Although he never says so, Bush clearly resents the widespread suspicion that he’s not too (choose your euphemism) intellectually engaged, and loses no opportunity to clear that up. I was not amused.”īut it’s not all country-boying. At a G-8 summit, he patted Bush’s arm and said flirtatiously, “George, you are so unilateralist.” But instead of considering this a compliment to his “cojones” - a word, possibly even a concept, that surely makes here its first appearance in any presidential memoir (it means, roughly, “unilateralist”) - Bush says coldly: “It was my first Chirac drive-by. God knows, Chirac did his Gallic best to charm. Memories of the French Revolution may help to explain Bush’s dislike of Jacques Chirac, the president of France, for example. tries to do in this book is “country-boying.” That is, pretending to be an unsophisticated hick who can smell a phony a mile away. I believe the Texas term for what George W.
While George the elder talked a good “kinder, gentler,” but did little about it, George the younger has two real achievements along those lines: first, his many efforts, only partly successful but starting immediately after 9/11 (and therefore, it seems, instinctive) to prevent an explosion of anti-Muslim prejudice and his leadership in the fight against AIDS in Africa. In college, he says, he was appalled to learn how the French Revolution betrayed its ideals. There is something very modern, almost New Agey, and endearingly insecure, about the tone and posture the son adopts in “Decision Points.” Even as he’s bombing Baghdad back to the Stone Age, he’s very much in touch with his feelings. Bush’s schoolboy petulance and solipsism, which at least seem authentic and human, over George H.
You’re supposed to prefer the father, all graciousness and handwritten little notes, over the son, who - even in memoirs written at age 64 after two terms as president - seems callow. They call themselves, smugly, “41” and “43,” meaning the 41st and 43rd presidents of the United States.
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