The Lost Bush Memoir

There’s a shroud around George W. Bush’s soon to be released memoir. But, as Bryan Curtis reports, Bush and his team already wrote a book in the presidency’s final, excruciating days. And nobody noticed.

George W. Bush’s Decision Points, arriving November 9, purports to be a “groundbreaking new brand of memoir.” But Bush already has a White House memoir. In the turbulent final hours of his presidency, he published, to almost no acclaim, a book that was many months and many thousands of taxpayer dollars in the making. The title of this lost memoir is A Charge Kept. It measures 128 pages, and you can order it on Amazon.com. Here you can see the Bush administration sweating to salvage its legacy, and perhaps see a preview of the Bush era as it will be reconstructed in Decision Points.

A Charge Kept—the title is an answer to Bush’s 1999 campaign biography, A Charge to Keep—was written under duress. By 2008, it was clear Bush wouldn’t be taking the legacy-polishing victory lap typically afforded two-term presidents. The economy was tanking, and John McCain’s campaign said it did not want Bush defending his record, even as that record was being filleted. Feeling they’d someday be vindicated by history, the Bushies turned to literature. They would write a book—a chronicle of “what we inherited, what we did about it, and what we left behind,” says Marc Thiessen, the former Bush chief speechwriter who oversaw the book’s writing.

Continue reading here on The Daily Beast by Bryan Curtis: The Lost Bush Memoir.