Inside The Mind Of George W. Bush

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As he was practicing his convention speech last week, he noticed that the language explaining this theory of liberation had been watered down. "Look," he said, loudly enough to startle his aides, "does everyone get why we're doing this? Why I sent troops into battle? This is big. This is big. This is big." The language was restored to its original form.

Bush is the first to say "I'm not a textbook player. I'm a gut player." While he reads history like a user's manual--he has finished Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton and is now on to one about Charles Lindbergh--Bush typically seems less curious about people's arguments than their motives for making them. That has its drawbacks. When the French warned about the potential hazards of occupying an Arab country--lessons learned from their colonial history--Bush's focus on their motives for avoiding war left little room for consideration of their arguments. Maybe Hans Blix wasn't just a peacenik but truly couldn't find weapons stockpiles. In fact, lots of people in a position to warn about risks that needed to be factored into the planning--we won't be welcomed, we will need more troops, the oil revenues won't pay for it, we will end up with a civil war--were seen as arguing against the war by other means.

Bush talks proudly about how his team members did have their disputes, but at the end of the day, everyone saluted and "got after it," as Bush would say. He talks about the process of decision making almost as proudly as the product. For him, the two are inseparable. "I had an advantage," Bush says. "I got to watch someone else do the job up close. I saw what it involved, saw some structural things that got in the way of his making good decisions." He concluded that flattening the hierarchy is what prevents your being isolated by your power. "If I were interviewing a guy for the job of President," Bush offers, "I'd ask, How do you make decisions? How would you get unfiltered information? Would you surround yourself with hacks? Are you scared of smart people? I've seen the effect of the Oval Office on people. People are prepared to come in and speak their minds, and then they get in there, and the place overwhelms them, and they say, 'Gee, Mr. President, you're looking good.' I need people who can walk in and say, 'Hey, you're not looking so great today.'"

So how does someone who talks so much about getting good information deal with getting something so big so wrong? Bush will defend to his last breath the decision to target Saddam, weapons or no, but he now talks like a convert about the need for intelligence reform. "Look, I asked a lot of questions beforehand," he says of the prewar intelligence. "Anytime you put a large group of people into a combat zone, you ask a lot of questions." Having said that, he admits he is now asking even more. "We've just got to make sure that everybody's voices are heard as the dots are connected."