Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media

“Strategery” is the latest installment of Bill Sammon’s triumphant series on the historic presidency of George W. Bush. First came “Fighting Back,” the riveting account of Bush’s courageous handling of the tense period immediately after September 11; then there was “Misunderestimated,” which took the story of Bush’s presidency up to the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Now “Strategery” picks up where the last volume left off, tracing John Kerry’s challenge to the President, the hard-fought and hard-won election, and the tumultuous year that followed — in which George W. Bush would consistently (though usually without any credit at all from a virulently hostile liberal media ) outwit his foes at home and abroad.

In writing “Strategery” (a term borrowed by good-humored White House officials from a Saturday Night Live skit), Sammon drew upon his unprecedented access to President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their most senior advisers. No other journalist has interviewed the president more often than Sammon. Here he chronicles the savage harassment that leftist activists directed at Karl Rove, and Rove’s audacious and ultimately successful plan for defeating John Kerry; how the Bush White House weathered the astounding partisan distortion of the Abu Ghraib scandal by the top talking heads of the media establishment; and the ferocious rough-and-tumble of the 2004 presidential campaign — including the full story of the forged documents CBS publicized in a failed attempt to torpedo the Bush presidency.

Nor does Sammon gloss over the hard times: he details with refreshing candor Bush’s rocky performance at a White House press conference and other stumbles, including the disastrous nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court. Sammon takes his story right up to Bush’s appointment of conservative John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and his nomination of another conservative, Samuel Alito, to another Court vacancy — detailing how the consistently “misunderestimated” President once again caught his enemies flat-footed and outmaneuvered them with aplomb.

Bill Sammon takes you inside the Bush White House:

• Bush’s astonishing willingness to sacrifice his prestige and even his presidency for a cause he believed in: the removal of Saddam Hussein — a dangerous dictator who posed a grave threat to America
• How George W. Bush was able to whittle away at John Kerry’s substantial early lead in the polls and ultimately defeat him in the general election
• The clumsy and even thuggish way that John Kerry and John Edwards tried to sway social conservatives away from the Bush-Cheney ticket
• Abu Ghraib: how the Leftist media establishment embarked on a hysterical feeding frenzy that was out of all proportion to the misdeeds of a handful of prison guards
• Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger: how the liberal press cravenly downplayed and even blamed the Republicans for his purloining of classified documents that might have proved embarrassing in the hands of the 9-11 Commission
• How the Swift Boat veterans dared to tell the truth about John Kerry’s service in Vietnam — and thereby almost single-handedly saved the nation from a Kerry presidency
• Teresa Heinz Kerry: how her strange behavior and even more bizarre utterances threw a monkey wrench into her husband’s campaign, despite the liberal media’s best efforts to spin her positively
• Zell Miller: how this Democratic Senator’s courageous speech galvanized the President’s supporters and severely damaged the Kerry campaign
• “Fake but accurate”: how Dan Rather and Mary Mapes of CBS brazenly brushed aside and ignored evidence that documents damaging to Bush were inauthentic in their zeal to destroy him and elect John Kerry President
• The full story of the strange exit polls that predicted a Kerry landslide and led to immense Democratic overconfidence on the afternoon of election day 2004
• How even Osama bin Laden aided the Bush reelection campaign by all but endorsing Kerry in a videotape released just before the election
• Why, in a stunning departure from precedent, the talking heads on the networks hemmed and hawed and dithered and stalled and refused to call the presidential election of 2004 until dawn broke on the day after the election
• How, by sharpening the debate on Iraq, the White House opened a major rift among Democrats
• The Koran-in-the-toilet story: how yet another media-fueled scandal turned out to be just an unsubstantiated rumor spread for political reasons
• How Bush’s deep faith in God led him through the darkest moments of his presidency
• Bush’s tough new stance on immigration and other reasons conservatives had to cheer as Bush began his second term
• Rove’s predictions: why he thinks that Hillary will easily win the Democratic nomination in 2008, but that she will find winning the general election far more difficult
• Hurricane Katrina: how the Democratic governor of Louisiana and Democratic mayor of New Orleans mishandled the situation with astonishing fecklessness — and then blamed (who else?) George W. Bush
• Evidence that, contrary to media reports, the situation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq was growing positively desperate by the summer of 2005
• The Harriet Miers debacle: why she was unable to gain the support even of conservatives
• The next step in the terror war? How Condoleeza Rice, appalled by Syria’s bullying of Lebanon and harboring of terrorists, has taken a hard line against Syria and sought ways to ratchet up pressure on Damascus
• Bush’s legacy according to one close observer: “if Iraq succeeds, he’s going to go down as a world historical figure. I mean, it’s going to change the face of the planet, and he’ll deserve all the credit in the world”

History will remember the Bush Presidency as one of the most trying periods in America’s history, when she was led by one of her most courageous and adept (and most misunderstood) leaders. Bill Sammon’s “Stategery” gives you a unique and absorbing glimpse into that historic Presidency.

Tags: Bill Sammon, Strategery