Bush’s White House from the inside, outside

Ron Suskind’s compelling, disturbing account of the Bush White House as seen (mainly) by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill is already famous, or notorious, so incandescent was the burst of publicity that accompanied the book’s publication. (Overnight, O’Neill’s “60 Minutes” interview triggered a government investigation into his possession of a document marked “secret,” compared with the 73 days it took to launch one into the administration’s leak naming a former ambassador’s CIA operative wife.) As with many a current movie, many of the book’s best lines and most garish scenes were given away in the trailer. Yet “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill” is still revelatory above and beyond the publicity because of the sheer weight of tales told out of school, few of them disputed by the White House. Among them:

* At the first meeting of the National Security Council’s principals, 10 days after inauguration, President George W. Bush had already decided to disengage from the Arab-Israeli conflict and unleash Ariel Sharon. (“Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things,” Bush said.)

* The same meeting made it clear to O’Neill that “getting [Saddam] Hussein was now the administration’s focus.”

* “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’ ”

* A year later, CIA Director George Tenet told Bush at a National Security Council meeting that it was still only speculation whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or was starting any weapons-building programs. Says O’Neill: “Everything Tenet sent up to Bush and Cheney about Iraq was very judicious and precisely qualified. The President was clearly very interested in weapons or weapons programs ... but Tenet was clearly being careful to say here’s the little that we know and the great deal that we don’t. That wouldn’t change ... and I read those CIA reports for two years.”

Mainly, Suskind’s book shines a light on the process by which Bush goes about White House business. O’Neill was a demon for rational argument about policy. Even when his mind was made up -- for instance, he favored privatizing Social Security -- he thought opposing positions should face off. That wasn’t the way Bush operated, according to Suskind:

* “O’Neill was watching Bush closely. He threw out a few general phrases, a few nods, but there was virtually no engagement.... O’Neill had been made to understand by various colleagues in the White House that the President should not be expected to read reports. In his personal experience, the President didn’t even appear to have read the short memos he sent over. That made it especially troubling that Bush did not ask any questions.... ‘This meeting was like many of the meetings I would go to over the course of two years,’ [O’Neill] recalled. ‘The only way I can describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection.’ ”

* President Bush “was caught in an echo chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that’s tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything.... “

* O’Neill concludes about the president’s belief in his authority to use force against Iraq to protect national security: “With his level of experience, I would not be able to support his level of conviction.” Then there’s the firing itself:

* At an economic policy meeting in November, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney finally abandoned the sphinx-like posture he’d maintained for almost two years to tell his worrywart, about-to-be ex-friend O’Neill that although he said that tax cuts would result in fiscal crisis, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” Not long thereafter, Cheney called to fire O’Neill -- surely an oddity in the history of the U.S. government. Talk about delegating authority.

To O’Neill, the overriding impression was of a president who lacked curiosity, deprecated dispute and remained disengaged. Honest brokers need not apply for high positions. Global warming? Fuggeddaboutit. Former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, another of Suskind’s major sources, says she was reduced to making “blind stabs at deducing the mind of the President.” Bush “doesn’t offer explanation, even to his most senior aides,” Suskind writes. “O’Neill knew that Whitman had never heard the President analyze a complex issue, parse opposing positions, and settle on a judicious path. In fact, no one -- inside or outside the government, here or across the globe -- had heard him do that to any significant degree.” On Nov. 26, 2002, Bush is telling his top economic and political advisors, “The economic uncertainty is because of [Securities and Exchange Commission] overreach,” a remarkable claim that O’Neill says went unquestioned.

In all of Suskind’s account, there is but one moment when Bush encourages a substantial unscripted exchange among his top advisors; at the same meeting he also asks a serious question about flagging wage growth.

Suskind’s book is smoothly, sometimes delicately, written and offers many insights. Bush’s well-known propensity to assign nicknames, he says, is more than a cute ingratiation maneuver, for “nicknaming ... was a bully technique. I’ve given you a name, now you wear it.” It is, in a way, a weakness of the book that Suskind gives O’Neill a free pass -- thus, his efforts (with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan) to include “triggers” with tax cuts, so that they become conditional on tax revenue, goes virtually without criticism. O’Neill’s naivete also goes unquestioned in Suskind’s account, starting out boundless and dwindling with every passing day. It’s striking that a well-connected Fortune 500 chief executive with considerable experience in the government’s executive branch could be so surprised by the leader of his party. On the other hand, had it not been for O’Neill’s naivete, we would not have this extraordinary inside account.

Kevin Phillips’ new book, on the other hand, couldn’t be more of an outsider’s account of Bush fils et pere, but this is not to say that Phillips is ignorant of what makes the Republican Party tick. His 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority” spelled out the “Southern strategy” that had just elected Richard M. Nixon and since then has elected three more Republican presidents, two of them named George Bush. He is a demographic wizard steeped in U.S. presidential history. But Phillips likes his Republican Party small-town, middle-class and more or less egalitarian, and in a series of recent books he has been thundering away at plutocracy. In general, these days, the shelves groan with a surplus of memoirs, but some day, Phillips should write one tracking his own evolution over the last 35 years.

“American Dynasty” is not that book, but it is interesting aside from the fact that Phillips has written it. Where conventional Bush commentators are struck by dramatic differences between the administrations of pragmatic “41” and fundamentalist “43,” Phillips is struck by the continuities, going back to the previous two generations, especially to the present president’s great-grandfather George Herbert Walker, a well-wired financier (Phillips calls him a “wheeler-dealer”) and his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, international banker par excellence, oilman, U.S. senator and longtime U.S. representative for German companies during the Hitler era. The Bushes, he argues, are not only wealthy, they are a pivotal family operating at the busy intersection of investment banking, oil, arms, global dealing and clandestine activity. He calls the two Georges beneficiaries of “crony capitalism” whose oil-drilling careers -- the incumbent’s was a far less than brilliant success -- would have been inconceivable without investments corralled by Wall Street broker Jonathan, the brother of George Herbert Walker Bush. Phillips argues, persuasively, that for four generations the Bushes have been central to U.S. power and global connections.

Phillips has compiled many fascinating facts but not always rigorously assessed them. Mixed in are too many speculative scraps. Phillips loathes the Bushes so thoroughly that he sometimes lets what-if and who-knows run away with him. He muses aloud about intelligence connections for which he has no evidence. Selectively, he compiles data on what has been called “the October surprise,” the unproven surmise that during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, vice presidential nominee George H.W. Bush participated in a deal to convince the Iranians, who were holding American hostages, to keep holding them on the promise that they’d benefit more from a Reagan victory than Jimmy Carter’s reelection. One too often hears, in Phillips’ account, the sound of barrel bottoms being scraped.

More important than the lumps of undigested fact and surmise, though, is Phillips’ keen eye for the bright thread that runs thickly through a century of Bushes and Walkers: what Phillips calls a “presumption of entitlement,” a blithe assumption that they were born to rule.

Cockiness is an overachiever’s abiding sin. It generates pride in one’s errors accompanied by a failure to admit what one doesn’t know -- in other words, precisely what appalls O’Neill and fills Suskind’s book, making it perhaps the most mordant White House account in recent history.

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The Price of Loyalty; George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill;Ron Suskind;Simon & Schuster: 348 pp., $26

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American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush;Kevin Phillips;Viking Press: 398 pp., $25.95