Top Five Bush Administration Books of 2008

When President Bush agreed to be interviewed by the writer Robert Draper for the biography, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, he started with a caveat: “Robert, you can’t possibly figure out the history of the Bush presidency—until I’m dead.”  In exit interviews with the media over the past month, both Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney have suggested, as Bush himself has in the past, that we should not judge the catastrophic blunders of the administration too harshly, because only with the kind of perspective that historical distance provides will it be possible to understand the wisdom and farsightedness that Bush and his deputies brought to the difficult decisions they were forced to make. Of course, this willingness to let history be the judge has its limits, most recently exemplified by the outgoing administration’s efforts to prevent its own records and internal correspondence from ever becoming available to historians—and the public at large. 

But one minor consolation of the last eight years of American political life is that for all its guardedness and secrecy and its paramount devotion to loyalty, the Bush administration engendered an extraordinary renaissance of muckraking political reporting. The list of books covering Bush, Cheney, and their various misadventures is long, and most of the reporters and writers who have ventured into this territory are quick to acknowledge the limitations placed on their own reporting by the instinctive culture of secrecy that has come to prevail in Washington. But each year a number of titles have distinguished themselves both for the light they shed on previously obscure areas of government activity—the facts that they add to our collective understanding—and for the broader context and analysis that they provide. We may indeed have a long wait before the true history of the Bush administration is known, but these books should more than suffice to tide us over. Here are the top five from 2008:

THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror turned into a War on our Ideals, by Jane Mayer. A definitive, harrowing narrative account of the development of torture as a tool in the war on terror, and the incremental series of legal obfuscations and outright lies that led to rendition, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib.

ANGLER: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Barton Gellman. A terrific companion to Mayer’s book; Gellman exposes the extent to which Dick Cheney and David Addington sacrificed the constitution and the rule of law in their efforts to hijack American policy and reshape the office of the presidency.

THE SHADOW FACTORY: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by James Bamford. A long-awaited followup from the definitive chronicler of the National Security Agency. Bamford exposes not only the legal transgressions of America’s biggest and most powerful spy agency, but the dangerous inefficiency associated with monitoring innocent American citizens rather than pursuing terrorists.

THE FOREVER WAR, by Dexter Filkins. Filkins’ extraordinarily vivid and immediate account of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq is not a polemic or analysis, but a lyrical act of witness, and a vital corrective to the sanitized, distant wars that Americans have been lulled into expecting.

AMERICA AND THE WORLD: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, moderated by David Ignatius.  This penetrating and wide-ranging discussion between two lions of American foreign policy deals only in part with the many missteps of the Bush administration, but the erudition and common sense of Brzezinski and Scowcroft, and their careful evaluation of the nature of America’s national interest, amount to an implicit (and sometimes explicit) repudiation of the from-the-hip neoconservatism that has dominated America's relationship with the world in recent years. More importantly, Brzezinski and Scowcroft look to the future, and the promise of a new foreign policy.

Comments

[Steve Clemons]

This is a great roster of the five books that most get at the GW Bush DNA for the time being, until other penetrating books come out in the years ahead. I blogged and linked your piece here:

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/01/five_must_read/

[Wake-up]

People around the world are waking up to Zionist complicity in the 9/11 false-flag & the terror of Apartheid Israel!