Slate magazine editor Jacob Weisberg has a few things to say about the presidency of George W. Bush. He's assembled his thoughts in a book called The Bush Tragedy, which Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein calls a "scorching, powerful and entirely plausible account" of an administration whose "epic collapse" Klein has lately been writing about.
Weisberg says the book isn't intended as an indictment. "What I've tried to do," he explained at the outset of a recent online chat at washingtonpost.com, "is provide an early historical perspective on George W. Bush. Instead of arguing, as so many have, that he is a bad president, I largely assume that he has failed as president, and ask the more interesting question of why."
Weisberg studied the president with an eye toward his relationships with his family, his advisors and his religion, and concluded that Bush's relationship with his father is at the core of his presidency and its failures.
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