May 21 University of Virginia 11am, The Lawn Valediction Speaker Charlottesville, Va...

From Ron Suskind's article about faith and President George W. Bush that appears in the Oct. 17 issue of The New York Time Magazine: Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across...

As is typical with most presidential panels, the President’s Social Security commission, convened in spring of 2001, was stacked from the beginning to produce the results the White House wanted. (As I noted in my book, The Price of Loyalty, all members were pre-approved by the White House’s chief economic and political advisers, Larry Lindsey and Karl Rove. This distressed Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, who wanted more balance on the panel.) But to an unusual degree, the White House felt free to strong-arm commissioners who deviated from the Bush game plan, and the commission’s co-chairman, legendary Senator and original thinker Pat Moynihan, didn’t like it.

Coverage of Fundamental Tax Reform: The Bush Plan, released in The Bush Files, appeared on Reuters and in The Washington Post and the Las Vegas Sun, to name a few. Tim Ahmann, of Reuters, writes: "But former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says Bush showed little appetite for fundamental reform while he was in the administration. "'I don't think he really understands what fundamental tax reform is about -- to him, it's just a line from a speech,' O'Neill told author...

Conservative columnist and former Treasury official in the first Bush administration Bruce Bartlett, writing in his syndicated column, praised "The Price of Loyalty" in today's column. "Suskind and O'Neill's characterization of [the president's] domestic policy operation rings true," Bartlett wrote. 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." Read the full column here.

The Treasury Department has concluded that former secretary Paul O'Neill and author Ron Suskind broke no laws in their use of sensitive Treasury documents, the AP's Martin Crustinger reported today. The department's inspector general, Jeffrey Rush Jr., said that while the documents should not have been released to O'Neill, the former secretary did nothing wrong after receiving them. Rush also concluded that the Treasury department needed to improve the way it handles classified documents. Read the AP story here.

Four U.S. Senators wrote to President Bush today urging him not to retaliate against Richard S. Foster, a government official and Medicare specialist who recently claimed that a senior administration official told him to withhold information from Congress. The Senators cited White House attacks against former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in charging that "the administration has shown its willingness to engage in unfair and untoward retaliation when it is confronted with criticism." The letter, signed by Senators Jon Corzine, Frank Lautenberg, Ted Kennedy, and Chuck Schumer, asks that Foster "be treated with the respect that he has earned and given an opportunity to air his grievances without being demonized in the public eye." Foster, Medicare's chief actuary, said last week that he was prohibited from telling Congress that the Medicare prescription drug bill would cost $140 billion more over then years than was publicly projected. The full text of the letter on Schumer's website here.

The Bush administration manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, Senator Ted Kennedy charged in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations today. Quoting from Paul O'Neill's recollections in The Price of Loyalty, Kennedy said the president was determined from his first days in office to oust Hussein, and that his administration cherry-picked intelligence to support that goal. Read Kennedy's full remarks here.

How should a Cabinet secretary respond to the first question on Meet the Press? Easy: change the subject. That's the advice Paul O'Neill was given in an internal Treasury document released today along with two other new documents on the Bush Files. "You need to interject the President's message," O'Neill was told, "even if the question has nothing to do with that." Read the document here. Two other files released today detail the internal deliberations of the Bush administration as it struggled to agree on a response to the collapse of Enron and the shortcomings in corporate governance the company's demise exposed. See these documents and more on the Bush Files main page.

Writing in the New York Times, magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel says The Price of Loyalty provides "an invaluable contribution both to the historical record and to the fierce public debate over the nature of the Bush adminstration's true views and motivations on issues of war and peace." Read the full review here.

"A first-rate piece of work," writes reviewer Ward Just in the New York Observer. The Price of Loyalty, Just says, is "an inside look into the methods and practices of the famously secretive administration from a genuine insider; it's the best we're likely to have for some time." Read the review here.

"A time-honored notion of public service has been deeply corrupted," writes Michael Tomasky in his New York Times Book Review commentary on The Price of Loyalty. "This book serves as that standard's obituary notice." Read the review here.

Writing today in the Los Angeles Times, media critic Todd Gitlin calls The Price of Loyalty a "compelling, disturbing account of the Bush White House." The book, he writes, "shines a light on the process by which Bush goes about White House business." Read the full review here.

In an interview with Associated Press reporter Martin Crustinger, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill stood by his criticisms of the Bush White House in The Price of Loyalty. Read more.