Keith Hennessey: George W. Bush is smarter than you

Admit it. Most of us are influenced by popular notions in the media or the culture, even though we would deny it. You might believe George W. Bush actually said "strategery." (He didn't. That came from a Will Farrell routine on Saturday Night Live, just as Sarah Palin never said, "I can see Russia from my house.")

So if you buy into the notion that Bush is a good man but not particularly bright, you might consider the notion that your own belief is not based on any particularly solid information. You don't know the man. You've never met him. (OK, maybe a few of you have, but not many.) So when someone who actually knows him well proclaims that Bush's intelligence is actually many levels above even most Ivy League scholars (of which he is one, by the way), you have to see that as either super-stubborn loyalty or something that challenges the very core of your thinking - which is timely as the George W. Bush Presidential Center opens. Hennessey is not timid in his assertion:

I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.

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One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?” The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve. I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.” He goes on to relate a lot of details about just how tough a challenge it was to go toe-to-toe with Bush intellectually in the White House. Far from his image as a mental lightweight, Hennessey says it was Bush who typically challenged the thinking and intellectual heft of his team. This passage seemed particularly illustrative:

On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)

Now maybe your opinion of Bush is set in so hard that there's nothing anyone can say that will make you think otherwise - certainly not the assertion of an alumnus of his administration who perhaps has an interest in burnishing his own credibility by propping up the president he served. (Although if you read Hennessey's blog with any regularity, you know he is no slouch.) But if you're intellectually honest, you probably should admit that your opinion of Bush's intelligence is based on very little direct knowledge, and certainly on far less direct knowledge than Hennessey himself brings to the equation. So why does this matter? It matters because, if the nation's collective notion of Bush's intelligence is poorly informed, then it stands to reason that the nation's entire concept of Bush's presidency - what he did and why did it - may be equally misguided. One of the features of the Bush Presidential Center is an interactive exercise in which the user is walked through situations Bush faced during his presidency, and is briefed with the same information Bush's advisors gave him. The user is asked to make a decision on the issue, and after the user does so, Bush himself appears on screen and explains why he made the decision he did. The whole idea of decision-making was of course the prevailing theme of Bush's memoir Decision Points, which by the way was a far more intellectual offering (see that?) than your typical presidential memoir, which is often just the story of the man's life. Bush said he wasn't interested in such a self-aggrandizing exercise, and wanted instead to write a book that would inform the American public about what he did and why he did it. It's easy to look back at Bush's presidency and say, well, Iraq was a tough go, we ran up deficits, we didn't solve certain problems. Much of that frustrates me too, although I've often said and will say again that the Republican Congress that was in place for much of Bush's presidency was far from a profile in courage. But regardless, few really understand all the challenges of governing, or can really make an honest assessment of why presidents have to make the choices they make. Finally, if you really examine honestly where your opinion of Bush's intelligence comes from, and you find that it's been influenced in large part by late-night comedians or by the occasional embarrassing quote repeated over and over again - and not by any real inside knowledge of the man's depth - you might want to ask some questions about your own intelligence. If you draw such confident conclusions on the basis of such scant evidence, maybe you are the dunce you have always believed George W. Bush to be. Maybe that's why he became president and you didn't.