Decision Points or Derision Points

W leaves White House for final time

~~Decison Points~~?

Try Derision Points

New Bush memoir by Maine reporter

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine – A new Bush memoir, Derision Points: Clown Prince Bush the W, is a refreshing antidote to Bush's Decision Points.

"It's kind of funny how Bush liked to call himself The Decider," says publisher JP Leonard. "So many decisions were made for him."

"Derision Points with an 'R' has the memories Dubya's memoir leaves out," says author Ted Cohen, a Kennebunkport reporter.

Derision Points is Dubya's candid back story.

Derision Points is a revealing portrait of the young George W. Bush as a rowdy teenage prankster, then a towel-snapping frat boy at an Ivy League college. Next Poppy Bush helps him dodge the draft -- and get elected to the highest office. Stranger than fiction?

It's a tipsy tale and not too flattering, yet one can't help sympathizing with the anti-hero. Dubya is a mischievous but likable character who just wanted to have a good time -- it was never his idea to be a president or even a Bush at all.

Cohen peels back the onion of Bush's dysfunctional family.

"Derision Points: Clown Prince highlights what life was like behind the scenes in the Bush household," Cohen said. "This was a very famous and driven family."

Cohen portrays the elder Bush as a man focused on career. It was all politics. Barbara Bush was a single parent in her husband's constant and unnerving absences.

"But it's not gloomy by any means. The story line moves quickly, buoyed by humor and dialogue. It's a fun book by a very funny guy," Leonard said. "Of course it's also a good insight into ruling-class behavior. The clincher for me was that they fired Ted for reporting the DUI story."

Cohen was the reporter on the Kennebunkport beat who scooped the story of Bush's DUI arrest just before the election.

The book's full title is Derision Points: Clown Prince Bush the W, the Real Story of Bush's Decision Points.

It's available from the publisher's website, progressivepress.com, on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Derision-Points-Clown-Prince-Decision/dp/161577243X/

and through bookstores.

More information can be found online at:

http://progressivepress.com/

Progressive Press

P.O. Box 126

Joshua Tree Calif. 92252.
Email:
progpress@earthlink.net

Tel. (760) 366-3695 FAX 366-2937

The Author's Tale

Columbia Journalism Review
January/February 2001

MISSING THE DUI STORY

BY BRENT CUNNINGHAM

Six biographers missed the story, even though one believed it was out there. So did some of the country's best reporters, despite nearly two years of digging.

One reporter was close enough to know he missed something, and another had the story, but allowed an editor to talk him out of running it.

Finally, five days before the election, a prominent Maine Democrat leaked the story to a Portland television reporter who put it on the air.

That was how the country learned about George W. Bush's drunk-driving arrest in 1976.

The impact of the story is debatable.

It knocked Bush off message for forty-eight hours, but the story came late in the contest and thus did not get the attention it would have earlier.

And given all we know -- thanks to those biographers and reporters -- about Bush's drinking before he quit at age forty, news of a DUI arrest wasn't exactly shocking.

Regardless of the impact, the various ways this story was missed make a curious, and perhaps cautionary, tale.

Misdemeanor case files in Maine are generally destroyed after five years, and all that remains is the official case history.

None of this is computerized. So even if you knew the arrest happened in the mid-1970s, it would require searching the indices of a hundred or so docket books, says Jeff Henthorn, a Maine court administrator.

Driving records are available to anyone who has the name and birth date of their subject.

But reporters would have had to know to ask specifically for Bush's complete driving history to find evidence of the twenty-four-year-old charge.

There was an easy way to get the story: walk into the Kennebunkport police station and ask Chief Robert Sullivan if he had anything on George W. Bush.

"We have a record of our charges, but not the full case file," says Sullivan. "A phone call is all it would have taken."

Ted Cohen, a twenty-five year veteran of the Portland Press Herald, was the only reporter who did that.

Cunningham is CJR's associate editor.

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