Last week I finished Decision Points, the Bush (43) memoir, and after some reflection -- all 477 pages of it -- my takeaway from the book by the most divisive president in my lifetime is: the man did what he thought was right. That should be the basis for any president and his decision-making, but not surprisingly, the book is full of puzzling moments, just like his presidency. Having it be wrapped around the critical decisions he made actually makes the book more interesting than a conventional memoir, so he gets style points.
The Good
- Bush did a lot for Africa + fighting diseases, and almost no one remembers this.
- The chapter on the financial crisis is one of the first behind-the-scenes --though brief -- accounts of what they did, and he actually deserves a lot of credit for (somewhat) stabilizing the crash.
- Reading his thoughts about September 11th is refreshing, because he doesn't exploit it.
The Bad
- It's incredibly frustrating to read the chapter on Iraq, and by extension, the chapter on Afghanistan
- The way it's written, Bush takes a ridiculous amount of credit for all the countries that have become some form of a democracy over the past nine years.
- He had this broad domestic agenda that got wiped out as soon as he went to war, and it shows, because he doesn't talk much about anything besides those.
- When he talks about the 2000 and 2004 elections, my blood boils.
The Puzzling
- Bush had many well-qualified candidates for vice president, and then somehow chose Cheney. The same goes for a lot of other cabinet positions...he let his loyalty to Bush (41) get in the way of picking people that actually knew what they were doing.
- He still has the problem of referring to his faith way too much; meaning, his faith is what got him elected and guided him through the presidency.
I chose to read the book in the first place because Bush was the first president I ever voted for, and I needed some kind of closure. He put us all through hell, and I wasn't expecting 400 pages of "I'm sorry," but I needed to know what the man was thinking as he was leading the country. No matter how candid and personal a memoir from Bush is, he'll always be this guy to me:
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