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• About The Bush Tragedy
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Tavis: Jacob Weisberg is the editor-in-chief of "Slate" and a former contributor to "Vanity Fair," "The New Republic" and "The New York Times" magazine. He's also a best-selling author whose latest book is called "The Bush Tragedy." With a title that blunt, I guess you certainly don't need a subtitle (laughter). Jacob, nice to have you on the program.

Jacob Weisberg: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: "The Bush Tragedy." Why "The Bush Tragedy," Jacob?

Weisberg: Well, I'm trying to give this story a Shakespearean dimension and there is this -

Tavis: - Prince Hal.

Weisberg: Exactly. Bush is Prince Hal, the character from Henry IV who is the ne're-do-well son of the king, and the father is tearing his hair out saying, "How is this kid who's out carousing with Falstaff every night and getting arrested and being a bum basically gonna become the King of England?"

Hal has this miraculous transformation, and in Henry V, he becomes the most war-like and religious, heroic British king. But there's an amazing analogy. He cooks up this pretext to invade France and, outside the play, this doesn't lead to a good end for England.

Tavis: You say in the book and you break this down. I want to give you time to go through them at least in three or four arenas. You say to really understand Bush and thereby the tragedy of his administration, you have to understand his relationships. You break this down methodically. Let me just take them one area at a time.

Weisberg: Sure.

Tavis: Talk to me about why it's important for me to understand his relationships where his family is concerned?

Weisberg: Well, I think so much is explained about Bush's motivations by his relationship particularly with his father and his brother. I think the story of his life in a way is trying to be like this heroic father and growing up in the shadow of this war hero, successful businessman, president, and trying to do all the things his father did and not succeeded at them, and then having this kind of midlife crisis where he said, "I'm gonna do the opposite of my dad."

He really bought into this idea that his father had failed as president because he was too soft, too pragmatic, not conservative enough in a lot of ways particularly on foreign policy. So I think he very consciously molded himself the way he thinks his decision-making, his religion, all of the opposite of his father.

Tavis: The Bush family line, at least publicly, is that the father stays out of the son's business, that he doesn't get involved, doesn't offer advice unless he's asked, etc., etc. Is that the true story?

Weisberg: Oh, I don't think so. I mean, they're both very sensitive about this. I mean, Bush was asked about this the other day and he said that this idea that his choices have anything to do with his father is shallow psychobabble. I mean, who our parents are explains a lot about pretty much any of us, and I find it hard to accept that Bush is the only person who's unaffected by his parental relationships.

But I think he's very sensitive to the perception that his father is shaping his decisions directly or indirectly and he hasn't wanted any perception that he gets advice from his father, that his father's closest advisers, the people like Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft, that they're an influence on him.

He's really pushed all that back, so I don't - I think he's right in that I don't think his father makes suggestions and Bush takes them, but in think in a deeper sense, this relationship has molded who he is and the outcomes on a lot of issues including Iraq.

Tavis: I'll come back to Iraq in a moment, I promise. But for the moment, if he's pushing back on his daddy's friends, let's talk about then understanding him in the context of his personal friends, his personal/political relationships. We're talking, of course, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove. Help me understand him better through his friends, his inner circle.

Weisberg: Yeah. Well, he's had in Rove the political consultant who has had the most powerful relationship with any politician, electing him twice governor of Texas, twice as president; with Cheney, the most powerful vice president in our history; and with Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor who's had unprecedented personal closeness to the president. And I think they're each explained a little differently.

With Cheney, who did work for his father, I think it's very important that Cheney transferred his allegiances from dad to son and made clear to the son, "I'm on your team. I'm not on your dad's team." In fact, I think Cheney got very good at presenting issues to Bush in such a way that he helped Bush think he was reacting in a way opposite of what his father would have done.

You know, that he was making these big, bold, risk-taking choices that could change the world and would shape a consequential presidency as opposed to his father, you know, the pragmatist, wouldn't be prudent, who played small ball, as Bush calls it.

Tavis: Talk to me about his faith, his religion, which he doesn't talk a whole lot about, but it certainly comes up when he talks about his transformation, that midlife crisis you spoke of earlier. Help me understand this guy and this tragedy vis-à-vis his faith.

Weisberg: Yeah. Well, part of it is the same thing with molding himself as the opposite of his father. You know, he comes from this Episcopalian family where religious expression is very constrained. It's not public. You don't talk about your faith in public, and he becomes an Evangelical born-again Christian.

It really is a bit of an affront, I think, to his parents, although I think they've learned to deal with it. But I think there's a lot of paradox around his religion. At one level, I think it's genuine and sincere. I think he believes. On the other hand, there's a lot of political calculation there.

When you look closely at the stories he's told about his conversion experience, he tells this whole story about how Billy Graham, during a walk on the beach up in Maine, brought him to Jesus. It just can't have happened the way he said.

Billy Graham didn't remember it. There's no beach to walk on at the house in Maine (laughter) and he had a conversion experience which is quite well documented a couple of years earlier with an itinerate minister called Arthur Blessed who's a sort of fascinating, kooky character who's been dragging a cross around the world for thirty years.

So he's shaped a lot of things in this faith narrative to make it a politically appealing story to a certain segment of his base. At the same time, I don't it's cynical. I don't think he doesn't believe. I do think there's not a lot of theological content to his religion.

Tavis: Let me ask you a question now, Jacob, that I could have asked to start this conversation, but it occurs to me to ask it now, which is whether or not it's too soon to call - don't laugh. This isn't a joke (laughter) - whether or not it's too soon to call his administration a tragedy. I ask that against the backdrop of being fair to him, and I'm paraphrasing.

As you know, he suggests all the time that the history books aren't written yet and that what we're doing is difficult. It's a rough, tough slog, but he is confident that years down the road that he is gonna be regarded in the way that maybe Reagan is regarded now for having done the right thing. Is it too soon to call it a tragedy?

Weisberg: Well, what I'm trying to do, Tavis, in a way is start that historical conversation. I think his presidency is effectively over. He's a lame duck. Something could happen in the next year, but he has very little power to make anything happen now. And I think we can start to look back and I think the question that presents itself is, "What went wrong?" Because I think it's very hard to color this as anything other than a really substantial failure colored very much by the decision to invade Iraq.

You know, we can't predict how history is going to shake out and history is an argument and that argument is never gonna end. But it's very hard for me to see how the biggest decisions of his presidency can be vindicated because they were made on the basis of faulty premise, faulty evidence, faulty logic.

They could get better. Iraq could get better. Let's hope it does. It has gotten a little better. But I don't think there's any way historians are gonna come back and say, "He made the right decision. He saw something other people didn't see."

Tavis: Maybe you're right about that, Jacob. I wouldn't argue that at all. But to your point now, he has a year left in office. He is working overtime. He and Condoleezza Rice are working more aggressively now than ever before - some think it's cynical - on this Middle East peace process. Could that be a sort of Doug Flutie political George Bush Hail Mary if something were to happen in the last year where his legacy is concerned?

Weisberg: Yeah. I think that's why he's so focused on it. I think there is an attempt here to salvage a legacy from a very unpopular presidency. I think it very unlikely in the Middle East. I mean, you know, more power to him. I'm glad he's trying. I think he should have been trying like that for many more years.

But people I know who analyze that situation don't give him very good odds of doing what, you know, the last several presidents have tried to do over a longer time frame and with more intense personal understanding and involvement of the issues.

Tavis: This could be an impossible question. I was trying to get at this going through your book last night, trying to get a better understanding of it. Beyond Iraq, which almost sounds ridiculous to say, beyond Iraq, what went wrong to make this a tragedy or is it impossible to ask that question because Iraq is so front and center?

Weisberg: No, I think that's a good question and I don't think Iraq is the beginning and the end of the story. In some ways, it's the larger response to September 11, how he shaped the war on terrorism and the way he saw it and it's Iraq in the context of the war on terrorism and whether, as he sees it, this is the new Cold War that's gonna last for generations or whether the next president and presidents take a substantially different approach.

But I also think domestically, you know, I think Bush was a successful governor of Texas. He was a consensus figure. He was re-elected with almost fifty percent of the Latino vote, with a lot of African American support, a lot of Democrats liked him, and his big issue in Texas, if you remember, was trying to equalize racial disparities in education. He had partly a liberal profile and I think he came to Washington in some ways intending to repeat that successful model, to be a consensus builder, but it got way from him.

I think it got away from him in part because of the way Karl Rove and others pushed him to the right politically to create a strategy for re-election in 2004 that cultivated the conservative base instead of trying to enlarge the center. So I don't think Iraq was his only wrong decision or his only wrong turn.

Tavis: I don't mean this question to cast aspersion on the president, but I generally want to get your take on this. The flip side of his having been a successful two-term governor - and just because you win twice doesn't make you a great governor. I don't we'd argue that point - but the flip side to his being a two-term popular governor in Texas is that there are a whole lot of people who just think this guy was never equipped for this job to begin with. He wasn't intellectually equipped; he didn't have a world view.

I mean, he may have been a great governor of Texas. They do things big in Texas, but the world's a little bit larger than Texas. That he didn't have a world view, that he didn't have the intellectual rigor or interest, etc. You know the arguments better than I know them. Any sense that there is some truth to that, that part of this tragedy was born of the fact that he wasn't equipped for the job in the first place?

Weisberg: I agree with that very much, Tavis, and I think it's not just that he wasn't equipped intellectually, but also that these relationships in his life, this drive to compete with his brother, to outdo his father, I think were dangerous. But on the intellectual side, it's interesting. I don't think he's an unintelligent man, but I think he's profoundly incurious about the world, about foreign policy, about so many aspects that are essential to the job.

And I think if he'd come into office, you know, the way Barack Obama's been coming at foreign policy issues without a lot of experience, without a lot of background, but trying as hard as he can to get up to speed on the issues, to learn about them, to become absorbed in them, if he'd had that attitude, his intelligence per se wouldn't have been a big obstacle. But to not know and not care is an insurmountable problem.

Tavis: The book by Jacob Weisberg is called "The Bush Tragedy" and we have just really scratched the surface of what you will find in it. But, Jacob, it's an honor to have you on the program.

Weisberg: Thank you so much.

Tavis: Good to see you.