Looking back now, it is startling how quickly the idea of attacking Iraq entered the conversation at the highest levels. Public support for the war in Afghanistan ran high, but Bush and Cheney didn’t stop there. After a shaky start, Bush found his voice and zeroed in on al-Qaida and its Afghan allies and harborers, the Taliban. Whatever else they might have done or wished to do, their response to the terrorist attacks that day was going to determine the fate of their administration. The Bush-Cheney presidency began on Sept. He also became a liability, begging for a pardon for his convicted chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and mishandling the media after he shot a hunting partner by accident. Such a choice would also have groomed a possible Republican successor for the 2012 election.Īs it turned out, Cheney became a typical vice president after 2004, loyal to the president but seldom in the loop before Bush had made up his mind about major issues. A new running mate – Bill Frist of Tennessee, for example, or Condoleezza Rice – would have been a better partner in pushing Bush’s second-term agenda. By the re-election campaign, he no longer needed Cheney to add gravitas to the ticket or secure the party’s right wing, and he considered replacing him. Despite Cheney’s extraordinary influence over administration policy in the first term, Bush learned his job over time and increasingly relied on other advisers. It leaves the reader wondering if Bush erred in keeping Cheney on the ticket in 2004.

The dual portrait of Bush and Cheney is nuanced and evolving. The result is a thorough and highly readable history. He offers few judgments or theories, relying instead on years of shoe-leather reporting – “nearly 400 original interviews with about 275 sources,” including Cheney but not Bush, who turned him down. A veteran reporter for the Washington Post and now the New York Times, he has placed the relationship of Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, at the center of an in-depth narrative of a dramatic two-term presidency. Instead, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and economic disaster banished his dreams.Įven in the high-speed, high-definition 21st century, it is early to put the Bush presidency into historical perspective, and this is not Baker’s chief aim. At home, through a politics of consensus rather than polarity, he wanted to reform Social Security and immigration laws. After winning a second term, he sought to foster democracy in the Middle East. Bush as a politician with an odd mix of thick skin and thin who grew into the presidency only to have events sweep away his hopes. Peter Baker’s Days of Fire casts George W.

Peter baker days of fire