Bush

Jean Edward Smith

eAudio - 2016

George W. Bush, the forty-third president of the United States, almost single-handedly decided to invade Iraq. It was possibly the worst foreign-policy decision ever made by a president. The consequences dominated the Bush Administration and still haunt us today. In Bush, Jean Edward Smith demonstrates that it was not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice, but President Bush himself who took personal control of foreign policy. Bush drew on his deep religious conviction that important foreign-policy decisions were simply a matter of good versus evil. Domestically, he overreacted to 9/11 and endangered Americans' civil liberties. Smith explains that it wasn't until the financial crisis of 2008 that Bush finally accepted ...expert advice, something that the "Decider," as Bush called himself, had previously been unwilling to do. As a result, he authorized decisions that saved the economy from possible collapse, even though some of those decisions violated Bush's own political philosophy.

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Biographies
Published
[United States] : Tantor Audio 2016.
Language
English
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hoopla digital
Main Author
Jean Edward Smith (author)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
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Tom Perkins (-)
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Unabridged
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Instantly available on hoopla.
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1 online resource (1 audio file (25hr., 04 min.)) : digital
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Mode of access: World Wide Web.
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9781515927983
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AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
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Review by Choice Review

When a political biography begins, "Rarely ... has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush," readers know it will be interesting. In fact, it is a fascinating political tale. Bush, in time, turned his early life around and followed his father into politics. Bush's political compass was one in which life was a struggle between two polar opposites, good and evil. And Bush was determined to be God's instrument in that struggle. Smith rather downplays the scenario in which Dick Cheney ran the government and pulled Bush's strings. Bush, Smith maintains, was the person in charge, labeling himself "the Decider." This book shows that Bush was the Decider who often decided without the advice of his advisers. Smith notes that Bush led the fight against AIDS, improved relations with China, and reduced America's nuclear arsenal in addition to taking America on a war course to find weapons of mass destruction and paving the way for the rise of ISIS. Other than his war policies, Bush is best known for his No Child Left Behind program. Bush left the presidency with very low approval ratings. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --William K. Hall, Bradley University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

IT'S AN AXIOM of American politics that presidents become more popular once they are ex-presidents. Admittedly, George W. Bush had nowhere to go but up. With two months left in his second term, Bush's approval rating sat at an abysmal 25 percent, just one point higher than Richard Nixon's during Watergate. On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, when a Marine helicopter ferried the outgoing president away from the United States Capitol, many in the crowd serenaded him with chants of "Bye-bye Bush!" and "Go home to Texas!" Then the predictable happened. Bush's absence from public life made Americans' hearts for him grow fonder. Out of the spotlight, he busied himself painting oil portraits of family pets and world leaders; when he did dip his toe into political waters, it was for laudable and uncontroversial causes like fighting AIDS and malaria in Africa. His poll numbers began their inexorable climb. By June of last year, Bush's favorability rating was 52 percent - higher than Obama's at the time. His younger brother, Jeb, started his ill-fated 2016 presidential run with the declaration, "I am my own man." But by the end of Jeb's run, he was appearing alongside Dubya at rallies. Although Jeb's fraternal Hail Mary ultimately fell short, his older brother's re-emergence on the campaign trail only served to confirm that, fewer than eight years after being hounded from the White House, George W. Bush had become a less polarizing, fairly popular, at times even lovable figure. Readers of the presidential historian Jean Edward Smith's mammoth new biography, "Bush," will surely be cured of this political amnesia. Smith - who has written biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower - is unsparing in his verdict on our 43rd president. "Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush," Smith writes in the first sentence of the preface. And then he gets harsh. In Smith's clipped retelling of his subject's early years, Bush was an unaccomplished, callow son of privilege who cashed in on his family's connections for everything from his admission to Yale to his avoidance of Vietnam. Quoting Bush's tautological explanation of his wasted youth - "When I was young and irresponsible, I behaved young and irresponsibly" - Smith concludes, "That pretty well says it all." Being Texas governor "was scarcely a full-time job," and his 2000 victory in the presidential race owed as much to the ineptness of his Democratic opponent, Al Gore - who "came across as wooden and selfimportant" - as it did to Bush's "ease on the campaign trail." None of this prepared Bush for the gravity of the responsibilities he would face as president, Smith argues, and time and again Bush failed to meet the challenges of the office. "His initial response to the subprime mortgage meltdown was similar to his initial response to Hurricane Katrina," Smith writes. "He watched it happen." Bush promoted incompetent yes-men and yes-women - "people who knew the president, had worked closely with him and were prepared to do his bidding" - to key posts in his administration, whether it was making Alberto Gonzales his attorney general or trying (and failing) to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court. Even Bush's speeches are subjected to Smith's - and, by extension, history's - withering judgment: "Bush's second Inaugural Address must rank as one of the most ill-considered of all time." And then, of course, there's Iraq. Just as the war ultimately consumed much of Bush's presidency, so does it consume much of "Bush," as Smith offers an exhaustive, excruciating autopsy of the American invasion and its bloody aftermath. "Unfamiliar with the rules and norms of the world beyond America's borders" and "smitten with his role as commander in chief," Smith writes, Bush committed "easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president." And Smith makes clear that in his considered opinion it was Bush's decision. He pins Iraq - and every other Bush failure - on the president and the president alone. Although Bush has often been portrayed as the puppet of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove or some other offstage figure, Smith argues that in the Bush administration, Bush was - to a degree unusual even for a president - the ultimate authority. Or, as he liked to think of himself, he was "the decider." He empowered confidants like Condoleezza Rice, first as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, who "sought to provide Bush with what made him most comfortable," and if his advisers gave him reasoned analysis instead of the comfort he craved, he simply ignored them in favor of his own gut. It was Bush, after all, who in his "Mission Accomplished" speech on the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln announced, without consulting the Pentagon or State Department, that he intended to bring democracy to Iraq. Just as it was Bush who, after that decision proved disastrous, "short-circuited the military chain of command" by reorganizing the staff of the National Security Council so that David Petraeus could communicate directly with the president rather than having to go through his immediate superiors. "Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt," Smith concludes, "had White House decision-making been so personalized." Smith's theory about Bush's "personalization of presidential power" sometimes leads him to let other administration officials off the historical hook. He portrays Cheney, for instance, as merely a devoted helpmate whose attempt to take command of the response to 9/11 was "not a power grab" but a "good faith" offer that was "a reflection of the president's unfamiliarity with the issues." Donald Rumsfeld is forgiven his swaggering arrogance: While Smith heaps scorn on Bush's bellicose statements, comparing them at one point to those of "a mid-20th-century European dictator," he writes that the secretary of defense only "unwittingly exacerbated" tensions with France and Germany when he dismissively referred to them as "old Europe." PERHAPS SMITH IS more charitable to Cheney and Rumsfeld because, unlike Bush, they granted him interviews. (Bush canceled an interview on the grounds that Smith had once written a critical book about his father, the 41st president.) But it seems that neither man told Smith anything revelatory. Indeed, Smith's biography of Bush unearths little new information on its subject. Most of "Bush" relies on previous books by journalists like Peter Baker, Robert Draper and Bob Woodward or the memoirs of key figures including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush himself. Nonetheless, Smith is an able synthesizer who weaves together a readable if often workmanlike narrative out of these sources. More important, despite his unremittingly negative assessment, Smith is neither a partisan nor a polemicist; he's a historian and his conclusions carry weight. When, toward the end of "Bush," he allows that his subject "may not have been America's worst president," the act of charity stings far worse than his cruelest barbs. It also strikes an ironic note, since, given the state of the 2016 campaign, it's now depressingly easy to imagine a president worse than George W. Bush. Time and again, Smith argues, Bush failed to meet the challenges of his office. JASON ZENGERLE is the political correspondent for GQ and a contributing editor for New York magazine.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

Esteemed biographer Smith (Eisenhower in War and Peace, 2012) doesn't take long to show his cards. On the opening page of this comprehensive biography of our forty-third president, he describes Bush's presidency as an unmitigated disaster. A budget surplus was squandered, the national debt exploded, a decade of relative peace was ended by involvement in two full-scale wars, and a strong economy ended in massive recession. For most of these misfortunes, Smith holds Bush directly responsible, writing that these failures resulted, to a large extent, from Bush's personal flaws. Bush is characterized as arrogant, rigid, and unwilling to consider the complexity of issues, even of his own policies. Smith dispels the commonly held notion that Bush fell victim to a cabal of ideologues, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and various neoconservatives. Rather, Bush truly was the decider, especially on foreign policy issues, where he seems to have been strongly influenced by a sense of religious destiny. Smith's portrait is fascinating; it will take time, however, for a more balanced account of the Bush legacy.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"George W. Bush may not have been America's worst president" is as nice as historian Smith (Eisenhower in War and Peace) gets in this hard-hitting biography. He gives the 43rd president grudging nods for his No Child Left Behind initiative, prescription-drug plan for seniors, and AIDS relief programs but otherwise portrays Bush's eight-year presidency as a parade of disasters; irresponsible tax cuts and spiraling deficits; a simplistic, bellicose response to the 9/11 attacks; warrantless NSA surveillance and other assaults on privacy; torture of detainees; a negligent passivity toward Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 financial collapse; and above all, the Iraq War, "the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president." Smith's negativity is sometimes too much-"Like Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984, the president launched the nation on a never-ending struggle"-but he presents a shrewd, nuanced view of Bush as an insecure, intellectually lazy man who made up for youthful fecklessness with an unwarranted overconfidence and decisiveness in office, a "personalization of presidential power" inside a bubble of sycophantic advisors. Smith embeds this portrait in a lucid, highly readable narrative, balancing rich detail with clear delineation of the larger shape of policy through the chaos of politics. This is a superb recap and critical analysis of Bush's controversial administration. Photos. Agent: Peter Matson, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize finalist Smith (Eisenhower in War and Peace) treads boldly into an assessment of the ambitious and controversial presidency of George W. Bush (b. 1946) with this highly interpretive study. The author contends that Bush, rather than advisors Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, set his own course in international relations guided by a religious, binary view of the world. Smith himself does not offer differing, alternative assessments of the presidency that spanned 2000-08. Instead, the author compares Bush to others who entered the White House hoping for a larger role at home than abroad. Similar to Woodrow Wilson, Bush believed God destined him for leadership, and both men attempted to export democracy during their terms. While Smith praises Bush's domestic policy stance on immigration, the senior prescription drug-assistance program, and the 2008 bank bailout, he ultimately deems the Iraq War to be the worst foreign policy decision of any American president, overshadowing everything else. There is little doubt that Bush's interventionist actions after the September 11 attacks made his a consequential reign. VERDICT Both public and academic libraries will want this work, although many other accounts are sure to follow as time, perspective, and still-classified primary sources result in a more nuanced, definitive portrait. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/16.]-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Biography of George W. Bush (b. 1946), concentrating on the eight years of his presidency. From the first sentence, accomplished presidential biographer and historian Smith (Political Science/Marshall Univ.; Eisenhower in War and Peace, 2012, etc.) establishes his critical tone: "Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush." By miring the country in a disastrous war in Iraq, costing 4,000 American lives and some $3 trillion, allowing torture of "unlawful combatants" and restrictions on Americans' fundamental issues of privacy thanks to an empowered National Security Agency, the author considers Bush one of the worse presidents yet. Hurtling quickly through his subject's early life, Smith emphasizes his abysmal school records at Andover and Yale. Indeed, he was coddled as a legacy son "many times over." His penchant for "coasting" and partying kept him floundering for many years, and his well-placed parents bailed him out continuously, until he apprenticed under Lee Atwater and caught the political bug. Marrying Laura Welch, a Midland, Texas, native and librarian, and becoming a born-again Christian thanks to Billy Graham in 1983 helped center Bush's ambitions. However, Smith points out how his "religious certitude and his singular determination," as well as his braggadocio, often swayed his actions more than the advice of more experienced colleagues. Bush relied on sports-minded advisers and hawkish "vulcans" like Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld when the crisis of 9/11 shifted the president's focus from domestic to foreign policy, which he knew little about. Smith considers it a national shame that he was so insistent on finding a casus belli to invade Iraqthen letting Colin Powell be the fall guydespite the resistance of the rest of the world and cowing even the Democrats in Congress. Notwithstanding Bush's global leadership on AIDS, immigration reform, and education, he left a tarnished presidency. A relentlessly hard-hitting assessment of a president who was a "decider" but "did not wrestle with the details of policy." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Bush Preface Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush. When Bush took office in 2001, the federal budget ran a surplus, the national debt stood at a generational low of 56 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and unemployment clocked in at 4 percent--which most economists consider the practical equivalent of full employment. The government's tax revenue amounted to $2.1 trillion annually, of which $1 trillion came from personal income taxes and another $200 billion from corporate taxes. Military spending totaled $350 billion, or 3 percent of GDP--a low not seen since the late 1940s--and not one American had been killed in combat in almost a decade. Each dollar bought 1.06 euros, or 117 yen. Gasoline cost $1.50 per gallon. Twelve years after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States stood at the pinnacle of authority: the world's only superpower, endowed with democratic legitimacy, the credible champion of the rule of law, the exemplar of freedom and prosperity. 1 Eight years later the United States found itself in two distant "wars of choice"; military spending constituted 20 percent of all federal outlays and more than 5 percent of the gross domestic product. The final Bush budget was $1.4 trillion in the red and the national debt was out of control. The nation's GDP had increased from $10.3 trillion to $ $14.2 trillion during those eight years, but a series of tax cuts that Bush introduced had reduced the government's revenue from personal income taxes by 9 percent and corporate taxes by 33 percent. Unemployment stood at 9.3 percent and was rising; two million Americans had lost their homes when a housing bubble burst, and new construction was at a standstill. The stock market had taken a nosedive, the dollar had lost much of its former value, and gasoline sold for $3.27 a gallon. 2 The United States remained the world's only superpower, but its reputation abroad was badly tarnished. Was Bush responsible? Perhaps not for the housing bubble or the disastrous collapse of high-risk investments in derivatives, except that he equated the American dream with home ownership and loosened oversight of the securities industry. Otherwise the answer is a resounding yes. Unprepared for the complexities of governing, with little executive experience and a glaring deficit in his attention span, untutored, untraveled, and unversed in the ways of the world, Bush thrived on making a show of his decisiveness. "I'm not afraid to make decisions," he told a biographer. "Matter of fact, I like this aspect of the presidency." 3 But his greatest strength became his worst flaw. His self-confidence and decisiveness caused him to do far more damage than a less assertive president would have. The critical turning point came on September 12, 2001. Al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on 9/11 violated the universal norms of civilized society, and the immediate global outpouring of empathy for the U.S. was unparalleled. Accordingly, September 12 was a defining moment in American history: the United States was not only an economic powerhouse and a military superpower but also enjoyed unprecedented moral authority. Bush could have capitalized on that support but instead he squandered it. He strutted around like a cowboy and then picked a fight with Iraq. 4 By conflating the events of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, Bush precipitated the deterioration of America's position abroad, led the United States into a $3 trillion war in Iraq that cost more than four thousand American lives and an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan, promulgated an egregious doctrine of preventive war, alienated America's allies, weakened its alliances, and inspired young Muslims throughout the world to join the jihad. 5 If Saddam and his secular regime had remained in power, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq could not have been created and the ISIS we know today would not exist. Domestically, the hysteria unleashed by his administration undermined civil liberty, eroded the rule of law, and tarnished respect for traditional values of tolerance and moderation. "I am the war president," Bush once boasted, asserting sophomoric delight in military braggadocio. 6 Neither Dwight Eisenhower nor Harry Truman would have called themselves "the war president," even though a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union could at any moment have taken 150 million lives in a few hours. 7 George W. Bush had lived in his father's shadow all of his life: at Andover and Yale, in the oil business, and in politics. To crush Saddam Hussein, which George Herbert Walker Bush had declined to do, would afford him the rare opportunity to succeed where his father had failed. George W. Bush's legacy was a nation impoverished by debt, besieged by doubt, struggling with the aftereffects of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and deeply engaged in military conflicts of our own choosing. His tin ear for traditional conservative values, his sanctimonious religiosity, his support for Guantánamo, CIA "renditions," and government snooping have eroded public trust in the United States at home and abroad. For eight years Bush made the decisions that put the United States on a collision course with reality. To argue that by taking the actions that he did, the president kept America safe is meretricious: the type of post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis that could justify any action, regardless of its impropriety. The fact is, the threat of terrorism that confronts the United States is in many respects a direct result of Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Bush was the decider. But he did not wrestle with the details of policy, particularly foreign policy. By contrast, FDR and Eisenhower determined every nuance of America's global stance. Roosevelt had no foreign policy adviser. Harry Hopkins was the president's personal emissary with foreign leaders, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull was relegated to diplomatic housekeeping. Under Eisenhower, the director of the NSC staff was merely an assistant to the president, not the national security adviser, and Ike always kept Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on a short leash. Bush took a different view of the chain of command. Not since the days of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover--the Republican hands-off-the-ship-of-state trinity of the 1920s--had a president been so detached from the detailed, day-to-day determination of policy alternatives. Bush saw issues in terms of black and white. There were no subtleties and no shades of gray. The war in Iraq was a biblical struggle of good versus evil--something from the pages of the Book of Revelation. His decision to bring democracy to Iraq was equally arbitrary and unilateral. Bush's religious fundamentalism often obscured reality. And he expected his cabinet to fall into line, not debate possible alternatives. Bush was supported by a phalanx of subcabinet appointees, conservative in outlook, crisply articulate, and powerfully motivated to provide the intellectual justification for policies the president had decided upon: men like I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith. Never before in American history has an administration come to power with a subcabinet echelon of like-minded ideologues, friends over the decades, dedicated to a common purpose, and armed with a game plan ready to be implemented. All had served in the administration of George H. W. Bush, and during the Clinton years formed a veritable government in exile. Their seminal policy statement had been drafted in 1991 by Wolfowitz and Libby, then serving as Secretary Dick Cheney's deputies in the Department of Defense, calling for American military superiority, emphasizing the power of the president to act unilaterally "when international reaction proves sluggish," and advocating preemptive attack against rogue states seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. 8 In 1997, they, along with Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, founded the Project for the New American Century, dedicated to increasing defense spending, challenging "regimes hostile to U.S. interests and values," and explicitly advocating regime change in Iraq. Had it not been for 9/11, their manifesto would have been little more than a footnote in intellectual history. But with the terrorist attack, the administration's second echelon dusted off their agenda, Bush signed on, and the direction of the administration was defined. When George W. Bush left office in 2009, the U.S. defense budget exceeded the combined defense budgets of every major country in the world and was clearly unsustainable. 9 But the Bush administration was not without its accomplishments. Because of his Texas roots and his admirable freedom from racial prejudice, Bush was far more sympathetic than Clinton or his father to the plight of illegal immigrants, particularly those of Hispanic origin, and he pioneered the nation's first prescription drug program for seniors. No Child Left Behind may not be a perfect solution, but it reflected the president's concern to improve the nation's schools. And Bush led the international fight against AIDS and malaria. On the other hand, the Bush administration turned a blind eye to the growing environmental problems confronting the country and the globe, showed little interest in improving the nation's infrastructure, and downgraded federal regulatory activity, particularly in relation to Wall Street, noxious emissions, and mine safety. This book relates the life of George W. Bush--his family heritage of investment banking and public service, his childhood in Midland, Texas (which by the late 1970s had the highest per capita income of any city in the United States), Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School, the Air National Guard, oil business, and the Texas Rangers baseball team. At Andover, George was a Big Man on Campus, and at Yale a solid fourth-quartile student. "We need good men in the bottom quartile," an Ivy League dean of admissions once said. "Men who won't jump out of a window if they get a D, and who might leave the university five million dollars." 10 Bush's personal life was at times unglued. Out of college and at loose ends, he often drank too much and was no stranger to prohibited substances. A premature and unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 caused him to hesitate about entering politics. His marriage to Austin librarian Laura Welch in 1977, and his reentry into life as a born-again Christian in 1985, led him back to the straight and narrow. 11 Bush's embrace of evangelical Christianity helped anchor him in the fundamentalist culture of contemporary Texas, and facilitated his effort to distance himself from his New England origins and Ivy League education. "The biggest difference between me and my father," George W. was fond of saying, "is that he went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High." 12 Bush flaunted his Texas roots while profiting from his family's establishment connections. For a dozen years he struggled to make a go of it in the oil business, and then struck pay dirt as the public face of the Texas Rangers. Dressed in cowboy boots and blue jeans, chewing tobacco and speaking with a West Texas twang, Bush became the J. R. Ewing of the American League West. In 1994 he rode his public prominence into the governor's mansion, defeating incumbent Democrat Ann Richards in a banner year for Republicans across the country. The Texas governorship is primarily a ceremonial post with virtually no executive responsibility--scholars of government consider it the weakest in the nation--and Bush thrived as a consensus builder and state cheerleader. Reelected overwhelmingly in 1998 in what had become the second most populous state in the nation, Bush was poised to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. In 1930, Franklin Roosevelt's overwhelming reelection as governor of New York, then the nation's most populous state, made him the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination in 1932. Bush's victory in Texas served the same purpose. After overwhelming John McCain in the primaries, he was nominated virtually without opposition on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Philadelphia. Vice President Al Gore received the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles two weeks later, also on the first ballot. The election was Gore's to lose. The nation enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity, and Bush's slogan of "compassionate conservatism" initially fell on deaf ears. The country suffered Clinton fatigue, exacerbated by the Monica Lewinsky affair, but the president had survived impeachment efforts, and the issue seemed to be fading. If Gore could mobilize the Democratic base, he seemed a shoo-in. Whether it was overconfidence or incompetence, the Gore campaign got off to a shaky start. The selection of Connecticut's neoconservative Joe Lieberman as the party's vice presidential nominee found little resonance among African American and Latino voters, and Gore's failure to protect the party's left flank allowed third-party candidate Ralph Nader to siphon off almost three million traditional liberal voters. On the campaign trail, Gore appeared as lifeless as a wooden Indian. He refused to appear on the platform with President Clinton, and muffed his three debates with Bush. Even with Gore's miscues and an almost flawless campaign waged by Bush and vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney, the election was a cliffhanger. When the dust settled, Bush won thirty states with 271 electoral votes, although Gore enjoyed a slight plurality in the popular vote. In Florida, which Bush ultimately won by 537 votes out of the almost six million that were cast, the Democrats were again asleep at the switch. It was evident on election night that the Florida vote totals would be contested. The Republicans rushed more than one hundred lawyers to the state and spent over $12 million in legal fees. The Democrats made do with $3 million. The decision was fought out in the courts, and ultimately the Republicans prevailed. Given the complexities of the American electoral system, there can be no question that George W. Bush was legitimately installed as the nation's forty-third president. What is less clear is why President Clinton did not step in--as Ulysses Grant had done in the contested Hayes-Tilden election of 1876--to organize a special electoral commission to determine the electoral vote from Florida. It would have been a political solution to a political question and would have removed the taint that the Bush administration initially suffered from. I was not permitted to interview George W. Bush for this book. Vice President Cheney set up an interview for me with the former president, but just before it was to take place I received a telephone call from Logan Walters, Bush's personal assistant. "The president does not wish to see you," said Walters. "You have written a book critical of his father, and because of that he does not wish to see you." Walters was correct. In 1992, I wrote George Bush's War, highly critical of George H. W. Bush's decision to commence the first Gulf War. I Ironically, in 1997 the University of Toronto decided to award George H. W. Bush an honorary degree for his role in ending the Cold War. This decision was highly unpopular in Toronto, largely because of Bush's earlier role as head of the CIA, and over a thousand demonstrators appeared on campus to protest the award. Our university president, Rob Prichard, said, "Jean, you're going to introduce Bush at the convocation because you wrote a book about him." "But the book is critical," I replied. "Doesn't matter," said Prichard. So I introduced former president Bush at the ceremony, and two dozen of my faculty colleagues stood up and walked out. That evening at dinner at the university president's house I gave Bush a copy of my book. He read it on the plane back to Houston, and several days later I received a two-page single-spaced letter from him. "I have read your book," said the former president. "Having done that I must tell you that I am surprised you were able to be so darn pleasant to me there at Toronto University . . . Your introduction negated the charges of 'murderer' heard outside and set a positive tone for my remarks." 13 Jean Edward Smith I . Jean Edward Smith, George Bush's War (New York: Henry Holt, 1992). Excerpted from Bush by Jean Edward Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.