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GQ magazine recently published excerpts from former George W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer's new tell-all book, Speech Less: Tales of a White House Survivor. Here are some particularly amusing highlights, via NY magazine:
8. Bush Wears Crocs: Particularly when he practices speeches.
7. Bush Nicknamed Speechwriter Jonathan Horn "Horny":This is not surprising at all, just funny.
6. Bush Is Arrogant About Things He Shouldn't Be Arrogant About: "I know it sounds arrogant to say," he told Latimer, “but I redefined the Republican Party."
5. Bush Takes Pride in Thinking up Very Simple Jokes: “If bullshit was currency,” he said straight-faced, “Joe Biden would be a billionaire.”
4. Bush Refers to People As "Cat": "We got to make this understandable for the average cat," he said of one speech.
3. Bush Didn't Have Much Regard for Barack Obama: Bush remarked, "This guy has no clue, I promise you."
2. Bush Didn't Understand His Administration's Own Economic Proposals: “We’re buying low and selling high,” Bush kept saying about the Treasury's plan to snap up troubled mortgages. The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that. One of Bush's staff members anxiously pulled a few of us aside. “The president is misunderstanding this proposal,” he warned. “He has the wrong idea in his head.”
Eventually, Bush, exasperated, deliver[ed] a classic line: "Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?" he asked.
1. Bush Was Remarkably Prescient About Sarah Palin: Right after Palin was selected as John McCain's running mate...Bush delivered what would become a spot-on assessment of her liabilities: "This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for," he said. "She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out." Never mind the fact that Bush, when he ran for president, also lacked experience on the national level.
Last Friday night (September 11), I arrived home from work relatively early to find Jason watching NY1. Like they've done before, NY1 had spent the day running tape of their real-time coverage from September 11, 2001.
I am one of lucky ones. I did not know anyone killed on 9/11. A couple of my friends were directly affected (and still are) by the events of that day. But, outside of my sadness for the victims and outrage over the damage a group of fanatics was able to perpetrate, what sticks with me now is how I felt about losing those two towers. The towers that framed my earliest childhood days in NYC; that filled my airplane window on repeat visits to the city after we'd moved away; that excited and welcomed me when I returned to live here in my 20s.
Swirling around with all the other emotions I experienced on 9/11 was my initial feeling of shock and sadness at the towers having been so badly marred. I remember wondering how they were going to repair that gaping hole all the way up there and picturing how atrocious the buildings would look until repairs were done. Next, I felt shock and sorrow at the grotesque sight of one tower standing by itself, alone on the skyline without its twin. Next, utter devastation as both towers vanished from our skyline forever.
To this day, a sense of disbelief prevails.
Now, years later, when I watch coverage of the events of that day, I am struck with a feeling of loss not unlike what I've felt for a beloved pet. It's as though I've spent the past eight years mourning a trusted friend. And still, I mourn for those buildings and the lives lost inside them. I have read, talked and thought quite a bit about 9/11 since that day, but have always tried to avoid visual imagery. It's too painful to see the look of fear and sorrow on witnesses' faces, to see images of firefighters rushing in to the buildings, of the buildings themselves crumbling with so many souls inside.
Yet, this year, I could not tear myself away from the images. I felt as though I owed it to the victims and the towers themselves to revisit that day, to remember and to reflect. I needed to remind myself how fortunate and how grateful I am to have survived that day and to have not lost anyone close to me. Watching the news with Jason, I laid my head in his lap and and held him close, remembering the overwhelming loneliness I felt on the night of 9/11, when I did not have him (or anyone) beside me on the couch as I am so lucky to have now.
After Jason went to bed, I watched a couple of hours of A&E's coverage with a very heavy heart, but a sense of duty to the victims and the towers themselves not to change the channel. I felt I owed it to myself and to those who were sacrificed to reflect as intensely as I did this year, after so many years of passively marking the anniversary. I realized you don't need to lose a family member or dear friend to be in mourning. I still mourn.
As it has every year since 2001, this day on the calendar conjures up a jangle of emotions and reflections. I remember so vividly the despair and helplessness I felt, being a New Yorker, watching the events unfold with disbelief, sitting in my Upper West Side apartment that night, five miles from the World Trade Center site, crying and shaking, unable to make sense of what had happened.
The first anniversary of the attacks was easily the hardest. Wall-to-wall coverage in the NYC and national media, everyone still so very raw and shocked and sad. The entire island of Manhattan seemed to be covered in a fog that first year, denser in certain areas and among certain groups of people. You could see it in people's faces and sense it almost instinctively when a stranger on the subway or the sidewalk was telling you with their eyes, "I know."
On the first anniversary of the attacks, the NY Times published a section featuring the names and photos of everyone who died. When you hear a death toll expressed as a number (in this case, 2,752), it's an abstract, intangible thing, hard to visualize in terms of real quantity.
I tried to avoid the news all day, but when I arrived at Jason's apartment that night, I saw he had taped each page of the NY Times spread along the wall in his hallway. Photo after photo after photo after photo. It was so utterly devastating to see all those faces--real people, in the flesh, not just a number in a news article. I stared at that wall for a long time, unable to tear myself away. I marveled at the magnitude. I mourned all those people I'd never met and the impact their deaths had on me, my friends, my family, my city.
I felt similarly the first time I visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. All those names etched in stone. You walk along that wall and the names just keep coming, thousands upon thousands. It is a simple, yet extremely powerful represenation. Similar, too, and with a great deal of personal meaning for me: the schoolchildren who collected 11 million paperclips to represent and honor the total lives lost during the Holocaust.
In successive years, the anniversary of 9/11 has gotten easier, but no less powerful. When I moved from NYC in 2004, I experienced the anniversary for the first time without people around me who'd been there. I cried in private that lonely year, but also in public, during a screening of "Fahrenheit 911." I was 3,000 miles from my city, watching the movie in a packed northern California cinema, not expecting imagery from that day to appear on the screen and make me explode in tears. The screen faded to black. The theatre fell silent; mine were the only sobs.
Poor souls jumped from the World Trade Center towers. That was, and still is, the part of that day's events that is most difficult for me to accept. I have tried putting myself in their shoes countless times, tried to imagine what they felt--the confusion, the terror, the helplessness--and I know I can never even begin to comprehend what they felt. I am nauseous just writing about it now. It's still so shocking, after all these years. Will it ever cease to be so?
Even now, whenever I find myself in lower Manhattan, my heart aches. When I go home to Brooklyn or cross the river into New Jersey and look back at the skyline, I feel lost and brokenhearted taking in its altered appearance. Something will always be missing from the view.
My heart is heavy today, though, like millions of Americans, I'm moving through my typical workday routine, drinking my coffee, reading my email, wishing co-workers a good morning and a good weekend. Lots of people saying "Never forget" today. As if we need to be told.