Destiny and Power Quotes

“The American people,” Small added, “must understand that as soon as America doesn’t stand for something in the world, there is going to be a tremendous erosion of freedom.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Where Goldwater-ites saw the world in black and white, Rockefeller noted shades of gray.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Two days later, in another diary entry, the defeated president said: “I still feel that there is a disconnect…honor, duty, and country—it’s just passé. The values are different now, the lifestyles, the accepted vulgarity, the manners, the view of what’s patriotic and what’s not, the concept of service. All these are in the hands of a new generation now, and I feel I have the comfort of knowing that I have upheld these values and I live and stand by them. I have the discomfort of knowing that they might be a little out of date.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Honor, duty, country. Those verities, together with a driving ambition and an abiding competitive spirit, had shaped his life and his understanding of the nation.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Americans tend to prefer their presidents on horseback: heroes who dream big and sound trumpets. There is, however, another kind of leader – quieter and less glamorous but no less significant – whose virtues repay our attention. There is greatness in political lives dedicated more to steadiness than to boldness, more to reform than to revolution, more to management of complexity than to the making of mass movements.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Well,” Bush answered, “I’m worried that sometimes your idealism will get in the way of what I think is sound governance.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Americans unhappy with the reflexively polarized politics of the first decades of the twenty-first century will find the presidency of George H. W. Bush refreshing, even quaint. He embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price. Quaint, yes: But it happened, in America, only a quarter of a century ago.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“You don’t kick a man when he is down,” Bush dictated. “You don’t revel in his demise. You don’t pile on in life.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“If oil was found, they were likely to profit; if there was just a dry hole, they could still write off much of the expense of the investment.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“There is, however, another kind of leader—quieter and less glamorous but no less significant—whose virtues repay our attention. There is greatness in political lives dedicated more to steadiness than to boldness, more to reform than to revolution, more to the management of complexity than to the making of mass movements. Bush’s life code, as he once put it in a letter to his mother, was “Tell the truth. Don’t blame people. Be strong. Do your Best. Try hard. Forgive. Stay the course.” Simple propositions—deceptively simple, for such sentiments are more easily expressed than embodied in the arena of public life.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“The better you did—the more contests you won—the greater the next goal, the greater the next mission.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“I still feel that there is a disconnect…honor, duty, and country—it’s just passé. The values are different now, the lifestyles, the accepted vulgarity, the manners, the view of what’s patriotic and what’s not, the concept of service. All these are in the hands of a new generation now, and I feel I have the comfort of knowing that I have upheld these values and I live and stand by them. I have the discomfort of knowing that they might be a little out of date.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Bush attended daily briefings in the Oval Office, and there were weekly lunches, usually on Thursdays, featuring Mexican food. (Bush added a lot of hot sauce to his chili; Reagan did not.) “Before lunch every week, there was a vacuuming for new jokes to tell,” recalled Boyden Gray, Bush’s legal counsel. (Bush dropped some jelly beans into his lap by mistake one day while sitting in the Oval Office. “George, I’ve got a question to ask you,” Reagan said. “What else do you feed that thing besides jelly beans?”)”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“He was careful about the appearance of cashing in on his government service, refusing a directorship with McDonnell Douglas, the aerospace company. There was another road not taken in these months when Bush declined an offer from Ross Perot to run Perot’s oil business in Houston. “I’ll pay you a lot of money,” Perot told Bush, who considered the idea. (“This was before Ross became really strange,” Bush recalled.) The Bushes and the Perots were friendly, and the Perots once visited Kennebunkport as the Bushes’ guests. “I thought about it,” Bush recalled. When he did his due diligence with mutual acquaintances, however, Bush found no support for the idea of going to work for Perot. “I talked to some people, and they said, ‘For God’s sake don’t do that.’ So I said no, and thanked him profusely for thinking of me.” “Well, this is your big mistake,” Perot said, according to Bush. Speaking of himself in the third person, Perot went on: “You don’t say no to Ross Perot.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Bush went off to a tour of “the caves” beneath the city that had been arranged for him by Deng Xiaoping. It was a memorable Christmas Day. “Dig tunnels deep,” Mao had ordered his people, “store grain everywhere.” Mao’s mission: to create a means by which his people might survive a nuclear assault from the Soviet Union. The result: a vast project to create enormous underground shelters across China. Bush was met at an intersection and taken to a clothing store, where his tour guide pressed a concealed button that operated a trapdoor. They climbed down into the tunnels. Bush walked from room to room. There was enough space, he thought, for thousands in this subterranean kingdom.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“One plays by the conventions of politics in order to be in power when the hour calls for unconventional decisions.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Fairly or not, Bush thought Rumsfeld an unreflective hawk who, along with a post-9/11 Dick Cheney, had formed the core of an influential hard-right element within the administration.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“A confirmed free trader, Bush was committed to NAFTA”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Bush 41 was the only Republican around who knew that anything that consistently defies arithmetic can’t work for very long.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Reagan was known as something Bush would never be: the Great Communicator. Instead of learning from the president he served for eight years, Bush appears to have become intimidated by the Reagan rhetorical legacy. He therefore preferred the press conference format, where he could jump around from topic to topic in a way that matched his personal hyperdrive.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Dan, what people want is results. That’s what matters.’ ” Bush’s discomfort with the rhetorical requirements of his office was one of his cardinal weaknesses as a president.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Dan Rostenkowski, the Democratic chairman of Ways and Means, for help. Over lunch in December 1988, “Rosty” agreed to “avoid embarrassing the new President on taxes for one year—but for only one year,” Dick Darman recalled. “Given the no-new-taxes pledge,” Darman noted, “even a one-year reprieve seemed better than none.” Bush took it, happily. Darman was reading Time’s coverage of the bipartisan announcement of a 1989 budget that avoided the hard choices until 1990. The headline, Darman knew, said it all: “Wait Till Next Year.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“After the deep recession of 1981–82, the country had had several good years under the Reagan presidency. (Though at a price: The federal debt—or accumulated deficits—had tripled from fiscal 1980 to fiscal 1989.) Beginning in 1989, the economy grew at below-typical rates.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“The federal budget had last been in balance under President Johnson. Since then, federal outlays had outpaced federal revenues at an ever-rising rate.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“No incumbent vice president had been elected to succeed an incumbent president since Martin Van Buren won in 1836.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“The vice president had also been present at an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday, January 7, 1986, when Secretary of State George Shultz “argued fiercely and with passion against any arms sales to Iran, especially arms sales connected to the release of the hostages,” Shultz recalled. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who was also there, agreed with Shultz, and said so. “No one else did,” Shultz recalled. Bush was silent as Reagan decided to proceed amid what Weinberger recalled as “talk of the hostages as one of the motivating factors.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“The record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages as part of an initiative to reach out to moderate elements in Iran. “I’m one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there,” Bush told his diary on Wednesday, November 5, 1986. “It is not a subject we can talk about.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“On taxes, he had repudiated his 1980 “voodoo economics” language. It was a large price to pay for political viability, for Bush had been right that tax cuts alone could not lead to long-term fiscal health. Together with a general failure to curb spending in the Reagan years, the supply-side view, with its emphasis on lower taxes, was driving up the federal deficits and debt. Reagan’s successor, whoever he might be, would be forced to reckon with unpaid bills and persistent shortfalls.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

“Economically, Reagan’s followers—and Reagan himself—had been converted to the theory of “supply-side economics,” which held that tax cuts would stimulate so much economic activity that tax revenues would actually rise if rates were lower.”
― Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush