9 release date, unveiled its cover design and announced new details about it.īush has said he is not writing a traditional memoir but an account of key decisions in his life. Bush's book 'Decision Points' on Sunday set a Nov. Despite the best efforts of Decision Points, its verdict is unlikely to be kind.NEW YORK - The publisher of former U.S. The 43rd president professes to have no fear of history, which is just as well. He is generally regarded as a failure in the White House.

'Dubya', however, found it hard to do either. He is regarded increasingly as a wise international statesman who knew how to build alliances, and when to stop. Now Iraq has set the Bush presidential reputations on very different trajectories. We also learn, incidentally, that the younger Bush acquired his trademark taste for giving people nicknames not from his mother, but his father. There has been much pop-psychologising over his supposed rivalry with the first president Bush, including a suggestion that the son's decision to 'take out Saddam' was to prove his wimpish father wrong for not doing so in the 1991 Gulf war.īut throughout the book, 'Son' has nothing but tender words for 'Dad', while in a private chat during the family's Christmas gathering in 2002, Bush senior tells Bush junior that 'if the man won't comply, you have no choice' but to go to war. 'I have a feisty and irreverent streak courtesy of Barbara Bush,' he writes – even if most of us remember mainly the cockiness and the smirk. Where Decision Points breaks unsuspected ground is over Bush's relationship not with a higher father, but with his biological one. It sends such demoralising signals to the team and the country.' In any case, 'the Good Lord wouldn't give a believer a burden he couldn't handle.'

Self-pity is a pathetic quality in a leader. You play the hand you're dealt, the author declares. All in all, it was 'one ugly way to end the presidency.'īut then again, being the most powerful man in the world is not for the faint-hearted. Russia has invaded and occupied Georgia, Hurricane Ike is battering his beloved Texas, America is fighting costly, seemingly interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US financial system is imploding in the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

George W Bush is reflecting on the final set of crises that crashed around his administration in the autumn of 2008. For the best summary of what made his ill-starred presidency tick, you must persevere almost to the end of this tome of breezy self-justification.

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