The George W. Bush presidency has found its Samuel Pepys.
This chronicler is Timothy S. Goeglein, who, by his own
endearingly modest account, was neither particularly senior nor
influential in the administration’s pecking order. His career
trajectory was limited, ending in tears when he had to resign over
a plagiarism scandal. But he kept his records and he knows how to
write.
Sometimes it is the unobtrusive observers of White House life
who provide the freshest insights into a president’s character.
Goeglein was a West Wing insider for seven years. He worked as Karl
Rove’s assistant and deputy director of the Office of Public
Liaison — the underestimated switchboard where faith
and politics get connected.
From this vantage point Goeglein gives an account that reveals
much that is new about the 43rd president. The author’s own fall
from grace forms a complementary story from the viewpoint of
a zealous fellow conservative and occasional presidential prayer
partner who passed through fires of failure and humiliation on his
road back to redemption.
Goeglein was caught red-handed as a serial plagiarizer in the
columns he was writing for his Indiana hometown newspaper. He
immediately resigned from the administration, never expecting to
see George W. Bush again.
But behind the public departure came private forgiveness.
Summoned to the Oval Office for what he expected to be “a woodshed
moment,” Goeglein was welcomed by President Bush with the words
“Tim, I have known mercy and grace in my own life and I am offering
it to you now….I want you to know that you are forgiven.”
Seating his guest in the chair of honor by the fireplace usually
reserved for visiting heads of state, the president talked and
prayed for 20 minutes with his prodigal aide. A few days later
Goeglein was invited back to the White House with his wife and two
young sons for a second session of presidential sympathy. “The
grace he showed me upon that exit was a reflection of his faith in
Jesus Christ,” writes Goeglein whose journey toward healing and
peace began soon afterward.
Not all powerful leaders walk their talk. One of the most
attractive features of his memoir,
The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics
in the George W. Bush Era (B&H Books), is the intimate
portrait Goeglein paints of his president as a man of genuine
humility and deep spiritual commitment. This is so different from
the cynical and often rather shallow media image of George W. that
the question will be asked: Is this revisionism for real?
Reality looks different from the inside track of power. This
book is a chronicle of glimpses and episodes. It is not a
comprehensive history of the Bush years. But when Goeglein is up
close to the action he sees clearly. Some of his best insights are
about family-related issues on which he rightly rates his boss as a
high achiever. For example, the account of the stem-cell research
policy shows the President to have been intellectually, morally,
and workaholically engaged in the decision-making process, deeply
involved in finding what he believed to be the right balance
between medical necessities and his own pro-life instincts.
Tim Goeglein is himself staunchly pro-life, an issue of pivotal
but neuralgic importance when securing support for presidential
nominees to the Supreme Court. Three of this book’s most riveting
chapters tell the inside story of how the White House team fought
for Bush’s two successful (John Roberts and Samuel Alioto) and one
unsuccessful (Harriet Miers) court nominations. This was a saga
that began when Goeglein was, by several hours, the first
presidential staffer to know, after being tipped off by a family
friend, that Chief Justice Rehnquist had passed away.
At the start of the third of these nomination battles, Karl Rove
came out of the Oval Office to say to his aide, “Your folks are
going to love this choice.” It was a telling phrase when applied to
the president’s selection of Samuel Alito. Yet Goeglein’s “folks”
were a somewhat more complicated mosaic of interest groups than the
label implies. Ever since its creation by Charles Colson and
Richard Nixon in 1970, the White House Office of Public Liaison has
reached out to a broader constituency than onesize-fits-all
conservatism. Goeglein uses the title “values voters” to define the
coalition he courted. This courtship worked seven years ago, but as
we enter the 2011–12 season of presidential campaigning with new
standard bearers like Romney, Bachmann, and Perry it is not yet
clear whose values will be victorious.
The Bush reelection team in 2004 had the advantages of
incumbency, a weak opponent, and clarity of presentation.
Goeglein’s account of how these strengths prevailed on his watch is
perhaps too simplistic and sweeping. Some of his claims such as
“values voters care deeply about HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa,
international sex trafficking and human rights in foreign
countries” seem overblown.
So what did really play in Peoria the last time a Republican won
the presidential election? And what can we learn about it from the
engine room of the Office of Public Liaison as presented in the
chapter “Getting Out the Values Voters”?
TIM GOEGLEIN WORKS HARD to persuade his readers that George W.
Bush was a good president. Opinions on this will differ. But where
this account really succeeds is in allowing Bush to emerge as a
good man. He comes over as thoroughly decent and devout. He never
dissembles. He has an exemplary family life. His prayerful faith is
sincere. He may have delegated too much on economic issues but he
delivered on his own highest priority, which was strengthening
America in the prevention of terrorism at home.
These qualities may well have helped to bring out the values
voters. Like many of his former targets, Goeglein responds
instinctively to George W. Bush’s virtues even though he can be
myopic about his hero’s faults. But the author evidently feels, as
the biographer of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone said of
his subject: “It was the character breathing through the sentences
that counted.”
Tim Goeglein’s own character was found wanting for a while. But
he recovered his own moral conscience, which is also, in Barry
Goldwater’s phrase, the conscience of a conservative. The political
principles of the author’s credo, explained in the final chapters,
would be applauded by any gathering of TAS readers. So would his
attractive portraits of his role models such as Bill Buckley and
Margaret Thatcher.
As a friend and fellow faller from political grace, I admire the
comeback Tim Goeglein has made. I also like his fervent loyalty to
the 43rd president. He comes out of these pages so well and in such
a sharp contrast to the assessments of most liberal journalists
that on the stock market of history George W. Bush shares look to
be a good buy.
