The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

This book has as much credibility as the rhetoric of George W. Bush.
After all, author David Frum used to be one of Bush’s speech writers.
Anyone who believes that Bush really won the presidential election of
2000, that record deficits are good for the U.S. economy, and that U.S.
soldiers and marines can impose Western-style democracy on Iraq from the
barrel of a gun should find this book persuasive. Those who think it a
small matter that Bush was wrong when he said that there was a link
between Saddam Hussein and the events of September 11, that Saddam was
hiding an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or that Iraqis would
greet invading U.S. forces as liberators may agree with the author.
Those who share Bush’s belief that he can solve any problem—from
crime in Texas to conflicts in the Middle East—simply by killing
enough bad guys should be ecstatic. Those who regard the occupation of
Iraq as a diversion from the war against terror; those who approve of
the Kyoto Accord, the International Criminal Court, and the Land Mines
Treaty; and those who respect the Geneva Convention on the treatment of
POWs will have their doubts. Those who fear that Bush’s repudiation of
President Nixon’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and his policies in
Iraq and Palestine endanger the world through a new arms race and a
clash between the Western and Islamic worlds will find this book
disgusting.

There are some howlers. Unaware that in 2004 Vice President Cheney
would shout an obscenity at Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, Frum devotes
the second chapter to a description of the high level of personal
morality and clean language that supposedly prevails at the Bush White
House. He depicts Bush as a non-partisan conciliator, and Senator James
Jeffords of Vermont—the liberal Republican who found the Bush
administration too right-wing for his tastes—in the most unfavourable
terms. He compares the oratory of George W. Bush to that of John F.
Kennedy. He rejects any suggestion that the United States did anything
unreasonable to provoke the September 11 terrorists, but argues that
President Bush had good reason not to thank Canadians for accepting 224
U.S.-bound aircraft and their 33,000 passengers and crew. Prime Minister
Chrétien’s “boorishness and unco-operativeness” had
“offended” the White House. Canada’s “lax refugee laws ... had
made Canada a haven for Islamic terrorists.” Although Canada would
send soldiers to Afghanistan, “Canada had not matched Britain’s and
Australia’s offer of military assistance.”

The book has two merits. It is interesting, and it does provide an
insight into the thinking of a White House insider.