The Bush Tragedy
by Jacob Weisberg
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Book Reviews of The Bush Tragedy
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: The Letter Hiding in Plain Sight
Summary: 5 Stars
In The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe imagines a story where a damning letter that can bring doom to the monarchy is hidden in plain sight, available for everyone to see but escaping the police's gaze because of its obvious location and minor changes in its appearance. This story was later taken up by psychoanalysts as a metaphor of their own method of enquiry. Marie Bonaparte, Freud's French disciple, stressed that the purloined letter in the story symbolizes regret for missing maternal penis and reproach for its loss by the son-detective. Jacques Lacan, rebellious heir to the Freudian tradition, saw the letter as the sign of the constitutive lack which forms the keystone of the symbolic order.
Although he cautions his reader against what he calls "psychobabble", Jacob Weisberg also claims the Freudian legacy. The Freud he refers to is the co-author of Woodrow Wilson's biography, in which he argues that Wilson's inability to process aggressive feelings towards his father left him increasingly messianic and detached from reality: "facts ceased to exist for him if they conflicted with his unconscious desires".
But Weisberg also implicitly refers to Poe's narrative to characterize his method of investigation: "In pursuit of leaks and scoops, we journalists often miss what's hiding in plain sight. The key that unlocks the mystery of political motivation is seldom hidden in a locked vault. It's usually right in front of us".
Indeed, there is a purloined letter in almost every chapter of The Bush Tragedy. The elusive letter is most obviously revealed in the opening chapter, where the key to George W. Bush's destiny is to be found in his middle initial. According to Weisberg's version of the family story, "W" is the product of two family traditions, the Bushes and the Walkers, and he is in many ways more a Walker than a Bush. As is well known, only one letter separates him from his father, and the towering figure loomed large on everything he did to gain recognition or assert independence.
Weisberg also exposes the plans of the two most controversial characters of the Bush presidency: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. As he demonstrates, they were not driven by a hidden agenda or a secret plot to take over America: they acted in plain sight, and their intentions had been publicized all along. Rove's grandiose historical ambition was to achieve nationally what he had done in Texas: operate a major political realignment and ensure Republican dominance for decades to come. Cheney, otherwise secretive and manipulative, never hid his intention to expand executive power and limit interference by the legislative branch. The writing was on the wall for all people to see.
Another version of the tell-tale letter is the wave of anthrax letters that followed the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Weisberg greatly reevaluates this episode: without the anthrax attacks, Cheney would never have gained such ascendency over the president, and Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.
I have read several biographies of American presidents and I thought the genre improved with the passage of time, with history providing a decanter that allowed the best wine bottles to mellow. But Weisberg's Bush Tragedy proves that a portrait could be written on the spur of time and still claim a commanding place on history's bookshelves.
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: I understand Bush Better and excuse him less.
Summary: 4 Stars
I had often wondered how a man like George W. Bush could have become the governor of Texas (where I live) and then President of the United States. Well, this book showed me how it could happen.
This book was a real eye-opener into the life of George W. Bush and the pressures he faced as the oldest child in a wealthy and extremely politically active family. Particularly interesting was the dynamic between the Bush/Walker sides of the family. When the author stated that Bush was more like the Walker side of the family, I thought, "Yes, for SURE!" In fact, that's one of the things that helped me to understand our now ex-President a bit better.
AS you might guess, the book was filled with a lot of political details and showed a lot of the inner workings of the who, what, when, where, why and how of the Bush presidency. Some of the events were just as I thought, many of them I didn't realize but was not surprised when I learned them, and some information was a BIG surprise.
For me, one of the biggest surprises was Bush's "real" relation to the religious right. Now I did know right from the get-go that Karl Rove was not part of it, but that he orchestrated the hook-up with the Bush election to it. I get the impression that Bush, while his views of Christ were Biblical, his real religious affiliation was not with the religious right at all -- and in fact, his father didn't approve of their antics, either.
To me, it's a story of a presidency which never should have happened in the first place. I have often wondered how Bush managed to get re-elected, although I have a private opinion that if Hurricane Katrina had happened in 2003 instead of 2005, the re-election of Bush wouldn't have happened, either.
I could empathize with Bush's mixed feelings towards his famous father, whom he had helped a lot, but to whom he often felt inferior. I can empathize -- but it doesn't excuse Bush's performance in the White House, either. The book gives some good psychological insights into Bush's behavior, but like some of the other reviewers, I think the author sometimes draws conclusions about Bush's motives which may or may not be accurate.
However, I would recommend reading the book; it's a real eye-opener.
Like many people of my generation (I'm two months and six days younger that the former President himself) I've been watching the Republican party change into something I don't know any more. In retrospect, I think I could see it coming even when I was in high school, although I didn't recognize it at the time. I think it's time for both parties in general and the Republicans in particular to do some serious self-examination and make a lot of internal repair.
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.