on in the administration of the "environmental president." In order to enforce his alien policies,
Teddy Roosby leading police-state attacks on the New York Tammany Democratic machine as New York Cityevelt was in the vanguard of the creation of a US domestic police state. He got his start (^)
Police Commissioner, and later carried his assault to other constituency groupings, the kind Bush
reviles today as special interests. Roosevelt founded the centerpiece of the US domestic police state
apparatus, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and made Charles Bonaparte, a relation of the
French imperial house, the first FBI director. Roosout industrial forces opposed to the Morgan interests) and his conservationism led to the creation ofevelt's program of "trust-busting," (which wiped (^)
a whole series of regulatory agencies, which are busily strangling US economic activity today.
On a deeper level: if London had not been able to count on the United States as a future ally, it is
doubtful that the British government would have encouraged Russia and France to go to war withAustria-Hungary and Germany in 1914. Without the short-term certainty of US intervention on the (^)
British side, the Bolshevik revolution would have been far less likely. Theodore Roosevelt's role as
the first overtly and extravagantly Anglophile US president after the Civil War thus helped to pave
the way for some of the greatest disasters of the twentieth century.
Above and beyond all policy and strategic issues, Bush is attracted by the psychological Gestalt of
Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt suffered from a very limited attention span. He was vain,
self-centered, unstable and tended towards exhibitionism. The most concise summary of Teddy's
pathology can be found in a letter by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice of the British Foreign Office, certainly
one of the most important influences on Rooscontroller. When another British diplomat, Valentine Chirol, complained about Teddy's wanderingevelt's life; some would call him Teddy's British (^)
focus and intermittent attention span, Spring-Rice replied:
If you took an impetuous small boy on to a beach strewn with a great many exciting pebbles, you
would not expect him to remain interested for long in one pebble. You must always remember thatthe President is about six. [fn 3]
This restless and distracted inability to concentrate, this incapacity for the prolonged contemplation
and examination of issues and problems, is one of the factors that made Teddy Roosevelt the
psychological wreck that he was. Teddy could not think; the psychological background noifar too loud. Instead, he was driven to undertake his legendary hunting exploits of killing vastse was
quantities of birds and animals, his prodigious feats of physical exercise and, later, his hollow
martial posturing as a "Rough Rider."
The polar opposite to Theodore Roosevelt on all of these points of world outlook and literaryexpression is Abraham Lincoln. Bush was often paid lip service to Lincoln as a great president, and (^)
even organized a lecture in the White House about the contributions of the Civil War president. But
there have also been a few unguarded moments in which Bush has revealed his instinctive hatred
for Lincoln. In mid-1990, Bush attended a performance at Ford's Theatre, which is still used for
dramatic productions and other events in downtown Washington. At the end of the evening Bushwas asked by a correspondent if he had enjoyed his evening. Bush remarked that whereas Lincoln (^)
had only been able to enjoy the first act of the play he had seen at Ford's he, Bush, had been able to
enjoy the entire evening. This quip was reported in the British press.
Bush's affinity for Teddy Roosthese two political figures. In the case of Bush, the inability to think is expressed mostevelt is based most profoundly on the shared cognitive impairment of
demonstrably in the incoherence of verbal expression. Thanks in part to Dana Carvey, who has
some insight into this side of Bush's character, the "Bushspeak" issue has been on the table at least
since 1987-88. But Bush has been spewing out garbled verbiage for a very long time. The following
sample was recorded by Elizabeth Drew in February, 1980, during a ride from Worcester,