Bush and the Psychology of Incompetent Decisions
By John P. Briggs, MD, and J.P. Briggs II, PhD

Thursday 18 January 2007
President George W. Bush prides himself on “making tough
decisions.” But many are sensing something seriously troubling, even
psychologically unbalanced, about the president as a decision-maker.
They are right.
Because of a psychological dynamic swirling around deeply hidden
feelings of inadequacy, the president has been driven to make
increasingly incompetent and risky decisions. This dynamic makes the
psychological stakes for him now unimaginably high. The words
“success” and “failure” have seized his rhetoric like metaphors for
his psyche’s survival.
The president’s swirling dynamic lies “hidden in plain sight” in
his personal history. From the time he was a boy until his religious
awakening in his early 40s, Bush had every reason to feel he was a
failure. His continued, almost obsessive, attempts through the years
to emulate his father, obtain his approval, and escape from his
influence are extensively recorded.
His biography is peppered with remarks and behavior that allude to
this inner struggle. In an exuberant moment during his second campaign
for Texas governor, Bush told a reporter, “It’s hard to believe, but
… I don’t have time to worry about being George Bush’s son. Maybe
it’s a result of being confident. I’m not sure how the psychoanalysts
will analyze it, but I’m not worried about it. I’m really not. I’m a
free guy.”
A psychoanalyst would note that he is revealing here that he has
been worrying about being his father’s son quite a lot.
Resentment naturally contaminated Bush’s efforts to prove himself
to his father and receive his father’s approval. The contradictory mix
showed up in his compulsion to re-fight his father’s war against Iraq,
but this time winning the duel some thought his father failed to win
with Saddam. He could at once emulate his father, show his contempt
for him, and redeem him. But beneath this son-father struggle lies a
far more significant issue for Bush - a question about his own
competence, adequacy and autonomy as a human being.
We have seen this inner question surface repeatedly, and we have
largely conspired with him to deny it.
• On September 11, 2001, we saw (and suppressed) the image
of him sitting stunned for seven minutes in a crowd of school children
after learning that the second plane had hit the Twin Towers, and then
the lack of image of him when he vanished from public view for the
rest of the day. Instead, we bought the cover-up image, three days
after the attack, of the strong leader, grabbing the bullhorn in New
York City and issuing bellicose statements.

• In 2004, we saw and denied the insecurity displayed when
the president refused to face the 9/11 Commission alone and needed
Vice President Cheney to go with him.

• In 2003, we saw and suppressed the dark side of the
“Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier landing, in which a man who
had ducked out on his generation’s war and dribbled away his service
in the Texas Air National Guard dressed up like Top Gun and pretended
that he was a combat pilot like his father.

• Asked by a reporter if he would accept responsibility for
any mistakes, Bush answered, “I hope I don’t want to sound like I’ve
made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t - you just put
me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not quick - as quick on my feet
as I should be in coming up with one.” What we heard, and yet didn’t
hear, was a confession of his feelings of inadequacy and an arrogant
denial those feelings all at once.

• In early 2006, when his father moved behind the scenes to
replace Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the son responded,
“I’m the decider and I decide what’s best” - and when he clenched his
fist at a question about his father’s influence, proclaiming, “I’m the
Commander in Chief” - we glimpsed what was going on.

To cover up and defend himself against his feelings of his
inadequacy and incompetence, Bush developed a number of psychological
defenses. In his school years he played the clown. (His ability to
joke about his verbal slip-ups is an endearing adult application of
this defense to public life.) His heavy drinking was a classic way to
anesthetize feelings of inadequacy. Indeed, drinking typically makes
the alcoholic grandiose, which has led some commentators to argue that
Bush has the “dry drunk” syndrome, where the individual has stopped
drinking but retains the brittle psychology of the alcoholic. Other
defenses now play especially powerful roles to protect the president
against his internal feelings of insufficiency.
The Christian Defense
Bush has carefully let it be known that he believes the decisions
he makes in office are directed by God. His famous claim to make
decisions by “gut” (”I’m a gut player,” he told Bob Woodward) equates
with his claim of the spiritual inspiration he receives through
prayer, his own and the prayers of others. Whatever else it is, this
equation of his own choices with God’s will has unparalleled
advantages. It creates the perfect defense against any doubts he or
anyone else might have that he can’t make the right decision. The need
to engage in analysis and explore alternatives to get there comes off
the table. Instead, he has his gut; he has his God.
Being “born again” also allows the president to present himself as
having relegated to the past all those previously inadequate behaviors
of his younger days: the poor academic performance, the drinking, the
failed businesses. He’s a new man, no longer incompetent but now
supremely competent as a result of his faith.
When Woodward asked Bush if he had consulted his father before
invading Iraq, he replied, “He is the wrong father to appeal to in
terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” How
wonderfully that appeal must seem to resolve the internal conflict
about adequacy we have described above.
The Bully Defense
Bush’s mother, Barbara (sarcastic, mean, disciplinarian, always
with an acid-tongued retort), is probably the model for another major
defense Bush deploys to defend himself against feelings of inadequacy.
A friend at the time described her as “sort of the leader bully.”
That bullies are insecure people is well known and fairly obvious.
A bully covers insecurity with bluster and intimidation so that others
won’t find an opening to see how weak he feels.
Much of the world outside the US considers Bush a bully. “You’re
either with us or against us” is a bully’s threat that anyone can
recognize. The Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes is a bully’s
doctrine.
For his intimates and those closer to home, Bush appears to be
what is called an emotional bully. An emotional bully gains control
using sarcasm, teasing, mocking, name calling, threatening, ignoring,
lying, or angering the other and forcing him to back down. Bush
administration insider accounts describe this sort of behavior from
the president. He’s well known for his dismissive remarks. His
penchant for giving nicknames to everyone has its dark, bully’s side.
Naming people is a way to control them.
In report by Gail Sheehy in 2000, recalled recently by New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd, we get a glimpse of how Bush’s pervasive
fear of failure (his absolute refusal to consider “failure as an
option”) and his bully defense go together. Sheehy interviewed friends
from his teenage years and college years. In basketball or tennis
games he would insist points be played over because he wasn’t ready;
he would force opponents who had beaten him to continue playing until
he beat them. At Yale he would interrupt his fellow students’ studying
for exams (helping them fail) to compete in a popular board game, “The
Game of Global Domination,” at which he was the player noted for
taking the most risks, being the most aggressive.
It’s likely that speculations about Vice President Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice functioning as Bush’s puppet-masters are
180 (or at least 160) degrees off. Bush is the president; he gets his
way, and they know it. Chances are they have learned to channel his
“gut” and give him policy advice that matches it. They may even
imagine they are steering him, not clear about the ways that he has
bullied them, elicited in them “The Stockholm Syndrome,” in which
hostages come to identify with and even defend the very person who is
threatening them. This is the same dynamic evident in the behavior of
battered spouses and members of gangs.
Ron Suskind described the small group around the president: “A
disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness
- a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly
questioners.”
Biographical reports tell us that Bush’s parents taught him to
keep his inner feelings to himself. As psychiatrist Justin A. Frank
noted in Bush on the Couch, this results in a “self-protective
indifference to the pain of others.” This is another aspect of his
bully defense, projecting his inner pain onto others. Bush’s
remarkable drive for the power to torture terrorist suspects and his
reported glorying in Texas executions during his terms as governor
testify to his lack of compassion, despite his recent statement of
qualms about seeing Saddam Hussein drop through the trap.
The Man of Splits and Oppositions
Being in the world, for all of us, involves the challenge to
somehow integrate the opposites of our nature and to select our way
through the many opposing choices presented us in life. The bully
polarizes the natural ambivalence (the internal opposition) anyone
feels about whether he is strong or weak, safe or vulnerable. A person
who needs to feel invulnerable and completely adequate all the time,
or who always feels helpless and inadequate, has polarized these
emotions and leads a deformed life. The degree of internal
polarization in President Bush appears to be serious - and widespread.
Commentators have made lists of the president’s polarities: the
proclaimed uniter who is a relentless divider, the habit of “saying
one thing and doing another,” as Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords put it.
The list is long and growing. It should include the oppositions that
show up in his famous Bushisms, such as:
There is no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst
leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten
our friends and allies with the world’s worst weapons.

They [the terrorists] never stop thinking of ways to harm our
country and our people - and neither do we.

To a psychiatrist, these are not mere malapropisms and mistakes in
speech. They suggest ambivalence oscillating violently between poles.
They suggest a desperate uncertainty about everything that the
president reflexively seeks to hide by taking absolutist, rigid
positions about “victory,” “success,” “mission accomplished,” “stay
the course,” “compassion,” “tax cuts,” “no child left behind,” and a
host of other issues.
The Presidential Defense
Once Bush took the bullhorn at ground zero, he found perhaps the
ultimate defense for his secret fears of inadequacy. As he told Bob
Woodward, in Bush at War, “I’m the commander - see, I don’t need to
explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the
interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to
explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe
anybody an explanation.” As commander in chief, as a war president, he
could assemble his other psychological defenses around him. He could
split the world into good and evil and the country would follow. His
internal oppositions could be projected without much resistance from
the populace or his adversaries. He could be the gut-led, divinely
inspired “Decider,” to save the country. He could project own internal
fears of being “discovered as a fraud” into a threat “out there”
waiting to happen. He could surround himself with loyalists whom he
could emotionally bully, creating a new family that would admire him
and that he could control. Meanwhile the ambiguities of political
decisions that can always be rationalized offer a safe haven. Until
history judges me (and that’s a long way off, maybe never) I can’t be
definitively seen as incompetent.
But as much as the presidency is a perfect defense for disguising
incompetence, it’s also the perfect trap. It accelerates the positive
feedback loop that was set in motion when he “changed his heart”
around age 40 (committing himself to God) and presumably put his
failures, and his feelings of failure behind him.
In recent weeks, anyone following the news must have intuitively
sensed from watching and hearing the president that he would reject
the Iraq Study Group’s report, co-authored by a person he must have
felt was the emissary of his father come to tell him that he had
failed again. He chose escalation, the one solution most knowledgeable
people agree cannot succeed, in order to keep alive the fiction that
success still lies in the future.
The dynamic is becoming obvious to almost everybody.
But how much is Bush aware of this psychological dynamic and of
the secret he’s keeping? Not aware enough. That’s the problem.
Psychotherapists use the term “unconscious,” but it isn’t quite an
accurate descriptor. We are aware of feelings, sensations and scripts
that occur when one of our unseen psychic mechanisms is triggered. So,
when an interviewer asked about the generals who demanded Rumsfeld be
removed, and the president knew his father had been working behind the
scenes to replace Rumsfeld, the question would not have triggered the
conscious thought: there goes dad again trying to make me feel
incompetent. Instead, the president may have felt a hollow sensation
or a flush of anger, an urge to form a clownish grin to cover his
watery feelings, and a script that would come out of his mouth as “I’m
the decider.” Beneath that would be the inadequacy and cover-up
dynamic outlined here.
A president’s psychology and his inner secrets are his or her own
business, except in one important area. That is area covered by the
question, “Does the psychology of this individual interfere with his
or her ability to make sound decisions in the best interest of the
nation?” Recent history has certainly been witness to presidents with
psychodynamics that have damaged their historical legacies. Bill
Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind. But in neither case was the
very ability to make sound decisions compromised to the extent we
believe it is with this president.
A Failed Process
Many accounts of the president suggest that his decision-making
process is a failed one; in an important sense, it is no process at
all.
Ambivalent feelings are normal at certain stages of
decision-making, and the ability to tolerate ambivalence has been
shown to be the hallmark of creative thinkers. The inability to
tolerate uncertainty because you think that may imply incapacity
brings decision-making to an end.
Thus, instead of focusing on the process needed to arrive at a
decision, Bush marshals his defenses in order not to feel incompetent.
That doesn’t leave much room for exploring the alternatives required
of competent decision-making. Not interested in discussion or detail
(where the devil often lies), he seeks something minimal, just enough
so he can let the decision come to him; it’s his “gut” (read “God”)
that will provide the answer. But these gut feelings are the very
feelings associated with his deep sense of inadequacy and his defenses
against those feelings. So while he brags that he makes the “tough
decisions,” psychologically, he’s defending himself against the very
feelings of uncertainty that are the necessary concomitant to making
tough decisions. His tough decision-making is a sham.
In the recent maneuvering toward the “new strategy” in Iraq, we
have witnessed a great pretense of normal decision-making. But the
president clearly made up his mind almost as soon as the “surge”
alternative appeared, and apparently moved to cow others, including
his new secretary of defense Robert Gates (his father’s man) in the
process. “Success” is the only alternative for him. “Failure” and
disintegration of Iraq is unthinkable because it would be synonymous
with his own internal disintegration.
As his decisions go awry, he exudes a troubling, uncanny aura of
certitude (though some find it reassuring). He seems to expect to feel
despised and alone (and probably has always felt that), as he has
always secretly expected to fail. That expectation of failure leads to
sloppy, risky, incompetent decisions, which in turn compel him to
swerve from his fears of incompetence.
At this point, the president seems to have entered a place in his
psyche where he is discounting all external criticism and
unpopularity, and fixing stubbornly on his illusion of vindication,
because he’s still “The Decider,” who can just keep deciding until he
gets to success. It’s hard not to feel something heroic in this
position - but it’s a recipe for bad, if not catastrophic, decisions.
Psychologically, President Bush has received support for so long
because many have thought of him as “one of us.” Most of us feel
inadequate in some way, and watching him we can feel his inadequacies
and sense his uncertainties, so we admire him for “pulling it off.”
His model tells us, “If you act like you’re confident and competent,
then you are.” We are the culture that values the power of positive
thinking and seeks assertiveness training. We believe that the right
attitude can sometimes be more important than brains or hard work.
He’s bullied us, too. We don’t dare to really confront the scale of
his incompetent behavior, because then we would have to face what it
means to have such an incompetent and psychologically disabled
decision-maker as our president. It raises everyone’s uncertainty. And
that is, in fact, happening now.
———-
John P. Briggs, MD, is retired from over 40 years of private
practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on
the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center
in New York City for 23 years and was a long-time member of the
American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson
White Institute in New York. J.P. Briggs II, PhD, is a Distinguished
CSU professor at Western Connecticut State University and is the
senior editor of the intellectual journal The Connecticut Review. He
is author and co-author of books on creativity and chaos, including
Fire in the Crucible (St. Martin’s Press); Fractals, the Patterns of
Chaos (Simon and Schuster); and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos
(HarperCollins), among others. He is currently at work with
Philadelphia psychologist John Amoroso on a book about the power of
ambivalence in the creative process.
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