When O'Neill worked in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, Suskind writes, he served presidents whom he respected as policy makers, whatever their other faults, for two reasons: first, they were knowledgeable about the details of policy; and second, they made it a point to have their aides present them with different, and sometimes starkly warring, points of view. Nixon called on the Office of Management and Budget (where O'Neill worked) to prepare so-called Brandeis briefs, named after Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court, that presented thorough analyses of opposing arguments and made everyone ''really think deeply about the ideal of good government and how to get there,'' in O'Neill's words. The people in the room may have all been from one political party or shared a general world view. But they understood that when spending the people's money and acting on behalf of the entire country, including that segment that did not vote for their president, their obligation to fact-based inquiry and rigorous testing of hypotheses was self-evident.
This book serves as that standard's obituary notice. First, Bush himself is portrayed as disturbingly unengaged. From O'Neill's first meeting with him through his last, Bush asked some questions here and there about politics and perception, but he rarely asked a specific question on a policy matter.
The weekend after the Sept. 11 attacks, when O'Neill was among the group invited to Camp David to discuss responses, he espied a large stack of intelligence briefings brought by the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and found himself thinking, ''I hope the president really reads this carefully. It's kind of his job.''
Second, O'Neill smelled at many high-level meetings the odor of a conversation set up in advance to drive the discussion toward the conclusion that Rove and the political team had already settled upon. One example: At a meeting on steel tariffs, which the administration put in place in 2002 against all free-market principle, O'Neill could tell where things were going when the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, ''made several oblique references to 'political realities.' '' The pattern repeated itself over and over, on tax cuts and the economy and energy policy and Iraq. In time, O'Neill grew aghast, and went to his old friend Cheney to suggest that the administration try Brandeis briefs. But Cheney -- the book's chief villain and, if Suskind and O'Neill are to be believed, our functional president -- just sat passively. ''He thanked Paul, as always, 'for his sharp insights,' '' Suskind writes. And that was the end of it.
