Tony Gutierrez/AP Photo
“You didn’t think I was sensitive, David? Please!” chuckled Bush to Carlyle Group co-CEO David Rubenstein, right, in 2017.
“The theory of history is that you should learn it to avoid the mistakes of the past,” billionaire David Rubenstein told an audience at The Washington Post Live yesterday morning. Citing the decline of history majors in the U.S. while plugging his new book The American Story: Conversations With Master Historians, he continued, “I think it would be better if we learned history.”
But on the Potomac not two miles away, in an art space that Rubenstein donated tens of millions of dollars to, hangs an exhibition that runs the risk of erasing one of contemporary history’s darkest moments: the invasion of Iraq and the killing of over 182,000 Iraqi civilians.
Former President George W. Bush’s paintings of wounded U.S. veterans are on display through today at the Kennedy Center, America’s premier tax-funded art space. Rubenstein, a private equity kingpin, has served as the Kennedy Center’s board chairman since 2010, and led the initiative to construct the Reach, a massive expansion devoted to contemporary art, performance, and film. The Reach carried a price tag of more than $200 million, achieved with help from the nation’s second-biggest defense contractor (Boeing), some unsavory governments (Qatar, the United Arab Emirates), and $50 million from Rubenstein himself. Bush’s works constitute the first show in the newly inaugurated space.
That an amateur painter such as Bush would lay claim to such a vaunted gallery has a whiff of cultural policy in a junta or autocracy. To have Bush’s Freudian enterprise on the walls of a new creative convening point suggests obvious preferential treatment for the former head of state; his wife Laura Bush is an honorary chair of the center.
What’s much worse is that the exhibition lacked any historical background on why American armed forces were sent into harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s an oversight that suggests, structurally, the inability of a major U.S. cultural institution to learn from history, let alone to recognize American war crimes abroad.
The exhibition, “Portraits of Courage,” begins with a video of the former president speaking about why he chose to paint veterans. Bush calls his project “interesting” in his folksy banter. In framing the exhibit as such, the curator has removed the crucial context. The mistakes of the past, to use Rubenstein’s formulation, may have been on full display, but there was no learning to be found. The term “post-9/11 veterans,” used in passing during a PSA about trauma that plays at the exhibit’s end, was doing a lot of work.
Bush's painting of First Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell was on display at the Reach.
When Rubenstein, who hosts a “peer-to-peer” chat program on Bloomberg Television, interviewed former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 2017, there was a lot of ribbing and laughter. Humor, I’ve often thought, is a weapon of the weak, but it’s also a tool of the powerful. Asked about his post-presidency pursuit of painting, Bush replied, “You didn’t think I was sensitive, David? Please!”
The chumminess suggested that there was more to this story.
It is well known that the private equity firm Rubenstein co-founded in 1987, the Carlyle Group, would go on to be intimately tied to key figures from the George H.W. Bush administration, notably former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci and Secretary of State James Baker. One journalist dubbed this “access capitalism,” and even that radically progressive magazine The Economist dinged Carlyle for its predatory behavior (“Shrouded in secrecy, Carlyle calls capitalism into question.”). The private equity group made a killing off of its purchase of United Defense in 1997 and exposed its own greedy tendencies in its handling of the nursing-home chain ManorCare. Rubenstein, who still serves as co-CEO of Carlyle, has also been a lead lobbyist for maintaining the carried-interest loophole, which has enabled Carlyle to amass over $90 billion.
So what’s his connection to the 43rd president?
In 2004, George W. Bush appointed Rubenstein to the board of the Kennedy Center. At the time, Bush’s father sat on Carlyle’s board and was a close family friend of Rubenstein. The appearance of conflict of interest was glaring.
Fourteen years earlier, in 1990, Carlyle gave an unanchored and career-less Bush a major boost. Rubenstein was putting a board together for the flight-catering company Caterair, and through a personal recommendation added W. In a candid interview, Rubenstein described “the guy” as not adding “much value,” except for his dirty jokes. The company ultimately collapsed, but not before the Carlyle Group made money off it through junk bond financing.
I reached out to Rubenstein for comment, and until I hear back, this quote from his conversation at the Post Thursday morning would be a good approximation of his answer. “Most CEOs are pretty well coached by the time I get to interview them,” Rubenstein said. “You usually don’t rise up to be a CEO without a lot of coaching, and they are pretty well trained not to say things that are going to get them in trouble … I would say that CEOs have some thin skins, but it depends what kind of questions you ask, and you can get anybody upset if you ask the wrong type of thing.”
I for one would also have liked to ask Rubenstein about attending Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Davos in the Desert event in 2017, just a year before journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination—and whether he, like me, feels uneasy when passing by the Saudi embassy in Washington, which neighbors the Kennedy Center. (Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.)
And while it’s impressive that the CEO of the Carlyle Group has carved out time to publish his first book, with 16 interviews with historians analyzing this country, from George Washington through Ronald Reagan, one wonders whether he ought to focus his lens on the more recent past. We’re still living in George W. Bush’s world, and the world is still living through his heinous wars. Americans are still enduring his assaults on civil liberties, his expansion of the surveillance state, and his cruel policies against Muslim Americans. Abu Ghraib may have been closed, but Guantanamo Bay persists.
You don’t have to interview Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Walter Isaacson to know that. Though, for his next book, it would do Rubenstein some good to interview historians of Iraq and Afghanistan.
