Author Ronald Kessler's A Matter Of Character: Inside The White House Of George W. Bush looks at Bush, the man, not Bush the "cartoon character" that everyone from commentators to comedians have turned him into.
NRO's Q&A with Kessler points out the continued contradictions behind the "comic book picture" that the left continues to paint regarding Bush.
National Review Online: So President Bush isn't dumb, you say?Ronald Kessler: Most of what the public knows of Bush is filtered through the liberal bias of the media. He wears cowboy boots, so he's a hick. He has unconventional ways of dealing with the twin threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, so he must not know what he's doing. He says exactly what he thinks, so he must be unsophisticated.
The caricatures are conflicting: Bush has a short attention span, yet from the day he took office he was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He is a puppet of Dick Cheney or Karl Rove, but he does not listen to anyone's advice. His decisions are made for him by warring factions within his administration, but he stubbornly clings to his own views. He graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, but is a dimwit.
What I found was that, contrary to the caricatures, Bush solicits differing views, then makes up his own mind.
NRO: And he doesn't have dyslexia, contrary to some disingenuous reporting?
Kessler: The claim that Bush has dyslexia was in a Vanity Fair article by Gail Sheehy, and she has since repeated that claim on TV. In fact, Nancy LaFevers, one of the two experts Sheehy quoted to support her conclusion, told me she told Sheehy that Bush was not dyslexic.
NRO: What's the most persistent and damaging myth about President Bush?
Kessler: That he is a Nazi because he deposed someone who killed 300,000 people. A large number of people actually believe that.
Kessler admits that he voted for Al Gore in 2000 due to a perception, based on the debates, of Bush as a "less informed" individual.
Kessler has changed that opinion as a result of his research for this book. He plans to vote for Bush in November.
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Article comments
1 - Warren E. Barrett
I have read books (supposedly by insiders who truly know the REAL G.W.B.)
and they diametrically oppose each other. How am I to judge who is telling the TRUTH??!!!