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    Bush
    Bush
    Bush
    Audiobook25 hours

    Bush

    Written by Jean Edward Smith

    Narrated by Tom Perkins

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    George W. Bush, the forty-third president of the United States, almost single-handedly decided to invade Iraq. It was possibly the worst foreign-policy decision ever made by a president. The consequences dominated the Bush Administration and still haunt us today.

    In Bush, Jean Edward Smith demonstrates that it was not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice, but President Bush himself who took personal control of foreign policy. Bush drew on his deep religious conviction that important foreign-policy decisions were simply a matter of good versus evil. Domestically, he overreacted to 9/11 and endangered Americans' civil liberties.

    Smith explains that it wasn't until the financial crisis of 2008 that Bush finally accepted expert advice, something that the "Decider," as Bush called himself, had previously been unwilling to do. As a result, he authorized decisions that saved the economy from possible collapse, even though some of those decisions violated Bush's own political philosophy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 5, 2016
    ISBN9781515977988
    Author

    Jean Edward Smith

    Jean Edward Smith taught at the University of Toronto for thirty-five years, and at Marshall University for twelve. He was also a visiting scholar at Columbia, Princeton, and Georgetown. He is the author of Bush, a biography of the 43rd president; Eisenhower in War and Peace; FDR, winner of the 2008 Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians; Grant, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist; John Marshall: Definer of a Nation; and The Liberation of Paris.

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    Reviews for Bush

    4.5/5

    23 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I enjoyed reading back through a time period I remember well. I enjoyed this in-depth look at George Bush's Presidency. I think Smith was fair in that he highlighted the positives of the Bush (work with AIDS, stopping the bleeding of the financial crisis, his genuine love of country and wanting to do well) and the negatives (basically everything to do with foreign policy and leadership style). It is obvious that Smith was not a fan of Bush, and he really goes after him repeatedly for his decisions after 9/11 and with the Iraq War.

      I didn't enjoy this book as much as other Smith books I have read and it took me a while to figure out why. In the narrative writing style, the quotes from Bush were almost always from press conferences, interviews, or from Bush's memoir. He didn't have any quotes from diaries and personal writings and wasn't able to make the personal connection that I was used to in his previous books. During the 8 years of the presidency, Smith rarely mentions the Bush family or Bush's relationship with his wife or children. The times he does mention the family, it is usually as a part of the campaigns.

      A good read if you want to look back at the time period but not up to Smith's usual standard.
    • 5/5
      This was a great, exhaustive account of Bush's political decisions from assuming office in 2001 until leaving it in 2009. Overall, an evenhanded account of the president considering the animosity many of his decisions earned him while in office. Extensive coverage of the war in Iraq, although I thought it bogged down the middle of the book somewhat since there was an over-reliance on Bob Woodward's four book series as a source of information as opposed to a more independent account. Would recommend to a friend or read again.