Bush's legacy and staff, dissected

He's also a guy who can be a bit goofy -- he once claimed to have seen ghosts coming from the portraits in a White House corridor -- and toughly endearing. Draper clarifies what always has seemed one of Bush's less glorious moments: his agonizingly long absence from Washington and the national spotlight in the hours after the 9/11 attacks. As we now know from the account in "Dead Certain," it was Cheney who kept insisting that the president hold himself out of any possible harm's way and Bush who repeatedly and profanely insisted on returning to Washington. It does the president both justice and credit to have that record set straight.

Savage is the Boston Globe's national legal affairs correspondent; he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Bush's use of "signing statements" to ignore laws passed by Congress. Despite the histrionic subtitle, "Takeover" is a meticulously reported and lucidly recorded account of the executive quasi-coup that is likely to be this administration's domestic legacy. As Draper shows, Bush always has been a politician eager to fill an inner vacuum by embracing some big idea -- reform, bipartisanship, "compassionate conservatism" have come and gone. According to Draper's account the president plans to spend his retirement founding a "Freedom Institute" in Texas to inspire the spread of democracy -- while doing a lot of lucrative public speaking to "replenish the ol' coffers."

What Savage shows is that, while Bush came to office in search of the next big idea, Cheney brought one with him. The vice president never has recovered from the trauma he suffered as President Gerald Ford's 33-year-old chief of staff. Like a number of similarly minded individuals, Cheney believes that the reforms enacted to check the executive branch excesses that led to Vietnam and related intelligence debacles dangerously eroded presidential powers. The vice president came to office believing that, if the Bush administration accomplished nothing else, it had to leave a presidency stronger than the one it assumed.