George W. Bush, Author
FERGUSON, ANDREW
George W Bush, Author Most campaign books are awful, but George W. Bush's "A Charge to Keep" sets a new standard BY ANDREW FERGUSON IN GEORGE W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep, which...
...His hair is tousled, he smiles richly, his face is deeply tan and unlined by care...
...Many of us under a certain age in America have led lives of ease and pleasure, untouched by hardship—one thinks of young Al Gore sweating out finals at St...
...In particular, its use of boredom, as both a literary device and a political tactic, breaks new ground...
...But he isn't an air-head—really, it should go without saying—and neither is Karen Hughes, the wily press secretary who wrote his autobiography for him...
...I don't mean to be misleading...
...Deep in his slumbering cerebellum, the benumbed reader may feel a faint stir: Is something about to happen...
...Once a speaker was joking about his upbringing and said, "It's not easy being a PK"—i.e., a preacher's kid...
...Bush/Hughes list the long string of summer jobs he held, familiar to any child of the upper middle class: management trainee, messenger at a law firm, customer service rep in a stock brokerage...
...This is the method of a magazine profile...
...In form it ranges from the dry and humorless policy tract (Bill Clinton's Between Hope and History, Steve Forbes's The New Birth of Freedom) to the goofily abstract (Bill Bradley's Time Present, Time Past) and speculative (Al Gore's Earth in the Balance), to the quotidian and earthbound memoir (the elder George Bush's Looking Forward, Ronald Reagan's Where's the Rest of Me...
...This implies a rush job, and the implication is borne out in the book itself—in its repetition of anecdotes and phrases, its extended verbatim quotations from long-ago speeches, and the heavy padding from contemporaneous news accounts of the governor's astounding triumphs, his ups, his downs, his smiles, his frowns...
...And finally, because it will never be taken seriously— and, for that matter, read—by anyone but loyal staffers, political cultists, or duty-bound reporters, it can be as boring as its authors wish...
...George W. Bush has told his story here, and he's told it first...
...For example, around page 95, George W. Bush is elected governor of Texas...
...There was, for starters, the application he had to fill out...
...Through no fault or credit of his own, this is the life George W. Bush has led, and his poor ghost labors mightily to inject it with drama, without success...
...All the reflexes of human curiosity are at once disabled...
...Committee, the Acupuncture Board...
...The last chapter consists of an extended stump speech meant to answer the question, but even more than the rest of the book, this is clearly the work of other hands...
...The single firsthand political memory he recounts from those years involves the insane comedian Dick Gregory, who spoke on campus about "The Negro in America...
...From now on, any contradictory accounts that other writers may offer up will therefore have to be squared with Bush's original rendering...
...George W Bush, Author Most campaign books are awful, but George W. Bush's "A Charge to Keep" sets a new standard BY ANDREW FERGUSON IN GEORGE W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep, which arrived in bookstores last week, there is a photograph that reveals far more about the governor than the thousands of words that come before and after it...
...By these criteria, A Charge to Keep is a stunning success...
...You ought to try being a VPK"—a Vice President's kid— was my instant comeback...
...As Bush/Hughes note in the introduction, A Charge to Keep was written primarily to preempt the work of other biographers...
...A campaign book, like any memoir, requires drama...
...He is wearing a sport coat and khakis under a cloudless sky...
...by nature and by class, Bushes are taciturn and unreflective men...
...Perhaps Don should write a memoir of his days with George Bush...
...My first impression was one of tremendous energy," Vance later told me...
...The book says: "It's important to listen...
...The effect can only be intentional...
...Earlier generations of politicians could pull this off...
...And how did you happen to jot it down...
...Here the governor recalls, or fails to recall, an adult Bible class in his hometown of Midland: I took it seriously, with my usual touch of humor...
...I was shocked .. ." he writes...
...This too is perfectly understandable...
...In any case, the uneasiness, on the reader's part, lingers and recurs...
...There follow five deadening pages in which the author lists all of his major appointments—names you have never heard before, nor ever will again—including the many boards to which he had to make appointments...
...These were the tests by which competence was proved and character formed...
...in a first-person account the effect isn't so much boring as unsettling...
...And it says: "We should educate children" and "We are America" and "Our children are the faces of our future...
...So a guy and his ghost tell his story as best they can, and recount the little lessons learned along the way—like that time at Andover, when young George W. tried to impress his English teacher with big words he fetched from a thesaurus...
...And a dramatic book requires a dramatic life...
...Some speakers came to campus to talk about the war," he recalls, "but my friends and I did not attend the speeches...
...It forced me to think about what I had accomplished and what I hoped to achieve...
...That they have produced a book so lacking in weight, so disorganized and trivial, so airily consumed by banality, is as much a consequence of the constraints they worked under as it is a reflection of their campaign's shortcomings or the candidate's inadequacies...
...In such cauldrons are compassionate conservatives forged...
...I watched, appalled...
...At the time Bush was part-owner of the Texas Rangers...
...In the foreword to A Charge to Keep, Bush/Hughes say that the governor was not inclined to write a book about his life, though he had been asked to do so...
...the top two buttons of his shirt are open, in the manner of the Sunbelt bon vivant...
...I walked into your office and there was lots of activity, phones ringing, people coming in and out, baseballs and paper everywhere...
...Then—whoosh...
...Running for president just seems to be the thing a guy does next...
...And one begins to hope, at least, that this is the case...
...Even the calamitous sixties, which he spent at Yale, seem to have left him eerily untouched...
...It is possible that the governor, who lacked the time to actually write the book, undertook the research for it, interviewing old pals, staff, and colleagues, and then handed all the notes and tapes over to Karen Hughes...
...Albans, or Steve Forbes fumbling with his trust fund, or Bill Bradley negotiating his salary with the Knicks—and it is no mark against George Bush (I repeat) that he has shared in the general good fortune...
...I was horrified...
...Our DKE parties were known as some of the best on campus...
...Or: "I'm a hard worker and tough competitor...
...He has the look of a man to whom life has dealt an inside straight: handsome, wealthy, with a pretty and intelligent wife, a pair of charming daughters, a lucrative and not terribly taxing job that allows ample time for lunch, working the phones, weight lifting, snapping towels with the fellas in the locker room after a morning run—a man who has arrived where he is by a series of happy accidents, and who, but for the happiest accident of all, his birth, would have been quite content to stay there...
...It was a different perspective," the governor writes, "and it made a lasting impression...
...I recruited Al Gonzalez, a smart and talented...
...Now fully alert, the reader wants to ask: When...
...I asked Mike Weiss, a longtime friend . . . Mike quickly identified the brightest budget mind in the state of Texas, Albert Hawkins . .. We added Cliff Johnson .. . The Air Conditioner and Refrigeration Contractors Commission, the Fire Ant Research Management Account Advisory Because it will never be read by anyone but loyal staffers and duty-bound reporters, the campaign book can be as boring as its authors wish...
...It says: "I believe a leader should respect the faith of others...
...When did Vance tell you that...
...Business school," he writes, "was a turning point for me...
...it may be a fuller and fleshier account than the governor has been able to give, though it could hardly be more complimentary...
...George W. Bush's own personal San Juan Hill was getting his MBA at Harvard...
...He's hurt...
...The first of these constraints was time...
...This will, in turn, be impossible, partly because his own storytelling is so vague and discontinuous, and partly because no reader, having read A Charge to Keep, will remember anything about it...
...For the Negro, Gregory said, America was like a big cigarette machine into which he put money without getting a pack of cigarettes...
...A profit is when revenues exceed expenses, and no one has seen one around here since Elijah," I answered...
...His reactions, rendered in hindsight, were correct...
...But it's not likely, for in truth the book offers little evidence of any involvement at all on the governor's part...
...Here, in another among many examples, the governor meets Vance McMahan, a young aide recommended by his chief of staff Karl Rove: Karl highly recommended him, and sent him to meet me in Dallas...
...Completing it required taking stock of your life...
...It was a mistake he would not make again...
...A Charge to Keep says many, many things like this, piled one on top of another, and by a strange coincidence, just as the book went on sale, U.S...
...I get the facts, weigh them thoughtfully, and decide...
...Don [Jones, a friend] remembers a time after watching a video on Luke's depiction of John the Baptist, when the speaker asked the class to define a prophet...
...just as putting out a book is a thing a guy running for president does...
...Because it is (usually) ghostwritten or (at the least) heavily edited by professional hands, any suggestions of genuine intimacy will be impossible...
...But "when I discovered that a number of other people were writing books about me, I decided to tell my story from my perspective...
...But his experience of the sixties extended beyond the tube...
...But anyone searching for the reasons why the governor now wishes to disrupt that life with a go at the presidency will put down A Charge to Keep as perplexed as ever...
...So friends have been brought in, interviewed by researchers, and then quoted to fill out the narrative...
...The quips are the governor's, but the memory is Don's...
...And indeed the insurmountable difficulty raised by A Charge to Keep is one endemic to the Baby Boomers...
...TR charged up San Juan Hill, Herbert Hoover fed Europe after the First World War, FDR conquered polio, JFK survived PT-109, and even Jimmy Carter had to endure Billy and Miz Lillian...
...Evidently the taping sessions with Governor Bush didn't yield sufficient fodder...
...It shows Bush in the front row of Arlington Stadium in Arlington, Texas, chatting with the great pitcher Nolan Ryan before a ballgame...
...we would hire bands and host big dances...
...The campaign book is for the most part a flexible, forgiving mode of literary expression...
...The paper came back with a "zero" marked so emphatically that it left an impression visible all the way through to the back of the blue book...
...The ghostwriter's normal method is to tape extensive interviews with his subject, then grind the recorded memories and observations into presentable prose...
...It must of course shamelessly boost the campaign, which requires that no unflattering evidence be admitted to the text...
...words pass from the page to the brain and then out again in the cadence of a lullaby...
...As the Bud cascaded from the kegs at the DKE house—where he was, in a strange foreshadowing, elected president—ominous images floated up from the TV: police dogs, assassinations, bloodbaths in rice paddies far away...
...This is what the picture says...
...For anyone born after 1945, these constitute the wilderness years...
...One hopes that he didn't really approve such horn-tooting sentences as "A friend once told me that he never realized how to enjoy his children until he watched me play with mine...
...There is something disembodied about the George W. Bush who wafts through his campaign book...
...News reported that the governor is "hurt that he is developing the image of an airhead...
...Or: "I'm an observer, a listener, and a learner...
...it is not, of course, what Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Or: "I am a decisive person...
...And a witty one it is, too...
...What the book says is: "We must give our prosperity a greater purpose, a purpose of peace and freedom and hope...
...Even so, certain conditions must be met for a campaign book to be successful...
...Bush/Hughes often achieve effects beyond boredom...
...One hopes that he didn't approve such sentences (there are many more)—one hopes that they are merely the gushy opinions of his ghostwriter, unwisely recast into the first person—because they carry the odor of the same overweening Baby Boomer self-regard that, until now, had found its perfect political expression in Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich...
...So much for trying to sound smart...
...the book says, not in the words printed on its 253 pages...
...Then there are the constraints imposed by the genre...
...He was serious, but I couldn't resist...
...Not all of these, however, can be considered intentional...
...At precisely those moments when the narrative evokes a glint of human interest, it is stalled by a platitude, hung up on an irrelevant observation, or collapses under an avalanche of extraneous detail...
...But now the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born after World War II, fattened in affluence, undisciplined by the easeful and generous bounty our parents created for us...
...The discussion of "lacerates" falling from my eyes did catch the teacher's attention, but not in the way I had hoped...
...If he read this book he'd be absolutely crushed...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 12
