Washington Post lefty Richard Cohen is unimpressed by George W. Bush’s reading habits, which were summarized last week by none other than Karl Rove. For the past three years, Messrs. Bush and Rove have competed to see who could read more books. Mr. Rove has won all three contests, but the President’s total of 186 volumes (plus an annual reading of the complete Bible) is pretty impressive, especially given that he has a full-time job.
Mr. Cohen concedes that “the caricature of George Bush as unread” isn’t tenable, but his Bush Derangement Syndrome won’t let go.
Mr. Bush’s 2006 reading list [writes Mr. Rove] shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, James L. Swanson’s Manhunt, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower. Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton’s Next, Vince Flynn’s Executive Power, Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger, among others.
Fifty-eight of the books he read that year were nonfiction. Nearly half of his 2006 reading was history and biography, with another eight volumes on current events (mostly the Mideast) and six onsports. . . .
His list was particularly wide-ranging [in 2007], from history (The Great Upheaval and Khrushchev’s Cold War), biographical (Dean Acheson and Andrew Mellon), and current affairs (including Rogue Regime and The Shia Revival). He read one book meant for young adults, his daughter Jenna’s excellent Ana’sStory. . . .
His reading this year [2008] included a heavy dose of history – including David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas’s Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears’s Gettysburg and David King’s Vienna 1814. There’s also plenty of biography – including U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Jon Meacham’s American Lion, James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.
From this list, which others might regard as rather wide-ranging, Mr. Cohen infers that the President is an “intellectually insulated man”. A better inference is that the WaPo poseur is himself insulated, as well as – “trivial” is the word that comes to mind.
First off, he regards biography and history as no school for statesmen:
As might be expected, most of Bush’s books have been biographies and histories. Biographies are usually about great men who often did the unpopular thing and were later vindicated.
Such as “King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan”? Many great men have, it is true, followed their own best judgement instead of the immediate popular whim. I wonder why Mr. Cohen considers that to be a fact from which Presidents should be shielded.
As for histories, they are replete with cautionary tales. That might explain how the 1961 classic, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, made it onto this year’s presidential reading list. Had Hitler (and Mussolini) been stopped in Spain, much misery would have been avoided. Substitute Iraq for Spain and you have, for the president, some reassuring bedtime reading.
Written by a man who very obviously has never read Hugh Thomas – and especially not the 1961 first edition (we aren’t told which one the President read), the moral of which is that, for all of Franco’s narrowness and brutality, Spain was fortunate that he, rather than his Stalinoid adversaries, triumphed. The revised edition is harder on the Caudillo and displays a certain dreamy romanticism toward the anarcho-syndicalists, but it too is not a text into which one can read metaphors for Iraq.
The next complaint is the absence of left-wing tracts denouncing the Bush Presidency:
It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Tom Ricks’s Fiasco, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side about “extraordinary rendition” and other riffs [sic] on the Constitution. Absent too is Barton Gellman’s Angler, about Dick Cheney, the waterboarder in chief.
Can anyone be more insulated than a man who still calls Iraq “a debacle”? As for the absent shelves, we, first of all, don’t know that the President hasn’t read any or all of these books. Mr. Rove identified about forty out of 186. Mr. Cohen assumes that none of them were written by Presidential critics; that assumption is his only evidence for the truth of his proposition.
Second, the cited works consist mostly of speculations about Mr. Bush’s motives and decision making processes. The President doesn’t need Tom Ricks to tell him what he directed in Iraq, Barton Gellman to inform him about his Vice President’s actions or Jane Mayer to extract sinister subtexts from his executive orders. As Matthew Franck asks, “[W]hy should the president read books by people who know less about the war and related matters than he does? Their arguments are familiar to him and their information is smaller.”
Regarding the President’s taste in fiction, we are given two observations. First:
Bush’s choice of the Camus classic [The Stranger] is odd on the face of it. It is a novel about estrangement, about an amoral, irreligious man (Meursault) who never shows emotion. It is a book out of my Gauloise-smoking youth, read in the vain pursuit of women of literary bent, and not something I would think an over-60 president would read. Maybe this is what happens when you have to give up jogging.
Ann Althouse goes to the bother of skewering that paragraph, but its vacuity needs no commentary. Next:
Bush read some novels, but they are mostly pre-movies, plotted not written, and lacking the beauty of worldly cynicism. I recommend Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Delicious.
It would be catty to note that The Leopard was made into a movie and otiose to point out that, once again, the columnist doesn’t know that Mr. Bush has never read it. As I recall, it was at the peak of its popularity, particularly among youthful conservatives, when he and I were undergraduates.
But suppose that the Prince of Lampedusa’s tale had shown up on the Presidential list; wouldn’t it have been further evidence of “insulation”? Its “worldly cynicism” is directed against progress, secularism, equality and other conceits dear to a liberal pundit’s heart. And it is not “delicious”. In that pitifully failed stab at le mot juste is encapsulated the triviality of Richard Cohen.
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