The Bush Tragedy

by Jacob Weisberg

Book Overview

This is the book that cracks the code of the Bush presidency. Unstintingly yet compassionately, and with no political ax to grind, Slate editor in chief Jacob Weisberg methodically and objectively... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812978358
• ISBN13: 9780812978353
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Random House Trade
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Insightful

This is the book that many people have been waiting for someone to write: one which closely examines the relationship between Bush and his father. It was clear, early on within George W.'s presidency, to anyone simply reading the newspapers that there were deep-seated resentments between the son and the father, or, at least, that the son was bending over backwards to avoid soliciting advice from George Sr. or any of his cronies. Weisberg explains in page-turning prose the complicated relationship that arose early on between the two men. What's surprising, however, is that an even more complicated relationship between son and mother is discussed, as well as the smoldering competitiveness between W and Jeb, who is the apple of his parents' eyes. These complexities have resulted in a personality which resents authority, hates complexities, prefers gut-instinct reaction to methodical thinking and examining, and consistently attempts to zig when his father might opt to zag. Weisberg sticks his pop-psychology neck out by conjecting that W seeks surrogate parents and family members within his relationships with Cheney, Rove, Rice, et al., but makes a convincing case, nonetheless. Weisberg uses the Shakespearean Henriad as a narrative arch template, a fascinating comparison that has been kicking around since 1999. But perhaps more meaningful is the comparison Weisberg makes at the end of the book to the relationship between Bush's hero, Winston Churchill, and his own father, Randolph Churchill. With age and maturity, Winston was able to find resolution in his complicated relationship with his father. W, seemingly, has not reached that level of maturity. That may be the ultimate Bush tragedy, one for which we are all paying.

America's tragedy

It's hard to know how many books have been written about George W. Bush during the course of his presidency that skewer him on just about everything, but Jacob Weisberg's "The Bush Tragedy" is a welcome addition to that increasing number as the author looks at his subject from a standpoint different from many of the others....his family. Weisberg is dead-on on his assessments of our nation's forty-third president and from that vantage point, we get to know much more about this latest tragedy in a series of family members that were as dysfunctional as they come. And the current president is the worst of them all. Growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, I've always been well aware of the Bush family from the days when "W"'s grandfather, Prescott, served in the U.S. Senate. The Bushes, then, were known as the "respectable" Republicans...the kind that used to be identified with the east coast, and a point well reviewed in this book. Few in town these days want to be associated with the name "Bush"...at least the Texas kind. As the Bushes moved south and west they developed into another kind of family with George W. Bush taking the family name off the deep end, with the help of religious conservatives. If Bush #41 began a trend of the northeast toward the Democratic party, Bush #43 sealed the deal. Yet as Weisberg points out, "W", who had been a cajoler in his days as Texas governor and did his best to keep the name "Bush" as a uniter, turned out to be a divider as president. This is one of many aspects of "The Bush Tragedy" that Weisberg covers well. Much of "The Bush Tragedy" features the ginning up of the war in Iraq...Bush's most notable and long-lasting failure. The author's accounts of the president's change of rationale for being in Iraq every eighteen months or so is terrific. Here, the Bush rhetoric comes under some intense scrutiny, all the better to remember those presidential miscues from a few years ago that now seem almost like scenes from another time. George Bush has claimed to read a good deal of history and counts Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill among his heroes. Weisberg brilliantly deconstructs this and the middle paragraph of a page not far from the end of the book sums up Bush to a tee. "The Bush Tragedy" is the most apt name for a book I've seen in a while. I highly recommend it and credit goes to Jacob Weisberg who reminds us that once in a while a really bad apple inhabits the White House.

EXCELLENT BIO; BUSH JR. IS LIKE THE WALKERS, BUSH SR. LIKE A BUSH

This is one of the best books about a Presidency in a long time. It is not so much about how Bush JR is obsessed with Bush SR, as some reviews have suggested, but an explanation of how and why Bush JR is like the Walker branch of his family, and his dad is like the Bush branch. It has a lot of new stuff including stunning detail about family politics. It tells us that Bush SR's dad Prescott Bush lived in a house bought by his father-in-law and worked at an investment bank owned by his father-in-law who was a Walker. Bush SR himself got his house in Kennebunkport ME by convincing the Walker widow who owned it to sell it to him. It also appears to show the George H. Walker branch of the family to be deceitful and dishonest (the current one worked at Goldman Sachs). In other words, although the Bush family seems to sell hardwork and Yankee values, it has really lived on the hog of the Walker side. Bush JR was so obsessed with his richer cousins that he likes their brash style and adopted it for himself. Of course all the psychoanalysis takes away from the book which reads as well and as seriously as any Presidential biography, even as good as David Mcculloch's John Adams. Few books this year have been so good

The most penetrating, and persuasive, explanation for Bush's failures

In The Bush Tragedy, Jacob Weisberg does what most of President Bush's critics have never tried to do: Take him seriously. In doing so, Jacob paints a devastating portrait of a man haunted by his father, crippled by a fatal lack of curiosity, and driven by ego to pursue aggressive and ill-considered policies. His Bush is not the cartoon of ignorant evil imagined by many of the president's critics, but a deeply complex man whose intellectual and emotional shortcomings have made him a disastrous president. Jacob, who (full disclosure) is a colleague and friend, has unearthed extraordinary new details about Bush's religious conversion, ancestral history, and family dynamics. My favorite bit--check it out on page 90--is an anecdote about how the president, always willing to make his own reality, decided that a painting of a horse thief was actually a portrait of a brave evangelist minister.