# Posted 7:52 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BUSH II OR REAGAN III? It is a dangerous thing to write about Ronald Reagan. No matter how much one knows about him, one cannot say that one understands him. Nonetheless, in the hope of knowing more, I sat down today and began to read President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, the WaPo correspondent who spent almost three decades writing about the Great Communicator.

While I sat down with Cannon's book because my dissertation demanded it, I couldn't help but compare Reagan to George W. Bush. As multiple commentators have observed, both the character and ideology of the current president are far more similar to that of Reagan than that of his own father.

As someone with a special interest in foreign policy, the most apparent similarity from my perspective is the dependence of both Reagan and the younger Bush on a circle of feuding advisers to provide them with the specific knowledge necessary to forge an actual policy. While I don't recall making this comparison explicitly, it was very much on my mind when I was posting about the divide within Bush's cabinet.

But now, having read the first handful of chapters in Cannon's book, I think its important to emphasize a critical distinction between the Reagan and Bush styles of consulting their inner circle.

According to Cannon, Reagan expected his advisors to achieve a consensus among themselves before bringing their options to him. To some degree, this approach was grounded in Reagan's strong averson to interpersonal conflict of all kinds. In contrast, Bush seems to welcome his closest advisors' presentation of contrasting perspectives and strategies, from which he chooses the most effective.

Another aspect of Reagan's approach was his avoidance of all unnecessary detail, almost to the point of being self-destructive. For example, James Baker (then Chief of Staff) approached the President on the morning of the only G7 economic summit held in the US during Reagan's eight years of office, only to find that Reagan hadn't even opened the briefing book Baker had given him the night before.

Although hesitant to confront the President, Baker asked him why he hadn't opened the book. In all seriousness, Reagan replied that the Sound of Music was on the night before and that he wanted to watch it.

From where I stand, this aversion to detail explains how Reagan could, in all sincerity, make the sort of absurd pronouncements that his critics found so maddening, e.g. that the Salvadoran army was struggling to reduce human rights violations or that the brutal Contras were the moral equivalent of the United States' Founding Fathers.

(Now, if you are one of those revisionist historians who believes that the Founding Fathers were genocidal plutocratic racists, the comparison works. But I digress...)

In contrast to Reagan, I think Bush has a far greater command of detail, despite constant attacks on his intelligence and competence as a public speaker.

What made this contrast click in my mind was an anecdote recounted in a front-page story on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in yesterday's WaPo. The anecdote runs as follows:

Bush called Sharon a "man of peace" last year, infuriating Arabs angry over the Israeli army's actions against Palestinians in the West Bank. Bush publicly has not backed off that statement, but last year he privately rebuked Sharon when the Israeli leader began to repeat the comment to the president, administration officials said.

Bush interrupted Sharon when he began to say he was a "man of peace and security," according to a witness to the exchange who recounted it. "I know you are a man of security," Bush said. "I want you to work harder on the peace part."

Then, adding a bit of colloquial language that first seemed to baffle Sharon, Bush jabbed: "I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that."

Bush final jab shows that he understands both his critics' motivations and the tactical value of refusing to change his stance regardless of such objections.

(While were on the subject of the Middle East, make sure to read this excellent op-ed about Sharon and Abu Mazen by Fareed Zakaria.)

In the final analysis, I think one should be very careful when analogizing between divisions in the Reagan and Bush cabinets. Yes, both Presidents are from being experts on foreign policy. But one of them has a much more productive method for taking advantage of his advisors' expertise. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion