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Curzon
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Curzon

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March 28th, 2005

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Bush’s Reading List

This via Iberian Notes:

Married to a former librarian, Bush likes short speeches and, judging from a recent reading list (Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, Joseph J. Ellis’s His Excellency: George Washington), lengthy books. Early in its first term the Bush White House established an authors lecture series, which enabled the president to pick the brains of David McCullough, Edmund Morris, Martin Gilbert, Bernard Lewis, and Robert Kaplan, among others. Bush has publicly acknowledged his debt to Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy, which distinguishes between “free” and “fear” societies, and exalts Ronald Reagan’s moral confrontation with Soviet tyranny. A recent New York Times story described his admiration for Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Glad to know our president is reading at least one decent author (I reserve comment on everyone else.)

Comments to this entry

Alfred Wallace
March 28, 2005
6:25 pm
I am listening to Ellis's "His Excellency George Washington". It describes how long it took Washington to realize that the only way to defeat an occupying power by force of arms was to "wait it out" until the occupiers made enough mistakes that they could be beaten. All that was required to maintain public morale was an occasional battle that could be spun as a victory. It seems that the Iraqi and Afghani insurgents may have stumbled on the same lesson independently: certainly Ho Chi Min seems to have done so..
I wonder whether Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld have read the book"¦ Perhaps they think they will be much more effective than British General Howe was all those years ago"¦. ..but I wonder"¦.