![]() There is no doubt that Cheney and Rumsfeld were given more licence and authority than almost all their predecessors once the “war on terror” began. And it was this characteristic that made for such a dangerously volatile and over-reaching US response when the 9/11 attacks came. It was how he intended from the outset to make his foreign policy distinctive from his father’s. This unilateralist inclination was clearly the younger Bush’s choice. ![]() The administration walked away from the Kyoto talks on climate change, and withdrew US support for the Rome statute establishing the international criminal court, going so far as to declare that it would “unsign” the treaty. While Bush Sr and Scowcroft cherished multilateralism and diplomacy, George W’s White House raised American exceptionalism to new heights, enthusiastically tossing US entanglements with the international community on the bonfire. However, beneath the surface lay plans for radical change from the very beginning.Įven before 9/11, the younger Bush led his administration in a quite different direction from his father. The latter two would emerge as the doves in the Bush administration, but at the time, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice were also seen as embodiments of continuity, steady hands at the side of a presidential candidate vulnerable to allegations of inexperience. He has sought to distance himself from his George Bush Jr’s political exploits. ![]() George Bush Sr and his wife Barbara in 2010. The Vulcans who huddled at Bush’s Texas ranch at Crawford also included the former and future defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the man who would become his deputy at the Pentagon, leading neoconservative ideologue Paul Wolfowitz, as well as former top general Colin Powell, together with his close confidant, Richard Armitage. They called themselves “ the Vulcans”, not as a tribute to Spock, but to demonstrate they were as tough (or as Bush Sr might say, “iron-ass”) as the Roman god of fire. ![]() The two were part of a group of foreign and security policy advisers that Bush Jr gathered around him during the 2000 election campaign. Dick Cheney had been his defence secretary, and Condoleezza Rice was a Russian specialist in the first Bush White House and protege of Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush’s national security adviser and friend. Both father and brother have sought to create distance without appearing to throw a close family member under a bus.įor Bush Sr, the dilemma is all the more agonising as some of the White House advisers he now criticises are former employees he bequeathed to his son. It is another public window into a family wrestling with the most toxic legacies of the junior Bush’s presidency, the Iraq invasion and torture, and it comes after a series of episodes on the Republican primary trail in which Jeb Bush has tried to dodge a definitive verdict on his elder brother’s exploits. ![]() The personal quotes in the new biography of George HW Bush, Destiny and Power: the American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush by Jon Meacham, show he has neither given up his long struggle with English syntax, nor abandoned his protective feelings towards his son and successor in the White House. ![]()
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