The First Lips : Experts Take Bush Up on Call to Read His Labella

Not since Lyndon Johnson bared his belly scar has a President of the United States uninhibitedly demanded public scrutiny of a particular part of his body.

Yes, Jimmy Carter had the toothy grin, Richard Nixon the sweaty upper labellum and Ronald Reagan the hairline. But none of them so brazenly summoned intimate examination--not until George Bush aimed a crooked smile at the cameras in a nationally televised speech from the Republican National Convention and challenged the nation to “read my lips.”

The President was turning an old phrase, using an expression in the same spirit as his predecessor, the Great Communicator, who immortalized a macho idiom from a Dirty Harry flick when he defied no-good “tax increasers” to “go ahead, make my day.”

Language guru William Safire calls these expressions “phrasal intensifiers.” He attributes the prominence of “read my lips” over the last 2 decades mainly to politics and pop music.

In that regard, its emphatic meaning seems to range from something like, “Let me spell this out for you, numbskull” to, “Pay attention, ‘cause there’s more to what I’m about to say than what I’m about to say.”

While the President’s “read my lips” seems to be a kinder and gentler taunt, it should not be dismissed as whimsical rhetoric. Nor should it be underestimated in its profundity, coming as it does from a politician whose success as leader of the Free World may well depend on how effectively he uses that very mouthpiece--not to mention his capacities for keeping a stiff upper lip, buttoning his lip, giving lip service, even biting his lip.

While taking the phrase’s challenge literally may be historically correct (it emerged in the late 19th Century when communications for hearing-impaired people were progressing), that serves no purpose other than to identify the “no new taxes” refrain uttered afterward. But when understood beyond the literal and idiomatic, “Read my lips” is an invitation, albeit an unconscious one, to probe this single facet--the President’s lips--for revelations about the inner depths of his character, the true George Bush.

There are experts who say they can do this sort of thing. An ancient practice known as physiognomy, popularly called “face reading,” is considered by many to be one of those strange and unreliable vagaries of not-quite-science yet not-exactly-claptrap.

“In essence, it is predicated upon the fact that the face is shaped by a great number of muscles which we are not usually aware of,” says Dr. Leopold Bellak, a New York psychiatrist who has studied and practiced physiognomy for more than 30 years.

“These muscles, in a habitual sort of way for each person, pull on the skin to shape something like a mask of that person’s disposition, attitudes and personality.”

Simply put, physiognomists such as Bellak argue that a person who is habitually negative in attitude, for instance, is likely to show a permanent scowl. Someone who keeps their emotions guarded might feature tight lips.

“All this goes under the broad setting of body language, of which the face is part,” Bellak says.

He admits that face reading is “not an experimentally based science” but adds that “it is not something irrational.”

He’s No Mick Jagger

As lips go, George Bush is no Mick Jagger, though his asymmetric smile gets attention in its own right. His bottom lip is downplayed and, at times, thin enough to disappear. The upper one is almost as thin and has a way of rising abruptly from the corners to shape a lopsided trapezoid mouth. When he speaks, the right-bottom side of his mouth is more active than the left. What does it all mean?

Using the European tradition of physiognomic principles, Bellak says he found “nothing too revolutionary” in the President’s face. He is reluctant to divulge much detail based on lips alone.

Generally, “This is not the face of a bad person,” Bellak says. “His lips are certainly thin, giving an impression that is consistent with the tightly self-controlled person. And that might also mean he is also controlling others.”

Thin lips, he adds, can also indicate someone who is “cold but not vicious,” while “sensuality does not seem part of the lips’ expression.”

Bush’s Eyes ‘Show Compassion’

The mouth, however, is offset somewhat by Bush’s eyes, which Bellak says “show compassion, and maybe some evidence of past suffering.”

In the hands of non-Western physiognomists, the President faces a crueler fate. In “Face Reading,” Timothy Mar’s book based on the ancient Chinese art of sighn mein, a mouth shaped like the President’s “is the sign of a coward.”

But not to worry. Sighn mein’s credibility in China has degenerated almost to that of palm reading in this country, banished to the seedy side streets of pseudoscience.

Laura Rosetree, author of “I Can Read Your Face,” believes that Bush would have been better off inviting people to read other facial features. “He would have been much smarter if he had said, ‘Read my eyebrows’ or, ‘Read my ears.’

“His eyebrows say unequivocally positive things about him. So do his ears--much more than his lips,” says the Silver Spring “holistic” face reader.

In 1976, when she started studying physiognomy, Rosetree decided that the Chinese techniques are overly judgmental. She set out to adapt the principles to more of a Pollyanna practice, one that reinterprets the negatives as “challenges” and balances them with strengths. She says her analyses are 95% accurate.

Jowls Related to Leadership

Rosetree sees the same personality clues replayed in several of the President’s features. “The cheeks, the slight jowls that are close to his lips, are related to a person’s style of leadership,” she says. “The more padding there, the more a person tends to elicit cooperation in others.

“The fullness in the President’s cheeks goes with having a lot of pressure to conciliate. . . . These people are appreciated because of their diplomatic abilities. They are marvelous in a crisis, or when pressure needs to be defused.

“However, they often are so good at keeping down the discord and controversy that they lose touch with their own feelings.”

Bush’s thin lips? “One strength that goes with them is having a very wry and self-deprecatory sense of humor,” Rosetree says. “That’s a plus. But in general, the challenge of having thin lips is a lack of personal self-expression, a reticence about divulging one’s personal needs and desires and feelings.”

When Bush smiles, she notes, his upper lip often completely retracts. “That indicates generosity,” she says. “Also, the two front teeth are very small in proportion to the other top teeth, which indicates that in terms of personal ego he doesn’t push it forward a lot.”

Front Teeth Tied to Generosity

That, Rosetree says, indicates Bush’s generosity.

“The President’s great strength is to conciliate, to give, to cooperate, to be sensitive to others,” she concludes. “But his challenge is to give expression or even attention to his own individual ideas and feelings. Learning to do that is what it really means to be a leader. When you are at the mercy of what other people want you to do, you are in deep trouble.”

Paul Ekman discounts physiognomy. “I read emotions and, to some extent, some kinds of thought process in the face,” says the professor of psychology at the UC San Francisco, “but not the content of what you are thinking, and not character and personality. That stuff is very entertaining and very misleading.”

Ekman has written two books on reading emotions from faces, with emphasis on the ones that indicate lying: “Unmasking the Face” and “Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage.”

Politicians as Performers

“The lips can tell you quite a lot about emotions--the ones a person is concealing as well as the ones he is acknowledging,” Ekman says. “But politicians are the hardest ones to catch. They are, in a sense, performers, and there is nothing illegitimate about that. They go before the media. They put on a performance, and we expect them to.”

What to watch for? A crooked smile and eyes that don’t engage are the first clues of misrepresentation, he says. “If the smile is with the lips more than with the eyes, it may be a false smile,” he says. “The social smile tends to be slightly stronger on the left side of the face. In the true smile of enjoyment, the eyes smile as much as the lips, and it is more symmetrical.”

Indications are, Ekman speculates, that George Bush “is enjoying himself these days.”