History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (13 page)

Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institute of higher education in the United States, and nearly one out of five U.S. presidents has attended the university.
Library of Congress

While both Obama and Bush, would later campaign on the benefits of education for a new generation, both of them were the beneficiaries of heritage. Both men were legacies to the Ivy League. George’s father and grandfather graduated from Yale, and Barack’s father attained a master’s in economics from Harvard.
¹⁰⁹

Along with Obama and the Bushes, other presidential Ivy Leaguers include John and John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Jack Kennedy (all Harvard); William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton (Yale); both Roosevelts (Harvard and Columbia); as well as James Madison and Woodrow Wilson (Princeton).

2
. BOTH APPOINTED ROBERT GATES AS THEIR SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

The midterm elections had not gone well for the Republican president. His party lost the majority in the House of Representatives, largely because of his lack of progress in a costly and escalating war. To make amends, and to redirect the war effort, the commander in chief sacked his top military adviser. One hundred and forty four years later, George W. Bush mimicked Abraham Lincoln’s removal of Gen. George B. McClellan, asking for and receiving the resignation of the ineffective secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In his place, Bush appointed Robert M. Gates, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
¹¹⁰

Before he became secretary of defense under Bush and Obama, Robert M. Gates served as director of the CIA. Other notable former CIA directors include David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, and George H. W. Bush.
Department of Defense

In many respects, Gates was of the old guard. A product of the Cold War, conservative, he had been affixed with the CIA since the 1960s, ascending the ranks as an expert of the old Soviet Union. But he was not a relic. Extraordinarily intelligent and a lifelong achiever (with a PhD from Georgetown), his best attributes were directness, pragmatism, and a willingness to work with others, elements that the Bush cabinet generally lacked.

During Gates’s term, conditions slowly improved in the Iraq War. Local Iraqi leaders were given cash payments in exchange for quelling violence. Additional U.S. troops enabled a new policy of “clear, hold, and build” (clearing neighborhoods of insurgents and securing the immediate area). Though the ideas were not his, Gates was able to implement them with far greater effectiveness, and public approval, than his predecessor.
¹¹¹

When Obama took office in January 2009, he asked Gates to remain at his post, and Gates accepted. There were speculations that Obama had been inspired by a recent bestseller called
Team of Rivals
, a narrative account of Lincoln’s mixed cabinet of Democrats and Republicans, including several who had run against him in the 1860 election. The idea seemed plausible considering that Obama had indeed read the book, and he also appointed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, his main competitor for the Democratic nomination.

But it was Gates’s and Clinton’s forthrightness and insistence on coordination that appealed to the new chief executive, exemplified by the fact that the Republican Gates and the Democrat Clinton met with each other weekly. Gates also repaired a broken relationship between the Pentagon and Congress, in large part because of his willingness to work with the left and the right of the aisle.
¹¹²

To date, Robert Gates remains the only secretary of defense to serve two different chief executives from two different parties.

3
. BOTH INCREASED TROOP LEVELS IN FOREIGN WARS

The idea was unpopular, but by 2006, so was the war. In an effort to secure a failing Iraq, President Bush called for a surge of 20,000 (15 percent) more troops to the troubled nation. The plan went against the advice of a bipartisan commission containing the likes of former Secretary of State James Baker III, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and former White House C
HIEF OF
S
TAFF
Leon Panetta. In the face of rising sectarian violence (which killed more than 30,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006 alone), the commission recommended U.S. troop reductions and greater responsibility from the Iraqis for their own security.
¹¹³

Weighing several options, Bush concluded that his original idea was best. Gathering support from his new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and the new U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, he announced the plan in January 2007. Later that year, the surge was in place, capping an American military presence of 169,000 men and women.
¹¹⁴

It took the U.S. and its allies three years and ten months to defeat Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in World War II. The attempt to secure Afghanistan took three times longer.
Department of Defense

The strategy appeared to work. In September 2007, an average of 117 civilians were dying every day from suicide bombs and insurgent attacks. Four months later, the rate fell to fewer than twenty deaths per day. By 2009, daily incidents of violence had declined over 90 percent. The success signaled an eventual end to U.S. presence, a goal finally achieved in December 2011.
¹¹⁵

Among many who criticized the surge was Senator Barack Obama, who insisted that Afghanistan needed to be the focus of antiterrorism, especially since it was the birthplace of the al-Qaeda-led 9/11 attacks. Two months after his inauguration, Obama implanted a surge of his own.

Under Bush, U.S. presence in Afghanistan rarely reached 35,000 servicemen and women. Under the recommendation of Gen. David McKiernan, the ranking U.S. officer in the theater, Obama ordered 21,000 (60 percent) more troops in 2009. By May of that year, Defense Secretary Gates dismissed Gen. McKiernan as being too cautious, replacing him with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a veteran of the Iraq invasion. By December 2009, Gen. McChrystal requested, and Obama approved, another 30,000 (an increase of 45 percent). Six months later, Obama fired McChrystal for publicly criticizing his administration, replacing him with Gen. Petraeus, the commander who had recently achieved considerable success in redirecting the Iraq War.
¹¹⁶

At its apex, the U.S. military reached 100,000 personnel in the Islamic Republic. But even that could not fix a country plagued by endemic illiteracy, corruption, tribalism, and a feeble infrastructure (see L
EAST
S
UCCESSFUL
C
OMMANDERS
I
N
C
HIEF
). Despite the surges, the American presence was relatively small. The U.S. was trying to secure a country about the size of Texas, with a force that was smaller than the seating capacity of the Texas University football stadium.
¹¹⁷

Among the U.S. Senators who voted in 2002 to authorize military force against Iraq were Hillary Clinton of New York and Joe Biden of Delaware, later secretary of state and vice president, respectively, in the Barack Obama administration.

4
. BOTH CHOSE BEN BERNANKE AS FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRMAN

For the young and growing nation, periods of boom and bust came with unsettling frequency, demonstrated painfully by widespread bank collapses in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907. Thus in 1913, Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Reserve Act, forming a central government monetary regulator, in other words, a bank for banks. The Federal Reserve soon began to create reserve notes (a.k.a., the national paper currency), manage the amount of notes in circulation in order to stabilize prices, as well as lower and raise interest rates to banks to stabilize credit.
¹¹⁸

Over time, Congress heaped greater responsibilities upon “the Fed.” The New Deal assigned the task of auditing and insuring national banks through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). By 1980, the board dictated minimum asset requirements for participating lenders. Soon after, the Fed essentially became an eager lending agency to financial institutions in times of crisis.
¹¹⁹

By the twenty-first century, the seven-member Federal Reserve Board became one of the most powerful entities in global economics. And with Senate approval, every member of the board, including its chairman, is appointed by the U.S. president.

In 2006, Bush selected Dr. Ben Bernanke as the new chairman of the Fed’s board of directors, replacing Alan Greenspan, who had served since the Reagan administration. A longtime professor of economics at Princeton, Bernanke had worked within the Federal Reserve since 2002 and had been a close advocate of Greenspan’s pro-bank, low interest rate, proactive policies. In 2008, Bernanke was a major proponent of the federal B
AILOUT
programs during Bush’s final months in office. In 2010, when the conservative Bernanke’s four-year term had ended, the “liberal” Obama reappointed him for another four. In their approval hearings, the Senate was less than enthusiastic. After fierce debate, the upper house voted 70-30 to keep Bernanke in place, the lowest level of support ever shown to a director over the century-long existence of the Fed.
¹²⁰

During the Bush administration, one of the highest-ranking officials in the Federal Reserve was Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and close associate of Ben Bernanke. In 2009, Geithner became Obama’s treasury secretary.

5
. BOTH ENDORSED MASSIVE CORPORATE BAILOUTS

Though not averse to the idea, the early federal government rarely engaged in bailouts. That is, until the global Great Depression. In 1932, in an attempt to dislodge the worst economic crisis in modern history, Republican Herbert Hoover helped invent a federal entity called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which quickly pumped more than $1 billion into banks, mortgage houses, and major corporations. Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt initially criticized the RFC for being too big, then he made it bigger during his presidency. The RFC lived for nearly twenty more years and became the largest corporation in the U.S. and the biggest banking conglomerate on the planet.
¹²¹

Since then, bailouts have nearly become a presidential tradition. In 1971, Nixon endorsed a $250 million loan to a failing Lockheed. In 1979, Carter seeded a faltering Chrysler with $1.5 billion. A savings and loan crisis in the 1980s led the Reagan administration to inject nearly $11 billion, followed by over $50 billion from the George H. W. Bush administration.
¹²²