Defining Dubya

When George W. Bush appointed Karen Hughes to be under secretary of state for public diplomacy, with specific orders to enhance the image of the United States in the greater Middle East, Hughes had never been to the region, had no expertise in the Muslims who largely populate it, and had never shown any real interest in it either.

It showed. On her first trip to the Persian Gulf, she approached foreign dignitaries as if they were soccer moms and began with a campaign slogan: “The four E’s of diplomacy: Engagement, Exchange, Education and Empowerment.” In one meeting, she told her host that the most famous phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance–“One Nation, Under God”–came from the U.S. Constitution.

So why did George W. Bush pick Karen Hughes for such a critical mission? Her words upon emerging from a meeting with an Egyptian sheikh provide one clue: “I think I was able to have a wonderful meeting with His Eminence to talk with him about the common language of the heart.”

We don’t know what His Eminence thought about his introduction to the common language of the heart. But George W. Bush, who years earlier declared that he had seen into the soul of Vladimir Putin, speaks it fluently. Hughes knows Bush as well as anyone other than his wife. And when Bush needs help on the big issues, he often seeks assistance from those most familiar to him, whatever their qualifications and without regard to what the rest of world might think.

And so it was that, as Hughes finished her trip, a reporter approached her for a comment on Bush’s likely Supreme Court nominee: “Harriet would be a wonderful Supreme Court justice!”

“Harriet Miers didn’t want the job,” reports Robert Draper in Dead Certain. “She didn’t want to be in Washington at all. For those who did not know her, the limits of Miers’s ambition might have been hard to gauge. For George W. Bush had made her a player in spite of herself.”

Throughout his short political career, Bush had frequently turned to Miers for help on legal matters–from his first gubernatorial campaign (1994) through his election as president in 2000 and deep into his administration. So when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, Miers seemed to him like a natural candidate to replace her.

But conservatives, who had waited years for an opportunity to remake the Court, were furious that Bush had passed over so many qualified candidates to select his friend from Texas. The fight over the Miers nomination was a low point in the Bush administration; but the story of how she came to be chosen, and why she ultimately withdrew from consideration, is a high point in Draper’s long look at the Bush presidency.

It is Draper’s reporting on Bush and his closest advisers that makes this volume worth reading. Draper covered Bush for Texas Monthly before he took his current job as a national correspondent for GQ, and had exceptional access to Bush and his team. Dead Certain reflects the depth and breadth of Draper’s understanding and includes fresh detail about the main players and their often-complicated relationships with Bush and with each other.

Draper reports in great detail about how the much-derided “Mission Accomplished” sign appeared on the deck of the USS Lincoln and suggests that criticism of Bush stemming from the sign is unfounded. He provides context for some of Bush’s gaffes that make them seem more understandable.

Why did Bush publicly compliment FEMA director Mike Brown for his agency’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina? Moments before Bush praised Brown–“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”–Alabama governor Bob Riley had said almost the exact same thing: “Whenever I needed anything here in Alabama, all I’ve needed to do is call Mike Brown,” Riley said. “Mr. President, he’s doing a heck of a job.”

Draper’s portrayal of the president is often sympathetic. His familiarity with Bush is the strength of his book, and it allows him to write about the president in a way that largely avoids caricature.

Unfortunately, this approach does not extend to Bush administration policies. Draper repeats many of the anti-Bush myths propagated by the antiwar left and repeated uncritically in the mainstream press. For example, he writes: “Joseph Wilson had been sent by the administration to Niger in 2002 to determine whether Saddam’s government had attempted to obtain uranium from that country. Wilson found that such a transaction had not taken place.”

Leaving aside the impossibility of proving a negative, Draper here adopts the long-discredited Joe Wilson framing of the issue. “The administration” did not send Wilson; the CIA did–at the suggestion of Mrs. Wilson. And contrary to Wilson’s after-the-fact claims, his reporting actually bolstered administration claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

Draper spends just three paragraphs on the Wilson affair. This seems insufficient, given the impact that nonscandal had on public opinion, and on the Bush administration’s defensive posture since the affair began in July 2003. But given Draper’s credulous recitation of the anti-Bush spin, readers should be grateful for the oversight.

Draper does this throughout Dead Certain, particularly in his writing about the Iraq war and the broader war on terror.

The virus metaphor might be fun, but Draper seems to misunderstand the most basic elements of the Bush administration’s national security strategy. Administration officials argued ad nauseam that threats must be eliminated before they become imminent. They made this case in television interviews, in congressional testimony and public speeches, and in various white papers. It is laid out in a document cleverly entitled The National Security Strategy of the United States, published in 2002. And Bush himself made this point directly in his 2003 State of the Union address. Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he declared:

Other metaphors prove even more problematic, as Draper writes, at times, beneath his résumé. “A candidate with an obscene war chest,” he says, “could afford to spread the field and look down the road to November 7, 2000.” And, “Blanco called Card’s bluff and stuck to her guns.” And, “To shore up the levees and stop the bleeding, the White House pulled out all the stops.” And, “Now, though, with the wind suddenly at his back, with no races left to run and the Republican majority behind their fearless party leader…well, there were no excuses, were there?”

None at all.

Stephen F. Hayes, senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Cheney: The Untold -Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President.