Wrong. What Podhoretz has produced is a Potemkin village, a diary constructed from other people’s memories to sugarcoat a screed. Podhoretz, son of the neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz, did in fact work for several months as a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, and in the Bush administration he spent four months as a special assistant to drug czar William Bennett. Then Podhoretz bailed out. He built his book about the remaining three and a half Bush years on interviews with the Bushies he left behind.
But the reader gets hardly a clue to this fact before the appendix. The book begins breathlessly with a “freeze frame,” depicting an unnamed White House staffer watching the victory parade after the gulf war: “Actually, you worship the man. Yes, ‘worship’ is the right word, ever since the 1988 campaign…” The “freeze frame” device keeps coming back, interlarding neocon civics lectures and unsourced anecdotes about the crises of the Bush staff. “You” neglect your family for your job, skirmish in White House politicking, write the toast to Prime Minister Miyazawa that Bush preempted by upchucking in Miyazawa’s lap. It becomes clear that “you” aren’t all the same person.
It’s all smoke and mirrors, veiling the crucial fact that Podhoretz wasn’t there. An anecdote about the morning senior staff meeting tells it all: “You don’t attend it, but you heard about it the way you hear about almost everything, it’s in the air.” This is a book of backstairs gossip and settling old scores in dozens of detailed accounts of events that Podhoretz (and his unnamed sources, in all likelihood) never witnessed.
Scores do get settled. John Sununu gets a predictable drubbing as a petty, overbearing tyrant. Richard Darman comes off as a brilliant bully, humiliating people with tirades of abuse. Lurking in the gossip is the screed: surprise! Bush’s presidency was hollow at the core. Podhoretz’s message is the Reaganite credo: that the true cause was betrayed by a pseudoconservative president of small talent and no real conviction. “In the final analysis,” he writes, “George Bush’s presidency was a kind of cosmic joke.”
In the final analysis, that might be true; but John Podhoretz has no more proof of it than the guy standing next to you at the bar.
