dannno
01-09-2009, 01:17 PM
http://independent.com/news/2009/jan/08/hey-bush-read/
Hey Bush, Read This
Thursday, January 8, 2009
By Barney Brantingham
BUSH THE READER? I love to read and never dreamed that George W. Bush would whip me in that department. Even his adviser and pal Karl Rove is aware of the cruel rap that the president “would rather burn a book than read one.”
But the age of miracles isn’t past because Rove claims Bush read 95 books in 2006, many of them in the heavy-duty category. That, folks, is nearly eight a month, including biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Lyndon Johnson, and Genghis Khan.
I know college graduates who don’t even know who half these people are, much less want to read about them when the Lakers are on TV. The question is what, if anything, has Bush, who Rove calls “the leader of the free world,” learned from all this eyestrain? Rove claims the president reads out of intellectual curiosity, but in the three years of the Rove-Bush reading contest 2006-’08 (Rove won all three years), Bush apparently has not been curious enough about how critics view his Iraq War strategy to pick up a book by one of them.
Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, says Bush’s book list supports the view that the president is “a captive of fixed ideas,” seeking vindication on every page, and “intellectually insulated.”
What caught my eye is Rove’s claim in the Wall Street Journal that among the books Bush read in 2008 is the late David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, a masterful 719-page account of another highly controversial and divisive war, the Korean conflict.
It happens that I just finished the book, a demanding task that’s taken me weeks (I read several books at a time), a few pages at bedtime before my eyes complain and I drift off to sleep, my brain spinning with not only the horrors of that brutal misadventure, but the series of grave miscalculations on the part of the U.S., North Korea, China, and Russia that led to a geographical status quo but the death of 54,246 Americans.
It’s hard to imagine Bush sticking with the book to the end, but if so, he must have found it almost impossible not to compare the Korean War with the president’s own horrendous miscalculations and erroneous assumptions in invading Iraq. In Korea in 1950, we were fighting Communism; to try to understand Bush’s real reasons for going into Iraq, I guess we’ll have to wait for his memoirs.
As much as I’m willing to concede that George Bush actually reads books apart from private-eye novels, it is hard for me to visualize him slogging through such a painful recitation of the near-criminally botched leadership by the U.S. military commander in Asia, General Douglas MacArthur, who apparently lusted for all-out war with China in those Cold War days of the 1950s, using nuclear weapons if necessary.
Korea was split north and south after World War II. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung had been begging his communist mates Mao Zedong of China and Russia’s Joseph Stalin for permission and military support to invade South Korea. They finally okayed the move, reluctantly accepting Kim’s assurance that the U.S. wouldn’t get involved. A tragic mistake.
President Harry Truman, under fire from the Democrats for supposedly “losing China” to Mao’s communists, saw it not as unification but an invasion of a “free” nation, part of Communism’s world-wide aggression. MacArthur’s miscalculations involved ignoring clear advance signs of North Korea’s impending invasion, his belief that unprepared U.S. troops could easily handle the invading army, and that Chinese troops wouldn’t later come swooping down. MacArthur—arrogant, incompetent, and out of control—was finally fired by Truman after the president could no longer tolerate the general’s flagrant insubordination.
In 2008, Bush’s reading tally dwindled to 40, down from 95 in 2006 and 51 in 2007, according to Rove. His 2008 book bag however, was heavy into subject A: war. Readings included not only Halberstam’s Korean tome, but Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears’s Gettysburg, the memoirs of Civil War general then U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, and James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.
I truly envy Bush for having read these books and wonder how he found the time to do more than skim them. It may surprise those who find Bush a know-nothing to learn from Rove: “In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader. He reads instead of watching TV. He reads on Air Force One and to relax and because he’s curious.”
History will surely not be kind to President Bush. And when it writes against his name, I hope that for once he reads every painful word.
Hey Bush, Read This
Thursday, January 8, 2009
By Barney Brantingham
BUSH THE READER? I love to read and never dreamed that George W. Bush would whip me in that department. Even his adviser and pal Karl Rove is aware of the cruel rap that the president “would rather burn a book than read one.”
But the age of miracles isn’t past because Rove claims Bush read 95 books in 2006, many of them in the heavy-duty category. That, folks, is nearly eight a month, including biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Lyndon Johnson, and Genghis Khan.
I know college graduates who don’t even know who half these people are, much less want to read about them when the Lakers are on TV. The question is what, if anything, has Bush, who Rove calls “the leader of the free world,” learned from all this eyestrain? Rove claims the president reads out of intellectual curiosity, but in the three years of the Rove-Bush reading contest 2006-’08 (Rove won all three years), Bush apparently has not been curious enough about how critics view his Iraq War strategy to pick up a book by one of them.
Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, says Bush’s book list supports the view that the president is “a captive of fixed ideas,” seeking vindication on every page, and “intellectually insulated.”
What caught my eye is Rove’s claim in the Wall Street Journal that among the books Bush read in 2008 is the late David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, a masterful 719-page account of another highly controversial and divisive war, the Korean conflict.
It happens that I just finished the book, a demanding task that’s taken me weeks (I read several books at a time), a few pages at bedtime before my eyes complain and I drift off to sleep, my brain spinning with not only the horrors of that brutal misadventure, but the series of grave miscalculations on the part of the U.S., North Korea, China, and Russia that led to a geographical status quo but the death of 54,246 Americans.
It’s hard to imagine Bush sticking with the book to the end, but if so, he must have found it almost impossible not to compare the Korean War with the president’s own horrendous miscalculations and erroneous assumptions in invading Iraq. In Korea in 1950, we were fighting Communism; to try to understand Bush’s real reasons for going into Iraq, I guess we’ll have to wait for his memoirs.
As much as I’m willing to concede that George Bush actually reads books apart from private-eye novels, it is hard for me to visualize him slogging through such a painful recitation of the near-criminally botched leadership by the U.S. military commander in Asia, General Douglas MacArthur, who apparently lusted for all-out war with China in those Cold War days of the 1950s, using nuclear weapons if necessary.
Korea was split north and south after World War II. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung had been begging his communist mates Mao Zedong of China and Russia’s Joseph Stalin for permission and military support to invade South Korea. They finally okayed the move, reluctantly accepting Kim’s assurance that the U.S. wouldn’t get involved. A tragic mistake.
President Harry Truman, under fire from the Democrats for supposedly “losing China” to Mao’s communists, saw it not as unification but an invasion of a “free” nation, part of Communism’s world-wide aggression. MacArthur’s miscalculations involved ignoring clear advance signs of North Korea’s impending invasion, his belief that unprepared U.S. troops could easily handle the invading army, and that Chinese troops wouldn’t later come swooping down. MacArthur—arrogant, incompetent, and out of control—was finally fired by Truman after the president could no longer tolerate the general’s flagrant insubordination.
In 2008, Bush’s reading tally dwindled to 40, down from 95 in 2006 and 51 in 2007, according to Rove. His 2008 book bag however, was heavy into subject A: war. Readings included not only Halberstam’s Korean tome, but Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears’s Gettysburg, the memoirs of Civil War general then U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, and James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.
I truly envy Bush for having read these books and wonder how he found the time to do more than skim them. It may surprise those who find Bush a know-nothing to learn from Rove: “In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader. He reads instead of watching TV. He reads on Air Force One and to relax and because he’s curious.”
History will surely not be kind to President Bush. And when it writes against his name, I hope that for once he reads every painful word.