The Bush tragedy /

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.

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