The Book on Barack

„If the United States is one big book club, and sometimes it feels that way, then the White House must have been hoping that this would be the week when everyone was talking about The Rogue, Joe McGinniss’s much ballyhooed takedown of his erstwhile Alaska neighbor Sarah Palin, loaded with interesting-if-true (interesting even if untrue, actually) anecdotes about the former Governor’s mayoral, marital, maternal, eschatological, and recreational activities. The West Wing’s preferred alternate selection, no doubt, would have been Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, drawn from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,’s long-sealed 1964 oral-history interviews with the recently widowed First Lady and featuring her tart appraisals of the great and the good, delivered in her breathy voice on the accompanying CDs.

No such luck. The book of the week, maybe the book of the month, is Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President. Suskind has a knack for persuading people in high places to talk frankly to him, on the record as well as off. His books make news. “The Price of Loyalty” (2004), for example, gave us the Dick Cheney quote that encapsulates a root cause of many later woes: Reagan proved deficits don’t matter, the Vice-President lectured Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury (and Suskind’s main source), adding, »This«—a huge, unfunded tax cut for the rich—»is our due.« In The One Percent Doctrine” (2006), Suskind related what he says Bush told the briefer who handed him the C.I.A.’s Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US memo a month before 9/11: »All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.« Bush’s successor, who has launched no disastrous wars and looted no healthy budgets, might have expected gentler treatment.”