George W. Bush and the Ghosts of Presidents Past

Extract

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the American philosopher George Santayana famously asserted. By the same token, a president who is well furnished with institutional memory should be less likely to commit avoidable errors and more likely to get the most out of his (and, at some point, her) time in office. The reflections that follow on what George W. Bush might learn from his predecessors were completed three weeks before his inauguration as the forty-third president of the United States. They appear in print after the Bush presidency has passed its hundred-day mark. Although they cannot take account of Bush's initial presidential performance, they do draw on the extensive record of his life and prepresidential political career.