Re: A Book Worth Reading

Stephen Hayes’s post yesterday on Matt Latimer’s book gently chides former Bush staffers for criticizing the book on the basis of the excerpts Matt’s own publishers shared in advance with GQ. This strikes me as as a peculiar case of blaming the victims. After all, it’s not the former Bush staffers who cherry-picked the juicy bits to share with GQ’s readership. Stephen is right, though, that many of us former Bush aides have reacted negatively to what we’ve seen so far–and for good reason. In my experience, most White House alums, across Administrations, share a visceral feeling that writing a book like this is a deeply dishonorable act–a violation of trust and an abuse of privilege that reveals more about the character of the book’s author than it ever could about the book’s subjects. Setting aside questions of propriety, the excerpts also irk his former colleagues because Matt turns out to be a particularly unreliable narrator, frequently misunderstanding or mischaracterizing the snippets of conversation he purports to have faithfully recorded. Two particularly egregious examples require a response. First, Matt writes disapprovingly about the President’s reaction to the remarks drafted for his prime-time address urging passage of the TARP legislation, and suggests based on his limited exposure to the President in the hours before the speech that the President did not understand his own proposal. In fact, what Matt claims to have heard suggests only that the President was wrestling in the early hours and days of the crisis with a substantive issue that would vex the Treasury, Fed, and legions of analysts, commentators, and bankers for many more months–how to get toxic assets off bank balance sheets without either “overpaying” for the assets or further destabilizing the banks by establishing a “firesale” market price. The difficulty of this task, among other concerns, soon prompted Secretary Paulson to sideline the toxic asset purchases in favor of direct capital injections in the banks, which a year on seems to have been an extremely effective use of the TARP funds. A more perceptive chronicler–or maybe just one with enough involvement in the process to know that the ubiquitous Secretary Paulson was anything but a “non-person” in the White House, as Matt strangely asserts–would have recognized the President’s passing expressions of frustration with his team as nothing more than blowing off steam before delivering an important speech in the midst of a crisis. And an advisor who had actually participated in the President’s dramatic Roosevelt R

oom briefing by Bernanke and Paulson–or for that matter any of the other policy discussions that were occurring daily–would have seen a President act decisively, on the basis of necessarily imperfect and incomplete information, to endorse an aggressive proposal by his Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary to avert a global financial collapse; push courageously and successfully for its passage by Congress even though he knew it was political poison; and then support the experts at Treasury and the Fed when they made necessary adjustments in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Matt didn’t see any of this–either because he was not there or because, when he was, he had his head down taking notes for his book and missed what was happening all around him. Second, Matt recounts another brief exchange from a speechwriting session to suggest that President Bush–who four times managed to win election with the overwhelming support of conservatives–at the end of his 14 years in office did not even recognize the conservative movement. Conservative commentators have suggested elsewhere that this anecdote may help explain decisions by President Bush that left conservatives disappointed–an inference the disillusioned Mr. Latimer seems to have intended to create. Conservatives may wish to debate whether President Bush was truly one of them, but that ought to be based on a clear-eyed evaluation of his eight years in office rather than the tendentious observations of a lurking staffer trading his 15 minutes in the Oval Office for 15 minutes on cable TV. Among other conservative accomplishments, President Bush cut taxes and fended off all efforts to raise them; pushed for free trade and open markets; kept America safe after 9/11 by taking the fight to the enemy; operationalized missile defense; liberated Iraq and Afghanistan; provided unstinting support to new democracies and deepened our commitments to the formerly captive nations of Eastern Europe; unfailingly defended Israel’s right to defend itself; appointed two conservative giants to the Supreme Court; faithfully carried the pro-life banner (including holding firm on stem-cell research); supported traditional marriage; fought to reform the most sacrosanct of all entitlement programs (Social Security) and consistently did what he thought was right for the country in the face of withering and unrelenting criticism and opposition from international and domestic elites. Conservatives can, and will, debate the President’s record. That historical record is rich enough that the President’s passing exchanges–real or imagined–in the presence of a self-obsessed, fame-seeking, and dishonorable White House scribe should offer little of value to that debate.