Bush showed brutish approach wasn’t prudent

The elder Bush, by contrast, was tagged by an October 1987 Newsweek cover story headline: “Fighting the Wimp Factor.” Then-editor Evan Thomas, who penciled in the word “wimp” over the objection of the story’s reporter, Margaret Garrard Warner, apologized for that in an essay last December.

Good. Bush’s life was anything but wimpy. He enlisted in the Navy at age 18. He was shot down over the Pacific and rescued by a submarine crew after floating in hostile waters for four hours. He led the nation in the war to push Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, yet was prudent enough to refrain from expanding the war into the disastrous invasion that would come under his son’s administration.

He managed the U.S. reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union without triggering a catastrophe. In an extraordinary display of political courage that probably cost him a second term, he broke his own “no new taxes” pledge to reach a compromise with Democrats to reduce the deficit that had been run up under President Ronald Reagan.

The elder Bush was no wimp, writes the conservative National Review’s David French, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. “No, he was a man in full,” French writes. “Decency requires strength. The conservative movement (and our nation) would do well to remember that vital truth.”

So would liberals and others on the left and right. Both sides need to remember that theatrical displays of toughness and strength cannot substitute for core values.

There’s a proper time and place for everything, my dad used to say. A president’s primary job is to run the government and command our national defenses. But presidents also set a tone that shapes a national culture.

If the unbridled and brutish side of masculinity takes over, the culture breeds more brutes. The elder Bush invited both praise and satire when he insisted that some bold, yet risky, moves “wouldn’t be prudent.” But prudence has its place when it reminds us to consider the serious and often unforeseen consequences of our theatrics. That doesn’t make us wimps. It means we’re smart.