Dimensions: 9.24'' x 7.02'' 384 pages Random House Publication Date: January 2003 Hardcover ISBN: 0375509038

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January 2003
The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
By David Frum

David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, offers a first-hand account of the strengths and weaknesses of the president and shows how in the wake of September 11, Bush changed course from what had been a mediocre presidency and used his unique skills to become one of the most successful, decisive, and popular leaders of our time.

AEI resident fellow David Frum, a columnist for National Review and the National Post, is also the author of How We Got Here (2000), What's Right (1996), and Dead Right (1994). 

The Right Man is a first-person eyewitness account of the first eighteen months of the Bush administration. It is more than an account of legislative battles and policy achievements: It attempts to describe the sight, sound, and feeling of a White House at war. Above all, it is a study of the personality and character of America's forty-third president, George W. Bush.

Initial Challenges

President Bush entered office under daunting circumstances after a hard-fought election and a bitter recount. He faced a divided Congress and a country still polarized by the Clinton scandals and impeachment.

Bush's first challenge was to establish his own legitimacy. He did this by creating a public image, and staffing a White House, as unlike that of his predecessor as possible. It was formal, methodical, harmonious, and scandal-free. Unlike almost all of his predecessors, Bush compelled his top aides to work together without factionalism and without leaking.

The second challenge Bush confronted was the economy, which was slumping into recession when he came into office. Bush offered a program of tax relief as a remedy for the recession, and fought for his program with two diverging but related political strategies--one of broad themes and big messages directed by Karen Hughes and one of tight legislative maneuvering run by Karl Rove. These strategies worked, but at a price. The tax victory exhausted the administration's political resources, and set in motion the events that led to the Republican loss of the Senate--and the Bush administration's loss of political momentum.

In May and June 2002, the president's education and faith-based bills stalled, and his energy proposals provoked a strong political counter-reaction. As energy prices rose across the nation and in California, his poll ratings dropped from the 60 percent of his first three months in office back to the 50 percent of November 2000. White House aides began to shift the administration leftward to try to repair the damage--and the result was a growing sense of drift and uncertainty.

This was the mood on the eve of September 11.

An Effective Presidency

9/11 transformed a drifting presidency into a resolute and effective one. President Bush immediately made two critical decisions: first, that the attack would be treated as an act of war, not a crime; second, that America's enemies in this war would be defined not narrowly as the authors of the September 11 attack, but as all terrorist groups of global reach and the states that sponsored them.

These were decisions of very large consequences. They put the United States on the road to confronting not merely al Qaeda, but also Iraq, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah--and then beyond them to the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia. Such a confrontation would represent a breach with three decades of American foreign policy--policy that had made the security of Persian Gulf oil supplies and the stability of the states above the oil America's highest priority in the region.

Understandably, so bold a new departure provoked considerable resistance inside the U.S. government. And much of the drama of the next year is the story of George Bush's fight to force the government to adapt its old ways to new realities, culminating in the axis of evil speech and then his June 2002 speech on Palestinian democracy. The United States today has come to a moment of decision as crucial as the first days of the cold war in 1946 and 1947, and it has fallen to the Bush administration to design a new grand strategy for a new time.

The Right Man describes the personal qualities that enabled Bush to play his decisive role. It is a candid account of his strengths and weaknesses--and those of his top staff.

Bush is in many ways not a natural politician. He lacks many of the political leader's familiar, useful arts: He will not tell small soothing lies. He will not say, "I'm glad to see you," if he isn't glad to see you. He is, however, a very successful organizer, and he built the first effectively functioning White House staff that Washington has seen in many years.

He is not a leader much interested in or always well versed in the details of public policy. But he has imagination, tenacity, and courage. But more important even than his boldness is his moderation. After September 11, Americans were enraged and ready to do anything, go anywhere. It would have been easy for an unsteady leader to lose control of public opinion and release an overreaction that might later have led Americans to feel shame. Instead, Bush pursued a moderate and steady course on civil liberties and demanded an Afghan war plan that protected the lives of innocents.

The trauma of September 11 forced the United States to confront the problems and dysfunction of the Arab-Muslim world. George Bush found himself presiding over a debate very like the one the North engaged in during the Civil War. Was it the nation's goal to restore the old order in the Middle East as quickly as possible, just as Northern conservatives in the 1860s wanted to restore "the Union as it was" without upending the institutions of the South? Or should the United States pursue total victory--even at the price of destroying an old order from which it had long profited?

Secretary of State Colin Powell championed one point of view; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the other. But it ultimately fell to President Bush to decide. Often he was tempted to take the seemingly less risky course of adhering to the old ways. And yet in the end, he almost always made the choice to seek the bigger victory--despite the risk.

In the time since September 11, conservatives have often worried about the ideology of the Bush presidency. The Right Man shows a George W. Bush largely unconcerned about ideology--he disdained supply-side arguments for his tax cut, preferring to rely instead on a rough-and-ready businessman's Keynesianism. It depicts a Republican coalition in which religious and social conservatives are becoming more important. It defends George W. Bush from the fears that many conservatives feel about the caution of his war timetable and gives a glimpse of the future he envisions for the Republican Party: business-oriented but not laissez-faire, avowedly multiracial, a party that has made its peace both with the market revolution of the 1980s and the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.

 This summary is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.