“You’ve got to read this. Look, this happens every 100 years. We need a national strategy”

One of the most remarkable news stories I’ve seen during this time is that of President George W. Bush’s prescience about the possibility of a pandemic and the urgent need to prepare for it.

The former president is a voracious reader, having completed 186 books while in office between 2006 and 2008 alone (the average American reader get through four books a year), in addition to reading through the entire Bible annually.

Well, that literary avocation came in quite handy, when, as reported by NBC’s Matthew Mosk, Mr. Bush was on vacation at his Texas ranch in the summer of 2005 and he began reading an advance copy of a book by John Barry called The Great Influenza, a history of the 1918 influenza — history’s all-time most lethal disease outbreak. When President Bush returned to Washington, he called Fran Townsend, his top homeland security advisor, into the Oval Office and gave her the book’s galley, telling her, “You’ve got to read this. Look, this happens every 100 years. We need a national strategy.”

Townsend recalls that her immediate response was not enthusiastic. “My reaction was, I’m buried. I’m dealing with counterterrorism. Hurricane season. Wildfires. I’m like, ‘What?’ He said to me, ‘It may not happen on our watch, but the nation needs the plan.’ ”

Over the ensuing months, Mr. Bush’s cabinet officers came to see the wisdom of his vision. According to Tom Bossert, who worked in the Bush White House and later served as a homeland security advisor in the Trump administration, “[Mr. Bush] did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it. He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen.”

In a speech at the National Institutes of Health in November 2005, Mosk writes, President Bush laid out proposals

in granular detail — describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. “A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire,” Bush said at the time. “If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it.”

The president recognized that an outbreak was a different kind of disaster than the ones the federal government had been designed to address. “To respond to a pandemic, we need medical personnel and adequate supplies of equipment,” Bush said. “In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators, masks, and protective equipment would be in short supply.”

Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time….[and] set out to spend $7 billion building out his plan. His cabinet secretaries urged their staffs to take preparations seriously. The government launched a website, www.pandemicflu.gov, that is still in use today. “If we wait for a pandemic to appear,” he warned, “it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today.”

Over the ensuing three years, Bush oversaw intense efforts to create a comprehensive pandemic plan, including diagrams for a global early warning system, funding to develop new, rapid vaccine technology, a robust national stockpile of critical supplies like face masks and ventilators, and exercises in which cabinet officials gamed out their responses. Yuval Levin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (and an outstanding member of that contemporary endangered species known as principled conservatives), writes at National Review of his experience as a Bush White House health staffer in those years:
That work took up an enormous amount of my time. We produced a general strategy document, a more detailed implementation plan, and a number of follow-up documents, ran several table-top exercises with senior officials to get a sense of the decisions they would confront in a major outbreak, and worked with Congress to fund various stockpiles and preparation programs, at least for a few years. I learned (and have since forgotten) more about ventilators than I ever imagined there was to know….

The work was very intensely driven by Bush himself… [who] was focused on the challenges an outbreak like that would pose to a modern government, and on the sorts of hard decisions he as president would face if it came. That attitude, that sense of profound personal responsibility for decision-making in a crisis, is one of the things that stands out most to me about Bush, particularly now in retrospect. It was enormously impressive.

But to those of us at a much greater distance from that personal responsibility, the focus on pandemic preparedness was hard to understand. We were doing a huge amount of work to be ready for one particular sort of danger that didn’t seem any more likely than a very great many others that could just as easily arise unexpectedly….

According to Mosk, “large swaths of the ambitious plan were either not fully realized or entirely shelved as other priorities and crises took hold… As time passed, it became increasingly difficult to justify the continued funding, staffing, and attention.”

Nevertheless, Levin observes that while “it’s easy now to say that was reckless…I think a more reasonable reading of the evidence is that it’s practically impossible to guess correctly about what sudden emergency our government will need to be prepared for, and it makes sense to gird for the unexpected and build as much all-purpose mobilization capacity as reasonably possible. More than anything, it’s a lesson in how difficult and daunting the president’s job, regardless of who occupies the office, really is.”

I’ve written before about the underappreciation of Dubya and what he brought to the presidency: His keen analytical skills and intellectual curiosity, his openness to criticism and willingness to change course when proven wrong, and his undertaking of unprecedented humanitarian efforts, from which he stood to gain nothing.

And one more thing that speaks volumes about the man who foresaw this calamity and tried to prepare his country to face it. Matthew Mosk reports that when asked through a spokesman to comment on the unfolding crisis or discuss the current response, George W. Bush declined.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS It’s clear that the frum community has been awash in chizuk during the current crisis. Recordings and live lectures featuring roshei yeshivah, rabbanim, and rebbetzins delivering such messages have ricocheted nonstop around our world in recent weeks. All to the good, for those who find it helpful.

But my sense is that for many others, more is not necessarily better. They may find that the sheer volume of such talks is overwhelming, even disorienting, and that chizuk overload ultimately results in diminishing returns. This is particularly so when the content is generalized and amorphous and not readily translatable into concrete terms relevant to one’s own life.

My 22-year-old-son, home temporarily from Eretz Yisrael, told me of a wise hadrachah from his rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Barry Klein: If you watch an inspirational video, don’t then immediately go on to another one. First, internalize what you’ve heard and apply it to your life.

And then there’s always another source of chizuk — yourself. Of course, Torah Jews turn to teachers and guides in times of trouble. But that doesn’t mean we need to see ourselves as incapable of giving self-injections of uplift.

The Navi Yeshayahu (27:20) seems to speak uncannily of our predicament when he says, “Leich ami, bo b’chadarecha, u’segor delascha ba’adecha, chavi kimat rega ad ki ya’avor za’am — Go, my people, come into your rooms and close the door in front of you. Hide for a moment until the anger passes.” Rashi comments: “Introspect about your deeds within the inner rooms of your heart.”

Don’t just stay home. Go into your room and close the door, taking only a Tehillim with you. Speak straight to your Creator. You might just find reserves of hope and possibilities of growth you simply never knew existed within you.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 807. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com