From Inner Circle to Outcast: The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind

By Jonathan Berohn

The Bush White House is nothing if not protective of the President’s image. That one of their own—former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill—refers to the President as “a blind man in a room full of deaf people” in Ron Suskind’s new book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill has not surprisingly ruffled some feathers.

More importantly, however, Suskind’s book offers some rare glimpses into a White House that ordinarily keeps its cards close to the vest. O’Neill, an old friend of Dick Cheney, is not your typical candidate for a White House expose. His business credentials are impeccable, and his personal ties to the administration run deep. Nevertheless, the triumph of ideology and politics over thoughtful policy was enough to drive him public at a time when glimpses behind the veil of White House secrecy are scarce indeed.

The value of O’Neill’s insights are even greater when you stop to consider that the most nominally conservative President in recent history has presided over the most nakedly interventionist foreign policy in American history while running up record budget deficits. How the President and his inner circle reached these decisions is obviously an important issue, and it is an issue that O’Neill and Suskind have shed quite a bit of interesting light on.

The White House, for its part has trotted out the traditional “sour-grapes” brush off, but that’s a little harder to pull off when the target was one of your hand-picked insiders. At the very least, Suskind, a former writer for the Wall Street Journal, presents O’Neill’s revelations in a thoughtful and provocative manner. If you’re interested in what’s really going on in the White House, this book is certainly worth a closer look.