George Bush biography: Did President ‘41’ disapprove of the Iraq war?

First, a question for keen students of American politics. Who are the only three US presidents since 1924 not to have written a memoir of their years in power? Two are obvious: Franklin Roosevelt and John F Kennedy, who died while still in office. But the third? The answer is the 41st occupant of the Oval Office, George HW Bush. Remember him?

The reasons for this omission are intriguing to ponder. Maybe it's just in the man's character. The first Bush, the last president from the old East Coast Wasp establishment that once ran the country, may have been the nicest leader America ever had. By almost universal consent, he is decent, thoughtful and kind, with a remarkable capacity not to bear grudges. "Grace" is a word frequently used to describe him. Not for "Bush 41" the score-settling or post facto "setting the record straight" that such volumes often amount to.

Unkinder souls might argue that, given his verbal infelicities and rhetorical limitations, an autobiography would have bombed. But such shortcomings did not hold back his son George W Bush ("43"). Or perhaps the reticence simply reflects the elder Bush's unique position, as anchor of the most successful political family in modern US history. Patriarchs do not need to explain themselves, nor do gentlemen blow their own trumpets.

The nearest Bush came to that was A World Transformed, a manual of the momentous world events that marked his four years in the White House between 1989 and 1993, co-authored with his national security adviser and trusted lieutenant Brent Scowcroft. The book was an absorbing reflection on the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War. But it lifted few of the veils around a gregarious but very private person. Happily though, the gap has finally been filled.

Jon Meacham's Destiny and Power is an unabashedly admiring portrait, built on many interviews with "41" between 2006 and 2015, access to the diaries of his wife Barbara – and, most important, to those of his subject, dictated into a pocket cassette recorder during the 12 years Bush Snr was Vice-President and then President.

Yet the biography reveals another side to the man: his competitiveness and readiness to "do what it takes" to reach the highest political office. And most fascinating of all, it sheds new light on the complicated, endlessly dissected, relationships within the Bush dynasty. Some 2,500 years ago, Sophocles wrote about Oedipus and Laius. America, say many Bush watchers (or "psycho-babblers" as both former Presidents disdainfully call them), has its modern equivalents in 41 and 43.

To a certain extent, the warmth with which Meacham approaches Bush is merely a push at a wide-open door. History is usually kind to ex-presidents: even George Jnr, who left office with an approval rating of 32 per cent, is now attracting some friendlier attention. But few have seen their reputations improve like his father has.

One reason is the sheer contrast between the party that the elder George Bush led, and its modern-day successor. At 91 and in frail health, he represents an almost extinct breed of Republican politician: experienced, pragmatic and moderate, ready to compromise with opponents if a deal is in the national interest. Compare and contrast with the 2016 Republican presidential field, led by a retired neurosurgeon with a tenuous grasp of fact and a bullying property-impresario-cum-reality television star, neither of whom have spent a day in elective office. Bush Snr's qualifications for highest office were unequalled, before or since. "The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush" reads the subtitle of Meacham's book – and odyssey it truly has been. Son of a US senator, Bush went to a swanky New England boarding school. He was shot down over the Pacific by the Japanese in a combat mission during the Second World War. He attended Yale, but instead of easing into a comfy Wall Street job went off to Texas to set up an oil business. Later he served as congressman, chairman of the Republican Party, US Ambassador to the United Nations and then China, and director of the CIA, capped by eight years as Ronald Reagan's Vice-President. Not even Hillary Clinton has a CV to match.

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Yes, he was a one-term president, defeated by Bill Clinton, who portrayed Bush as uninterested in domestic policy, bereft of ideas and generationally out of touch. There was truth in those charges. And a Republican party already starting its rightward drift could be even less kind. Bush was a wimp, a heretic who agreed to tax increases.

By his own admission, too, he lacked "the vision thing". But that may be no bad thing these days, in a party whose doctrines, closed to all compromise, often appear to have parted company with reality. Meanwhile, Bush's foreign policy achievements looked good at the time – and look even better in the light of what has come after.

Why, journalists would ask back then, did he seem so unexcited by the end of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and then of the Soviet Union itself? Well, "no gloating" was Bush's guiding principle: triumphalism, he reasoned, might provoke a wounded Soviet Union to lash out, with terrible consequences. Instead, the Communist regime unravelled and Germany was reunified in 1990, with scarcely a shot fired in anger. His deft crisis management was a huge factor in this benign outcome and – who knows? – if Bush were president now, he might even have made a friend of Vladimir Putin.

The same deftness was evident over Iraq. In 1991 he put together a genuine global coalition and secured a specific UN mandate to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. The first Gulf War was won by a swift and devastating ground campaign, and Bush stopped exactly where he said he would. He didn't press on to Baghdad, calculating that to topple Saddam would further destabilise the Arab world. Believe it or not, the US even turned a profit on the war, thanks to contributions from the rich Gulf countries. How different from his son's war of choice in 2003, which cost trillions and helped throw the region into chaos, and which some historians believe was the biggest US foreign policy blunder in a century – Vietnam included.

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And therein lies the central fascination of Meacham's book. Did Bush Snr disapprove of the unprovoked 2003 Iraq invasion? Was Junior, desperate to escape Dad's shadow, seeking to show he was tougher than his father by going all the way on to Baghdad, thus remaking the Middle East in a way 41 did not dare?

Or, by contrast, might Dubya not have been the "decider" at all: was his a puppet presidency manipulated, in his first term at least, by those cronies from way back, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence? One thinks of the wonderful image conjured up by The New York Times columnist and ace Bush-tormenter Maureen Dowd (known, incidentally, to the family as the "Cobra"), of Cheney and Rummy kicking George Jnr up to bed at 9pm, and then settling down in the Oval Office over a couple of bourbons to run the war.

No, it wasn't quite like that. But Meacham, a sensitive and meticulous biographer, does unearth some gems. In one of their conversations, Bush chides his son for his aggressive language that made the US appear a unilateralist warmonger. In particular he disapproves of the phrase "Axis of Evil" that 43 used to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea in his 2002 State of the Union address. He also blames his son for not keeping Cheney on a shorter leash. Instead, the vice-president and his staff were allowed to operate what amounted to their own state department, formulating policy and speaking openly about it. Loyal to a fault, Bush Snr would never have dreamt of such a thing back in the Reagan days – even though his own boss was said sometimes to have been literally asleep at the wheel.

But whether Bush Snr was opposed to the invasion is less clear. As Meacham has it, 41 accepted he was no longer in the game. He would give advice only if requested. And if his son concluded that war was the only choice, then so be it. As for the born-again Junior, the arbiter he consulted was not his biological father but "a higher father". In fact, father and son seem to have discussed Iraq rather more than either has admitted. And if they did disagree, it did not lead to estrangement; if anything the opposite. The Bushes are a tight clan that venerates its patriarch. For proof, look no further than 41's A Portrait of My Father, the encomium to Dad that Bush Jnr published exactly a year ago. "It's a love story," he told CNN at the time.

Far more damning are the father's complaints about Cheney and Rumsfeld. On both he bestows the epithet "iron-ass". The animosity towards the man his son put in charge of the Pentagon is no surprise. Bush Snr and Rumsfeld have been rivals for 40 years, since their days in the Ford administration; and the latter, according to the former president, was "an arrogant fellow". He told Meacham, "There's a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks... I don't like what he did and I think it hurt the president [his son]." Offered by his biographer a chance to tone down the criticism, he turned it down. "That's what I said."

Cheney's case is more puzzling. In the first Gulf war, he was Bush's Secretary of Defence, low-key, eminently competent and in agreement with the decision not to push on to Baghdad. Then something happened. Maybe it was real fear born of the 9/11 attacks. But maybe, Bush Snr mused to Meacham, Cheney was swayed by the hardline views of his wife Lynne (see below) and daughter Liz.

Either way, however, he was a man transformed. "I don't recognise my friend Dick Cheney any more," Scowcroft told The New Yorker in 2006 – and nor does Bush Snr. (As for Cheney himself, he has let it be known that he wears the "iron-ass" description like a badge of honour.)

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But the ramifications for the family don't end there – because now the second son Jeb is also vying for the White House, and having to contend with the inevitable, distracting questions about his dad, his brother and Iraq. George W may look like his father, but he acquired his sharp edge from his mother Barbara. Jeb, the son who long seemed the most likely next President Bush, is in temperament much more his father's boy. Jeb seems bemused by the rightward, anti-establishment lurch of the Republican party. So is 41. "I'm getting old at just the right time," he says, reflecting on contemporary US politics.

And truly Bush Snr is of a vanished era. Yes, he could fight dirty when he had to. But he also could always see the good side of another human being. Even the criticism of Rumsfeld and Cheney is of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger variety. No politician made more kind gestures, or traded more heavily in simple human politeness.

And if he didn't write a memoir, he left a library's worth of handwritten notes. No President ever wrote more of them, to friend and foe, to people who even briefly crossed his path. One stands out in Meacham's book. It was written in 1995 or 1996, long after Bush had left office, addressed to The Washington Post reporter Ann Devroy, once scourge of his White House, but now stricken with cancer. It's worth quoting at length.

There had been tension between them, Bush acknowledged. "I was the out-of-touch president, the wimp, you were the Beltway insider who thrived on who's up, who's down. But now… you are fighting a battle that far transcends the battles of the political wars. Strangely, wonderfully, I feel close to you now. I want you to win this battle. I want that same toughness that angered me and frustrated me… to see you through your fight."

If that isn't class, what is? "I feel like an asterisk," Bush told Meacham in another of their conversations. "I am lost between the glory of Reagan – monuments everywhere, trumpets, the great hero – and the trials and tribulations of my sons." The gentleman, as so often, is too modest.

Who made Dick Cheney an 'iron ass'? If you thought he was illiberal, then meet his wife...

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That Dick Cheney, Dubya's vice president, is an "iron ass" is well known. But according to John Meacham, he's not the biggest "iron ass" in the Cheney household. That accolade goes to his wife, Lynne.

Cheney himself has scoffed at the notion attributed to George HW Bush by Meacham that over time his wife had somehow turned him into said "iron-ass" by being one herself. He got there all by himself, he has joked. What he doesn't deny is that his wife is indeed made of stern stuff.

The reputation was earned during her years as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, created to encourage research and innovation at universities, libraries and museums, from 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president, until 1993. From that high perch, she railed against what she saw as the proliferation by professors of political correctness on campuses and a slow erosion of traditional values.

In 2000, even before her husband became vice-president, she slammed Eminem for lyrics she said insulted women. And n 2013 she told Alan Simpson, a respected former US senator from Wyoming to "shut up" at a public fundraiser.

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Her profile as a conservative was high enough that, when it was clear in 2000 that George W Bush had won the Republican Party nomination, it was her name that came up first as a possible No 2 on his ticket. Only later did Dick Cheney, who had been in charge of the candidate's vice-presidential search team, emerge as the person George W would pick. Social conservatives applauded the choice of Mr Cheney in part because Lynne was his wife.

Ms Cheney has been a consistent critic of schools and universities for failing, in her view, to spend enough time teaching Americans about their history and their past leaders. Part of her solution has been to write her own history books, the most recent on former President James Madison.

Some of the books aim to catch children early such as America: A Patriotic Primer, an alphabetic canter through everything that makes America great. Thus, B is for "the Birthday of this country of ours", while "F is for Freedom and the Flag that we fly" (complete with instructions on how to fold a flag with respect, and how to say the Pledge of Allegiance) and "V is for Valour!"

But it would appear Mrs Cheney is less than "iron-ass" when it comes to her two daughters, Mary and Liz. In 2007 she parted with fellow conservatives and opposed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Mary is a lesbian – and it could be the "shut up" to Simpson had to do with Liz Cheney's efforts at the time to unseat a sitting senator in Wyoming. Her campaign fizzled but many in the party, Simpson included, disapproved.