Bush's ghostwriter..."I owe more than I can repay to the 43rd president, a man of courage..."

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Bush's Ghostwriter

by Bryan Curtis

How did 28-year-old ex-Yalie and former speechwriter Christopher Michel become the man behind Dubya's memoirs? Bryan Curtis talks to Bush chief of staff Andrew Card and former speechwriters Matt Latimer and Marc Thiessen about how Michel went from Barbara Bush’s classmate to the confidant he dubbed “Junior Bird Man.”



http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-09/bushs-ghostwriter/

At a reunion for George W. Bush's administration on February 26, the Decider joked about his upcoming memoir. "This is going to come as quite a shock to people up here that I can write a book," Bush said, "much less read one." Of course, Bush is writing the tentatively titled Decision Points in the presidential sense—that is, he's putting it through the word processor of a loyal aide. The aide is Christopher Michel, a 28-year-old former White House speechwriter. In a phone interview from Dallas, where he is knee-deep in the manuscript, Michel says, "The president is working on it pretty much constantly, and that means that I am, too."

***

On January 21, Bush's first full day as a private citizen, Michel and his wife left for a three-day vacation in the Bahamas. On January 22, Michel logged on to a computer from his hotel. He found an email from Bush containing the first pages of the memoir. "He didn't waste any time, and he didn't slow down much since then," Michel says.

Michel, in the grand tradition of ghostwriters, says the president is fully in charge. "He'll write a first draft of a lot of different things, and email it to me," Michel said. "My role is to help put together different scenes—he'll write the scenes, and I'll help stitch things together." The two usually start work before 7 a.m. They meet daily in an office building in Dallas. Or else they stage wall-to-wall editing sessions at the Bush ranch in Crawford, the president taking breaks to ride his bike while Michel jogs. Michel has also been able to corner Bush on transoceanic flights to China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, India, and Nigeria. Bush was without a computer for eight years in White House, and has taken to emailing with the eagerness of a new adapter. Michel says Decision Points, or whatever it ends up being called, will be finished by the end of summer and on shelves in the fall.

Critics will, and should, inspect every comma. But perhaps the best way to read the Bush memoir is as the elusive pièce de résistance of the most loyal Bush scrivener. In the 2009 email to friends, Michel wrote, "I owe more than I can repay to the 43rd president of the United States, a man of courage who will fare well in history."

[HughBeaumont]

1. I think I'm going to power vomit everything I've consumed in the last 23 hours.

Is it just me who can taste the BILE?