Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies 1989-1993 - Hardcover

Podhoretz the Younger--former White House apparatchik, son of Norman, and debut author--sheds some harsh light on the Executive Branch and, with some heat and a lot of wit, explains just what George Bush and other inquiring minds would like to know: what changed and how the Bushes lost the key to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If Reagan wore Teflon, says Podhoretz, his preppy Veep became the Velcro President. Everything stuck to Bush because ``understanding was not his strong suit.'' The author argues persuasively that Bush (unlike his predecessor) ``didn't believe in anything very much except that he wanted to be president.'' Never mind the vision thing: Bush never meant what he said. That's why he laid a gigantic egg in the Oval Office, snatching defeat from the jaws of the Desert Storm victory and a favorable rating of 91% in the polls. Throughout his lively text, Podhoretz provides a valuable primer in the workings of the White House, where the West Wing is nothing more than a political bucket shop, inflating the stock of the ``president'' (always uncapitalized here). Updating Peggy Noonan and Don Regan, Podhoretz lets us in on the antics of Sununu and Darman at early morning staff meetings. He reveals the phone number used by staffers everywhere to reach anyone anywhere, and he tells which Cabinet secretary was easy to dominate ``because it is never difficult to outwit a dimwit.'' He takes us to the awful 1992 Republican Convention and the ``worst-run campaign in presidential history...led by a man who believed he deserved a second term because, damn it, he just did, that's all.'' Interspersed are abstract portraits of real, though nameless, staffers and their suffering (along with the Prez, of course, a lot of loyal functionaries suddenly became unemployed). A frisky if cautionary saga of political decline and fall, as well as a diverting backstairs tour related by a perceptive and irreverent conservative. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bush's 55-point drop in approval ratings between his war triumph and electoral defeat resulted in a dearth of mirth among his startled acolytes. Having licked his wounds, this ex-staffer supplies some of the hilarity occasioned by such a vertiginous fall. Podhoretz was only a nominal Bushie; like most true-blue Reaganite holdovers, he was exiled from the White House soon after the veep became the prez in 1989. Adopting the code-lingo of hallway scuttlebutt, such as referring to technocrats Sununu and Darman as the Gnostic Gnomes, Podhoretz assembles vibrant vignettes, most pertaining to events of campaign '92, of mid-level staffers hanging around the White House mess, in the OEOB, at the Republican convention, and in front of urinals. At such impromptu locales, staffers groused about what the higher-ups were doing with their ideas (disregarding them, normally) to save Bush from himself. This author applies a comedic verve that makes his polemic--straight from the conservative camp that always distrusted Bush--solidly entertaining for pols of all stripes. Gilbert Taylor