George Bush, A Biography, by Nicholas King (Dodd, Mead, 146 pp., $7.95). “And then came a rumor,” Mr. King writes of the Republican Convention, “thin as a bat’s squeak, reported by an electronic voice, that George Bush was the chosen one.” This biography of George Bush, commissioned after the Iowa caucuses, canceled after Michigan, revived just about the time that bat’s squeak was heard, is a workmanlike, easy-to-read, comprehensive story of George Bush’s life and accomplishments. Nicholas King, a veteran newspaperman who served as George Bush’s press attaché at the UN, admits in his preface that the trouble any Bush biographer will run into is that the subject is a thoroughly admirable man. The nearest thing to a scandal anyone has been able to dig up about Bush is that he took a campaign donation from CREEP (the Committee to Re-elect Nixon) which would have been illegal two years later when a new law on campaign spending was enacted. Bush, born to privilege, has done things the hard way. He was the youngest commissioned pilot in the U.S. Navy in WWII, was shot down in the Pacific, and won the distinguished Flying Cross. He struck out on his own after Yale and made a fortune in offshore drilling in Texas. He served two terms in the U.S. Congress and lost two Senate races. Then came a series of tough public service jobs. When would one least want to serve as U.S. ambassador to the UN? The year that the U.S. took a public drubbing with the admission of Red China and the expulsion of Taiwan. George Bush was the man on the scene. What was the least enviable job the Republican Party had to offer seven months into Watergate? National Chairman. George Bush took it. When Senator Church and the New York Times were having a high old time blasting the CIA, whom did Gerald Ford turn to to take charge of that demoralized agency? You guessed it. Nicholas King fleshes out all of these stories and Bush’s tenacious drive for the GOP presidential nomination without telling us much about the private man, although he offers a couple of insights that explain his resilience. It’s humor. When Barbara Bush decided to marry George it was, she said, among other things, “because he is funny.” He can be. When brash New York magazine called Bush “One of the Ten Over-rated Men in New York City,” Bush’s response was to invite the other nine, plus Dick Schaap, author of the story, to a party. They all came.
Coups and Earthquakes: Reporting the World for America, by Mort Rosenblum (Harper & Row, 230 pp., $10.95). This book is, to the best of my knowledge, a unique treatment of the fourth estate. Mort Rosenblum, a former Associated Press correspondent and now the editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, takes us behind the datelines for an inside look at how foreign reporting really works. Employing a superb mixture of smooth writing, careful reporting, and wonderfully incisive wit, he explains how foreign correspondents cover world crises. In a hilariously satirical chapter titled “The West Malaria Rebellion,” Mr. Rosenblum garishly illustrates the insane conditions under which correspondents work. Entertaining anecdotes abound. (One example: A Nigerian press officer announces that all censorship has been lifted. Does that mean, asked a correspondent, that we can send a story saying so? No, said the press officer, because it had never been announced that there was censorship.) In his chapter on “The System,” he describes editors interested only in “coups and earthquakes,” and cost-conscious publishers who are convinced that the public cares little about foreign news. In many ways, this is the theme of the book. Mr. Rosenblum cites three separate readership surveys all of which show that newspaper readers desire more extensive foreign coverage. Despite this evidence, however, the number of American reporters stationed abroad continues to dwindle steadily, so that Americans are less well informed about world events today than they were just ten years ago. Mr. Rosenblum leaves no aspect of foreign reporting untouched. He focuses on the special problems faced by radio, television, and photojournalists, along with the intricate nuances of human rights, war, and foreign economic reporting. For anyone who takes newspapers seriously, this book is essential reading.
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