When Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about Roosevelt's first class temperament, he never explained why that was important.It didn’t explain how, for a future President presiding over victory in two wars, in just one term, without braggadocio, might matter. Nor did it explain that respecting those with disabilities and allowing it to become a civil rights issues mattered. Or how respecting manners in the conduct of both public and private affairs might shape the destiny of a great nation.
Yet it is precisely that temperament, that George Herbert Walker Bush brought to the Presidency.
All of this just might be an amusing dinner table conversation about days and behaviors gone by, if Jon Meacham, had not shown us how profoundly these qualities matter in the conduct and outcome of public and international diplomacy. Meacham's book about George H.W. Bush is Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush
.My conversation with Jon Meacham:
