Frum, too, serves up Bush the Visionary. You might recall Frum's brush with Washington fame. A onetime writer for the right-wing Weekly Standard, he had favored John McCain over Bush in the primaries but joined Bush's White House speechwriting team several weeks into the Administration. After the 2002 State of the Union address, Frum's wife zapped out an e-mail to friends crediting him with penning the "axis of evil" line, which was the highlight--or lowlight--of the speech. Whoops. Protocol calls for speechwriters to be humble. Only the Big Man deserves the spotlight or the microphone. (Actually, Frum had suggested the phrase "axis of hate," and chief speechwriter Michael Gerson had transformed the epithet into something a bit more religiously cast.) A month later, Frum left the White House. In The Right Man, he explains--or claims--he had submitted his resignation before the State of the Union speech and had not been booted. But his departure was widely perceived as a warning: Don't cross el jefe.

So no hard feelings? Frum has opportunistically capitalized on his White House days by writing about his service to Bush in a fashion that should please and occasionally aggravate his former comrades. Like Woodward, he places Bush firmly at the helm, steering the ship of state and following a course of his own determination. But he takes a few swings at his former boss. Overall, it's a net win for the Bushies, though I imagine many of them wish Frum had kept his laptop shut.

Frum is, to an extent, an insightful observer, and the book is written in a sprightly fashion. He does, though, share the biases of his conservative claque. While he argues that the Clintons were "morally slack" (no argument there), he sees Bush as a beacon of probity. The evidence? He "scorned the petty untruths of the politician." (I suppose Bush's dishonest statements about his Enron contacts, his tax cuts, his Social Security and Medicare proposals, and his pledge to be a Uniter Not a Divider do not qualify as "petty.") Frum claims Bush tried to be nonpartisan, tried to compromise, tried to be civil, but those mean Democrats--nasty Tom Daschle, in particular--rejected his overture. Look, Bush even placed a Democrat in his Cabinet. (Fact-checker query to Frum: Didn't Clinton do the same by appointing Republican William Cohen as Defense Secretary?) And, Frum maintains, the real point of the Kyoto global warming accords and the International Criminal Court treaty--both of which Bush refused to sign on to--was to restrain American power.

Frum hails the Bush White House for being marked by "moral fervor." Bushies do not curse. They always stand when the President enters the room. The first words he heard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were "Missed you at Bible study." Bush people were "determined to keep our White House clean, both literally and metaphorically." (Secret meetings with corporate lobbyists and contributors regarding an energy plan? Nothing unclean about that.) But not everything in Bushland impressed Frum. He found "a dearth of really high-powered brains" on the White House staff. (What does that say about Bush? Frum doesn't speculate.) And Bush, Frum reveals, was not always so swell: "Bush's fiercest critics paid tribute to his likeability, but in private, Bush was not the easy, genial man he was in public. Close up, one saw a man keeping a tight grip on himself." Frum quotes a prep-school classmate of Bush: "George is smart: not the smartest guy I've ever met, but smart. But as a boy, he always used his intelligence to hide his intelligence. And he's still doing it."

Frum is especially ungenerous toward Karen Hughes, the television reporter who years ago became Bush's number-one spinner: She "rarely read books and distrusted people who did--anything she did not already know she saw no point in knowing." She was obsessed with increasing Bush's appeal through the use of simple stories that address big themes and that would resonate with the American public overall: "children, health, jobs, faith, patriotism." After watching Bush and Hughes interact, Frum felt compelled to ask several colleagues if the two ever had an affair. All were "astonished by the idea." Searching for a deeper understanding of the intercourse between Bush and Hughes, Frum places W. on the couch: "When he ran for governor, he recruited Hughes--a woman very like his mother (she even looks much as Barbara Bush did in her mid-40s), but who offered him the unqualified admiration his mother never did. His wife was his mother antidote. His aide was his mother substitute." Meow! There is something to be said for hiring only loyalists. They rarely resign and go on to diss your mom. Frum also takes a whack at chief political wizard Karl Rove, noting that he was excessively consumed with patching together a winning coalition. Rove's desire to bag New Mexico's five electoral votes, Frum reports, drove the White House to commit an early PR blunder by deep-sixing a stricter regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency on arsenic in drinking water. (The regulation was projected to cause a hike in water costs in the Southwest.)

Sure, Bush needed both Rove and Hughes, but he was the man pulling the levers behind the curtain. He fiercely edited his speeches, once slashing up a draft and handing it back to Frum with the explanation, "The headline is: BUSH LEADS." He made the ultimate decisions on the energy plan--not Cheney--after Cheney and Hughes slugged it out over conservation and alternative energy. (Guess who wanted less emphasis on these topics?) Once Frum suggested "to Bush that he use the phrase cheap energy to describe the aims of his energy policy." Bush shot back: From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, American cars became more fuel-efficient, then in 1995 progress stopped with the rise of the gas-guzzling SUV. And what do you think, Bush asked, fueled the SUV craze? "Cheap energy?" Frum replied sheepishly, and left.

"Bush was not a lightweight," Frum writes. "He was, rather, a very unfamiliar type of heavyweight. Words often failed him, his memory sometimes betrayed him, but his vision was large and clear. And when he perceived new possibilities, he had the courage to act on them." Still, Frum acknowledges that come the summer of 2001, Bush's vision wasn't helping him much. He had scored his big tax cut that favored the wealthy. (Always call it "tax relief," Hughes demanded.) But after Senator Jim Jeffords left the GOP and handed control of the Senate to the Democrats, the Bush yacht seemed to be floundering. Gas prices were on the rise, the economy was sluggish. His faith-based initiative was sinking. He had employed an old Washington dodge and passed Social Security reform to a commission. The energy plan was out of steam. Frum was even avoiding parties, in order to evade antagonistic questions from his conservative pals. One bright moment for Frum was Bush's decision on stem-cell research. Before releasing his policy, Frum recalls, "he did something I had never seen him do: He brooded." But Bush tried to have it both ways on stem cells, by allowing some limited research to continue while preventing the development of new stem-cell lines to widen the research possibilities. Frum considered this a majestic, Solomon-like resolution. But to this ideological wrestler from Canada--who in years past had decried the American conservative movement for going soft--the future looked bleak. The White House was considering unveiling proposals to encourage e-mail between children and their grandparents, and to promote positive stories in newspapers.

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