Blumenthal’s First Draft of History

November 7, 2006

By Rick Perlstein

How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime

By Sidney Blumenthal
Princeton University Press · $26.95

Journalistic compilations are a crucial part of America’s literary, intellectual and political heritage. They enjoyed a golden age in ’60s and ’70s trade publishing: Gazing over the library of books I am using to write my own history of the years 1965 to 1972, I see collections by Joan Didion, Garry Wills, Jack Newfield, Steven V. Roberts, Jonathan Schell, J. Anthony Lukas, Tom Wolfe and Michael Herr, compiled from Esquire and the Nation, National Review and the New Republic. Without them, our understanding of postwar America would be much the poorer.

Well, we are without them now. Trade publishers today rarely print such compilations—and our understanding of the years we are now living through has suffered for it. Thus it is altogether fitting and proper—though, in the grand scheme of things, a little sad—that university presses should pick up the slack.

It fell to Princeton University Press to publish How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime, a compilation of articles from the (London) Guardian and Salon by the great Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton aide and a longtime journalist who did some of his important early work for In These Times. The best of the classic journalistic compilations draw out common threads that lie scattered across occasional pieces, often tied together in an introductory essay. This gives the compilation a twofold purpose, as both a document of an era and an argument about that era. In this regard, How Bush Rules is exemplary, convincingly arguing that George W. Bush is “the most willfully radical president of the United States,” by documenting in real-time the episodes that have made up his presidency.

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Read the entire review here.

Posted by Jock Gill at November 7, 2006 8:47 AM | TrackBack