Why is Bush reading Tom Wolfe? Don't ask

White House Letter: Why is Bush reading Tom Wolfe? Don't ask
Elisabeth Bumiller
International Herald Tribune
Monday, February 7, 2005

WASHINGTON If you ask the White House what President George W. Bush is reading these days, the press office will call back with the official list: "His Excellency: George Washington," by Joseph J. Ellis, "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow and, not least, the Bible.
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What the official list omits is Tom Wolfe's racy new beer- and sex-soaked novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." The president, a Wolfe fan, has not only read the book but is enthusiastically recommending it to friends.
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It is unclear exactly what Bush liked so much about the book, which is told from the point of view of a young woman from the God-fearing backwoods of North Carolina, Charlotte Simmons, the first in her family to go to college. Charlotte, who is at first shocked by the booze and debauchery she encounters at Wolfe's Dupont University, modeled on Duke among others, eventually succumbs in a chapter-long deflowering scene at the hands of a drunken fraternity rat. Then she sinks into depression.
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Bush, who was the hard-drinking, hard-partying president of the jock fraternity at Yale, Delta Kappa Epsilon, is also the father of two partying twins, Jenna and Barbara. Jenna graduated last year from the University of Texas and Barbara from Yale, and on neither campus is the milieu of Charlotte Simmons entirely foreign.
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Does Bush like the book because it is a journey back to his keg nights at Deke, or because it offers a glimpse into the world of his daughters' generation? Or does he like the writing? Or is it all of the above? The White House won't say. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, did not respond to phone calls or e-mail messages last week asking about Bush's interest in Wolfe's book.
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So perhaps Wolfe had some thoughts. In relatively short order he was located last Friday at a conference at his alma mater in Lexington, Virginia, Washington and Lee University. He was asked if he thought it unusual that a 58-year-old man, that is, the president, had so embraced his book.
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"Well, a 74-year-old man wrote it," Wolfe replied. He said he had no idea why Bush liked it. "I imagine he responded to the blinding talent," Wolfe added, chuckling, "but beyond that, I'm just not sure."
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Wolfe, who voted for Bush and was invited by the first lady to the White House last year to speak at a salute to the authors Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote, said he had not talked to the president about his book. But he said that Bush's father once told him how much he liked "The Bonfire of the Vanities," Wolfe's novel about New York City bond traders and racial politics during the excesses of the 1980s.
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Friends note that the current President Bush has read every one of Wolfe's books, including "A Man in Full," the behemoth about real estate and social change in Atlanta in the 1990s.
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Bush, who does his reading for pleasure on Air Force One, on weekends and before bed at night, has long said he prefers books to channel surfing, although he does watch television sports.
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"I'm reading, I think on a good night, maybe 20 to 30 pages," the president told Brian Lamb of C-Span in an interview at the White House last month. "I'm exercising quite hard these days, and I get up very early, and so the book has become somewhat of a sedative. I mean, maybe there are some other old guys like me who get into bed, open the book, 20 pages later you're out cold."
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Bush added that "in this job, there are some simple pleasures in life that really help you cope. One is Barney the dog, and the other is books. I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else."
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Friends say that Bush, who like most modern American presidents is drawn to the biographies of those who governed before him, reads more nonfiction than fiction and tends toward history. "It turns out that the president better have seen the day that has gone in order to be able to help lead to the day that is coming," Bush told Lamb, paraphrasing the Texas writer and painter Tom Lea. "In other words, history really matters for the president."
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Bush noted that he liked the Hamilton biography because "it was a very interesting history of how hard it was to get democracy started." He also told Lamb that he alternates between reading the Bible every day in one year and a daily devotional by Oswald Chambers, a Protestant minister of Scotland from a century ago, the next.
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Bush told Lamb that "Oswald Chambers was one of the great Christian thinkers" and that "the easier it is to understand what he writes, I think, the more understanding of religion a person becomes." This year, the president said, he is once again making his way through the Bible.
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He did not utter a word to Lamb about "I am Charlotte Simmons."