Who's Your Daddy?

To the Slate editor in chief, Jacob Weisberg, the presidency of George W. Bush is a plane crash, and he says there is a black box that can help explain just what brought this White House down in flames: a black box "filled with a series of relationships — familial, personal, religious and historical," most notably the father-son relationship, which "lies at the very core of the second Bush presidency and its spectacular, avoidable flame-out."

In contrast to Winston Churchill — another son with a famous father, who managed to free himself psychologically and politically from the shadow of his parent, learning from his elder's mistakes without being governed by the need to rebel programmatically — the younger Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Weisberg, "played out his family drama in a way that had devastating consequences for his family, his country and the world."

George W. Bush, Mr. Weisberg writes in "The Bush Tragedy," "has been driven since childhood by a need to differentiate himself from his father, to challenge, surpass and overcome him"; and "to challenge a thoughtful, moderate and pragmatic father, he trained himself to be hasty, extreme and unbending," traits that would ill serve him in his presidency and help lead him into the morass of the Iraq war.

Many elements of this book will be highly familiar to readers who have tracked Mr. Bush's career. Comparisons of the current president and Shakespeare's Henry V, as family ne'er-do-wells who clean up their acts and ascend to the throne, were made by reporters even before Mr. Bush entered the Oval Office, and they were expounded upon at length by the British historian Niall Ferguson in a 2004 article in Vanity Fair.

Similarly, dissections of the president's conflicted relationship with his father have been performed innumerable times by reporters and pundits, and they stood at the center of two books that appeared in 2004: "Bush on the Couch," a heavy-handed evaluation by Justin A. Frank, a clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center; and Peter and Rochelle Schweizer's revealing study, "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty," which featured surprisingly in-depth interviews with Bush family members and which has become a seminal sourcebook for Mr. Weisberg and other Bush watchers.

Mr. Weisberg has taken all this raw material and used it to write a brief — a decidedly subjective brief — about what he thinks went wrong with the presidency of George W. Bush. Although the insistent emphasis on the father-son relationship can lead to some gross oversimplifications (the president's "unconscious motive" in going to war against Iraq, Mr. Weisberg writes, "was finishing his father's business"), "The Bush Tragedy" does provide a provocative and plausible account of the evolution of his political beliefs while doing a far more persuasive job of marshaling evidence to make a Freudian case for the younger Mr. Bush's missteps than other recent efforts, like, say, Craig Unger's 2007 book, "The Fall of the House of Bush."

In the course of this volume Mr. Weisberg argues that George W. Bush's Oedipal relationship with his father and sibling rivalry with his brother Jeb (who, for many years, was regarded as the family's rising political star) fueled his transformation from hard-drinking black sheep in the family to dynastic heir. George W. Bush, he writes, had a contradictory attitude toward his father: a "drive to correct Poppy's mistakes" and a "demand for his admiration."

By the time he was running for president, Mr. Weisberg argues, the younger Bush had developed a populist political persona distinctly different from his father's: where his father had "considered religious enthusiasm a form of bad manners," George W. "was open about his faith and courted the evangelical right"; where his father was mocked for being too prudent and cautious, George W. was intent on being bold and blunt; where his father had methodically immersed himself in policy details, George W. was going to be "an instantaneous 'decider' who didn't revisit his choices or change his mind."

As Mr. Weisberg tells it, both Mr. Bush's political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney recognized the president's Oedipal fixation and used it to help maneuver the president into going along with their own agendas. Mr. Rove, who "recognized the younger Bush as fiercely loyal to his father, yet desperate to escape his shadow," Mr. Weisberg says, presented a political plan as "a map of differentiation" that would prevent a humiliation like his father's 1992 loss to Bill Clinton.

After securing the White House, Mr. Weisberg goes on, Mr. Rove, who harbored grandiose ambitions of creating an enduring Republican majority, "used his influence to steer Bush away from being the president he originally wanted to be — the kind of center-right consensus-builder he was as governor of Texas — and into a too-close alliance" with the party's right wing, thereby helping "turn him into the most unpopular and polarizing president since Nixon."

Meanwhile, Mr. Weisberg contends, Mr. Cheney "appreciated, in a way more subtle than Rove did, the way in which Bush needed to make himself his father's antithesis." The vice president also knew how to frame policy choices for the president "around contrasts to his father's views" and how to appeal to the president's own vision of himself by describing initiatives as "bold, game-changing and the right thing to do."

Given Mr. Bush's impatience with policy details and Mr. Rove's and Mr. Cheney's unprecedented influence in the White House, the usual policymaking process was often circumvented, and dissenting opinions went unheard or ignored. Just as Mr. Rove was able to push his agenda of solidifying the Republican base on the president, Mr. Weisberg suggests, so was Mr. Cheney able to promote his view of enhanced executive power — a view that resonated with Mr. Bush, as it would with many presidents, "even liberal presidents with a better grasp of the Constitution and more foreign policy experience."

Some arguments in this book — like those concerning Mr. Bush's efforts to find historical analogies to vindicate his actions and the narcissistic aspect to much of his reading — are genuinely intriguing. Others — like the author's assertion that "without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq" — are poorly fleshed out or poorly backed up by demonstrable facts.

All in all, this is a book that seeks not to uncover exactly what went wrong with the Bush administration, but a book, like Freud's famous case studies, that seeks to come up with an explanation for what happened, presenting an argument for how a consensus-seeking, moderate-centrist governor in Texas evolved into a highly polarizing president wedded to his base, and how a candidate who said he believed in a humble foreign policy and opposed the use of troops for nation building became the president who has presided over the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq.