The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future [Hardcover]

Craig Unger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2007

The presidency of George W. Bush has led to the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the United States -- the bloody, unwinnable war in Iraq. How did this happen? Bush's fateful decision was rooted in events that began decades ago, and until now this story has never been fully told.



From Craig Unger, the author of the bestseller House of Bush, House of Saud, comes a comprehensive, deeply sourced, and chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right, and how they assaulted the most vital safeguards of America's constitutional democracy while pushing the country into the catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East that is getting worse day by day.



Among the powerful revelations in this book:



Why George W. Bush ignored the sage advice of his father, George H.W. Bush, and took America into war.


How Bush was convinced he was doing God's will.


How Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated George W. Bush, disabled his enemies within the administration, and relentlessly pressed for an attack on Iraq.
Which veteran government official, with the assent of the president's father, protested passionately that the Bush administration was making a catastrophic mistake -- and was ignored.


How information from forged documents that had already been discredited fourteen times by various intelligence agencies found its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in which he made the case for war with Iraq.


How Cheney and the neocons assembled a shadow national security apparatus and created a disinformation pipeline to mislead America and start the war.


A seasoned, award-winning investigative reporter connected to many back-channel political and intelligence sources, Craig Unger knows how to get the big story -- and this one is his most explosive yet. Through scores of interviews with figures in the Christian Right, the neoconservative movement, the Bush administration, and sources close to the Bush family, as well as intelligence agents in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Israel, Unger shows how the Bush administration's certainty that it could bend history to its will has carried America into the disastrous war in Iraq, dooming Bush's presidency to failure and costing America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Far from ensuring our security, the Iraq War will be seen as a great strategic pivot point in history that could ignite wider war in the Middle East, particularly in Iran.




Provocative, timely, and disturbing, The Fall of the House of Bush stands as the most comprehensive and dramatic account of how and why George W. Bush took America to war in Iraq.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Unger's follow up to House of Bush, House of Saud tracks George W. Bush's ascent to power, helped by Christian fundamentalists and neoconservative policymakers who themselves rise to unprecedented influence in Washington after years in the political wilderness. Bush embraces both groups with the fervor of a new convert-and with, Unger claims, devastating results on America's foreign policy. This is an exhaustively chronicled but by now familiar story of the Bush presidency, and Unger revels in the details, especially the Byzantine backstabbing and emasculation of Colin Powell and Condelezza Rice by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the tensions between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.'s inner circles. In Unger's narrative, the Iraq War emerges as a fait accompli in search of an appropriate trigger, provided by September 11 and the alleged weapons of mass destruction. The historical nuggets surrounding the rise of the neocons and the Christian right are intriguing, and Unger includes some eyebrow raising revelations, but overall he leaves readers who have been awake for the past seven years with that "it's déjà vu all over again" feeling.
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About the Author

Craig Unger was deputy editor of the New York Observer and editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. He has written about George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for the New Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1 edition (November 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074328075X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743280754
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #802,087 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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208 of 212 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The history behind Bush, the neocons, and the "religious" right, November 12, 2007

By 

Mark Shanks (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future (Hardcover)

Probably the more appropriate photos for the dust jacket would have been those that appear facing page 215: George H.W. Bush breaking down into sobs while discussing his son. Ostensibly meaning son Jeb, although no one watching could help believe his anguish was with son Dubya.

How did George W. turn out so differently from his father? How did he go from drunken, failure-prone frat boy to a "born again" self-styled "compassionate conservative" and twice-elected President of the United States? Author Unger lays out his case, starting with a brief history of American-style evangelicism, especially the "Rapture"-based theology and fundamentalism, and follows with a chapter on the origins and philosophy of the neoconservative movement. The two seemingly disparate groups provided the ideological underpinings of the George W. Bush administration, as well as the reliance on purity of faith over rational and objective analysis.

Much of the background material has been long available, but there are some curious new revelations. In spite of what Bush (or his ghost-writer) wrote in "A Charge to Keep", Bush was "born again" not under the guidance of Billy Graham, but by a far sketchier character named Arthur Blessitt. (Blessitt once ran a "Jesus coffeehouse" on the Sunset Strip, until he was evicted in 1969.) When Bush senior came in behind Pat Robertson in the 1988 Iowa caucuses, he had Dubya act as his liason to the growing grass-roots evangelical vote. In that role, he took delight in denying "access" to his father and got his first taste of power. Although his parents had long counted on brother Jeb to be the political heir, Dubya had other plans.

This isn't a biography, and certainly isn't a military history - only 55 pages from the start of the war in Iraq to the last page. It IS very well researched, with 49 pages of footnotes and a 9-page bibliography. I can't say how much overlap there is with Draper's book "Dead Certain", the book it is most likely to be compared with. Unger does go into detail on the Bush-Cheney relationship that Draper seems to have skimmed past. (Unger includes "Dead Certain" in the footnotes and bibliography.)

With so many books out on the Bush presidency and the Iraq war, what does this contribute? Most of all, it traces the alliances of the forces behind the scenes, and provides new insight into the motivations of the key players. It really is fairly objective in its assessments, but I was surprised (and disappointed) in the petty visciousness displayed by both Bush and Cheney towards subordinates and critics in example after example. (One of the better lines comes from Bob Strauss, who said, "Bush senior finds it impossible to strut, and Bush junior finds it impossible not to.") It also makes it easier to understand how the events so well documented in "Fiasco" and "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" came about. It is very disconcerting to see that George W. was holding secret, "no press allowed" meetings with assorted Christian Zionist/ evangelical groups before and during his 2000 campaign. The catch-phrase "compassionate conservatism" takes on an entirely different meaning when it is shown to be part of the agenda to smash down the church-state barrier. There's some pretty interesting background on a particularly skeezy schlub (Michael Ledeen) whose fingerprints seem to be all over the infamous Italian "Niger yellowcake" forgery. (This character also asserts that "my mother was the model for (Disney's) Snow White".) Unger makes it abundantly clear why the current Republican "base" will never, ever allow Israel to establish anything like a Palestinian state, at least not on land on the West Bank. (That would effectively block their end-time Rapture fantasies.)

I'd recommend the book to those who haven't followed the rise of the evangelical (and most especially the Christian Zionist and "Dominionist") voting bloc, the move of the neoconservatives (or "the crazies", as Bush senior referred to them) from the margins to hands on the levers of power, or the direction they may take next. This administration has larded every conceivable federal agency with these kinds of people, and it will take many years to repair their damage.

86 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible book., November 11, 2007

By 

Jill Meyer (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future (Hardcover)

Craig Unger masterfully tells the story of how two sets of odd "bedfellows" came together in the late 1990's, creating an alliance to elect George W Bush president and begin this country's downfall.

This is one of the best books I've read on Bush and Iraq, and the first one that goes into depth about the "players" who influenced aging frat boy Bush into taking our once-great country into the debacle called the "Iraq War".

My main thought, while reading the book, is that the neo-cons and the evangelists who united in their joint desire to remake the Middle-East must have given very little thought to how the war was going to actually "work", since the results, from the very first day after "mission" was declared "accomplished" have been one scene of horror after another.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Now, go buy it and read it.

83 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The evidence was there, November 9, 2007

By 

Rich Merritt (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future (Hardcover)

In November 2000, 50,456,002 voters cast ballots for George W. Bush. No doubt many of these good Americans now regret their vote and some have complained that they feel duped, or that they didn't know the real man. What this book shows is that all the evidence anyone needed to vote AGAINST George W. Bush was available long before that fateful election night seven years ago.

W's lack of excellence as a student was no secret; neither was his drinking, never mind the persistent rumors of illegal drug use. The late Molly Ivins provided us with all we needed to know about W's failed business ventures in Texas. He was a bad student, a bad businessman, and as evidenced by the "mano a mano" moment with his father when W was well into his twenties, a bad son. Now he's been a bad president and has turned a once a great nation into the scourge of the world. Unger provides a great play-by-play of how this happened and shows that no one can honestly say all the warning signs weren't there.

What Unger reveals that I didn't know before is that even Bush's conversion account with Billy Graham is fabricated. Years ago I would've been duped by Bush also, as I describe in my memoir,Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star, because evangelical and fundamentalist 'blind faith' leads people to trust other fundamentalists unconditionally. But when the man even lies about his born again experience, that's evidence of a deep-rooted psychological issue, one that will cost the USA dearly for at least a generation.