The Book on Bush

National Review, Feb 24, 2003 by Lou Cannon

As these and other passages in The Right Man suggest, Frum has left the White House without the White House leaving him. Frum is no apologist for Bush on domestic issues, but he is loyal to the point of defensiveness when it comes to foreign policy or national security. He goes out of his way, for instance, to say that Bush's support of Israel in resisting terrorism has nothing to do with the "Jewish lobby." Is that really true, and if so, why shouldn't the Jewish lobby have some say? In another context Frum does not hesitate to observe that Bush knew when he advocated tolerance toward Muslims that "Muslim votes may have tipped the balance of the election" that made him president.

Frum is a gifted polemicist, as he demonstrated with Dead Right, his critique of the conservative movement. The Right Man is less tightly organized and veers back and forth between assessments of Bush and his staff and anecdotes from Frum's early days in the White House. Frum keenly analyzes the attributes of key aides Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. Despite an obvious preference for Rove, he shows how each of them, in very different ways, made vital contributions to the Bush presidency. Otherwise, he pretty much brushes off the staff, with the exception of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, who comes off as fair- minded and disciplined. "She practiced an almost steely discretion- which it was part of her charm to let slip from time to time," Frum writes. Preparing for a meeting with unnamed foreign dignitaries after 9/11, she asked her scheduler, "So which thugs have you got for me to meet?"

Frum's claim to fame as a speechwriter was that he was the inspiration for Bush's famous linkage of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the "axis of evil." In Frum's draft the phrase was "axis of hatred" and included Iraq and Iran, the latter apparently at the behest of Rice. Michael Gerson, the head speechwriter, changed "hatred" to "evil." It isn't clear from the book, or perhaps to Frum, how North Korea became a part of the axis. And Frum doesn't make much of a case for it. He says Bush was doing what Reagan did in bluntly describing the nature of the Soviet Union. But when Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," he didn't throw in China or North Korea just for the heck of it. Bush is right to see all three regimes as "evil," but the "axis" part of the formulation remains a head-scratcher.

Frum is at his best when he applies his powers of observation to Bush: "George W. Bush is a very unusual political person: a good man who is not a weak man. . . . He has many faults. He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be. But outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity."

In Frum's view the Bush presidency was stumbling toward obscurity until 9/11, when Bush rose to the occasion and became an effective wartime president. Leadership remains an elusive mystery of politics, but Bush is certainly a leader. Frum makes a persuasive case that Bush, for all his faults, is the right president to lead our country in these perilous times.