robert Greene Bianca Rowlett The Presidency of George W. Bush. By John Robert Greene. American Presidency Series. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. xviii, 421. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-7006-3268-8.) In his third contribution to the American Presidency Series, John Robert Greene takes on the daunting task of recounting and evaluating the recent, controversial tenure of President George W. Bush. Unlike earlier literature on the administration, which Greene claims was inadequately sourced and highly reductionist, this work utilizes newly available archival materials from a variety of repositories—including the George W. Bush Presidential Library, which opened its doors in 2013—to provide a detailed, balanced, and comprehensive synopsis of the Bush presidency that is not “based solely on its handling of the War on Terror” (p. xii). Organized chronologically into fifteen chapters, the book offers a judicious and meticulous overview of Bush’s life and presidency. Indeed, Greene excels at providing objective, informative, and brief descriptions of the significant events, legislation, issues, and personalities associated with the Bush White House, making the book an invaluable resource for scholars of modern politics and diplomacy. Ultimately, Greene portrays Bush as a more complicated, intelligent, authentic, and compassionate individual than critics might expect. He argues that the Bush presidency was complex, and its record was mixed; it “defies simplistic judgments and stereotypical conclusions” (p. 314). Among the administration’s accomplishments, Greene praises its diversity, noting that Bush’s cabinet included two African Americans, one Hispanic American, two Asian Americans, one Arab American, and three female cabinet secretaries, including the first women to lead the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior. He points out that thanks to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Bush “did more to combat the worldwide scourge of AIDS” and assist victims of AIDS in Africa “than any other president” (p. 311). Greene also claims that the administration’s No Child Left Behind legislation stimulated education reform, and that Bush’s “faith-based policies” demonstrated a “compassionate conservatism” that pushed Republicans to rethink welfare services (pp. 35–36, 311). Greene credits Bush with saving the nation’s banking system and preventing another Great Depression through his support for bail-out legislation, and with making the world safer by removing the dangerous Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Greene does not shy away from criticizing the administration, asserting that it was “plagued by staff infighting, particularly on the national security side of the house” (p. 309). He also notes that the administration could be vindictive, as exemplified by the 2006 dismissal of U.S. Attorneys and the Plame-Wilson affair. Greene notes that “attempts to revise the Social Security system and advance immigration reform” failed, and he accuses the administration of being “sluggish” in its response to Hurricane Katrina (p. 309). He describes the administration as being close-minded and overly martial in tone, and he charges it with embracing the “highly suspect theory of the unitary executive” in the realm of foreign affairs (p. 309). Regarding the War on Terror, Greene notes that the Bush administration was slow to respond to initial terrorist threats before 9/11. It then lied to the American public, using the false threat of [End Page 400] weapons of mass destruction as pretense for war, before sanctioning and utilizing torture on suspected enemies, all while violating constitutional and legal protections for American citizens. Greene claims the inept conduct of the Iraq War led directly to a violent insurgency against American troops, and he criticizes the administration for its lack of “a clearly articulated exit strategy” prior to 2008. Finally, Greene notes, the Afghanistan war was sidelined and left for Bush’s successors to resolve (p. 310). A stated goal of this series is to identify each presidential administration’s “relationships to the past, its own time, and the future” (p. x). While Greene is outstanding at evaluating the administration within its own time, additional analysis of its historical connections would be beneficial. Regarding the Bush administration’s legacy, Greene astutely and poignantly observes that “we now live in a world of its making” (p. 314). Bianca Rowlett University of...

Day of Fire: An Oral History Perspective on the Bush White House on 9/11

Presidential crises come in multiple forms. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC exemplify a type of crisis marked by a combination of four qualities: (1) a sudden event that is (2) unanticipated and (3) requires (4) an urgent response by the president. This article offers an account of the day's unfolding events as White House and other officials experienced them. It does so in the words of participants, most of them drawn from lengthy and recently-released interviews conducted by the University of Virginia's Miller Center as part of its George W. Bush Oral History. Like all historical methods, oral history is imperfect. Among its advantages, however, is that it supplements documentary White House records that have become steadily less revealing. The article concludes with a brief discussion of certain post-9/11 measures designed to enhance security, some of which have been effective but none of which forestalled the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.

The Failure of Legislative Leadership: A Retrospective Study of Crafting the State of the Unions in the George H. W. Bush White House

The analysis of the archival documents illustrates that speechwriting in the George H. W. Bush White House was decentralized and responsibility for crafting Bush Senior’s State of the Unions (SOTUs) was diffused among a team of different writers each year. George H. W. Bush would not use his SOTUs as an opportunity to assert his legislative leadership. The preferred structure of Bush Senior’s SOTU was a thematic, not a programmatic speech. The study concludes that a speechwriting process that fails to balance the ceremonial and deliberative aspects of the SOTU undermines the president’s opportunity to assert his legislative leadership.

Mueller, Wolfgang; Gehler, Michael and Suppan, Arnold (eds) The Revolutions of 1989: A Handbook (review)

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 376 “representative” of Poland on the whole, it offers a very poignant concentration of events, processes, and experiences that have shaped the nation […] since the end of World War II’ (p. 11). As her book successfully illustrates, these are not just repression, resistance and inefficiency. Nowa Huta is also ‘emblematic of post-war rebuilding, successful urban planning, stable and guaranteed work, strong community ties and social institutions, and collective action’ (p. 189). UCL SSEES Anne White Mueller, Wolfgang; Gehler, Michael and Suppan, Arnold (eds). The Revolutions of 1989: A Handbook. Internationale Geschichte/International History, 2. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 2015. ix + 705 pp. Notes. Tables. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. €75.00. The purpose of this compendium is to synthesize twenty-five years of research and reflection on the end of Communist power in Central Europe in 1989. It is primarily a tour of the literature on the political history, and a geographically very broad one at that; the collection’s originality lies in the connections it allows the reader to make between developments in many different areas of the world. In fact, the least surprising part is the opening section on 1989 in the narrow sense of the revolutions in the line of states from Poland to Bulgaria, which are ably summarized by country experts and shown to have been massively over-determined. There is little scope for scholarly controversy when discussing the end of regimes that depended on Soviet force for their survival, and were a poor fit with the educated, urbanized societies they brought about. Once the Soviet balustrade was removed — as early as July 1986, according to Andrei Grachev’s chapter on Gorbachev — it was just a matter of finding a way to let political gravity work. With most of the countries of Central Europe, the only competitor to the standard account of events is a conspiracy theory, especially regarding the negotiations between the Communist authorities and representatives of the emerging opposition that ensured peaceful transitions to free elections and constitutional change. The authors of the country chapters address and largely demolish those often wildly speculative claims of secret deals and bad faith. Only in the case of Romania, where the Soviet hold was weakest and the Ceaușescu regime had pursued a sultanistic path, is there a genuine dispute over how best to explain the violent events. On the superpower level, it turns out that it is American conduct, not the Soviet, that is now the greater subject of disagreement. Norman Naimark, in the book’s liveliest chapter, presents a devastating case for seeing the administration of George H. W. Bush as passive and timid at this crucial time REVIEWS 377 in history. Even when moving fairly quickly to endorse German unification, a topic that receives very thorough attention in this book, the Bush White House was still reacting to someone else’s initiative (Helmut Kohl’s) and was not all that far ahead of the trend (Georges Saunier’s subtle chapter on France shows that by 3 November 1989, a week before the Berlin Wall opened, François Mitterrand was already anticipating the merger of the two Germanies). Philip Zelikow, at the time director for European security affairs on the White House National Security Council, offers a more positive account, crediting President Bush with foresight and boldness, although he is convincing only with regard to the Conventional Forces in Europe talks. One of the book’s strengths is that it factors in other countries under some form of Communist rule that were in crisis but did not experience a change of government in 1989. Péter Vámos’s chapter on China’s Tianamen Square protests is an excellent account of the events and of their importance not just for that country, but also for anxious Central European leaders who lacked the appetite for such a brutal crackdown. The chapters on Yugoslavia and the Baltic states wander too far from 1989 itself and how the fall of nearby Communist regimes was perceived (or, at least, how it was reported in their media) into general accounts of the resurgence of national identities, the politicization of history and crumbling of...

Influence from abroad: Foreign voices, the media and U.S. public opinion

This book overthrows the commonly held thesis that domestic elites are the primary influence drivers behind mass public opinion during international conflict. The exercise in self-restraint to show a united front in international relations has been the conventional wisdom for nearly 70 years in U.S. foreign policy relations. Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in postwar 1947, called on his Senate colleagues to lend their support for the Truman Doctrine efforts to challenge Soviet imperialism overseas and said, “we must stop partisan politics at the water's edge.” That conventional wisdom was in dramatic form in Washington from just after Labor Day 2002 through 19 March 2003 when Democratic Party opposition to the Bush-Cheney military response to Iraq was all but on silent mode. Bush White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained the post-Labor Day timing of the strategic communications campaign, known as the White House Iraq Group (aka White House Information Group or WHIG), this way: “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August” (Bumiller, 2002). “A centerpiece of the strategy, White House officials said, is to use Mr. Bush's speech on 11 Sept. to help move Americans toward support of action against Iraq, which could come early next year.” Couching the Iraq military invasion in the rally-round-the-flag syndrome of post-September 11, the bipartisan support for a military option against Iraq caught on in short order and with little notable dissent. On 11 October 2002, a three-quarter majority of the Senate, including many Democrats (77-23), notably 2008 presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, authorized the use of military force against Iraq. This united front created an information vacuum that was filled by foreign elite voices opposed to the Bush administration in substance or procedure; even kingpins in the Senate were given a stage that did not reverberate. The book devotes an entire chapter, “Byrd Gets No Word,” to Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) and his eloquent, but futile, quest to amplify Democratic Party dissent: “Listen. You can hear a pin drop” (p. 51). An interesting footnote is that Hayes and Guardino show that the Department of Defense attempt to use military analysts to make the case for war in Iraq “did not appear to pay significant dividends for the Bush Administration, at least on network television before the war” (p. 40).

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. By Robert M.Gates. Alfred A.Knopf, 2014. 618 pp.

Duty: Memoirs of Secretary at War. By Robert M. Gates. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 618 pp. Memoirs from public officials typically are most instructive in presenting one person's perspective on key events during time of service and less helpful in appreciating preexisting policy constraints as well as restrictions of electoral cycle. Because he served two consecutive presidents as secretary of defense, and is only defense secretary to serve two commanders in chief from different political parties, Robert M. Gates has an unusual opportunity to present that broader perspective. His insightful assessment of defense policy making under George W. Bush and Barack Obama informs scholarly understanding of key national security debates and policy choices in twenty-first century. The book title, Duty, captures overarching theme well: Gates was not keen to serve as defense secretary or to stay in office for four-and-a-half years (late 2006 to mid-2011), but he so because he wanted to work for who sacrifice so much for United States. The pressures of job often became overwhelming, especially in Washington--Gates writes that he did not enjoy being secretary of defense (p. 465), and he refers to his tenure as deployment to Washington combat zone (p. 468). During his daily, predawn run, each time Gates would pass Lincoln Memorial, he would ask, How you do it? (p. 220). For Gates, the only thing that kept [him] going was getting out of Pentagon and being around troops (p. 465). With United States at war throughout his tenure, Gates was an integral advisor to key decisions about sending increased to Iraq for Bush and to Afghanistan for Obama. Under Bush, Gates participated in and implemented key decisions about 2007 troop surge in Iraq, conflicts with Russia, Syria, and Iran, increasing support from North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies in Afghanistan, and managing Pentagon battles over hardware, intelligence, support for wounded soldiers, and more. Gates worked well with president professionally, but he writes that they were not close personally (p. 95), perhaps in part because of Gates's close ties with former President George H. W. Bush, whom he had served as director of Central Intelligence. Gates describes second President Bush as intellectually curious (p. 94) and a man of character, man of convictions, and man of action (p. 96). In Bush White House, he is critical mostly of communications staff, who he says focused on tactical, often partisan, public relations, but says he was able to rebuff requests and make decisions with president's support. Given ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, rumors that Gates might be asked to continue in new administration, whether Republican or Democrat, started in early 2008. Consistent with theme of his memoir, Gates writes that he not seek to stay but believed he had responsibility to do so, if asked. …

A Presidency Upstaged: The Public Leadership of George H. W. Bush by Lori Cox Han (review)

Reviewed by: A Presidency Upstaged: The Public Leadership of George H. W. Bush by Lori Cox Han Sara A. Mehltretter Drury A Presidency Upstaged: The Public Leadership of George H. W. Bush. By Lori Cox Han. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011; pp. xi + 242. $40.00 cloth. Lori Cox Han begins her book, A Presidency Upstaged: The Public Leadership of George H. W. Bush, by recounting the complex legacy of the single-term president. Initially viewed as a static president who occupied the White House in between two "dynamic and skilled communicators" (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), George H. W. Bush's legacy continues to be debated by scholars (1). Han argues that Bush's tenure in office and his presidential legacy can be better understood by focusing on the "public presidency"—the president's communication to the American public, his relationship with the press, the communication strategies employed by the advisers to the president, and the media responses to the White House. Furthermore, Han contends that Bush's public leadership was constrained by the context of his presidency, particularly the changes in political media coverage. Throughout the book, Han builds her argument that Bush was upstaged in three major areas. First, Reagan upstaged Bush by creating a "public [End Page 617] expectation" of presidential communication that the press simultaneously resented and expected to be fulfilled by the new president (200). Second, Bush's public presidency and communication were upstaged by "the changing technology and news media environment during the late 1980s and early 1990s" (200). Finally, just as his predecessor upstaged Bush, his successor, Bill Clinton, upstaged the Bush presidency and solidified Bush's initial legacy as an ineffective communicator and incapable leader. In six chapters, Han examines the scholarly assessments of George H. W. Bush, the internal dynamics within the Bush White House, a variety of external factors, two case studies on Bush's public speeches, and a final assessment of the Bush legacy and our understanding of the contemporary public presidency. The book is meticulously researched, with comprehensive sources from newspapers, television shows, memoirs, and the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, including fascinating materials newly obtained through Han's Freedom of Information Act request. After a review of existing scholarship in the first chapter, chapter 2 details the various strategies taken by the Bush administration during its four years in the White House, drawing on an impressive number of archival documents. Han's citation of memoranda from Marlin Fitzwater, the Press Secretary and chief architect of Bush's public communication strategy, demonstrates that the Bush White House actively made decisions to move away from Reagan's "Great Communicator" strategies of giving national addresses, speaking "over" Congress and the press. In contrast, the Bush team designed their communication strategy to emphasize substance over style (18). To underscore the importance of giving the press access to policymaking details, the president made himself available for "real interaction between him and White House reporters" (21). Bush primarily relied on smaller public events to communicate policy rather than on large, national addresses. For example, Bush discontinued the weekly radio address begun by Reagan (and reinstituted, Han notes, by Clinton). The White House communications team worked to keep Bush off, rather than on, the national stage, holding smaller "roundtable interviews" and Q&A sessions with niche publications such as McCalls' (targeting 5 million women readers), Outdoor Life, Prevention (health and fitness), Flame (a Christian publication), and Good Housekeeping (35). While Bush actually participated in more public activities in his four years than Reagan during his first term, Han concludes that the Bush White House never quite learned the lesson [End Page 618] that more press access does not equal more favorable or more comprehensive coverage of policymaking. Overall, the lack of a strong, overarching "vision thing"—as the Bush team called it—plagued Bush throughout his presidency (43). In chapter 3, Han's comprehensive research strongly supports her assessment of the changing dynamic between the news media and the presidency during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This section of the book will be of great interest to scholars looking at the relationship between the media and the contemporary...

Lessons Learned from NARA's Electronic Records Archives Project

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archives (ERA), built to hold the avalanche of electronic records being created by the federal government of the United States, recently reached a major milestone. On September 30, 2011 ERA's initial development phase ended and the operations and maintenance phase began. Begun in 2005, ERA incrementally deployed important functions starting in 2008, when the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) started ingesting its existing collection of electronic records into ERA and piloting the records management functions that allow federal agencies to create records schedules and transfer their permanent electronic records to NARA.As of January 30, 2012 ERA was storing more than 131 terabytes of records in a wide variety of formats from the United States Congress, federal Agencies, and the George W. Bush White House. This volume is just the beginning of what ERA will manage and store, though. For example, NARA has recently received around 300 terabytes of electronic records from the 2010 Census, currently being prepared for ingest into ERA. NARA is relying on ERA every day to perform a key part of its basic mission, and ERA provides a flexible foundation on which NARA can build increasingly sophisticated functions over time.ERA's successes are critical to the mission of the archives, but the challenges the project encountered and the lessons NARA learned along the way may be more valuable to the digital preservation community. This paper will provide a summary of what ERA is and highlights of the project's accomplishments, but will also discuss important decision points in planning and development, external constraints, lessons learned from the experience, and challenges remaining in the future. Lessons learned include the importance of project governance, strategies for maintaining control of the project, and the necessity of constantly communicating to ensure that stakeholder expectations are realistic. Challenges included managing a large number of disparate requirements for records governed under different legal frameworks and working under the constraints of legally mandated timeframes for records ingest and access. NARA's response to these challenges involved a solution architecture that includes a common architectural pattern shared by different instances within a system of systems. NARA will be relying on this flexible software framework, along with standardized interfaces and data elements, to adapt ERA now that the system has moved out of initial development and into the operations and maintenance phase.

Why has the United States not bombed Iran? The domestic politics of America's response to Iran's nuclear programme

Why has the United States (US), under both the Bush and Obama administrations, refrained from attacking Iran even though US officials have depicted the Iranian threat in all but apocalyptic terms and even though a loud chorus in Washington has been persistently calling for a preventive strike against Iran? I present an analysis—informed by Graham Allison's famous bureaucratic politics model—of the main political and bureaucratic forces in Washington acting to promote or impede a preventive attack on Iran's nuclear sites. I argue that America's abstention from attacking Iran should be understood not as a coherent national response to Iran's nuclear programme but rather as (in Allison's terms) an ‘intra-national political outcome’ resulting from the ‘pulling’ of ‘Iran Threat’ interests—primarily Vice President Cheney's camp in the Bush White House, members of Congress, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—and the countervailing ‘hauling’ of the Pentagon, the military's top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State. The main reason why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has opted for a military strike is that the ‘haulers’, who were led by a formidable bureaucratic-political player, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have had the upper hand over the hawkish ‘pullers’.

Political Ideology, HIV Infection, and PEPFAR

Have you read the recent evaluation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR; Evertz, 2010)? It provides an interesting analysis of successes and problems with PEPFAR as well as an agenda to improve this global initiative to stem the tide of the HIV epidemic. Evertz, the first openly gay appointee of a Republican president, served in two different HIV-related positions in the BushWhite House. His analysis of PEPFAR comes from an insider’s perspective, but his comments are tempered by a pragmatism that was not often applied to HIV during the previous administration.

Saving the National Children's Study From Its Saviors

Saving the National Children's Study From Its Saviors

Occultatio: The Bush Administration's Rhetorical War

Debate roiled in the early months of Barack Obama's presidency surrounding the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and their relation to torture. In this essay we argue that the Bush White House bequeathed to the incoming administration a citizenry haunted by the paradox of torture enacted in the name of freedom. To account for this legacy, we introduce the trope of occultatio, a device of imperial mystification. Through key examples of legalese, signing statements, redaction, and stonewalling, we show how the Bush administration's occultic political style actively exploited the gaps of which democracy is made.

The Law Presidential Power and Foreign Affairs in the Bush Administration: The Use and Abuse of Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton's writings, virtually alone among the framers, were invoked by President George W. Bush and his legal advisors as the cornerstone of the administration's assertions of sweeping executive powers in the areas of war and peace and national security. The Bush administration's conscription of Hamilton to justify its soaring claims of presidential power, however, represents a distortion and abuse of his views of the latter president's views, particularly those expressed in The Federalist Papers. With the loss of Hamilton as an intellectual pillar, President Bush's theory of a plenary executive power finds no support among the framers. Analysis of Hamilton's writings will repair his undeserved reputation as an apologist for expansive executive powers.

Samuel P. Huntington and the Ambiguities of American Power

It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in the state of concluding: a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making. - Susan Sontag1Nothing is my last word on anything. - Henry James2He may not have ultimately enjoyed the last word on anything, but during a long and often controversial career, Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) certainly did enjoy the exercise of initiating and often shaping the vistas of new debates on a wide array of contentious policy issues, from challenging the orthodoxies associated with the proper management of US civilianmilitary relations, to undercutting the virtues associated with the arguments for economic globalization and domestic multiculturalism as they applied to the workings of the American body politic, to underscoring the problematic role that he envisioned that Islamic societies would play in the competitive realm of 21st century political and military statecraft.3Although he served two years as a hawkish coordinator for security planning under his longtime friend, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, during the Cold War redux Carter years, it is as the author andor editor of 19 books that Huntington's considerable measure will be recalled and his ultimate intellectual legacy judged.Two of the works out of his large and diverse corpus stand out as strikingly resonant to the degree that they address the continuing vicissitudes and dilemmas of contemporary American foreign policy.THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: HUNTINGTON AND THE DILEMMAS OF CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHuntington's arguably best-known work, The Clash of Civilizations, was an odd artefact in that it arrived as a counterintuitive intellectual offering during a triumphalist American era, distinguished by Secretary of State Madeline Albright's assertive claim that we are the indispensable nation. We see further into the future.4Such diplomatic expressions of unreflective American exceptionalism were echoed and legitimated by the intellectual championing of the victorious virtues of globalized American laissez-faire capitalism and the associated imminent if problematic end of history it would usher in for the prosperous citizenry of the triumphalist west5Samuel Huntington's book broke the mood of this celebratory Zeitgeist with his argument that the fading of Cold War bipolarity was giving way to emerging 21st-century power configurations that would be characterized by international conflict based upon antagonistic cultural-civilizational identities and the worrisome corresponding power ascent of China and resurgent Islamic nations.6Huntington's book was met by widespread criticism from across the ideological spectrum. From the left, Edward Said argued that a myopic cultural chauvinism underlay Huntington's efforts and consequently limited the intellectual utility of his works. From the centre-right, scholars such as Michael Ignatieff, Stephen Walt, John Gray, and William Pfaff faulted Huntington for privileging vague constructions (civilizations) at the expense of underestimating the centrality of place that the machinations of material interests and nation-state realpolitik would continue to enjoy in the firmament of post-millennium statecraft.7These criticisms were largely warranted and were, in part, a dual reflection of the sweeping subject matter under consideration and Huntington's own propensity to embrace an occasionally simplistic and overgeneralizing aphoristic writing style.These limitations notwithstanding, The Clash of Civilizations remains a germane book, well worth reading for three reasons. First, for better or worse, the book's arguments, as understood and popularized by the Bush administration, were highly influential in shaping the private-political strategic thinking and larger public diplomatic response of the Bush White House in the immediate emotionally charged aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks. …

Bailouts: An Essay on Conflicts of Interest and Ethics When Government Pays the Tab

This essay, a precursor for a book project on the same topic, addresses ethics problems for government officials who orchestrate bailouts of private companies. These problems include excessive politicization of bailout decisions, the influence of campaign contributions, conflicts of interest when executives from the private sector move in and out of government positions, insider trading on government information about bailouts, and loose regulation of conflicts of interest within private companies that assist with bailouts as government contractors. This essay concludes that government ethics law in its current state is not up to the task and that the United States is not prepared to implement bailouts in a manner that will instill public confidence. Although these problems could be alleviated through stricter ethics rules or a more systematized approach to bailouts, most solutions would be more costly than the problems they attempt to solve. Bailouts thus impose a substantial burden on government ethics that may be impossible to remove, in addition to the economic cost bailouts impose on taxpayers. Designing a bailout free economy may be the only acceptable alternative. The author represented the Bush White House in drafting ethics agreements for Treasury Secretary Paulson and other Presidential nominees who were later responsible for implementing the massive bailout of the financial services industry in 2008.

Presidential Communication Before and After, Then and Now

munications Agency: FDR's Office of Government Reports and Scott McClellan s What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washingtons Culture of Deception highlight the structure, style, and role of communication at top White House levels, albeit six decades apart. These two books not only contrast the first and current presidential communication apparatus, they contrast with one another in purpose and style. Lee's book on the first presidential communications agency aims to describe the historical origins of the Office of Government Reports under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In so doing, Lee provides a macro examination of events involving the executive branch and Congress as well as the White House (1). In contrast to Lee's approach, McClellan, former press secretary, aims for an insider's account of politics and communication within the White House of George W. Bush, particularly on the selling of the Iraq War, from 2001 to 2003.

Black, White, and Shades of Gray: The Sixty-Year Debate Over Propaganda versus Public Diplomacy

This article explores public debates over the use of U.S. “soft power”—international government-to-people communication, generally classified by proponents as informational “public diplomacy” and critics as persuasive “propaganda” efforts. The focus is on challenges emerging during both the Cold War and the War on Terror. The study relies heavily upon previously classified documents from the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries, as well as reporter Bob Woodward's contemporary accounts based upon classified materials in the Bush White House. The author examines the 1953 debate over the role of U.S. propaganda, and shows how many of the same issues reemerged following the September 11 terror attacks. While there is broad consensus for communicating U.S. policies and values to foreign audiences, differences of opinion in the role, scope, and administration of overseas information programs dominate the debate. The role the State Department plays in administering these public relations programs, first raised during the Cold War, remains unresolved. In both debates, the president's closest communications adviser appears to have exerted the greatest influence on the outcome.

The use of impression management to promote 'starve the beast' policies

This study explores the use of impression management techniques promoting tax policy consistent with starve the beast (STB) policies. We employ thematic content analysis to examine how the 'independent' Federal Reserve Board (FRB) under Alan Greenspan used impression management tactics mimicking Bush's White House in promoting the 2001 Economic Growth & Revenue Reconciliation Act. Results confirm impression management technique use to market STB policies undermining society's interests. Results suggest Greenspan's advocacy failed to preserve FRB independence by taking a political position using impression management techniques mirroring White House strategies. Greenspan's stance was inconsistent with the FRB's charter, setting a dangerous precedence that erodes the FRB's independence. This suggests the FRB's lack of regulatory oversight blamed for snowballing the 2008 economic crisis was potentially driven by attempts to align the FRB with the neoconservative White House. This partisan activity threatens long-term foundations of US monetary policy, which has significant global implications.

What happened: inside the Bush White House and Washington’s culture of deception, by Scott McClellan, New York, Public Affairs, 2008, ISBN 13-978-1-58648-556-6

What happened: inside the Bush White House and Washington’s culture of deception, by Scott McClellan, New York, Public Affairs, 2008, ISBN 13-978-1-58648-556-6

Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Questioning Presidents

On February 7, 2001, as the new Bush White House settled into a rhythm, a handful of reporters from various news organizations secured some time to interview Larry Lindsey, the president's top economic advisor, who had also advised George W. Bush during his campaign. Young White House Press Office aides--graduates of the hard-fought Bush-Cheney campaign and new to Washington--walked the band of reporters to the West Wing lobby to await a final escort to Lindsey's office. The reporters sat on a cushy sofa and several chairs, browsed courtesy copies of the morning newspapers, and enjoyed the sweet scent of blush roses arranged by the White House florist specifically for the receptionist's desk just 10 feet away. The reporters, most of whom had covered Bush's predecessors, understood right away that the president's new press team had made a small mistake, but they remained mum, accepted the hospitality and made themselves comfortable. The West Wing lobby, which is basically a hushed waiting room, was, in an era long gone, accessible to reporters covering presidents. But over the decades, journalists found themselves confined to press quarters near Richard Nixon's covered-over swimming pool. They are escorted during all movements (and often roped off like a herd) and branded as PRESS with color-coded ID tags. Bush, like his father before him, frowns on reporters who shout questions and simply ignores journalists who try waving their hands to summon his attention. Loitering in the lobby, therefore, afforded the band of scribblers unsupervised access to both observe and question the president's top aides and their associates, who strode through the clubby expanse in mid-conversation, aiming for a doorway that opens to the VIP offices beyond. The longer the reporters sat, the richer the pickings. Karen Hughes, then the president's communications counselor, had never laid eyes on some of Washington's economic reporters when she nodded a cheery hello while sailing by. Seizing the opening, the journalists identified themselves and brought her to a halt with a few impromptu questions. Clearly caught off guard, Hughes frowned, volunteered as little as possible and beat a hasty retreat. The reporters chuckled as they returned to their seats, knowing the lobby would be off limits to the Fourth Estate for the remainder of Bush's tenure. Karen Hughes and her colleagues could have learned from the assembled journalists there, if they had sought a few tips. On inauguration day 2009, when the new president and his White House team trudge indoors and peal off their thermal underwear after the final parade float turns off Pennsylvania Avenue in the dark, there will be three groups of people who at that moment know a lot more about the White House and presidential routines than they do. First are the members of the residence staff who control the president's new house and the traditions of the presidency within it; second are the career executive branch workers who understand what continuity of government really means and can be an incoming president's best friends; and third is the White House press corps, including journalists who know the Oval Office well enough to give the new president an engaging tour and seasoned enough to remind him that, in a democracy, communicating is governing. No president can move an agenda forward or win reelection without majority support of the American people, and a free press continues to furnish voters with the best fact-based translations of the president and his chosen administration. History is littered with tales of newly inaugurated chief executives who vowed to soar over the heads of the media to control their messages and speak directly with voters; all of them revised those goals when they dug into the job. Even with the explosion of the Web and other instantaneous, direct-connect forms of communication, presidents remain locked in a mutually dependent and politely adversarial relationship with the White House press corps. …