Deciding on Decision Points: A Review of Dubya’s Self-reflection on Life, God, and Country
Bush, George Herbert Walker. Decision Points. Crown Publishers.
There is no question in anyone’s mind, whether liberal or conservative, that President George Walker Bush has emerged after his eight remarkable years in the White House, as one of the most controversial yet pivotal leaders of our time, and certainly of the first decade of the Twenty First Century. And whether you love him or hate this two-term, 43rd President of our Republic, I cannot recommend strongly enough that before trying to assess the legacy of his truly monumental presidency, both Mr. Bush’s detractors (of which there admittedly are many on both the Left as well as on the Right), and his unflinching supporters, standing with him to the last, should take the time to read his book.
However, this recommendation comes with an important caveat: I maintain that those in either camp would be wise to do so with an open mind, or, at the very least, as objectively as possible. For just a moment, prospective readers should try to look beyond, if not temporarily disregard the relentlessly crucifying, and perhaps at times, unfairly vitriolic artillery barrage with which the media assaulted the man (with journalists such as Scott Horton for Harper’s Magazine calling him the “worst president ever” and the like) during his time in office. I say this not in any attempt to enshrine the former president upon a pedestal among Washington, Reagan, and Lincoln because of some secretive personal view that I harbor. I intend nothing of the sort, for I too, like so many Americans, have a number of misgivings about some of the policies implemented by his administration. Nor am I trying to support the far-left and their staunch Bush-bashing agenda by scaring potential readers away from a book that even arguably liberal-leaning news publications such as Newsweek admits puts forth a rather convincing argument in favor of a more positive retrospective view of his leadership. Heck! Even his predecessor Bill Clinton touted its publication, raving “Decision Points is well-written, and interesting from start to finish. I think people of all political stripes should read it.” Rather, I simply believe that the only way to make it a substantive and worthwhile read is to approach the work from a mindset that attempts to see Mr. Bush, his presidency, and the legacy he left on our nation from the unique perspective from none other than the man himself—attempting to understand the personal life experiences, convictions, and viewpoints that he would take with him to the Oval Office as well as some of the facts laid out before him when the former Commander-in-Chief, and him alone, would have to make the crucial and arduous decisions that would come to shape his presidency and our nation as a whole.
In other words, to comprehend in full our forty-third president, along with all his contentious decisions and why he made them, one must walk in his shoes, to truly be the man who, as Teddy Roosevelt so famously remarked in 1910, “is actually in the arena, … face marred by dust and sweat and blood,” as it is he and “not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better,” for, merely from the outside looking in, we civilians cannot comprehend the full extent of what was involved in the eleventh-hour choices that Mr. Bush had to make in times of national crisis—with all of the available intelligence and resources at his disposal laid out before him on the table. To paraphrase W’s response at a press conference to a reporter’s query as to why he took the monumental action, divisive to this day, of utilizing military force against Iraq despite the nonexistence of WMDs in which he countered to the asker that if instead he held the office of the commander-in-chief, given all of the present, undisclosed information available to him at the moment when he was forced, for the sake of the security of the American people and preservation of American values, then he would have made the exact same decision as the true occupier of the Oval Office standing defiantly at the podium. And it is Decision Points, which is divided into essentially fourteen different decisions that Bush considers most important leading up to and during his presidency—not Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Richard A. Clarke’s Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, or Scott McClellan’s What Happened—that truly provides a fairly detailed, reasonable, and, as ex-President Clinton rather surprisingly but aptly put it, the account “will help you to understand better the forces that molded him, and the convictions that drove him to make those decisions, to do what he thought was right.”
Granted, though it reveals a number of rather surprising and telling details about Bush’s most memorable (although not always positive) life experiences, his book is not a tell-all, no-holds look behind the scenes into the deepest innards of the Bush Presidency. So if that’s what you were expecting to find you will be quite disappointed. Nor does Decision Points follow the chronological, birth-to-present progression typical of the memoir genre, for its author instead chose to break down and then categorize the most pivotal moments in his life into fourteen theme-based chapters, each focused on a central choice or group of related choices that he made in the course of the truly remarkable sixty-three years that he has under his Texan belt so far. Thus, Bush, in his engaging, non-chronologically-styled memoir, takes the now hackneyed, predictably organized presidential autobiography in a new and rather refreshing direction. But Mr. Bush, who decides to begin with discussing what he calls “one of the toughest decisions I ever made,” remarkably isn’t even referring to a choice that he made during his presidency, although he admits it is one that, without which, “none of the others that follow in this book would have been possible.” Thus, what he is referring to in his dramatically opening line wherein his wife poses the gravely serious but “simple question” that his wife poses to him, asking “[c]an you remember the last day you didn’t have a drink?” is the immense and widely-known struggle he encountered to overcome his alcoholism, for of course he confesses that, given his habitual personality, “I could not remember one.” As such, in the course of this first chapter, which he appropriately titles “Quitting,” Mr. Bush confronts his former self in a phase of his life in which he was a wild and care-free, frat boy-esque party animal during his time at Yale and Harvard Business School (although he fails to go into as much detail as I and probably most other Dartmouth students would be interested in hearing), where he was a chain smoker and had several run-ins with the law, and then his religion and family-influenced path to finally getting serious, that led to him putting away the bottle and engaging in potpourri of stints in a variety of jobs before ultimately realizing his great passion for and skill with people and subsequently, the man’s true calling in the field of politics. The rest, as they say, is history.
Speaking of the topic of history and how leaders are seen through its eyes either with love or hate, I am reminded of the words of Winston Churchill when he famously remarked to Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943 that ‘history will judge us kindly because I shall write that history.’ And, as such, only time will tell, and perhaps his writing this resolute and competent, if not plainly-written personal memoir will help (and it should) improve the legacy of (as it did other widely-despised past presidents at the time they left office (such as Ulysses S. Grant, Harry S. Truman, and Richard M. Nixon, to name just a few) America’s ‘Don’t Mess with Texas’ President, George Walker Bush.
