The Reckless Presidency of George W. Bush

Policies, not personalities, are former NBC News producer Gannon’s (Obama’s War: Avoiding a Quagmire in Afghanistan) announced focus in this addition to the heap of books on the Bush administration. Gannon seeks to distinguish his work from the pack by avoiding personal attacks (which proves less than successful), but acknowledges that some might suspect the presence of an ideological bias in only portraying Bush failures. The Bush years are vividly portrayed as framed by disaster, with 9/11 and the 2008 housing crisis providing “bookends.” In between came calamities: the Iraq war and the campaign to sell it to the world; Abu Ghraib; tax cuts that benefited the wealthy; and irresponsible deregulation of environmental safeguards. Gannon asserts that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was justified, but believes the country “lost its moral compass by invading Iraq in 2003.” Though the book is light on new insights, few can quibble with Gannon’s observation that whatever the final legacy of the Bush administration might be, the Republican presidential candidates so far in 2012 “seem unable to escape the Bush shadow even as they try to ignore it.” (July)