“Write this down,” Bush told Republican governors in the fall of 2002.
Nobody moves.” (This comes from former spokesman Ari Fleischer’s memoir.)īaker also gathers a wealth of other revealing quotes and anecdotes, not previously published, from interviews and from private notes of White House meetings. From them he unearths gems, such as Bush’s quip about the icy reception he would get when addressing the United Nations General Assembly: “It’s like speaking to the wax museum. He has read the memoirs so you don’t have to. Its virtue lies in the mass of information Baker has collected and the way he has pulled it together, so that the jumble of material on the Bush years is consolidated in one smooth narrative. The book has few groundbreaking revelations or startling judgments. “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” by Peter Baker (Doubleday). 11, 2001, the president said, “And then there came a day of fire.”) (The book’s title is a play on a quote from Bush’s second inaugural address: Referring to Sept. After tracing the upbringing and early careers of both Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, Baker chronicles their time in office from start to finish, encompassing their foreign and domestic policies. Peter Baker’s impressive new book, “Days of Fire,” one of the first efforts to set out the history of the Bush administration, is a distinguished work, notable for its scope and ambition, that should become a standard reference for historians. It has taken several years for the key actors to write their memoirs and for the president’s friends and subordinates to offer stories they wouldn’t volunteer at the time the Bush team was in the White House. The historical judgments of the Bush administration are only beginning to take shape. This recent rethinking will prove no more enduring than the original perceptions. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, we have been treated to even thinner caricatures of W.: Bush the humanist, a contemplative painter who was misunderstood at the time and did little to inspire the passions that engulfed him. More recently, amid an outpouring of coverage prompted by the April opening of the George W.
Bush and his administration.įor years, amid the rancor of the Iraq war, Bush was often portrayed as a simple idiot or sometimes as a demonic manipulator. We are in the midst of a wave of revisionism about George W. James Mann, a resident fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.” He is working on a biography of George W.
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