If George W. Bush's presidency has left no other legacy, it already has established a new standard for real-time history. The last seven years have been rich with paradox, and none is greater than the fact that a notoriously insular, loyalty-obsessed and press-shy administration has produced a virtual library of insider-tell-all, behind-the-scenes reconstructions of its most important decisions.
All that remains is for some canny publishing entrepreneur to establish the Bush of the Month Club.
And what an experience membership would be! It's impossible to recall an administration in which quite so many people -- from the president on down -- were so eager to rat each other out. At times, wading through their conflicting accounts seems less like reading presidential history than it does like listening to a batch of Mafia informers' tapes.
Robert Draper's "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush" falls partly into that category, but it also is a shrewdly observed and very engagingly written exploration of the president's enigmatic personality. Charlie Savage's "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy" is a gifted reporter's exposition of how and why the Bush administration has conducted itself and of that conduct's disturbing legacy.
Read together, these two books give a fascinating account of how Bush's character has shaped his presidency and of how a radical and historically revisionist theory of presidential powers provided the perfect tool with which to do that.
Draper is a national correspondent for GQ and a former editor of Texas Monthly, for which he wrote an extended profile of then Gov. Bush. The future president obviously found something to admire in that piece, because he gave the author six hours of interviews, which provide some of the most interesting material in "Dead Certain." Draper also spoke at some length with about 200 other sources, including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Bush political advisor Karl Rove, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Draper's access to Bush has provided a week's worth of headlines, some of them centering on the president's insistence that he never approved disbanding the Iraqi army, a decision that now looms as one of the disastrous occupation's foundational mistakes. In a preview of what we're likely to see in the who-lost-Iraq debate expected to occur after Bush leaves office, L. Paul Bremer III, who was in charge in Baghdad when Saddam Hussein's army was allowed to melt away, this week provided the New York Times with documents and an op-ed piece that seem to indicate that the president and Rumsfeld were fully informed about what was going on in Iraq.
