From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Exceeding Expectations
An insider account of how Sept. 11 transformed President Bush.
Early September 2001 was a bleak time at the Bush White House. President Bush's approval rating was slipping, the economy was slumping and his domestic agenda was going nowhere. The president's speechwriters received early notice of "the big new initiative for the fall"--a grab bag of feel-good measures to address social ills ranging from obscene music lyrics and families not eating dinner together to school shootings and racial intolerance.
The ideas were hardly bold: One policy paper suggested that newspapers be encouraged to print more positive stories, another that the federal government promote e-mail as a way for grandparents to keep in better touch with their grandkids. "My heart sank at the thought of it all," writes David Frum, who, from his perch as one of the president's speechwriters, believed that he was watching the implosion of the Bush presidency. Mr. Frum was so uninspired that on some days he would find himself falling asleep in his office with a book on his forehead.
"The Right Man" is David Frum's attempt to makes sense of how the Bush presidency was transformed after Sept. 11--in particular, how George W. Bush became a wartime president who inspired the country in the weeks after the terror attack and who remains a remarkably popular figure more than a year later. The book is part memoir, part political analysis. The memoir makes for the more compelling reading: Mr. Frum writes with wit and style, and with an eye for detail. The analysis takes up the post-Sept. 11 transformation itself, although Mr. Frum still seems unsure about just how it happened.
But first, Mr. Frum's story. His account of Sept. 11 at the White House is riveting. As panic spread after the attack on the Pentagon, he got persistent calls from his wife telling him to get out of the White House because surely it would be attacked next. "'No,' I said fiercely. 'No! I am not leaving!' I clicked off the phone, ready to . . . well, I don't know what I was ready to do--whatever it is that speechwriters do in times of war. Type, I suppose--but type with renewed patriotism and zeal." But Mr. Frum's heroic moment lasted less than two minutes. The Secret Service evacuated the building.
At first, the agents ordered everybody to move out in slow, orderly fashion. The vast hallways of the White House's Old Executive Office Building were packed. "Little streams of clicking feet merged into rivers of footsteps, and then into a torrent. 'Don't run!' the guards shouted, and the torrent slowed." But soon panic seemed to spread to the guards "'Run!' They now shouted. 'Ladies--if you can't run in heels, kick off your shoes.'"
Within a few hours, the White House speechwriting team was together again, set up at the Washington offices of DaimlerChrysler, which had offered emergency office space. Its task: come up with something for the president to tell the nation that night. Fears of another attack had Air Force One on the run, which was hardly reassuring. The team wrote something, which was scrapped by senior Bush aide Karen Hughes. Ms. Hughes offered her own hasty rewrite, which Mr. Frum describes as "a doughy pudding of stale metaphors" so bad that it became known around the White House as the "awful office address." The president was off to bad start.
"I could imagine Americans switching off their television sets and looking at one another with the same dismay I felt," Mr. Frum writes. "I could imagine them thinking: Bush was a nice fellow, a perfectly adequate president for a time of peace and quiet; but this was war, real war, and he had given not one indication all day long of readiness for his terrible new responsibilities."
So what changed? Well, for one, Ms. Hughes stopped messing with the speechwriters, who were able to craft two great speeches that set the tone for the post-Sept. 11 Bush presidency: one at the first memorial for the victims (Sept. 13), the other at a joint session of Congress (Sept. 20). "Bush's oratory in the ten days after the terrorist attacks," Mr. Frum writes, "transformed his leadership."
This may seem like a rather self-serving thing for a speechwriter to say, but he is at least partly right. And he acknowledges that some of Mr. Bush's most powerful words were unscripted, when he grabbed a bullhorn on his first trip to Ground Zero in New York and told the rescue workers, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
If there is an antagonist in Mr. Frum's account, it is Ms. Hughes, who may have tinkered with Mr. Frum's words one time too many. He says that she was the most powerful woman in the White House since Woodrow Wilson's wife, Edith, essentially ran the place in the final months of that presidency. In his mind, Ms. Hughes was more powerful than Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton, frequently pushing the president in the wrong direction on policy and turning his words into mushy compassionate conservatism. (She left in July 2002; Mr. Frum left four months before.)
Even as Mr. Frum tries to explain Mr. Bush's transformation, he doesn't seem quite convinced of it. He concludes with a laundry list of the president's virtues--"decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity"--but he seems more convinced and specific when he lists his faults: "He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader should be." So, again, how did the Bush presidency move so swiftly from fecklessness to firm command? Mr. Frum seems to need more time to figure it all out.
But then again, it may be premature to talk about the radical transformation of a presidency less than two years old. A lot can still happen.
Mr. Karl is CNN's congressional correspondent. David Frum's book is available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
