NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind will speak
at Vanderbilt University on Thursday, Oct. 14, delivering a lecture
titled "In Search of George W. Bush: Informed Consent in the Age of
Spin."
Suskind’s book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill,
published earlier this year, is a candid assessment of the Bush
presidency by former U.S. Treasury Secretary O’Neill, the only member
of Bush’s innermost circle to leave and then agree to speak frankly
about the inner workings of the administration. Suskind, a former
senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal,
supports O’Neill’s account with a trove of some 19,000 official
documents from the Bush administration provided to him by O’Neill, as
well as through interviews with many participants in the administration.
Suskind’s lecture begins at 6 p.m. in Ingram Hall on the Vanderbilt
campus. A reception with the author precedes the lecture at 5 p.m. Both
are free and open to the public and sponsored by the Chancellor’s
Lecture Series.
For two years, O’Neill, a veteran economic policy expert from the Nixon
and Ford administrations, served as President Bush’s top economic
official and as a principal member of the National Security Council.
However, his outspokenness kept him on the outside of the
administration’s carefully controlled power structure and eventually
forced his resignation as Treasury secretary. Suskind’s book describes
the Bush White House from O’Neill’s perspective.
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative columnist and former Treasury official
in the first Bush administration, wrote in his syndicated column in
April, "I have been strongly influenced by Ron Suskind’s The Price of LoyaltyÖ[which]
paints a picture of an administration in which it appears that
President Bush often makes key decisions with little if any analysis or
discussion among those with the job of implementing those decisions.
"I do believe that [Bush] has fostered a White House culture that
contributes to error with a stifled internal debate, a decision-making
process that seems to short circuit research and analysis, and an
obsession with loyalty and secrecy that makes the Nixon White House
appear as a model of openness and transparency," wrote Bartlett.
The online journal The Slate says of The Price of Loyalty,
"Whatever his personal failings and shortcomings as Treasury secretary,
O’Neill is a smart and principled man whose blunt storytelling,
supplemented by Suskind’s independent reporting, provides what is by
far the most vivid and valuable accounting of this administration. And
unlike the typical White House memoirist, O’Neill made sure the public
would have the documents to back up his description of what he saw."
Suskind has made these documents available to the public through a section of his website called "The Bush Files" (http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com/thebushfiles/).
Suskind is also author of the book A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, which was launched as a series in the Wall Street Journal and won him the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. From 1993 to 2000, Suskind was senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal. He currently writes for various national magazines, including the New York Times Magazine and Esquire.
Suskind is the second lecturer in the 2004-05 Chancellor’s Lecture
Series at Vanderbilt. The Chancellor’s Lecture Series serves to bring
to the university and the wider Nashville community those intellectuals
who are shaping the world today. For more information about the series,
visit www.vanderbilt.edu/chancellor/cls.
Media contact: Kara Furlong, (615) 322-NEWS
kara.c.furlong@vanderbilt.edu