George Herbert Walker Bush: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) [Hardcover]

Tom Wicker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Lives Biographies | Publication Date: May 3, 2004

No one is more qualified to give a fully rounded, objective portrait of our forty-first president than Tom Wicker. A political correspondent for The New York Times for more than thirty years, Wicker was a first-hand witness to and reporter of George H. W. Bush’s political rise and presidential reign. In George Herbert Walker Bush, Wicker provides a richly drawn and succinct overview of Bush from his New England roots, his decorated service in World War II, and his successful oil businesses to his shift to politics and rapid rise within the Republican party. As he describes changes within the Republican party in recent decades, Wicker charts Bush’s career, including in-depth analysis of his campaign tactics and his gift for creating friendships and inspiring loyalty which, Wicker argues, has been the key to Bush’s success. The result is a fascinating, timely glimpse into one of the most powerful families in America today, complete with insights into the current reign of George W. Bush, the continued legacy of the Bush family, and contemporary American politics.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The opening anecdote sets the tone for this uncomplimentary brief bio: Wicker recounts a visit by an (unnamed) friend to the post-presidential office of George H.W. Bush in Houston. The two men share an hour of purposeless small talk, prompting the friend—and the author—to reflect that the visit is a microcosm of the life of Bush, who seemed to have no strong purpose other than "a burning desire to become president." The rest of Wicker's biography sketches Bush as a man with the faults and virtues of his patrician background: loyalty, gregariousness, personal modesty, intense competitiveness, a shallow mind and a deep sense of entitlement. His credentials for the White House, Wicker notes, were scanty; the author dismisses Bush's impressive-looking résumé (two-term congressman, U.N. ambassador, CIA director, GOP chairman, Reagan's vice-president) as padded with thankless jobs proffered by presidents who found him harmless and pliable. He credits Bush with two impressive acts: daring to recommend resignation to President Nixon (before the entire cabinet, no less) at the climax of the Watergate scandal and forging the global coalition that drove the armies of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991—a feat of diplomacy, Wicker notes, made possible by Bush's lifelong skill at befriending practically everyone. But veteran journalist Wicker faults Bush for what the author categorizes as a readiness to alter positions for political advantage and repeated use of "low blows" to attack electoral opponents like Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis (behavior that, he claims, Bush would never have tolerated on the tennis court). For those who lived through the Bush years, the story Wicker tells is a familiar one, here usefully if briefly summarized; for others, this account will provide a handy starting point for further study of the Bush legacy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The extant full-scale biography of the forty-first president is Herbert Parmet's George Bush: Portrait of a Lone Star Yankee (1997); Wicker's offering is more akin to a narrative essay about Bush's political career, especially his three electoral campaigns for the presidency. And in each one, Bush needed to convince Republican Party conservatives that he was one of them and not the Northeast moderate that his wealth and his Ivy League resume seemed to indicate. The accommodations Bush accordingly made to the right wing, dating to his support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and engraved in political memory by his "Read my lips: No new taxes" pledge of 1988, pull Wicker into his most detailed passages, which will likewise draw in politics-minded readers interested in tactics and the ways candidates prosper or perish by the media-magnified moment. Wicker, former New York Times pooh-bah on politics, gracefully but emphatically criticizes Bush and doubts that he will rate highly among presidents. Wicker has his opinions, but his experience endows his survey with appeal across the political spectrum. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1St Edition edition (May 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670033030
• ISBN-13: 978-0670033034
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,014,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Less a biography and more a polemic, July 8, 2004

By 

Thomas Stamper (Orlando, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: George Herbert Walker Bush: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) (Hardcover)

Wicker does a good job of concisely giving you Bush's early political life, his successful House campaigns, his unsuccessful Senate campaigns and what not. He also gives a decent description of Bush's role as ambassador, CIA director and chairman of the RNC in the 1970s. All through the era, Wicker paints Bush as a good soldier for the Republicans, and he comes off as an honorable man.

But once Bush becomes Vice President, Wicker is disappointed in him. Wicker sees Bush as a sell-out of his moderate Republican leanings for the red meat Reagan policies. He compares Bush to a chameleon that changes his colors to blend into the current campaign strategy. On top of that, Wicker contends that Bush could easily change political stripes because he lacked vision and purpose.

Okay, Bush lacked vision, but Wicker doesn't seem to value vision at all when it came from Ronald Reagan. In fact, in the middle of a biography of Bush, Wicker deems it necessary to tell us that Reagan's vision of a Soviet Free Europe had absolutely no role in bringing down that superpower. He's just got to tell us that Gorby saved the world not Reagan. That Gorby's goal was the opposite of Reagan's doesn't mean anything to this objective journalist. Does that mean that Gorby lacked vision too? Didn't that genius understand that people would be better off out from under his iron boot? Come to think of it, maybe Hitler would have fallen apart too if we'd just given him a chance. History is just replete with examples of totalitarian governments that renounce themselves and become free without outside agitation.

That's the main problem with Wicker's book. It's less a biography of Bush than a step by step criticism of Republican ideology and its failings. How dare a Republican administration treat Saddam Hussein nicely when he was beating up on the hated Iranians. Surely they knew 10 years in advance that he would invade Kuwait and we'd have to go to war with him.

Bush certainly lacked vision compared to Ronald Reagan. But after 8 years of Clinton, a person can sure grow found of decency, loyalty and personal honor. Wicker says as much during the last paragraph of the book. His conclusion is that Bush may have been a mess, but at least he was a brave guy who won the Gulf War. It was almost like the Penguin editors added that at the end so as not to upset Bush enthusiasts.

Every public figure should have positive and negative books written about him/her in order for students of history to get a wide picture. Books are part of the great debate. The trouble with this book is that it's not a good place for conjecture over substance. In a 200 page Penguin Lives' book, I would like to have an outline of the guy's life not a political fight. Wicker could have easily written a larger biography of Bush somewhere else and told us what a numbskull he was. It seems out of place in this series. Am I going to suffer this again if I read Penguin's books on Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther?

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Journalism, not scholarship (are they mutually exclusive?), June 30, 2004

By 

Joseph Mark Davison (Charlottesville, Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: George Herbert Walker Bush: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) (Hardcover)

As an avid reader of the Penguin Lives and American Presidents series, I was surprised to see a Penguin Lives biography of a frankly unremarkable president. I have read seven other Penguin Lives (Napoleon, R.E. Lee, Lincoln, St. Augustine, Joan of Arc, Mao Zedong, Wilson) and have been impressed by both the depth of analysis and amount of historical content in these tightly written books.
This book is not up to the same standard and I'm disappointed in the editors of this otherwise unblemished series for putting their label on it. At 240 pages, Wicker's book is also longer than any other Penguin Lives book I have read. By contrast, Thomas Keneally's excellent P.L. biography of Abe Lincoln was 192 pages. Is there really more to say about Bush the First than the Great Emancipator?
First of all, the book is chock full of stupid factual mistakes. Two stood out as soon as I read them and undermined the entire book's credibility: First, Wicker writes that Richard Nixon resigned in 1984 (as opposed to 1974), and toward the end he claims that George W. Bush's presidency began in 2002 (as opposed to 2001). This sloppy scholarship made it less of a surprise to me that Wicker was a correspondent for the New York Times, a journal that after the Jayson Blair scandal has little credibility itself.
Aside from "Check Your Facts," another Writing 101 rule that Wicker ignores is "Provide Evidence For Your Claims." He calls the belief that Reagan's defense buildup accelerated the collapse of the USSR's economy, and thus Soviet communism, "a common misperception." Okay Tom, you claimed it, now back it up. He doesn't even try. I don't mind someone sharing an opinion, but don't insult my intelligence by expecting me to take it for granted! He offers other purely political opinions that he fails to support with any evidence, especially when outlining Bush's political collapse in 1992.
Overall, his thesis is fairly interesting, but also fairly obvious. Bush the First was a president of morals but little conviction who got to office on his friendliness and Reagan's coattails, and he was ultimately rejected by conservatives and the nation's voters because of it. I can think of forty-two other presidents whose biographies I would rather read.
The subject, GHWB's life, is admittedly quite interesting. He held a wider variety of government jobs than any other president I can think of. While George H.W. Bush's presidency was uninspring and thus not a great idea for a biography, it is Tom Wicker's sloppy fact-checking and unsupported editorializing that make this book truly stink.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not one for the ages, July 2, 2004

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: George Herbert Walker Bush: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) (Hardcover)

I've read four or five other Penguin Lives biographies besides this one of George H.W. Bush, and I'm generally a fan of the series and the approach. Designed to be summary overviews, writers are forced to choose key elements and facts from their subject's lives and (ideally) extrapolate them into a portrait that, while not exhaustive in the details, at least gives the reader an idea of who he was, why he did what he did, and how it matters to history. Good writers in this series have managed to pull this off. Others haven't done so well. Unfortunately, Tom Wicker's contribution is one of the latter.

The first tip-off, of course, is Wicker himself. As another reviewer points out -- absolutely correctly -- journalism and biography are different skill sets. It may be too much to ask a journalist who has spent years covering his subject up close to then turn around and have the kind of analytical distance a good bio really requires. This isn't to say a biographer can't have opinions. But they shouldn't be *a priori* ones, and it's too easy to suspect Wicker of having had his mind made up about GHWB before he started to write.

Still, Wicker does hit on many of the major themes of Bush's life -- ones other biographers have identified as well: his sense of *noblesse oblige,* his lifetime of high achievement in most everything he's tried, his friendliness, his history of "running to the right" and then governing from the center. Much of this he interprets as signs of overweening ambition, ruthlessness in destroying opponents, and a desire, above all, to be president of the United States. He paints Bush as a man who played at being conservative because he needed to in order to win election, who swallowed his pride and his centrist principles to serve uncomplainingly under Reagan, but who was unable to win the loyalty of conservatives who anyway tanked the GOP's chances with their divisive 1992 convention in Houston.

Along the way, Wicker recounts many of the highlights of Bush's years as veep and in the White House -- not only Desert Storm and the '92 election (though he devotes the most space to those), but also half-forgotten episodes like the John Tower confirmation fight and the Panama invasion. He also devotes a good deal of time to a what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it of Bush's role in Iran-Contra. All of this is decent history, and of course belongs in any biography of George Bush. But it seemed as much like a chance for Wicker to rehearse old grudges against, and take swipes at, Reagan and the Republicans. This is another problem with writing biographies of your contemporaries.

As a general rule, the Penguin Lives series is a good way to get a quick thumbnail portrait of the men and women featured in its books. But they're not of uniform quality, and some, like this volume, will definitely leave you wanting more. George H.W. Bush strikes me as an interesting historical figure whose legacy (like J.Q. Adams' or William Howard Taft's) will be seen as coming from someplace other than his years in the White House. There's certainly room for a short summary biography of him, but this title isn't quite it.