Product Description

"The Bush Tragedy" opens up the black box of the plane-crash presidency of George W. Bush to examine the political wreckage. How did a man of such evident flaws and limited abilities find himself in the position of the most powerful man in the world? How and why did half of America fall for Bush before falling out with him? Weisberg analyses Bush through familial, personal, political and historical relationships, and examines how his idolisation of Reagan and his devout Christianity led to widely condemned policy decisions that have fundamentally changed the role and position of the US. "The Bush Tragedy" is a razor-sharp character study of one of the most controversial presidents in American history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215975 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
'The Bush Tragedy is political drama, family history and psychological insight in dazzling combination. If you read one book about George W. Bush and his presidency, this should be it' Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink 'Precisely because he does not think George W. Bush is a joke, Jacob Weisberg has been able to write a very witty and deeply penetrating profile of him' Christopher Hitchens 'The epic failure of the Bush Administration is a story for the ages and Jacob Weisberg - with a clever assist from William Shakespeare - has written a scorching, powerful and entirely plausible account of this perverse family saga. Not only that - it's a beautifully written and erudite book, hilarious at times, a joy to read' Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors

About the Author
Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate.com, where he writes a weekly column about politics and currrent affairs, 'The Big Idea' . He was previously Slate's chief political correspondent. Before joining Slate in 1996, he wrote for magazines including the New Republic, Newsweek, and New York Magazine, and has also written for Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. He is the co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World. He is also the author of the 1996 book In Defense of Government and the Bushisms series, including the most recent Bushisms V: New Ways to Harm Our Country.

Customer Reviews

A somewhat flawed review of a flawed man
I have been intruiged about how George Bush was not only elected once, but re-elected as US president. So, in a bored moment, I bought this book. It promised much,and is worth a read, but cutting to the chase, it was fascinating but fairly distorted ... not by lack of trying, but by trying too hard. Everything was force fitted into a mould that had some truth in it, but was pushed too far. In a little more detail, the backstory was fascinating, the early years likewise, and you can certainly see how his thesis of a man who wants to emulate his father's course, but also draw sharp contrast and be thought of as his own man. Having done this groundwork, it felt like the period of the presidency was skated over, and through the lens of folks like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Even here it paints only a sketch of Condi Rice who feels an intruiging figure who, from the little I know, I thought should have been smart enough to provide a more guiding hand. The books written fairly well, but nothing like as well as one might interpret from the reviews.

So, one of the things I was left wondering was how it got the rave reviews it did on the cover - e.g the front cover has a quote from Malcolm Gladwell (he of 'The tipping point') - "Political drama, family history and psychological insight in dazzling combination. If you read one book about George W. Bush and his presidency, this should be it". That would be the same Malcolm Gladwell thanked in the Acknowledgements for his 'keen insights and editorial suggestions' would it? And, the one who dwelt on Jacob's mother Lois extensively within 'The Tipping Point'. So, hardly the disinterested observer that you might imagine.

But, he's in good company, since Jacob also thanks Joe Klein (Author of 'Primary Colors') for the benefits that have come from conversations with him (and others) ... and Joe turns up on the back cover saying 'Scorching, powerful and entirely plausible ... a beautifully written and erudite book, hilarious at times, a joy to read'. In terms of general reviews we have 'A serious, thought-provoking effort to penetrate what instinct tells us muct be an extraordinary family drama' from the Washington Post. Jacob is editor-in-chief of Slate Group, a division of The Washington Post Company in which I must presume the Washington Post is stabled. Maybe it's an innocent connection, but after two spun connections, I am a little skeptical.

But, for all the skepticism, still worth a read, and worth three stars

A Family Madness **
Drawing on some distorted form of Freudian analysis and dabbling in Shakespeare, Weisberg is at some pains to show how George W. Bush's family heritage formed the President's personality. The son is continually referencing his father in comments and actions, while at the same time trying to distance himself from the 41st President . This isn't the first effort along these lines, nor will it surely be the last. In this well-written, but terribly narrow assessment, the author carefully traces how W.'s actions are a reflection of his reactions to his President father.

The account opens with a summary history of the Bush and Walker families. Their rise, successes and especially their personalities lay the groundwork for what follows. Weisberg carefully follows W.'s life in Texas and his attempts at an education in the East. Yale was not a happy time for the young man, and his reaction to the alien world of "The Eastern Establishment" set patterns he would follow throughout his career. As he haltingly moves toward becoming the Republican nominee [although little is given of that process], Bush begins collecting the men - and a woman - who will become his "inner circle". Karl Rove is a sycophant with a dream, manipulating Bush while being subjected to W's banter. Rove is later joined by Dick Cheney, two men with a dream of remaking the Presidency and US society. It's a compelling, if highly disturbing picture.

The Iraq invasion is, of course, the pivot point for Weisberg's analysis, calling the crusade against Saddam Hussein a total blunder. Yet Weisberg, in his depiction, makes a major gaffe of his own. After making serious effort to show how Bush makes decisions with little consideration, then sticks to the choice against any contending opinions, tells us that the President had not chosen to invade until almost the final moment. This is an astounding reversal of what Weisberg has been presenting throughout the book. The author accepts that the Bush regime "honestly" felt Hussein was a threat and the war decision justified on those grounds. Weisberg lightly passes over those such as Richard Clark or Christopher Meyer who testified Bush had decided on "regime change" long before. He ignores Colin Powell's admission that he was fed a lot of "BS" to present to the UN. Indeed, the contrived WMDs the Bush regime touted so vehemently were declared missing by Hans Blix, who receives not a drop of ink here.

Nothing is offered for why US voters should have returned this misfit to the Presidency. It will be the greatest tragedy in US history if Bush leaves the Presidency without facing charges, but this eventuality never enters Weisberg's account. In fact, no real assessment of the long-term impact of the regime's many Constitutional violations is given. We are given the portrait of a vulnerable man, with the most superficial talents holding sway over government procedures and policies unfit for a democracy. Does Weisberg think any one or a generation of successive Presidents is going to be able to set right what the Bush regime has wrought? Any new President will not be able to purge the Supreme Court of the witless hacks Bush has placed there. Worse, the deep penetration of appointments vetted more for their sympathy to "Christian" evangelical views than for any abilities is not easily uprooted and dispensed with. Weisberg may have well fulfilled the mandate he set himself, but as far as the author's concerned, that will all pass into history's assessment when Bush leaves office. The effect on society will endure. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

** with thanks to Thomas Keneally

IGNORANCE IS BLISS
'He doesn't know anything. He doesn't want to know anything. But he's not dumb.' That was Bill Clinton on his successor, quoted here. No author assessing the 43rd presidency of the USA at this late stage could be starting without a definite opinion of it. Weisberg has form, of course, as an anthologist of Bushisms, and the book's very title is a dead giveaway. For all that, this is a serious piece of research and analysis. Bush's multifarious shortcomings are never alleged to include low IQ. If he has a 'tragic flaw' it is depicted as self-deception and distorting the processes of reason to shore up preconceived views, and I give Weisberg credit for not falling into the same trap.

'Tragedy' in the title is used in two senses, one the diminished modern sense of 'disaster' the other the traditional use to denote a type of drama. At the head of each chapter and periodically in between Weisberg quotes from Shakespeare's Henry IV and V. His citations are neat and apposite, but I'm not inclined to labour them or treat them as more than a literary device. The real burden of Weisberg's argument starts with his delving into Bush's family history and tracing character traits that he thinks reappear in the person of his tragic hero. This is a very tricky area, and once again I'm not disposed to tread too hard on it but rather see how I react to the personality as depicted (from what I can make out of it from this distance), whatever its alleged genetic origins.

Broadly, the narrative here makes sense to me. To understand Bush, we have to have some picture of the other actors. Some are fairly two-dimensional. Rumsfeld comes across as a bullying know-all, Rice as a toadying hero-worshipper. Much more interesting are the depictions of Rove and, particularly, Cheney. Weisberg is at pains to stress that while Bush was probably manipulated by both, the only way to manipulate him was to flatter his sense of his own significance and give him ownership of the ideas being suggested to him. Rove was put in his place when he showed signs of getting uppity, and Cheney comes across as a grey eminence, ambitious not for himself but for his political agenda. In fact Weisberg has made me revise my notions of Cheney entirely. His alarming concepts of a presidency that can do more or less what it likes are not, it seems, any consequence of 9/11 but reflect a siege mentality that Cheney has held, or that has gripped Cheney, throughout his political life. In particular, the story of the anthrax letters and the Cheney-led panic they induced in the White House was a revelation to me because, in Rumsfeld's phrase, policy since 2001 has 'been seen through the prism of 9/11'. Looking at anything through a prism tends to give a distorted view, but where have the anthrax letters gone from the prism? Cheney's congenital paranoia leapt to certainty that Saddam must have sent them as a prelude to a mass onslaught, but we have heard little of them since. Presumptions and prisms.

For Weisberg, Bush is driven by a craving to be distinctive and historic, measured against his father or Churchill or Reagan or the cosmos or whatever, but handicapped in this ambition by having no understanding of history. Weisberg finds 'narcissism' in Bush's attempts to put Churchill's head on his own shoulders, and his brazen proclamations that the people of Iraq are pursuing his agenda and fightin' for freedom, let alone that they ought to be grateful to America, are what fill me with disgust at the man. As far as Churchill is concerned, Weisberg has a phrase 'historical cliché' that fits the bill. In the unlikely event that Mr Bush reads this notice, let me inform him that over the longer view Churchill's career was marked by inconsistency, changes of political party, quirkiness and self-doubt. Churchill's greatness lay in his colossal energy and his power of persuasion. He was the man for the hour, but not for many other hours, and he was a consensus politician - Mr Bush please note. He was a patriot given a job to do when his country was under dire threat, and he was the right man. It was not his doing that Britain was actually a little better prepared, and Germany a little less well, than believed in 1940, and it is caricature to allege that he stood by some overarching political 'principles' come what might. In passing, the only obvious error I spotted in the book was the statement that the British 'fleet' was trapped at Dunkirk. It was the British expeditionary army. If my figures are right from memory, Admiral Canaris and others had a job persuading Hitler that his invasion of Britain was not on because the slow-moving barges carrying the troops would need an escort of destroyers, of which Germany had 10 and the British home fleet 90-100.

It's an interesting question how well a non-American can understand America post-9/11, but as I have visited America frequently since 1962 I must have as much insight into that as I shall ever have, so I'll have a go in the light of this illuminating book. Bush got where he did by appealing to something in the national culture. In a brilliant recent piece the columnist Gary Kamiya identifies this as 'national etiquette' which assesses truth and probability on an index of nationalistic fervour rather than on what might be expected normally. To oppose some policy is not to be supportive of it - a proposition that Kant would call 'analytic' (i.e. self-defining), but gaining force from the emotional connotations of 'non-supportive'.

That has kept Bush going, wearing his lapel-flag - keep it analytic in that sense but strictly in no other. I don't know what's left of his tumbledown tabernacle of make-believe, nor who except himself believes any of it, but today's news (3/28/08) suggests not much and not many other than Mr J McCain. I have known the romantic self-admiring form of American patriotism since 1962, and what Kamiya says was doubtless ne'er so well express'd, but I know that it was oft thought among more rational Americans. People may or may not empathise with the Peerers through the Prism after 9/11. The point is more - they have less sympathy than Americans expect, and will continue to have less until Americans stop romanticising themselves.

Back to tragedy. Weisberg opened the bidding with Shakespeare, I'll reply with Aeschylus. Of the condition of mankind before Prometheus Aeschylus tells us, and I find it replicated in the Bush presidency and its intellectual sympathisers, 'ephyron eike panta' - 'they were muddling everything together indiscriminately'.