Paul O'Neill, the fired Treasury secretary whose documentation and recollections are the backbone of the book, may be remembered less for what he did in office than for his observation that the incurious Bush at Cabinet meetings was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
Unlike the Bible's, these proverbs will fade from memory, but they have made "The Price of Loyalty" a part of scripture for administration critics. A little exegesis is in order: What does the book really mean? In a nutshell, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind has written an invaluable history, both for what he says about our current leaders but also, unwittingly, for what he says about O'Neill, with whom he sides.
News followers know that the book's most serious indictments are, one, that the fix was in on the Iraq war from the very first days of the administration, and two, the president's anti-intellectual bent and the ideological rigidity of his advisers produced an administration pursuing ruinous goals poorly grounded in reasoned analysis. (The war, deficit spending, and anti-environment policies are among the proffered examples.) Given the show of diplomacy Bush made before invading Iraq, the obviously inadequate planning for the occupation, and the hundreds of Americans and Iraqis who have died, the first charge could have been damning. But the case Suskind and O'Neill present won't change any minds.
They show that the administration took the Clinton recipe of regime change through peaceful pressure and sprinkled in a willingness to use bombs. Yet as late as the weekend after Sept. 11, 2001 (and page 189), when Bush and his team began mapping the war on terror, it remained the case, as Suskind writes, that "no one was willing to commit, at this point, to an Iraq invasion." The following year, Bush began making his case publicly, and we got months of public debate. Nothing in this book retroactively tips the balance in that debate.
