In Search of Bush

In Search of Bush
By ALAN BRINKLEY
New York Times

THE BUSH TRAGEDY
By Jacob Weisberg.
Illustrated. 271 pp. Random House. $26.

With almost a year still to go in George W. Bush’s presidency, he has already become the subject of an astonishing amount of literature — on the war in Iraq, on his controversial economic and social policies, on his two contested presidential elections and on the man himself. So Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, treads some familiar ground in his effort to understand the origins of Bush’s much explored psyche. His analysis is not as original or startling as he sometimes claims; his explanations of Bush’s behavior are often highly speculative; and he relies too much on such overworked clichés as the parallels between the president and Shakespeare’s Henry V. But “The Bush Tragedy” is, nevertheless, an intelligent and illuminating book. It takes much of what we already know and uses it to create a mostly persuasive account of the character and behavior of a man whom many observers have already called the most disastrous president in our history.

Weisberg sees Bush’s life, and his presidency, as the product of a series of relationships — with his family and with the two men who most decisively influenced his administration: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. All these relationships, he argues, contributed to Bush’s failures, but none more importantly than the complicated one with his father.

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