Dubya and me

I know that two invitations from the president should have spurred me to action, but I wasn’t planning to be in Washington until the following August. In the meantime, at the University of Illinois, where I had become a journalism professor after leaving The Washington Post in 1996, I was surrounded by students and faculty angry about Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq. In my academic cocoon, Bush was called a stupid warmonger trying to avenge his father’s failure to oust Saddam Hussein, a stupid warmonger trying to make the world safe for Big Oil, a stupid warmonger trying to prop up his sagging popularity. I told colleagues that I believed Bush—right or wrong—sincerely considered Iraq a deadly threat to the United States, period. My view got me labeled a Bush conservative. Then one morning I got into my academic office building’s elevator and saw this scratched into the paint: “Kill Bush.”

I had to catch my breath: Was this America?

When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd invoked my by-then ancient Washington Post Magazine article about GHWB in arguing that W. was little more than “a wealthy white man with the right ancestors,” I wrote a column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch responding both to Dowd and to all the vitriol directed toward the president.

“I have told various George W. haters that they had best not underestimate the man,” I wrote, “that he’s smart, thoughtful in a brawny kind of way and, most of all, a good and decent man. … What I’ve never mentioned is that I didn’t vote for George W. I disagree with him on the Supreme Court, environment, abortion, the death penalty and affirmative action. So I voted against this good and decent man. It pained me to do it. … It baffles me that grown people must convince themselves that those with whom they disagree are stupid or malevolent.”