In City Journal, onetime presidential aide to George W. Bush (and former Mishpacha columnist) Tevi Troy, writes that Bush senior, the recently deceased former president, George Herbert Walker, “was always being underestimated.” Despite his success in varied settings in life, whether in military combat, the oil business, or a series of high-level public-sector posts — Republican National Committee chairman, ambassador to the UN, liaison to China, and CIA director, vice president, and finally, as the nation’s 41st chief executive — “people always seemed to think that he was missing something.”

Political opponents and foreign tyrants alike, from Bob Dole to Saddam Hussein, were misled by Bush’s quiet resolve, Troy writes, into underestimating him, which left them “astounded when Bush bested them. They shouldn’t have been. Beneath his gracious, even goofy, WASP exterior was a real warrior.”

But it was his son, Bush 43, who in turn bested his dad when it came to others’ underestimation of him — or shall we say “misunderestimation”? It was the younger Bush who told the crowd at his final campaign rally before the 2000 election that his Republican rival John McCain had “misunderestimated me.” The phrase entered the history books as perhaps the best-known of many “Bushisms” yet to come during his terms in office, which cemented his reputation as a regular “Mr. Malaprop.”

To be frank, I’m still not sure what “misunderestimated” means. Maybe it’s a word like “irregardless,” which, with prefix and suffix canceling each other out, would seem to denote “with regard.” (That, in turn, means one would have to use “disirregardless” in order to say what he actually meant to say in the first place.)

Under this theory of things, “misunderestimated,” shorn of both prefix and modifier, denotes “accurately estimated.” Perhaps, then, Mr. Bush was unintentionally saying that McCain had sized him up exactly right?

Well, that never detained Dubya. This is the same lovable language bungler who once told an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, “You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one.” Clearly, saying the very thing one intends not to say, never stopped this man.

Then again, “misunderestimated” might well be an instance of an inadvertently constructed “portmanteau word,” one that results from the confused verbal melding of two words with meanings in the same broad neighborhood. An example would be the erstwhile vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin calling for people to “refudiate” the proposal to build a mosque on the site of the World Trade Center, thereby conflating “refute” with “repudiate.”

A surprise here  — my trusty Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary lists “irregardless” as a bona fide word, meaning “regardless,” and conjectures that it’s a blend of “irrespective” and “regardless.” This emboldens us to venture that perhaps, from “misunderstood” plus “underestimated” emerged “misunderestimated.” Think of it as the lexical version of “E Pluribus Unum.”

But the truth is that Mr. Bush’s reputation for mangled speech may not have been quite as deserved as has been claimed.

Consider that Slate writer Jacob Weisberg, who actually made money off Mr. Bush’s linguistic lacunae by spending nine years compiling hundreds of Bushisms and publishing them in book form, offered a list of his 25 favorite Bushisms in a January 2009 article. He wrote that there “were many to choose from, but in my opinion, the greatest Bushism of all was delivered on Aug. 5, 2004, when the president declared: ‘Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.’ ”

But one moment there. Is it so unreasonable to read that line as making a deeper point — that a nation’s truly farsighted leaders, rather than getting complacent in times of peace, are constantly, proactively trying to penetrate the enemy’s mind to divine what evil he might be plotting?

Then there’s the fact that, as linguist Mark Liberman at Language Log says of Bush’s supposed linguistic repeat-offender status,

you can make any public figure sound like a boob, if you record everything he says and set hundreds of hostile observers to combing the transcripts for disfluencies, malapropisms, word formation errors and examples of non-standard pronunciation or usage.

Which of us could stand up to a similar level of linguistic scrutiny?.... I have an idea. I’ll buy dinner for Jacob Weisberg, if he’ll let me record a couple of hours of convivial conversation about speech and language, and then examine the transcripts carefully for Weisbergisms...

It was the hyper-focus on Mr. Bush’s spoken miscues that was partly responsible for the widely held public perception during his time in office that he wasn’t all that bright. But here’s what former Bush economic policy advisor Keith Hennessey told his Stanford Business School class when a student questioned Dubya’s smarts:

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.” I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer….“For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.

“President Bush is extremely smart by any standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting….

“In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.

“And… I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics.

Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both….

“If you can, find someone who has interacted directly with him outside the public spotlight. Ask that person about President Bush’s intellect. I am confident you will hear what I heard dozens of times from CEOs after they met with him: ’Gosh, I had no idea he was that smart.’ ”

This, in addition to a fact that only came to light after his presidency concluded: He’s a voracious reader of quality books. He finished 186 books in office between 2006 and 2008, mainly history and biography — and by both liberal and conservative authors — which compares favorably with the average American reader’s literary diet of four books annually. This was in addition to reading through the entire Bible annually, along with a daily devotional.

Talk about misunderestimating.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 740. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com