Customer Reviews

Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President

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If you want to find out more about public officials, start with the books they don't want you to read. Fortunate Son, James Hatfield's swan song, amasses the singlemost informative and chilling overview of Bush the Younger, a man of wealth, privilege, and arrogance nearing Shakespearean proportions. In the wake of its destruction by its original publisher, subsequent revival by Soft Skull Press, as well as the tragic suicide of its author, this book has undergone several revisions. This third revision, featuring a new forward by Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller, is as outstanding as they come, the antithesis to all of the Neoconservative-sanctioned Bush books flooding the market. Approached as a cautionary tale, Fortunate Son's enormous scope is as insightful as it is well-written. An amazing work by an author whose brilliance resonates through every chapter.

As with any book, like Al Franken's, "Lies....", any attempt to prevent it from being published, makes people want to know why, and that is why I read this book. It is well researched, there are pages and pages of sources to back up his statements. He had tried numerous times to talk to Bush about the book, but was ignored and then he and his family were threatened, they even knew the baby's name, if he published the book. Now that really got my interest. When I started to read the book I was puzzled by their actions. He didn't sound biased, in fact, as you read about Bush in his childhood you got the feeling he kind a liked him. Bush was a little wild growing up, drank a lot and chased women, which a good portion of young men do at that time in their lives. There's even a few stories, if he had wanted to, he could have used malice, but he didn't, in fact, I ended up grinning at a couple of his antics. He was writing a biography and tried to write it as accurate and truthful as he knew how. He told about Bush's drinking problems, how losing his little sister hurt him, about him accepting Jesus and his turning to sobriety and his business deals, etc. As Bush matured, we get a look at a different person, one who doesn't act so christian. The man he has turned into is one that is downright scary for the people of our country. Through the name and position of his father, we find that young Bush is rescued and backed financially by moneyed people. People with money who expected to be rewarded for their generosity and that is repeated over and over. This book clearly shows us an accurate picture of the man in the White House. If there are things in this book that he and his party don't like (and there are many things), it is not the fault of the author, for he just reported the facts, Bush did the deeds. We all, sometime or another, have to reap what we sow. I would recommend that everyone should read this book before the next election so that you will know who this man truly is before deciding your vote.

This is one of those books you will love if you don't like the Bush family and their politics. The prose is engaging; The plot turns razor sharp corners at high speed; The revelations are overwhelming.

The questions I asked myself after reading the book are:

Why should I care if the author had a checkered backround?
How many of the facts are true? The ones I could check are.
How did the Bush family manage to suppress the stories in the book?
Why have other politicians been vilified publicly for fewer and less serious infractions?

This is a book as revealing about the political system as it is about the Bush family. By the way, "W" does seem to be a sympathetic if somewhat flawed person in this book which makes one ask why all the hypocracy in trying to suppress it?

I put off reading this book for a long time, thanks to the questions we all had about Hatfield's integrity and the credibility of his charges against the Accidental President. This newly updated and better-annotated edition put these concerns to rest, and although it's not the best Bush biography I've read thus far, it deserves far more respect than it's received from the mainstream media. For a book which Bush's supporters went to great lengths to prevent from ever being published, Hatfield shows a surprising lack of antagonism toward his subject for the most part. Molly Ivins' "Shrub," Mark Crispin Miller's "The Bush Dyslexicon" and Paul Begala's "Is Our Children Learning?" are all far more openly partisan (and better written), but Hatfield does provide information not available elsewhere about the youthful indiscretion that Bush and his allies have otherwise done a superb job of keeping buried.

Using straightforward accounts from the public record and those who know him, Hatfield illustrates such issues as Bush's obliviousness to racial segregation in his hometown, his indifference to his studies at Andover and Yale, his alcoholism, his spotty record in the Air National Guard, his questionable business dealings, and his performance as governor. Bush's actions and words speak for themselves throughout the book, and Hatfield shows little inclination to analyze them to death or to put an actively anti-Bush spin on them. In fact, he occasionally sounds pro-Bush, noting, for example, that he got off to a respectable start in the oil business after graduating from Harvard Business School. Some of the less flattering accounts, such as that of his "service" in the Air National Guard, have a necessarily vague and incomplete feel to them, mainly because there simply isn't a lot of reliable information available about that period of Bush's life. Hatfield is, however, able to provide a number of accounts of cocaine use and womanizing that stand in sharp contrast to the family-values image Bush's handlers have managed to convey to the public. If Hatfield's research failed to answer many questions about the extended adolescence Bush himself has always refused to discuss, he did succeed brilliantly in raising many questions that deserve to be addressed but haven't been thus far.

The book's most famous accusation - that Bush was arrested for cocaine posession in 1972 and his father got the charges dropped - is more solidly supported than I'd been led to believe. Although Hatfield did fail to produce a source who was willing to confirm the story on the record, he names a number of sources who probably know the answer but - like Bush himself - refuse to confirm or deny it. Additionally, he provides three anonymous sources, not a lone Deep Throat as has been widely reported. The afterword does have a cloak-and-dagger feel to it all the same, and there are typographical and grammatical errors sprinkled throughout the narrative which have helped to make the book easy for Bush supporters to vilify.

But for all that, most of what Hatfield reports is well-annotated (in contrast to the original printing) and presented in a non-sensationalistic style. If Hatfield was not the ideal messenger, he at least provided us with an important collection of information that other journalists chose to gloss over or didn't have access to. As Mark Crispin Miller points out in his introduction, the Bush campaign's reaction to the book was just as telling in one sense as the book itself is. If it's inaccurate, why suppress it?

Celebrate your right to know. Whatever your politics, read the book and decide for yourself whether or not it's worth believing.

This is the book that (in its last chapter) documents with excruciating detail Dubya's arrest for cocaine possession and subsequent community service punishment...and how he got the records destroyed as governor by taking the unprecedent action of issuing a new driver's license to himself and essentially erasing himself as a person in Texas prior to that time. Devastating and brilliant!

After J.H. Hatfield's book on George W. Bush and family had reached The New York Times bestseller list before its initial run, publisher St. Martin's Press announced that it was withdrawing publication. George Bush I was seen on national television and snarling that the book was "garbage." That is what happens when 1) individuals have more clout than they deserve, and 2) they are unable to refute the message of the author, and so they attack the messenger, an old trick, this time exercised by the candidate who gave us a campaign predicated on Willie Horton and the mandatory pledge of allegiance.

The book was fortunately brought out by a smaller company with the integrity to let the message be sent to those who wish to read it. What inflamed the Bushes was that Hatfield dared to write the unthinkable, posing the issue that Bush II had been convicted of drug possession and that an unexplained period of community service in a Houston ghetto at a time when he was devoting himself to hedonistic hellraising appeared suspiciously out of character. Hatfield's suspicions were confirmed by the fact that Bush refused to discuss any questions dealing with his life prior to his twenty-sixth birthday, a stark departure from expectations concerning Bill Clinton and his Oxford University days, along with whether or not he inhaled.

The Bushes feared this book not because they believed its contents constituted "garbage" but because the record was clear that a candidate for the highest office in the land had led a dissolute life in which family influence served as a launching pad to great political success. George II's family contacts led to dealmaking with the deep pockets of corporate America along with the oil patch elite. Hatfield details the pattern of corruption and, alas, has never been refuted.

The right declares that its voices have been silenced, even amid the steady drumbeats of the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Hannitys and Coulters. Fortunately the attempted bookburning exercise failed and Hatfield's message reached willing listeners. The Bush presidency and the positions taken, whether they be tax cuts for the rich or lies about weapons of mass destruction, are logical successors to the backdrop provided by the author's splendidly researched volume.

I just finished this book. I don't write too many reviews on amazon dot com because they tend to get dismissed by people of opposing view points.

However with this book, all that it contains are facts. Honestly, it's more of a complete biography if you will, containing every act that W. did during his rise to the white house. Starting with a little info on his father to get a mark on what his atmosphere growing up was, it lists the good and the bad things he has done over the years. Inside stock trading, flip flopping stances on various issues, covering for his friends along with his fathers friends, are what await you in this book.

This book has little to no speculation, (and those comments are posted as footnotes, not in the main text) so the reviews that are saying there are no facts to this book are wrong.

I urge you to read this book before you vote in the coming November.

Hatfield comes across as a man looking for the truth, and in my view, he uncovers what any intuitive person would expect to find, if not more discouraging. There is much that smells bad about George W. Bush, his easy life, and the clean-up that occurred to make him pretty for election. This book, if you are interested in something approaching a credible explanation of how this boy became president, takes you right to the source of that smell. It's too bad Hatfield was hounded to a less than "compassionate" end for his efforts to pull back the curtain on the unlikely successes of George W. Bush.

I now know a lot more about George W's record as governor of Texas and his true positions on issues such as taxes, health care, and the environment after having read Fortunate Son. I learned much more about what Bush really stands for from this book than I learned from all 3 debates combined. I can understand why he's always so evasive though... answering is definitely not in his best interest. Dubya's record in Texas pretty much speaks for itself, and that wouldn't change whether Fortunate Son had been written by a Pulitzer Prize winner or a so-called "paroled felon."

I haven't seen this sort of in-depth investigative reporting seen since the Watergate scandal of the early 1970's. Hatfield gives us a taste of what "Bush the Man" will mean as President of the United States...and it is a very disturbing picture indeed. In this latest edition, the author details his own experiences in the Texas legal system, where he was arrested and convicted of a felony while the rich perpetuator of the scheme was never even investigated by the state. Based on these experiences, Hatfield asserts that George W. Bush is a benefactor of a very lopsided system of justice, a system where minorities, the poor and just about anyone without the right connections goes to jail while the members of the Texas elite get away with murder. You'll have to read the book yourself to see if you agree with Mr. Hatfield!