Bush's legacy and staff, dissected

Actually, Draper's reconstruction of the Bush presidency is singularly silent on a number of critical decisions that followed the terrorists' Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, including the draconian policies on detainees and the adoption of torture as state policy, though he does make clear that George W. Bush had long considered his father's unwillingness to overthrow Hussein a mistake.

Draper does an excellent job of portraying just how the administration's divided and often dysfunctional operations also reflected Bush's conscious choice not to emulate his father's staff structure, in which a strong chief of staff enforced discipline throughout the executive branch. Instead it has been divide-and-rule from the Oval Office, though the consequence has been nearly constant internecine strife, particularly between the Defense Department and vice president's office and most of the rest of the government. "Dead Certain" also clarifies certain important details concerning the president's relationship with Rove, who opposed the selection of Cheney as vice president. First Lady Laura Bush apparently dislikes Rove, whom she calls "Pigpen," and openly disparaged him when news accounts referred to him as Bush's "brain." For his part, the president habitually humiliated and denigrated his chief political aide.

Bush emerges from this account, moreover, as a politician with his own street fighter's instincts wholly apart from anything Rove brought to their collaboration. Draper's reconstruction of the pivotal South Carolina Republican primary -- in which Bush smashed John McCain's candidacy by encouraging religious extremists and POW nut cases to calumniate the Arizona senator as a quisling and sexual libertine with a drug addict wife -- is fairly chilling stuff. (Though Draper doesn't make the point, one of the things the Bush family and its famous friends in the House of Saud seem to have in common is a flair for using religious fanatics to further their political ambitions.)

Draper's singular contribution is his convincing portrait of Bush's unusual persona. All personalities are unique in their individual details, of course, but the president's appears unique in type, as well -- a curious amalgam of old-line WASP entitlement and sly oil-patch cunning. The man "Dead Certain" describes calculates with the confidence of a blue blood secure in his birthright, but who goes with his gut. He's a guy with the wildcatter's unshakable faith in the intuition that the next million is just one good hunch away.