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Summary
Summary
This is the book that cracks the code of the Bush presidency. Unstintingly yet compassionately, and with no political ax to grind, Slate editor in chief Jacob Weisberg methodically and objectively examines the family and circle of advisers who played crucial parts in George W. Bush's historic downfall.
In this revealing and defining portrait, Weisberg uncovers the "black box" from the crash of the Bush presidency. Using in-depth research, revealing analysis, and keen psychological acuity, Weisberg explores the whole Bush story. Distilling all that has been previously written about Bush into a defining portrait, he illuminates the fateful choices and key decisions that led George W., and thereby the country, into its current predicament. Weisberg gives the tragedy a historical and literary frame, comparing Bush not just to previous American leaders, but also to Shakespeare's Prince Hal, who rises from ne'er-do-well youth to become the warrior king Henry V.
Here is the bitter and fascinating truth of the early years of the Bush dynasty, with never-before-revealed information about the conflict between the two patriarchs on George W.'s father's side of the family--the one an upright pillar of the community, the other a rowdy playboy--and how that schism would later shape and twist the younger George Bush; his father, a hero of war, business, and Republican politics whose accomplishments George W. would attempt to copy and whose absences he would resent; his mother, Barbara, who suffered from insecurity, depression, and deep dissatisfaction with her role as housewife; and his younger brother Jeb, seen by his parents as steadier, stronger, and the son most likely to succeed.
Weisberg also anatomizes the replacement family Bush surrounded himself with in Washington, a group he thought could help him correct the mistakes he felt had destroyed his father's presidency: Karl Rove, who led Bush astray by pursuing his own historical ambitions and transforming the president into a deeply polarizing figure; Dick Cheney, whose obsessive quest to restore presidential power and protect the country after 9/11 caused Bush and America to lose the world's respect; and, finally, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, who encouraged Bush's foreign policy illusions and abetted his flight from reality.
Delving as no other biography has into Bush's religious beliefs--which are presented as at once opportunistic and sincere-- The Bush Tragedy is an essential work that is sure to become a standard reference for any future assessment. It is the most balanced and compelling account of a sitting president ever written.
Author Notes
Jacob Weisberg is chief political correspondent for Slate magazine and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Framing the Bush administration as a Shakespearean tragedy, Weisberg provides an intriguing interpretation of Bush and his motivations thus far. Part armchair therapist and part literary critic, Weisberg chips away at the various public and private personalities Bush has presented over the years to demonstrate his insecurities. Examining his relationships to family and friends as well as isolating particular lines of dialogue as key insights into Bush's true nature, Weisberg keenly illustrates how Bush's insecurities have played out on a global scale. Weisberg also juxtaposes Bush within his family legacy, by drawing comparisons between his style of leadership with those on the Walker side of the family. In his deep voice, Robertson Dean provides an enjoyable performance that works well with Weisberg's prose. His deliberate cadence and well-placed emphasis makes the narration easy to follow and understand. Dean projects power and energy and is sure to have listeners looking for other audiobooks he reads that offer more narrative prose. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
WITH almost a year still to go in George W. Bush's presidency, he has already become the subject of an astonishing amount of literature - on the war in Iraq, on his controversial economic and social policies, on his two contested presidential elections and on the man himself. So Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, treads some familiar ground in his effort to understand the origins of Bush's much explored psyche. His analysis is not as original or startling as he sometimes claims; his explanations of Bush's behavior are often highly speculative; and he relies too much on such overworked clichés as the parallels between the president and Shakespeare's Henry V. But "The Bush Tragedy" is, nevertheless, an intelligent and illuminating book. It takes much of what we already know and uses it to create a mostly persuasive account of the character and behavior of a man whom many observers have already called the most disastrous president in our history. Weisberg sees Bush's life, and his presidency, as the product of a series of relationships - with his family and with the two men who most decisively influenced his administration: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. All these relationships, he argues, contributed to Bush's failures, but none more importantly than the complicated one with his father. George H. W. Bush was a true product of the family's Yankee past - reserved, responsible, careful and, for the most part, open-minded. As a child, George W. Bush was largely ignored by his busy, career-oriented father (and raised mostly by his aloof and often depressed mother). As an adult, he found himself unable to live up to his father's imposing example and chose, instead, to become something close to his opposite. For many years, he ordered his life not by carefully nurturing a career, as his father had done, but by using his father's fame to pursue quick and easy deals. He came to scorn the patrician New England world that had shaped his family and embraced instead the less decorous and more aggressive society of the Texas oil country. He also became an alcoholic. But according to Weisberg, even his recovery from addiction - assisted in part by his newfound interest in religion - contributed to his stubborn, swaggering and often reckless certitude. ("Bush's faith," Weisberg suggests, is sincere but has "no theological content." He "seldom goes to church," and his faith is less evangelical Christianity than "Self-Help Methodism.") For Bush, being born again did not mean becoming a new person, but a more effective version of the person he already was. President Bush with his father in 2002. Weisberg also attempts to explain the extraordinary roles that, in different ways, Rove and Cheney played in fashioning Bush's actions. To Rove, Bush was a hero from the moment they met. ("He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have," he later recalled.) Long before anyone else imagined a big future for Bush, Rove was already planning the ascent to the presidency, and he would spend many years devoted to Bush's career - using a large arsenal of political skills. (His tactics included ugly and effective whispering campaigns, which he heedlessly employed in both local and national races.) He was among the first to urge Bush to run for governor of Texas. After being set on his course, Bush needed little urging to imagine a race for president and entered the campaign as if the White House were a kind of entitlement; but it was Rove who had laid the groundwork for it within the party. Seldom has a candidate reached the presidency with so little personal effort or engagement. Once in office, Bush allowed Rove to continue shaping his political strategy, which overlapped extensively with public policy. The many concessions to the religious right were not the result of the president's religiosity, but of Rove's political calculations. He was determined to increase the evangelical turnout, which in 2000 had been so low it almost cost Bush the election. Sacrificed to this electoral strategy was the broad, cross-party appeal that Bush had created in Texas and the "compassionate conservatism" he had promised in his 2000 campaign. They were replaced with a narrow, base-driven strategy that alienated many of his initial supporters and undermined Rove's ambitious goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Bush had a very different, but no less important, relationship with his vice president. Cheney did not share Rove's belief in Bush's great political gifts. Instead, Weisberg argues, he saw in the new president an easily manipulable vehicle for his own longstanding agenda. He did not strive to be Bush's friend, but he became the president's continual and loyal courtier. "Cheney had figured out how to play on the son's sense of his reborn self, flattering the maturity of his judgment," Weisberg notes. "There was no need to spell out the implicit proposition: You have the self-confidence and inner security to rely on me." Cheney was not alone in persuading Bush (who needed little persuasion) to launch the disastrous war in Iraq, but without Cheney the conflict might never have overcome the opposition of many in the administration. Cheney was even more central to some of the other damaging actions of Bush's presidency: the assaults on due process and civil liberties; the defense of torture; the heightened secrecy; the contempt for international law and international organizations; and, perhaps most of all, the imperial view of the presidency, based on Cheney's theory of the "unitary executive" and (in Weisberg's words) his "lifelong goal" of "making the presidency stronger." Is the story of George W. Bush in fact a tragedy? Many Americans, of course, believe that his presidency has been a tragedy for the nation and for the world. But Weisberg provides few reasons to think it has been a tragedy for Bush himself. He portrays Bush as a willfully careless figure, only glancingly interested in his legacy or even his popularity. "To challenge a thoughtful, moderate and pragmatic father," Weisberg argues, "he trained himself to be hasty, extreme and unbending. He learned to overcome all forms of doubt through the exercise of will." Tragedy, in the Shakespearean form that Weisberg seems to cite (although there is nothing tragic about Henry V either), requires self-awareness and at least some level of greatness squandered. The Bush whom Weisberg skillfully and largely convincingly portrays is a man who has rarely reflected, who has almost never looked back, and who has constructed a self-image of strength, courage and boldness that has little basis in the reality of his life. He is driven less by bold vision than by a desire to get elected (and settle scores), less by real strength than by unfocused ambition, and less by courage than by an almost passive acquiescence in disastrous plans that the people he empowered pursued in his name. To challenge a thoughtful, moderate father, Bush 'trained himself to be hasty, extreme and unbending.' Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia University.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One The Bushes and the Walkers O, had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons, From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame, Deposing thee before thou wert possess'd Which art possess'd now to depose thyself. --richard ii George walker bush is the product of two family traditions, the Bushes and the Walkers. On one side is the familiar patriarch Prescott Bush (1895-1972), the decorous Republican senator from Connecticut, the New England WASP, the pennant-waving Yale man. On the other side of his father's family stands a lesser-known patriarch, George Herbert Walker (1875-1953), the St. Louis buccaneer and raucous playboy. The Bushes as we know them today are the product of a combination of-- one might say the combustion between--the two very different families arrayed around these two dominant men. Because the family is private to the point of being obsessively secretive, its basic internal struggle has been largely obscured in favor of a familiar cliché: the old American upper class. But this isn't the story of a happy, unified family. Drilling into the history of the Walkers and the Bushes, one hits layer upon sedimentary layer of conflict among brothers, cousins, uncles, and grandparents. The buried drama and forgotten ancestors are the beginning point for understanding George W. Bush, the roots of whose temperament are not as shallow as they appear. Superficially, the Walkers and Bushes had much in common when they came together just after the First World War. Both families represented industrial fortunes from the Midwest transplanted into East Coast finance. Both were fanatical about sports and ferociously competitive, sharing a passion for baseball, golf, and tennis. Both came to worship side by side at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, and at St. Ann's in Kennebunkport, Maine, where George H. W. Bush's parents, Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker (1901-1992), were married in 1921. Endless connections to Yale, Skull and Bones, and the Harriman banking enterprises run through both families. Yet an enormous amount is papered over by the simplification that George H. W. Bush was raised a Connecticut Yankee. The union of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker represented less a merger of equals than a crossing of lines: old fortune and new, Protestant and Catholic, Republican and Democrat. Prescott Bush descended from New England abolitionists. Dorothy Walker came from a Maryland family that owned slaves--a family secret that has been previously reported only in a small paper published in Springfield, Illinois. The more noticeable differences were resolved with relative ease. Both families soon became thoroughly Episcopal and Republican, and money ages quickly in America. But there endured a less visible conflict over attitudes, beliefs, and principles. To put it simply, the value system of the original patriarch, George W.'s great-grandfather George Herbert Walker, was based on the pursuit of wealth. The one embodied by George W.'s grandfather Prescott Bush was an ethical ideal. The ramifications of this divergence were infinite and insurmountable. The Walkers behaved like the worst nouveaux riches: they were grand, greedy, extravagant, and focused on class distinctions. Prescott Bush's clan was pointedly modest, frugal, and egalitarian. George Herbert Walker's world was one of yachts, racehorses, estates, and servants. Prescott Bush couldn't abide a yacht, was uncomfortable at clubs, and hated formal dinners, preferring the modestly genteel lifestyle of a suburban commuter. His social life was the Whiffenpoofs, the Greenwich town council, and golf. The Walkers were gamblers; the Bushes conservators. The Walkers pursued winning and success; the Bushes sought to serve and lead. The Walkers viewed wealth as an end; the Bushes as a means. The Bushes embodied the old WASP embarrassment about being rich; they pretended they really weren't, and treated the help as "family." As Richard Ben Cramer puts it in What It Takes, whose early chapters contain the most insightful writing about them, the Bushes were known in Greenwich as being "not like that"--the sort of people who lorded their wealth or station over their social and economic inferiors. Biographers find no shortage of tales of the early George H. W. Bush's egalitarian decency; how he stood up for a Jewish kid being bullied at Andover, how he bonded with the enlisted men on his boat during World War II, how in Congress he wrote personal letters to crotchety constituents, turning them into devoted friends. Counter-snobbery can be a more highly evolved snobbery. In the Bush family, downplaying social superiority is a subtle way to hold it over those who advertise their class--people like the boorish George Herbert Walker and his sons. George H. W. Bush's exaggeratedly considerate and self-effacing behavior is typically attributed to his mother, Dorothy, who was George Herbert Walker's daughter. But in this, Dotty Walker was a defector from her father's family to her husband's. She rejected the egoistic, mercantile values of George Herbert Walker and absorbed her husband, Prescott's, asceticism, rectitude, and sense of duty. The admirable, sometimes hyperbolic selflessness she passed on to her children represented a transfer of loyalties and ultimately a shift in the Walker-Bush balance of power. In the battle of the two patriarchs, Prescott might, until fairly recently, have been thought the winner. The first Bush presidency expressed Prescott's ethic of self-restraint and public service, not the Walker ethic of masculine risk-taking, conquest, and domination. The Bush name became famous around the world; the Walker name was absorbed. Even Walker's Point, George Herbert Walker's summer haven in Kennebunkport, and a place that Prescott Bush found too unpleasant to visit in the 1950s because of his feelings toward his in-laws, was assumed to be the ancestral manse of George H. W. Bush's Yankee ancestors. But the struggle in which the Bush victory was achieved left some rogue DNA. George W. Bush's likeness to some of his Walker ancestors offers a conspicuous display of the phenomenon sociologists call intergenerational rootedness--the curious persistence of family patterns over long spans of time. While George H. W. Bush is Prescott's son, George W. Bush is in many respects his great- grandfather's. He is more Walker than Bush. bush parsimony meets walker egotism in the practice of recycling an insufficient number of names among an excessive number of male heirs. The result is a profusion of Samuels, Georges, Herberts, Johns, Walkers, and Prescotts, applied as first, second, third, and fourth names--an exploding blob of WASP nomenclature that deters comprehension. The older George Bush, the forty-first president, had always been known growing up as "Poppy" or "Pop," a diminutive of "little Pop," to distinguish him from what the family called his namesake and grandfather, George Herbert Walker. Bush avoided this preppie moniker in the Navy, where his nickname became his actual name, "George Herbert Walker Bush," played out to mock his upper- class breeding and manners. At Yale he reverted to Poppy, which he remained to his family. On oil rigs, he was just plain George. When Poppy named his first son after himself but not quite, he compounded the confusion. Growing up, his son was known as Little George, Georgie, George Junior, and Junior, which was how he was known to friends at college. As his political career took form in Texas, he eschewed all versions of Junior, embracing "George W." or merely "W" (pronounced "Dubya"). Only when he became president did he reclaim the name "George Bush," relegating his father to the status of "41," "George H. W. Bush," or "Bush Senior." Given how confusing the men's names are, one can only be thankful that W. had daughters. Having an ordinary three names instead of a pretentious four helps to answer the implication George W. Bush most resents, that he arrived in the White House with the help of such un-American principles as primogeniture, dynasty, and aristocracy. Though he can hardly cultivate a log cabin myth, this Bush has long thought of himself as a Texan rather than a New Englander, an entrepreneur rather than a beneficiary of inherited wealth, and the opposite of any kind of snob. Distinctions he draws with his preppie father are central to his personal and political identity. George H. W. Bush struck a Texan pose as well, with far less success. Former President Bush mainly set himself up for ridicule when he professed a love for country music and pork rinds or when he claimed that he didn't know what the word "patrician" meant. In truth, Bush embodied the easily parodied but much admired WASP type as thoroughly as any man of his generation, not just its taste and manners, but the ideals and moral vision of the old New England upper class. He wore Brooks Brothers and believed in duty to country. He was a skinflint who wrestled with his conscience. He personified good sportsmanship and drizzled thank-you notes. These preppie folkways made George H. W. Bush's Texan mask comically transparent. Excerpted from The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
