Books: Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

Bush Without Hysteria

by Matthew Hennessey

Peter Baker’s masterpiece of objectivity

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House,

 by Peter Baker (Doubleday, 816 pp.)

The Wizard of Id— Johnny Hart and Brant Parker’s syndicated comic about a quirky and oppressed medieval kingdom whose peasants declare, “The king is a fink!”—debuted in 1964, at a turning point in American political culture. The end of the New Frontier and the beginning of American escalation in Vietnam, 1964 was the year the sixties became the sixties—when the counterculture got going and the first signs appeared of a shift in political decorum that would make it not only acceptable, but cool, to find a soapbox, a Hanoi turret, or a lower Manhattan park, from which to yell, “The president is a fink!”

Anyone below retirement age will barely remember a time when it wasn’t socially acceptable to lambaste the president in this way. From 1964 to about 1998, if you voted for the other guy, then you generally scorned the White House occupant and didn’t mind saying so, just as you didn’t mind giving credit occasionally when it was due. Sometime between Watergate and Whitewater, however, things changed. We left the era of president as fink and entered the era of president as criminal. 

Our political culture careens from mortal charge to mortal charge: 

• Clinton lied under oath; 
• Bush stole the election and launched an illegal war; 
• Obama faked his birth certificate and governs by decree. 
• (All three, of course, shredded the Constitution.) 

Let’s not forget the counter charges. 

• Clinton’s critics were engaged in a vast right-wing conspiracy. 
• Bush’s foes were East Coast snobs. 
• Obama’s faultfinders are selfish “tea baggers” or racists. 

This trend toward slander is reflected in the oft-heard commandment that critics should “respect the office of the presidency,” even as they run down the current president’s reputation or impugn his integrity. Consider some best-selling titles about recent presidencies: Imposter, Fiasco, Fraud,Catastrophe.

How refreshing it is, then, to have a book about an American president that plays it down the middle. Especially since the conceit of Peter Baker’s Days of Fire—ostensibly a look at the George W. Bush administration through Bush’s relationship with his vice president, Dick Cheney—lends itself to the type of partisan hysteria that has become so common.

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