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Title: The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind ISBN: 0-7432-5545-3 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 13 January, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.22 (263 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Must read insight into the workings of this Administration
Comment: The most enigmatic part of this book is the title. While Mr. O'Neill is treated sympathetically by the author throughout, few would claim loyalty to be his strongest suit. Indeed, it is made amply clear that from the beginning that Paul O'Neill was determined to serve as Secretary of Treasury on his terms and on no other. Indeed, Mr O'Neill seems to have had some difficulty coming to terms with the fact that Secretary of the Treasury is not an elective post. Viewed in this light his subsequent antics including a habit of engaging in idiosyncratic policy dialog far removed from the bounds of his office and only peripherally related to his areas of expertise can be taken to paint a picture of every CEO's nightmare,that is the know-it-all has-been who views age and experience as a sort of corporate get-out-of-jail free card. Reading this book, O'Neill comes across again and again as fundamentally at odds with, even in opposition to, the goals of the Administration he has pledged to support. While Suskind does an excellent job of presenting O'Neill's position on many of the issues he dealt with during his two years in office, little space is given to describing the dichotomy of a man pledged to serve another but finding himself from day one in opposition to many if not most of the core values of the President. Indeed, this books weakest point is its characterization. By the end of the book, we know exactly where O'Neill stands on various issues but we do not really feel that we know the man or his motivation.
If the character of Paul O'Neill only comes through in outline, the characters of the other main protaganists in this book are downright ethereal. The President comes across not so much as intellectually limited as uninterested and disengaged whereas, by his own admission, O'Neill was almost entirely in the dark when it came to policy making and the motivation of men he had known for decades. As an essay in character and motivation, this book never even starts to get off of the ground.
On the other hand, if the book fails as an essay in character, it succeeds hands down as a factual diary of the workings of the Bush Administration. The picture we are presented with is of an administration which has junked the legacy of 50 years of diplomacy and international engagement in favor of a America-centric diplomacy geared solely to American domestic interests coupled with a wholesale junking of accepted pragmatic economic housekeeping in favor of a new conservative orthodoxy. This administration does not function as an implementer of carefully considered and crafted policy but as a politburo with a mission to fulfil America's conservative destiny.
Whether or not you are appalled by or attracted to this situation will presumably be determined by the degree to which you subscribe to the underlying orthodoxies. However, thoughtful persons of all persuasions will presumeably be horified at the lack of substantive thought and planning that has gone into many of the most aggressive actions of the Bush administration including the invasion of Iraq. This adventure was not, O'Neill points out the result of clear-sighted analysis of American interests but a knee-jerk, doctinaire response based on little more that gut feeling. One suspects that the next several years will be spent digging America out of holes of this President's making. For documenting the problem, O'Neill and Suskind deserve the thanks of all.
Rating: 5
Summary: Over Time, an Invisible Treasury Secretary
Comment: Whose loyalty to whom and/or what? What is the "price"? How was it determined and by whom? The subtitle evokes another question: While obtaining his "education" during his 23 months as Secretary of the Treasury in the current Bush administration, what did Paul O'Neill learn? After research which involved 19,000 documents and hundreds of interviews, Suskind responds to these and other questions throughout the 349 pages which comprise his book. Of course, O'Neill is the focal point but much (most?) of the controversy about this book is a result of Suskind's portrayal of President Bush, in large measure based on O'Neill's comments about him. For example, O'Neill's most widely quoted observation that, during various meetings, President Bush was "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." Here's another: "I wondered from the first, if the President didn't know the questions to ask or if he did know and just not want to know the answers? Or did his strategy somehow involve never showing what he thought? But you can ask questions, gather information and not necessarily show your hand. It was strange."
To me, stranger yet is what the book suggests about Vice President Cheney, a close personal friend of O'Neill's for several decades who was primarily responsible for his appointment as Secretary of the Treasury. About two years later, Cheney informed him that the President "has decided to make some changes in the economic team. And you're part of the change." When Cheney then asked O'Neill to claim that it was his decision to leave public service, he refused. "I'm too old to be telling lies now." If the President Bush plays his cards close to the vest, the Vice President seems to keep his locked up in an undisclosed location. In decades to come, historians may well judge Richard Cheney to be his nation's most enigmatic as well as most influential Vice President. "We thought we knew Dick," O'Neill observes. "But did we?" Does anyone?
In this book, Suskind seems to take O'Neill at his word, that what O'Neill expressed to him is what he sincerely believes is true when commenting on various people and his relationships with them. Others are far better qualified than I to separate fact from opinion, to separate O'Neill's perceptions from the realities of his tenure. Obviously, O'Neill deeply resents what he views as mistreatment of him while Secretary of the Treasury; he also seems to lament even more his inability to influence the process by which issues were discussed and by which policies were formulated in the Bush administration. He characterizes cabinet-level debates as "incestuous amplification," driven more by self-serving expediencies than by principles.
Frankly, I do not know how much to believe of O'Neill's account even as I welcome it as another source of information, commentary, and evaluation of the current Bush administration as our nation proceeds into an uncertain, indeed perilous future.
Rating: 5
Summary: After 264+ reviews, anything else left to say?
Comment: I finished reading Mr. Suskind's book after Dr. Rice testified before the September 11th Commission, and reading Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies." Both Mr. Clarke and Mr. O'Neill (through Mr. Suskind) paint a similar portrait of the President: an unengaged ideologue with a set agenda, who defers much of the running of the government to a closed circle. If that very idea upsets you, and makes you want to holler "Treason" or "Go back to makin' be'er cans," or "You libbers make me sick," then do not read this book.
Paul O'Neill is not a liberal. He is a long-time Republican advisor, counselor, trouble shooter, and cabinet member. He is also close friends with Allen Greenspan--and someone who knew in his heart he was doomed in George W. Bush's Washington.
When the new president arrived on the scene, all levels of government were falling all over themselves about tax cuts. The President's initial proposal rapidly became the "floor," according to the House Republicans. Amidst numerous justifications and expiations on tax cuts, there was Mr. O'Neill testifying that in ten years at Alcoa, he never based a decision on reseach & development because of the tax consequences--and anyone who did was a "fool." See Mr. O'Neill become a lone voice, crying in the wildness, trying to use the budget surplus to address structural problems in medicare & social security--only to be told that President Reagan "proved" that large deficeits "don't matter." See Mr. O'Neill scratching his head on the fact that the three presidents who ran up the largest deficeits are the "conservatives" Mr. Reagan, Mr. George H.W. Bush, and Mr. George W. Bush--while the "liberal" Mr. Bill Clinton ran a surplus.
Then there is Mr. O'Neill in a cabinet meeting, being told that the new administration was not going to address Israeli-Palestinian relations, because that situation was hopeless--they'd have to work it out themselves. Meanwhile, the Administration needed to step up focus on the *real* threat to stability in the region: Iraq. Iraq? Iraq hadn't threatened anyone's stability since the Gulf War--but if there was anything upsetting the apple cart in the arab world, it was the Mr. Sharon and the on-going problems with the Palestine Authority.
And so on. And so on.
What was the "price" of loyalty for Mr. O'Neill? That depends on who--or what--Mr. O'Neill was going to be loyal to. Fortunately for the nation, Mr. O'Neill chose to be loyal to his principles and to the truth--which meant there was no room for Mr. O'Neill as Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Suskind, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has put together an interesting, well-documented book illustrating just what was involved in Mr. O'Neill's "education"--much of which is far from pretty.
Anyone with at least half an open mind should read this book.
One final note--Shortly after this book was published, the White House immediately launched investigation(s), all seeking to prove that Mr. O'Neill violated National Secrecy, or Government Secrecy, or showed & told documents he should not have--all within weeks of "someone" leaking to Mr. Robert Novak that Ms. Valerie Plame was a secret CIA agent. Ms. Palme happened to be married to Mr. Joseph C. Wilson, who just happened to be the diplomat who pointed out that Mr. Bush's assertion in his State of the Union address regarding Iraq purchasing uranium yellowcake from Niger was (to put it mildly) "not true." Since those events came to rise, the White House has quietly announced that Mr. O'Neill violated no rule, statute, nor security clearance in preparing this book with Mr. Suskind. None. As for the Justice Department's investigation of the leak that destroyed Ms. Palme's career--We're still waiting on that one.
It looks like Mr. O'Neil is not the only one receiving an education.....
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Title: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke ISBN: 0743260244 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 22 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips ISBN: 0670032646 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken ISBN: 0525947647 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 29 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Bushwhacked : Life in George W. Bush's America by Lou Dubose, Molly Ivins ISBN: 0375507523 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman ISBN: 0393058506 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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