'Ten Minutes From Normal': Walking Into the Propeller
(snip)
…Readers who hope this book will offer a few revealing glimpses of the man driving global affairs will be disappointed. At times, they may feel as though they've been handed a campaign brochure between hard covers. He is both humble and ''in charge,'' ''decent'' and ''engaging,'' a man of ''strength and grace in adversity,'' who possesses ''a laserlike ability to reduce an issue to its core.'' From the thousands of hours they've spent together, Hughes -- as always -- has selected a bare, few morsels for ''appropriate'' public consumption. They tend to be smallish, layered anecdotes -- as when Bush didn't want her to answer a pile of press calls in their first days in the 1994 race because, he says, ''we have to have a focused message . . . answering all those questions will get us off track.'' That, ostensibly, was the starting point of the so-called message control. Hughes later describes how she independently came up with the term ''compassionate conservative'' after hearing Bush talk passionately about being a conservative with a heart. In Hughes's rendering, he is a man without flaws.
(snip)
Instead, much of her story swirls around the tensions of family and work, something countless working women wrestle with each day, but without Hughes's advantages. Still, some of the book's best-written passages are in this realm, especially those that involve Robert, Hughes's precocious and insightful teenage son, whose journal entries during the 2000 campaign, when he traveled with his mother, are amply excerpted. Oddly, some of the book's clearest, least self-interested insights come from Robert, who pokes holes in a few of his mother's pretentious utterances and expresses mixed feelings that a Bush victory will mean he'll have to leave junior high school in Austin. Later, when Hughes is working long hours in the White House, he says he and his father are lonely and miserable in their rented house in Washington -- and ''it's all because of you.'' This drama culminates in the heartwrench of April 2002, when Hughes decides to step down as America's most powerful woman, to place her ''family first'' and return to Austin.
Robert is now happily reunited with friends for high school, while her husband, Jerry -- a decent, thoughtful, semiretired lawyer who had the good sense to ask that he not be rendered in this book -- tends to family and church affairs. Karen talks to the White House practically every day, prepares speeches and media strategies for the president, flies to Washington every few weeks and whistle-stops the country giving speeches. Besides all that, she wrote this book and, once her book-tour-cum-campaign-swing ends, will join the president in August for his round-the-clock run for re-election. I'm not sure where the tough choice was -- to me, it looks as if she cashed in some loyalty tokens and traded up, multiplied her pay, cast herself as a spokeswoman for working mothers and left others to try to ''counterweight'' Karl, a thankless task. One wonders if we haven't been spun from the get-go.
So, everyone's happy. Except maybe the reader. George W. Bush remains an enigma who guides world events by letting actions speak. And Hughes, maybe the person who knows him best, has used our desire to know the president to plant carefully hewn tales of the goodness and integrity of her family-friendly boss in the public mind.
The only remaining question is when Robert will be writing his memoir. Now, that'll be one worth reading.
more…
http://nytimes.com/2004/04/25/books/review/25SUSKINT.html
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