THE BUSH TRAGEDY: THE UNMAKING OF A PRESIDENT
by Jacob Weisberg
Random House $43.99
KEY POINTS:
It is irresistible to think of Hollywood turning this scintillating thesis of a book into a big-screen epic a few years down the road and watching the notional credits roll.
Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, Eugene O'Neill and Edna Ferber. Additional dialogue by Winston Churchill and Arthur Miller, based on an unoriginal idea by Sophocles and Shakespeare. Starring Sean Penn as George W. Bush, Clint Eastwood as Poppy Bush, Meryl Streep as Barbara and Russell Crowe as Karl Rove.
Running time: roughly 57 years, from the day Prescott Bush became a US senator to the day next February when grandson George leaves the White House forever.
And there is an almost cinematic plot here, one that seeks to bathe modern politics in history and psychology. Here's Prescott, an uptight bear of an east coast merchant banker, married to Dorothy from the midwest Walker family.
Prescott and Dorothy had five kids and a rigid family philosophy. Boys go far away and try to make their own fortunes.
Second son George Herbert Walker Bush does precisely that. He goes to war and becomes a hero; then he goes to Texas and finds oil.
But he wants to turn politician, just like dad. The family Bush has loads of clout. Poppy Bush becomes director of the CIA, ambassador to China, veep of the USA and then commander-in-chief from the Oval Office, hailing triumph in the Cold War before starting a hot one in Iraq.
But Poppy and Barbie's eldest son George has a lot of the Walker in him. Dad and mum give his boozing and lowbrow high jinks pretty short shrift. They think their second son, Jeb, down there in Florida, will be the true standard-bearer of family values. Thus they piss off George W.
He stops boozing, finds God and Laura - and also finds Rove, one of Poppy's backroom boys.
Together, they win Texas and then the White House, whereupon young George embarks on a determined programme of self-destruction.
Young George is going to stick it to old, quavering, thoughtful George. He's going to have clear, triumphal policies. He's going to blast that Saddam, who once tried to blow up the Bushes, right off the face of the earth. Which is where tragedy enfolds Texas and the world.
Books about George W. have moved over the years from hagiography to mere "slaghimoffgraphy", chronicling the supposed transition from titan to figure of fun.
Weisberg, the editor of Slate magazine online, is a scholar, wit and acute observer. He's made a living out of several collections of Bushisms, volumes of dunderheaded verbal bloopers.
Now he tries serious and is seriously brilliant. This portrait of a senior son - scorned and utterly pig-headed - arrives supported by many telling quotations from inside the family and solves otherwise baffling mysteries.
Why invite Baker-Hamilton, that committee of wise, grey men, to tell you how to get out of Iraq, then tell them to take a running jump? Because Jim Baker was Poppy's fixer, doing Poppy's business.
You can explain a great deal in this fashion, via the passion of hearth and home. Add disaffected or disgruntled courtiers - such as Rove and Dick Cheney - and there's a rational, tragic explanation of why the 43rd President has been such a bust, why Rove and George W. leave nothing behind them but an electoral stink and snarl.
Too easy, too pat? Sometimes. The Poppy Bush I once traipsed around Alabama with on the campaign trail is wry and surprisingly witty, but also unimposing. Can this flappy chappy really have ruled with a rod of (at least psychological) iron?
And once you loosen the ties that bind his sons to him, even by a half-turn, the plot itself comes to seem a trifle mechanistic. There is a feeling, from time to time, that Weisberg is whittling his theory down to too honed and simple a size. (It's strange, for instance, how neither the weight of Saudi advice nor the depth of duff Mossad intelligence that preceded the Iraqi invasion rates a mention.) There are also a few literary bridges to Henry V (and Randolph and Winston Churchill) too far. But none of that drains the fizz from a truly fizzy, original work of exploration.
Weisberg can be cruel, giving young George too little credit for conviction under fire. (Choosing the surge doesn't look quite so idiotic now, as McCain surges in behind.)
But, overall, this tale of filial pain and revenge offers wince-making insights from page to page - plus the great boon of common sense. Bush's mob - Cheney, Rumsfeld et al - didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction, Weisberg concludes.
They did think Saddam could destroy them. "They tried to frame a man they thought was guilty - which is not quite the same thing as framing someone you know to be innocent."
So is George W. guilty as charged? No. But don't pronounce him quite innocent, either.
- OBSERVER
