Originally published at IntellectualCapital.com
By K. Daniel Glover

A reporter once asked a conservative Texan his thoughts on the moderate views of a colleague, and the quick-witted politician did not take long to answer. “The only things you find in the middle of the road,” he said, “are yellow stripes and road kill.”

Although George Herbert Walker Bush, the nation’s 40th president, was not the target of that pointed jab, the gist of it nonetheless applies, and that should be obvious to readers of “George Bush: The Life of a Lonestar Yankee.” Written independently by Herbert S. Parmet but with access to Bush, his family and his inner circle of friends, the book portrays Bush, a transplanted Texan, as a “nice guy” adrift in a nasty world, as a moderate politician always struggling to please the disparate factions of his party.

Ultimately, Bush appeased those factions well enough to become vice president in 1980 and to be elected president in 1988, but Parmet convincingly demonstrates that Bush never fully suppressed the streak of moderation at the center of his political philosophy. And in the end, Bush became “road kill” at the expense of a more eloquent and telegenic moderate, Democrat Bill Clinton.

Losing sight of the topic
The detail of Parmet’s tome, the first comprehensive biography of a man known as “Poppy” into adulthood, adds a new and much-needed element to the writings on Bush.

It gives readers insight into the characters who shaped Bush’s life — from the “stern and commanding father,” Prescott Sr., to the nurturing mother, Dorothy, who taught her children to raise a family with “‘generous measures of both love and discipline.'” And it is chock-full of interesting trivia. (Who knew that George and Barbara Bush once shared a house, and a toilet, with a mother-daughter team of prostitutes in Odessa, Texas?)

Yet the book falters in other respects. Often times, it seems as if Parmet forgot that George Bush, and not the places that he lived or the people that he met, was his topic. That is especially true in the early pages, when readers are treated to lengthy discourses on the Greenwich Country Day School that Bush children attended in Connecticut and the history of Odessa, Texas, where Bush made his oil fortune. The effect that Watergate and other trying times had on Bush, meanwhile, merit only brief mentions.
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