George W. Bush, Author

But he isn’t an airhead — really, it should go without saying — and neither is Karen Hughes, the wily press secretary who wrote his autobiography for him. That they have produced a book so lacking in weight, so disorganized and trivial, so airily consumed by banality, is as much a consequence of the constraints they worked under as it is a reflection of their campaign’s shortcomings or the candidate’s inadequacies. The first of these constraints was time. In the foreword to A Charge to Keep, Bush/Hughes say that the governor was not inclined to write a book about his life, though he had been asked to do so. But “when I discovered that a number of other people were writing books about me, I decided to tell my story from my perspective.” This implies a rush job, and the implication is borne out in the book itself — in its repetition of anecdotes and phrases, its extended verbatim quotations from long-ago speeches, and the heavy padding from contemporaneous news accounts of the governor’s astounding triumphs, his ups, his downs, his smiles, his frowns.

Then there are the constraints imposed by the genre. The campaign book is for the most part a flexible, forgiving mode of literary expression. In form it ranges from the dry and humorless policy tract (Bill Clinton’s Between Hope and History, Steve Forbes’s The New Birth of Freedom) to the goofily abstract (Bill Bradley’s Time Present, Time Past) and speculative (Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance), to the quotidian and earthbound memoir (the elder George Bush’s Looking Forward, Ronald Reagan’s Where’s the Rest of Me?). Even so, certain conditions must be met for a campaign book to be successful. It must of course shamelessly boost the campaign, which requires that no unflattering evidence be admitted to the text. Because it is (usually) ghostwritten or (at the least) heavily edited by professional hands, any suggestions of genuine intimacy will be impossible. And finally, because it will never be taken seriously — and, for that matter, read — by anyone but loyal staffers, political cultists, or duty-bound reporters, it can be as boring as its authors wish.

By these criteria, A Charge to Keep is a stunning success. In particular, its use of boredom, as both a literary device and a political tactic, breaks new ground. At precisely those moments when the narrative evokes a glint of human interest, it is stalled by a platitude, hung up on an irrelevant observation, or collapses under an avalanche of extraneous detail. For example, around page 95, George W. Bush is elected governor of Texas. Deep in his slumbering cerebellum, the benumbed reader may feel a faint stir: Is something about to happen? Then — whoosh! There follow five deadening pages in which the author lists all of his major appointments — names you have never heard before, nor ever will again — including the many boards to which he had to make appointments. (“I recruited Al Gonzalez, a smart and talented . . . I asked Mike Weiss, a longtime friend . . . Mike quickly identified the brightest budget mind in the state of Texas, Albert Hawkins . . . We added Cliff Johnson . . . The Air Conditioner and Refrigeration Contractors Commission, the Fire Ant Research Management Account Advisory Committee, the Acupuncture Board. . . . “)

All the reflexes of human curiosity are at once disabled; words pass from the page to the brain and then out again in the cadence of a lullaby. The effect can only be intentional. As Bush/Hughes note in the introduction, A Charge to Keep was written primarily to preempt the work of other biographers. George W. Bush has told his story here, and he’s told it first. From now on, any contradictory accounts that other writers may offer up will therefore have to be squared with Bush’s original rendering. This will, in turn, be impossible, partly because his own story-telling is so vague and discontinuous, and partly because no reader, having read A Charge to Keep, will remember anything about it.

I don’t mean to be misleading. Bush/Hughes often achieve effects beyond boredom. Not all of these, however, can be considered intentional. There is something disembodied about the George W. Bush who wafts through his campaign book. The ghostwriter’s normal method is to tape extensive interviews with his subject, then grind the recorded memories and observations into presentable prose. Evidently the taping sessions with Governor Bush didn’t yield sufficient fodder; by nature and by class, Bushes are taciturn and unreflective men. So friends have been brought in, interviewed by researchers, and then quoted to fill out the narrative. This is the method of a magazine profile; in a first-person account the effect isn’t so much boring as unsettling. Here the governor recalls, or fails to recall, and adult Bible class in his hometown of Midland:

I took it seriously, with my usual touch of humor. Don [Jones, a friend] remembers a time after watching a video on Luke’s depiction of John the Baptist, when the speaker asked the class to define a prophet. He was serious, but I couldn’t resist. “A profit is when revenues exceed expenses, and no one has seen one around here since Elijah,” I answered. Once a speaker was joking about his upbringing and said, “It’s not easy being a PK” — i.e., a preacher’s kid. “You ought to try being a VPK” — a Vice President’s kid — was my instant comeback.

And a witty one it is, too! The quips are the governor’s, but the memory is Don’s. Perhaps Don should write a memoir of his days with George Bush; it may be a fuller and fleshier account than the governor has been able to give, though it could hardly be more complimentary. In any case, the uneasiness, on the reader’s part, lingers and recurs. Here, in another among many examples, the governor meets Vance McMahan, a young aide recommended by his chief of staff Karl Rove:

Karl highly recommended him, and sent him to meet me in Dallas. “I walked into your office and there was lots of activity, phones ringing, people coming in and out, baseballs and paper everywhere. My first impression was one of tremendous energy,” Vance later told me.

Now fully alert, the reader wants to ask: When? When did Vance tell you that? And how did you happen to jot it down? It is possible that the governor, who lacked the time to actually write the book, undertook the research for it, interviewing old pals, staff, and colleagues, and then handed all the notes and tapes over to Karen Hughes. But it’s not likely, for in truth the book offers little evidence of any involvement at all on the governor’s part. And one begins to hope, at least, that this is the case. One hopes that he didn’t really approve such horn-tooting sentences as “A friend once told me that he never realized how to enjoy his children until he watched me play with mine.” Or: “I am a decisive person. I get the facts, weigh them thoughtfully, and decide.” Or: “I’m a hard worker and tough competitor.” Or: “I’m an observer, a listener, and a learner.”

One hopes that he didn’t approve such sentences (there are many more) — one hopes that they are merely the gushy opinions of his ghostwriter, unwisely recast into the first person — because they carry the odor of the same overweening Baby Boomer self-regard that, until now, had found its perfect political expression in Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. And indeed the insurmountable difficulty raised by A Charge to Keep is one endemic to the Baby Boomers. A campaign book, like any memoir, requires drama. And a dramatic book requires a dramatic life. Earlier generations of politicians could pull this off. TR charged up San Juan Hill, Herbert Hoover fed Europe after the First World War, FDR conquered polio, JFK survived PT-109, and even Jimmy Carter had to endure Billy and Miz Lillian. These were the tests by which competence was proved and character formed.

But now the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born after World War II, fattened in affluence, undisciplined by the easeful and generous bounty our parents created for us. Through no fault or credit of his own, this is the life George W. Bush has led, and his poor ghost labors mightily to inject it with drama, without success. Bush/Hughes list the long string of summer jobs he held, familiar to any child of the upper middle class: management trainee, messenger at a law firm, customer service rep in a stock brokerage. For anyone born after 1945, these constitute the wilderness years. George W. Bush’s own personal San Juan Hill was getting his MBA at Harvard. “Business school,” he writes, “was a turning point for me.” There was, for starters, the application he had to fill out. “Completing it required taking stock of your life. It forced me to think about what I had accomplished and what I hoped to achieve.”

Even the calamitous sixties, which he spent at Yale, seem to have left him eerily untouched. As the Bud cascaded from the kegs at the DKE house — where he was, in a strange foreshadowing, elected president — ominous images floated up from the TV: police dogs, assassinations, bloodbaths in rice paddies far away. His reactions, rendered in hindsight, were correct. “I was shocked . . . ” he writes; “I watched, appalled. . . . I was horrified. . . . ” But his experience of the sixties extended beyond the tube. “Some speakers came to campus to talk about the war,” he recalls, “but my friends and I did not attend the speeches.” This too is perfectly understandable. “Our DKE parties were known as some of the best on campus; we would hire bands and host big dances.”

The single firsthand political memory he recounts from those years involves the insane comedian Dick Gregory, who spoke on campus about “The Negro in America.” For the Negro, Gregory said, America was like a big cigarette machine into which he put money without getting a pack of cigarettes. “It was a different perspective,” the governor writes, “and it made a lasting impression.” In such cauldrons are compassionate conservatives forged.

Many of us under a certain age in America have led lives of ease and pleasure, untouched by hardship — one thinks of young Al Gore sweating out finals at St. Albans, or Steve Forbes fumbling with his trust fund, or Bill Bradley negotiating his salary with the Knicks — and it is no mark against George Bush (I repeat) that he has shared in the general good fortune. But anyone searching for the reasons why the governor now wishes to disrupt that life with a go at the presidency will put down A Charge to Keep as perplexed as ever. The last chapter consists of an extended stump speech meant to answer the question, but even more than the rest of the book, this is clearly the work of other hands. Running for president just seems to be the thing a guy does next; just as putting out a book is a thing a guy running for president does. So a guy and his ghost tell his story as best they can, and recount the little lessons learned along the way — like that time at Andover, when young George W. tried to impress his English teacher with big words he fetched from a thesaurus.

The discussion of “lacerates” falling from my eyes did catch the teacher’s attention, but not in the way I had hoped. The paper came back with a “zero” marked so emphatically that it left an impression visible all the way through to the back of the blue book. So much for trying to sound smart.

It was a mistake he would not make again.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.