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Summary
Summary
In this ambitious work of political narrative, Robert Draper takes us inside the Bush White House and delivers an intimate portrait of a tumultuous decade and a beleaguered administration.
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
Draper, a writer for GQ, was given six hours of face time with President Bush for this book, and before publication, some felt this unprecedented access would result in hagiography. This notion is dispelled in the prologue, when a surly president, who can't find anything he likes on the White House menu, barks out an order for a hot dog, which he proceeds to eat with open mouth, causing crumbs of said dog to land hither and yon. Using the skills of a magazine writer (rather than a biographer), Draper offers a form of presidential portraiture, set against the events of history, that is almost startling in its clarity. Elements of the president's personality that the public has long observed his certitude, impatience, and braggadocio are explored more fully here even as they are tempered with perhaps less-noted aspects of the Bush persona: sentimentality, loyalty, and compassion (he's more of compassionate conservative than his detractors might believe). Draper makes interesting choices about what incidents he stresses and what he ignores, all in service of a more fully shaded picture of the president. The Flordia battle after the 2000 election gets almost no time, while the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina receives extensive coverage. Nor does Draper source some of his most fascinating anecdotes. But he does acknowledge plenty of interviewees, from Laura Bush to Karen Hughes, Andy Card to Dick Armey, and all the insights these insiders contribute add value. By book's end, each side on the great Bush divide will probably come away with something it can cling too. But both will be forced to realize George Bush is more, and less, than they hoped.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
George W. Bush knows he's right; Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo made sure he got his way. THREE years after the American invasion of Iraq, after endless searches had found no sign of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush still believed that Saddam Hussein had had them. He expressed that conviction repeatedly to his chief of staff, Andrew Card, until Card left the White House in April 2006. So writes Robert Draper in his unusual biography of George W. Bush. It is unusual because Draper, a national correspondent for GQ magazine, was given extraordinary access to this press-averse president and his aides, including six private meetings with Bush, surely in the belief that he would be a friendly biographer. Draper is friendly, at times admiring. But he also unhesitatingly supplies devastating evidence of the characteristics that have helped to produce the disasters of the Bush presidency. "Dead Certain," the title, conveys one of those characteristics. Bush knows he is right. When facts turn out to get in the way, he brushes them off. When "Mission Accomplished" turned sour in Iraq, when various supposed bench marks of success did not stop the bloodshed, the president remained utterly confident of victory. He was sure, Draper writes, that "history would acquit him." These are some of the words Draper uses in discussing Bush: "certitude," "intransigence," "his obstinate streak," "compulsive optimism." "I truly believe we're in the process of shaping history for the good," Bush told Draper early this year. "I know, I firmly believe, that decisions I have made were necessary to secure the country." At the time of that interview, February 2007, Republicans had lost control of both houses of Congress. "Americans had soured on the president and his war," Draper writes. "The First Optimist had made pessimists out of them." But the president did not change. "What had to be believed, he believed." The way Bush sold the country on going to war against Iraq is well traced by Draper in quotations from speeches in late 2002. Saddam "is a man who would likely team up with Al Qaeda," Bush said on Nov. 3. Later the same day: "This is a man who has had contacts with Al Qaeda. ... He's the kind of guy that would love nothing more than to train terrorists and provide arms to terrorists." The next day: "Imagine a scenario where an Al Qaeda-type organization uses Iraq as an arsenal." And repeatedly, Draper says, Bush used the line: "This is a man who told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass destruction, promised he wouldn't have them. He's got them." Draper says bluntly that "Bush wasn't relying on intelligence to buttress his claims of Saddam's dark fantasies of plotting attacks on America with Al Qaeda, or of direct contact with Al Qaeda. For no such intelligence existed." But the scary talk worked. In time millions of Americans believed, in the teeth of reality, that there were Iraqis on the planes that struck the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001. The other half of the salesmanship for war was the contention that the Iraqi people would welcome American invaders. We are familiar with the talk that they would greet us with flowers. But Draper has a telling quotation that I had not seen before. Vice President Dick Cheney is trying to persuade Dick Armey, the Republican House majority leader, who was skeptical about a war on Iraq, in a private meeting in September 2002: "We have great information. They're going to welcome us. It'll be like the American Army going through the streets of Paris. They're sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will be so happy with their freedoms that we'll probably back ourselves out of there within a month or two." An abysmal ignorance of Iraq and Islam underlay such beliefs. The Economist, which still doggedly supports the Iraq effort, wrote recently (in an article not about Bush but about former Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose support for the war had some calling him Bush's poodle), "Only an historical illiterate would have assumed that the divided Iraqis were bound to thank their invading liberators and coalesce in democratic government." One has to wonder whether George W. Bush had heard about the division between Shiites and Sunnis when he decided on war. Whatever one's view of the possible benefits of the war, the costs have been enormous. More than 3,500 Americans have been killed so far, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Millions of Iraqis, among them much of the educated elite, have fled the country. The one clear winner from the invasion and the consequent civil strife has been neighboring Iran, whose fellow Shiites dominate the Iraqi government. Far from suppressing terrorism, the war has aroused widespread anti-Americanism and bred a new generation of terrorists. Some Bush critics, starting with his first presidential campaign, have put him down as stupid. He is not stupid. He was an effective, if ruthless, candidate. Some who have dealt with him as president - people outside his circle - have found him informed when he was really engaged with a problem. But his attention to many issues has been fitful. "We've got a great chance to establish a Palestinian state," he said in a 2004 press conference, "and I intend to use the next four years to spend the capital of the United States on such a state." But for much of the next several years the Bush administration was disengaged from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bush seems to lack the intellectual curiosity that makes for an interesting mind. For all of Draper's admirable effort to paint a full picture, warts and all, it is a bit of a struggle to read more than 400 pages about George W. Bush. Draper admires what he calls the "affable compassion" of Bush as a candidate in 2000, before he turned out to be a hard-line conservative on both economics - lower taxes for the rich - and social issues like stem cell research and abortion. His folksy Texas style, even his clumsiness with words, are attractive to many Americans. His occasional locker-room lingo is more natural than Richard Nixon's awkward efforts. "We're kicking ass" in Iraq, he told Australia's deputy prime minister this year. But there is another, less attractive part of the Bush persona: the mean-minded frat boy. At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Senator John McCain was about to speak for the re-election of Bush 41 when young George came up to him and said, according to Draper, "You've gotta hammer Clinton on the draft dodging." That from a man who had weaved his way out of serving in Vietnam. McCain replied, "Sorry, that's not my thing." On Jan. 31, 2001, soon after taking office, Bush held a cabinet meeting. When he entered the room, one chair was empty: the secretary of state's. "Lock the door," Bush said. A few minutes later Colin Powell could be heard trying the doorknob. The room "erupted with laughter." Then Bush ordered the door unlocked. He "had made his point," Draper says; Powell was "not the big dog any longer." That the president of the United States would want to show how important he was by humiliating Colin Powell speaks volumes. Draper's thesis is that the immature Bush was transformed by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. "All the man's undersized, self-conscious ways - the smirk, the reedy defensiveness, the exaggerated imperiousness of his executive stroll - had collapsed into this new persona. ... He was a war president now, and perfectly at ease with the role." But there is a great failing in Draper's account of Bush as a war president. He says next to nothing about what I think will be seen, along with the Iraq war, as the most important legacy of Bush's presidency: his effort to enlarge the unilateral power of the president. Invoking the "war on terror" as a reason, Bush has worked relentlessly to unbalance the balance of powers - the separation of the government into three branches - that James Madison, the father of the Constitution, thought was its fundamental safeguard against abuse of power. Thus Bush ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans on international telephone calls, in violation of a criminal statute requiring that the agency first obtain warrants from a special court. Congress had spoken with unmistakable clarity. When it forbids a specific action, Justice Robert Jackson said in his much-noted opinion in the steel seizure case of 1952, executive power is at its "lowest ebb." And Draper does not discuss the most profound example of Bush's extreme assertion of executive power: torture. Not the occasional mistreatment of prisoners by an out-of-line American, but deliberate violation of the obligation on the United States by treaty (the Geneva Conventions) and domestic law not to torture prisoners or subject them to "cruel," "inhuman" or "degrading" treatment. A formal 2002 opinion by the Justice Department, accepted by the White House counsel at the time, Alberto Gonzales, defined "torture" to the vanishing point, only as the infliction of pain equivalent to the pain that accompanies the loss of a bodily organ "or even death." The opinion said the president had supreme power to order the torture of prisoners, and neither Congress nor treaties ratified by the United States could stop him. AN Iraqi major general, among others, was tortured to death by his American captors. Dozens of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were sexually humiliated and tormented. Unknown numbers were held in secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe and sent to countries that routinely torture, in what was blandly called "extraordinary rendition." In the C.I.A. prisons, men were subjected to water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning. At the prison in Guantánamo Bay, men had to endure extreme heat and cold, unrelenting loud music, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness and "stress positions." All this has been justified by President Bush as necessary for the effective interrogation of prisoners, to find out dangerous terrorist plans. But prisoners who are mistreated to make them talk give unreliable information, as experts on interrogation know. They will say anything to make the pain stop. The use of torture and cruel treatment has actually hurt American national security. It has aroused outrage around the world, alarming friends and allies, depriving the United States of its reputation as a country that does not resort to inhumanity. What Draper does not discuss - the record of Bush and his lawyers on torture - is grippingly examined by Jack Goldsmith in "The Terror Presidency." Goldsmith is a conservative Harvard law professor who was assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for nine months in 2003-4. That is where official government opinions on the law are prepared. John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general in the office, prepared the 2002 opinion defining torture narrowly and asserting that the president had supreme power to order its use. Goldsmith withdrew that opinion and replaced it with a much more modest one. It took courage to do that, because he was treated as a traitor by some in the administration - notably David Addington, then Vice President Cheney's counsel, now his chief of staff. And it has taken courage to write this book. Goldsmith does not criticize the torture opinion and other actions as beyond the law. Rather, he argues that they were bad policy, driven by an ideological view that even consulting Congress would impinge on the presidency. Goldsmith believed that bringing Congress in would give the president what he needed and strengthen his legal basis. But Addington asked, "Why are you trying to give away the president's power?" He accused Goldsmith of making Americans vulnerable to terrorism. Yoo was, with Addington, a prime mover for supreme presidential power. (He was so reliable in pronouncing lawful what Bush wanted to do that Attorney General John Ashcroft, displaying an unheralded wit, called him Dr. Yes.) Goldsmith was a friend of Yoo's and, in my judgment, goes easy on him. He says Yoo's opinion, in its narrow definition of torture, "didn't seem even in the ballpark." But he credits Yoo with sincerity in his legal views and says Yoo has "enormous personal charm." If so, charm did not alleviate the brutality of the interrogation tactics unleashed in part by Yoo's opinion. In an interesting comparison with Franklin D. Roosevelt's sweeping power in World War II, Goldsmith says Roosevelt relied on persuasion, bargaining, compromise. "The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense. This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise." Goldsmith's arguments are the more convincing because they are not premised on traditional liberal or civil libertarian views. For example, he approves the detention of suspected terrorists in Guantánamo. But he warns that there is a "big question" as to whether all the people held there as members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban were in fact members. President Bush put aside the Geneva requirement that their status be determined by a "competent tribunal" and himself made a "group status determination." Goldsmith calls this "an inadequate response to concerns that particular individuals were not enemy fighters but instead were innocent farmers scooped up in Afghanistan." The Bush administration has tried to exclude not just Congress but the courts from decisions relating to the "war on terror." When it detained two American citizens as "enemy combatants" and held them in solitary confinement without charge and without access to counsel, its lawyers first argued that the courts could not even consider lawsuits filed on their behalf. Detention without trial, in short, was beyond any outside review. The torture issue has come up several times in embarrassing ways for the administration: when the pictures from Abu Ghraib appeared, and again when torture opinions were published despite efforts to keep them secret. Each time Bush has said, "We don't torture." Exactly. In the Bush administration, whatever we do is not torture. Senator McCain, who was tortured in North Vietnam, pushed through Congress a bill prohibiting torture by the American military or the cruel, inhuman and degrading tactics forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. President Bush signed it into law - but with a signing statement saying he reserved the right not to carry out provisions that intruded on the president's constitutional power. Goldsmith's story has ended in a terrible irony. The New York Times reported recently that Alberto Gonzales, as attorney general in 2005, approved a secret opinion that said such tactics as head slapping, simulated drowning and exposure to frigid temperatures, separately or in combination, did not constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners. David Aldington won. And America's vision of itself as a country of laws, not men, lost. There is a profound oddity in the position of the presidentialists like Yoo, Cheney and Addington. Legal conservatives like to say that the Constitution should be read according to its original intent. But if there is anything clear about the intentions of the framers, it is that they did not intend to create an executive with more prerogative power than George III had. Not even in time of war. Remember that the framers gave Congress the power to declare war and "make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces." Madison wrote: "In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legisl