DEAD CERTAIN: THE PRESIDENCY OF GEORGE W. BUSH
By Robert Draper
Published by Simon & Schuster
GIVING
By Bill Clinton
Published by Hutchinson
KEY POINTS:
There are four standard phases to the chronicling of an American presidency.
One, the glad-confident-morning phase, dishes up hope and expectation, dew-fresh.
The second, around four years later, habitually trades in polemic, defensive or disillusioned.
Then, at the close, there's the final verdict, the valedictory, the stab at instant history (Robert Draper's stock-in-trade), plus a postscript phase that might be called "What Bill and George did next".
Dead Certain, Washington's hottest dinner-party book, is a turbocharged phase-three project. How do you sum up a President who'll sit in the Oval Office for 13 more months?
Get him to do it for himself. Leaven your judgment through six hours of face-to-face interviews, then top them off with a couple of hundred of chats with his political nearest and dearest. In particular, get him to speculate what he'll do when nobody hails this particular chief any longer.
"I'm gonna build a fantastic Freedom Institute ... I want a place where young leaders: you know, the former prime minister of Mongolia, it'd be cool to pay him a stipend, have him come to live in Dallas and write and lecture." Anything else, sir?
"Well, replenish the ol' coffers ... Clinton's making a lot of money." (He is indeed but that's a different story.) Draper is the Washington correspondent of GQ magazine and might thus have been more naturally employed covering the last Clinton years.
But he worked in Texas a decade ago and made friends with George W.
This isn't a particularly well-written account. ("His unmade bed of a life was starting to achieve coherence, thanks to a brunette librarian with catlike eyes named Laura Welch").
Nor is it well-constructed: one thing tends to plonk along after another, already made stale by repetition. But there are fresh facts and insights here and they do carry a punch.
The Bush we meet in these pages is not the George W of parody. We see him make his own way, and fortune, in Texas oil. We see him fight hard for the nomination, win by a dubious whisker and become his own man.
We watch him get into the office by 7.30am sharp and work like a beaver (with two hours' mandatory running or cycling factored in). We hear him take charge of meetings starting smack on time, dressing down a late Colin Powell, chewing off his Iraq lieutenants when they can't get the electricity back on. He can even seem formidable.
But his progress, like his tragedy, comes back to front. The first years in Washington are the good years (with his vital aide, Karen Hughes, close by). He's personally staunch after 9/11. And then it all goes wrong (after Ms Hughes goes back to Texas).
There's his father's unfinished business with Saddam Hussein. There's also an increasing refusal to pause, ponder and adjust. This later Bush is a conviction politician who lacks real convictions, a cock-eyed, stubborn optimist. "Are you an eight-year man?" he asked his staff after four years were gone, but his own sixth and seventh years have been cruelly revealing.
Draper can't hide the mistakes of a rigid mindset but at least he sets this President in a different context: don't blame somebody else for the blunders.
Bush doesn't. He was responsible, he ruled this roost. But, equally, don't write him off as a bit of clown. There's nothing buffoonish about the way he shuffles his administration pack and he doesn't blink easily. "Mr President," says his National Security Adviser, Steve Hadley, despondent over the latest Iraq policy review, "you've got to run it."
To which Bush snaps back: "I am running it."
So to phase four and that "Freedom Institute". Old Presidents don't fade away. Jimmy Carter still stirs the Jewish lobby with a will. Poppy Bush was there at Bill Clinton's side in New Orleans. And Clinton himself toils in the gardens of redemption and calculation.
Giving is a buy-one-thick-autobiography-and-get-a-slim-one-free sort of non-book, a series of homilies on charity and service that often seems little more than a list of worthy causes.
If you can't give money, give time. If you can't give a lot, like Bill Gates, give a little. This is "how each of us can change the world" and scepticism inevitably arrives as part of the package.
How long before the next election? Count the glowing tributes to Hillary and look for the games hubby's playing now.
But don't let the cynicism grow too corrosive, either. Clinton's call to linked arms silences most doubters with its weight of detail, especially when he talks about the 10.2 million Americans now working for a million charitable organisations in the United States. He is putting in the time and effort. He is replenishing the "ol' coffers" and giving something back, too.
Last year, Bush and Clinton bumped into each other by accident at the United Nations.
"Six years from now, you're not gonna see me hanging out in the UN lobby," George tells Draper, with a semi-smirk. But stranger things have happened. Sometimes - a Jimmy Carter memorial lecture - you can like your presidents most when they're done and dusted and the best of phase four is still to come.
- Observer
