THE BUSH TRAGEDY-NYT-"The Most Diasastrous President In Our History"

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Sun Mar-02-08 06:31 PM
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THE BUSH TRAGEDY-NYT-"The Most Diasastrous President In Our History"

�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.

Jim Bourg/Reuters
President Bush with his father in 2002.

THE BUSH TRAGEDY

By Jacob Weisberg.

An Excerpt From 'The Bush Tragedy' in Newsweek (newsweek.com)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.

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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.

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Brinkley-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin