The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg
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Book Reviews of The Bush Tragedy
Book Review: The Bush Tragedy
Summary: 3 Stars
To say that I am not a Bush supporter would be an understatement. I have endured the last eight years with gritted teeth and the knowledge that the nightmare of this administration would end on January 20, 2009, one way or another. The question had always been just how much damage to our civil liberties would be done, how far the Constitution could be bent like a pretzel before it actually broke, and how far would America's stature in the court of world public opinion sink before that date. So for me to even read this book is somewhat bemusing. I already knew the Bush/Cheney administration was a tragedy. The fiasco treatise was read daily in the press and watched on the news channels. We had elected someone who could barely speak intelligent English and we had given him the codes to the arsenals. I did not have to read a book to tell me what we American's had been living through the past eight years was a tragedy. It was like the quintessential Greek play, only it was real life. You had to laugh at times, or eat Prozac or Lexapro or whatever your flavor.
I must have read a review of this book in Newsweek that caused me to order it from Amazon.com. I remember I was intrigued by two things, the review said the author approached his subject (Bush) not as a joke, but in a serious attempt to explain the man and the reasons of the actions taken. And the author is the editor in chief of Slate magazine, a web portal that I have been known to frequent. Then there is the "Bushisms" series that the author has been associated with. Given the fact that Jacob Weisberg is said to try and write a serious work about the court jester, I decided to give it a go.
Overall the book is a fairly good read. The author takes some leaps here and there trying to tie his take on the actions of the man and pin them to what he feels is the motive behind them. Sometimes they stick, other times not so much. Weisberg does take some of his own armchair psychoanalysis a bit to far at times, pointing backwards inside the Bush family tree one and two generations as to why something was done. Then there are other times when he is able, due to his access to back door information and background, to provide some insightful revelations about the man Dubya and those around him, specifically Karl Rove. There should be no doubt that Karl Rove was the evil puppeteer who worked the marionette and got him into the oval office in 2000.
The first chapter is meant to introduce you to the family tree and who is who in the grand scheme of things. However this is probably the weakest chapter written by Weisberg, and very hard to follow, even with the photo family tree provided. Weisberg insists of calling the same person multipule names, often on the same page. At one point he refers to George Herbert Walker Bush as George H. W., #41, Poppy, Pop, and little Pop all within a matter of sentences. Being a somewhat amateur genealogist, this is taboo. You designate a name, one name for a person, and refer back to that name at all times. This constantly changing of monikers to reference the same individual gets confusing fast, and it did. And of course everyone in the family had to have at least two names, and two different nick or pet names as well. Take it slow, refer back to the photo family tree, and you will make it through.
Jacob Weisberg is at his best however when providing details on Dick Cheney, the vice president, revealing the real authority behind the administration. A good bit of background information is given on where Cheney came from, who he had worked for and why, and how he came to be the #2 man in the administration. Let there be no doubt, Dick Cheney has done more to undo the Constitution and personal liberties of American's than any other man in the 232 years of our history. Dick Cheney is so powerful (or so he would assume) that he singlehandedly took the office of vice president out of the executive branch of government and moved it to the legislative branch!
Something that did surprise me that came out in this book was the basic revelation that George H.W. Bush was a better statesman, president and leader than he has been given credit for in the court of public opinion. Bush senior was able to take advice from different sources, reflect on them, and eventually formulate a plan or make a decision based on several different points of view, and in particular, based on facts. Dubya on the other hand, has little use of facts, or briefing points, or other bits of empirical evidence. Even Dubya's wife, Laura Bush, makes comment that her husband is not able to retain facts and information, instead bases his decision making process on some form of "I got a feeling about ..." Like the time Bush looked into the eyes of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and seeing into his soul, found goodness. Possibly the citizens of Russia are wondering just where Dubya looked, for they are still searching for the goodness.
There are many personalities that come into play in the development of Dubya and who he is today. His mother, Barbara, who does not fair well in this book; an great-uncle, George Herbert "Herbie" Walker Jr., who favored Dubya's father more than his own sons; a grandfather that insisted the grandchildren call him "Senator"; and of course Dubya's brother, Jeb, who was favored to be a president until Dubya wrestled that away.
If you want some family background and insights to THE.WORST.PRESIDENT.EVER than this book is a read for you. If you are just so glad the nightmare might be coming to an end soon (notice I said might, as it will take years, possibly decades to undo the damage done by this administration) than take a pass on this book.
Either way, I am just glad we will soon be able to talk about President Bush in a past tense form.
Book Review: Interesting, but reveals the limits of political psychology
Summary: 3 Stars
Despite its wealth of biographical information, Jacob Weisberg's psycho-biography of George W. Bush, The Bush Tragedy, argues a simple thesis to a complex question. Why were the former president's foreign policy decisions so disastrous? Rather than supporting the currently popular answer - the insidious influence of naïve neoconservatives - Weisberg takes a psychological tact.
The 43rd president has made a hash of the Iraq War, the so-called war on terror and indeed everything else because of the ghost of his father, the 41st president. George W. Bush, like all the Bush men, Weisberg argues, felt an urge to escape his father's shadow, to prove himself and to appear a self-made man. The results have been disastrous; they have been tragic.
The Bushes have a narrative, Weisberg claims, a roadmap to success. It goes something like this: excel in both athletics and academics at preppy East Coast institutions, join the armed forces and serve with distinction, head West in a beaten up roadster with nothing but connections, strike it rich and go into politics. George W. tried his darndest to follow this script, but try as he might, he could do nothing but fail. Then he turned 40.
At 40 George W. turned his life around. He quit drinking, found God, and became the "enforcer" in his father's campaign for the presidency, fiercely taking on any reporter who would dare to criticize his much admired Poppy. Bush took much pride in his role in helping his dad win the election. Weisberg writes that he learned much through the experience, finally becoming his own man and building on the momentum of the moment to his own successful bid for Texas governor and eventually the presidency itself.
But Bush the younger never completely exorcised Bush the elder from his psyche. In Weisberg's account George W. retained even after his remarkable turn-around an explosive mix of admiration for his good-at-everything-dad and also resentment for the father who was never home and who never helped with his son's learning disabilities, and for the husband who was never there for his lonely and often depressed mother.
This resentment was magnified by his father's failure to retain the White House in 1992. George W., Weisberg argues, from that moment on began to distance himself from his father's policies and politics. Contra Poppy, he was open about his faith and pandered to the evangelical right. He welcomed visions. While his father worried over details, micromanaged, dithered and debated, George W. Bush became the "decider" and aimed to practice leadership bold, blunt and "consequential".
This has been the mindset that has lead to disaster in Iraq and elsewhere, Weisberg claims. Bush's bad decisions are the result not of bad advice from Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and many others but rather a psychological duel with the dad who could not follow through, who did not march on Bagdad.
Perhaps. Weisberg's account is plausible but simplistic. The book is subjective in places and often makes largely ungrounded inferences. If it is the Bush administration's blunderings in Iraq we wish to explain, we would do better to go at things with greater rigor and systematic scope. Policy decisions - both good and bad - are explained through reference to those who made the decisions, certainly, but we must look to all the people who helped form a policy. Also, while personal psychology certainly plays a role in how a policy is developed, principled and ideological commitments surely play the greater part.
Still, while we should be hesitant to give Bush's psychology as large a role as Weisberg does in explaining the failures of the current administration, impulsive and reckless psychology have been involved and not just on the part of the current president.
Book Review: Still in Search of an "Authentic 'W' Humanity."
Summary: 3 Stars
Having already read several books (some reviewed here on Amazon.com) in search of the "real W," and after seeing the movie "W," which left me cold because there just did not seem enough meat there to support a full story (even a highly suspicious and caricatured one), I decided to purchase this book hoping for a final full frontal view of the real "W's'" humanity.
Since "W's" life, from beginning to end, has been such an unmitigated disaster, one would assume that he would be an easy subject (target?) to portray, at least psychologically anyway. However, the challenge, both for a writer and for a director, is how to capture his authentic humanity without reverting to caricatures and anti-Bush harangues. [It is clear that after a while, even caricatures also eventually become boring -- for one can gore a "dead ox" only so many times.]
For me, one of the most revealing (though hardly any more convincing than this one) of the books I have read so far is the psychoanalytic book "Bush on the Couch," by Justin A. Frank. Frank, who makes superb use of Melanie Kline's psychoanalytic techniques, concludes that "W's" main problem originated from suffering his father's neglect during his formative years -- and suffering from poor parenting, more generally. For instance, even after his sister had died of Leukemia, his parents (mainly at Barbara's insistence) for years, kept this fact from seven-year old "Georgie." Frank concluded that whatever else Barbara and George Bush may have been, during "W's" formative years at least, they surely could not have been considered good parents.
Here, Weisberg is clear up front about the fact that he is no Bush lover. He is in fact the creator of a very active anti-Bush blog. This book is pretty much a re-excavation of well-tread Bush family history, careful collation and "grafted on" to the author's many previously published (Salon) thoughts and views about "W" and his failed presidency.
His focus here is not on "W" per se, but on why his presidency has been a failure. Unsurprisingly, after a heavy-handed historical introduction and a compilation of his mostly anti-Bush views, Weisberg comes to the same conclusions that Frank's psychological analysis came to: that it was family relationships that were primarily responsible for the warped nature of "W's" personality and outlook on life. And while Frank's book delves on poor parenting, Weisberg's "focuses in" on trans-generational family influences (one assumes that this is the only reason for the lengthy, almost overwrought historical analysis).
What does all this have to do with "W's" draconian instituted failed rightwing policies? Apparently the connection, which the author makes only indirectly and in the subtext is that it turned "W" against the competitive legacy of his "uber-successful" parents and the generations of his wealthy and status-conscious fore-parents, ultimately leaving a psychological hole in his psyche, one that was eventually filled-in with Texan styled swagger, an undue reliance of sycophantic gurus such as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, backing into fundamentalist Christian faith, and (need it be said out loudly), also deep personal self-hatred and denial, prompted by his many barely concealable inadequacies, neither of which he seemed able to completely shake.
I enjoyed the book, but found it unconvincing. Three stars.
Book Review: Highly Biased
Summary: 2 Stars
I'm a conservative who did not know very much about Jacob Weisberg before buying this book. I heard his take on George W. Bush's religious views and they really intrigued me. I myself am no fan of the 43rd President. I consider Bush to be a big spending liberal so am more open to leftist critiques concerning him than I would be for other politicians. And to be fair, Chapter 3 "The Gospel of George," was quite strong. I think Self-help Methodism is a solid way to describe Mr. Bush's religious perspective. That he is not a doctrinaire evangelist is quite evident and Weisberg does a good job in stating his case. He was the first I heard to do so and should be given credit for his insight.
Overall, however, The Bush Tragedy is a very poor work. I do object to the cover's claim that the author has "no political ax to grind" because he obviously does. Furthermore, he has no respect for conservatives whatsoever. I know this to be true due to an article he penned over the summer claiming that the reason people like me didn't back Obama was due to his race. This is preposterous. The real reason is that no true conservative would ever back Obama because he's a leftist. Weisberg also refers to himself as being a "liberal hawk" in these pages; although, nothing hawkish about his worldview is discernible. He admits as well to penning six books on Bush's linguistic mistakes which is not an indicator of ideological neutrality. Further, Weisberg--a journalist--suggests that the president has a language processing deficit similar to dyslexia even though the author demonstrates no evidence that he is qualified to make such a statement.
Another thing alarming about The Bush Tragedy is that Weisberg's 2008 release pretends that the Iraq War has been lost whereas the evidence has suggested otherwise for over a year. Aside from a page 218 mention, The Surge is not cited at all. It's as if it never happened. A more honest narrator would admit that the final chapter on Mr. Bush largely depends on what happens in Bagdad. History's final pages are not yet written but they are on this work...which is infinitely forgettable.