My Life and Times

December 20, 2004WHITE HOUSE LETTER
Bush's Cabinet Picks Come Already Vetted by Life's TestsBy ELISABETH BUMILLER
ASHINGTON - Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel and President Bush's nominee for attorney general, is the son of Mexican migrant farm workers who never finished grade school.
Jim Nicholson, the ambassador to the Vatican and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of veterans affairs, grew up in a house without plumbing on a tenant farm in Iowa and sometimes went to bed hungry.
Carlos M. Gutierrez, the chief executive of the Kellogg Company and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of commerce, learned English from a bellhop in a Miami hotel and got his start as a truck driver delivering Frosted Flakes in Mexico City.
Mike Johanns, the governor of Nebraska and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of agriculture, grew up on a dairy farm in Iowa and has said that everything in life was easy after that.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and Mr. Bush's nominee to be secretary of state - and one of the highest-ranking African-Americans in the administration - grew up in segregated Birmingham, Ala., and was friends with one of the girls killed in the church bombing there in 1963.
Most striking of all, Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and until Dec. 10 Mr. Bush's nominee to be homeland security secretary, is a high school dropout and the son of a prostitute who may have been murdered by her pimp.
For weeks now, Americans have watched the tearful nominating scenes in the White House Roosevelt Room as the president has selected embodiments of the American dream for his second term. Of 9 new appointments to his 15-member cabinet, 6 have the kind of hard-luck stories much admired by Mr. Bush. So do a number of other cabinet members from Mr. Bush's first term.
"The president appreciates those who understand the values of hard work, integrity and personal responsibility," said Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. "Those are values that are often instilled in people at an early age."
But Mr. Bush's love of up-by-the-bootstraps stories is far more complex than that, friends and analysts say, and offers a window into the psychology of the president.
First, Mr. Bush's choices reflect the sentiments of a man who was incubated in the world of the East Coast elite but has a spent a rebellious lifetime trying to make his own way. Mr. Bush's cabinet is notably light on Ivy League graduates, and only one of his past and present choices, John Ashcroft, the departing attorney general, attended the president's undergraduate alma mater, Yale.
Only one of his choices graduated from Harvard College, and that was Tom Ridge, the departing homeland security secretary who attended on a scholarship and grew up in veterans' public housing. Mr. Gonzales did graduate from Harvard Law School, and Elaine L. Chao, the labor secretary, graduated from Harvard Business School, as did the president, but she arrived in the United States as a Chinese immigrant on a freighter in New York Harbor at the age of 8, speaking no English.
"Elaine Chao believes deeply in the American dream because she has lived it," Mr. Bush said in typical remarks when he nominated Ms. Chao in 2001.
Second, Mr. Bush seems to identify with the hardscrabble stories, as difficult as that may be to believe about a man who was born into one of the most privileged families in the United States. As Jim Hightower, the former Texas agriculture commissioner, memorably cracked about Mr. Bush's father in comments since applied to the 43rd president: "He is a man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."
Stanley A. Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist at the City University of New York, argues that there is in fact something to the remark, and that Mr. Bush, who said last spring that he had to "knock on a lot of doors to follow the old man's footsteps," truly believes that he had to overcome hurdles on his way to the White House.
"He was born into a family where there were enormous expectations for the kids, and he literally spent a lifetime not measuring up," said Mr. Renshon, whose recent book, "In his Father's Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush," is a psychological study of the president.
"In Bush's case," Mr. Renshon added, "he follows in his father's footsteps, he doesn't make it for decades, but he keeps on plugging, and he succeeds. But I think it was very complex for him because he often didn't know where his parents' and family help ended and his own contribution picked up. He had to carve out his own sphere in a very big shadow."
Finally, the cabinet choices make a political point by underscoring what Mr. Bush likes to promote as important values of his administration: ownership, opportunity and individual initiative.
Of course, in the case of Mr. Kerik, whose nomination imploded in questions about his past legal, ethical and financial dealings, some wonder if the president became a little too wrapped up in the romance of the American dream.
"Bush is a good judge of character," Mr. Renshon said, "but he gets swept away."
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