What Tina Brown Wants to Read

From Tina Brown’s recent Washington Post column on the lack of juicy memoirs being written by former and current Bush staffers.

“And maybe a Bush memoir will give us a road map at least to some of the mysterious gaps and silences of the past five years. What was really going on during the missing hours on 9/11 aboard Air Force One, or in the interlude after Election Day 2000 when he vanished from sight and then emerged talking as if he were already president?

I want to know about that lazy hidden summer of 2001 when the Aug. 6 presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” moldered in his in box, and why the governor of Louisiana couldn’t find him when Hurricane Katrina was devastating the Gulf Coast. I want chapter and verse on the incident with the invasive pretzel. I want to deduce from parsing the punctuation the precise moment in the war in Iraq when his mood changed from swaggering certainty to the suppressed panic that now hovers at the corners of his mouth every time he goes into the herky-jerky routine of The War! On Terror! I want to know when the president first knew that the Valerie Plame leak was going to cause the long arm of the law to reach into the heart of his inner circle.

Bush these days seems more and more like Fredo Corleone in “The Godfather: Part II,” wrestling with barely hidden rage and anxiety and relying more and more on the balm of loyal consiglieri who he believes won’t give him up. It could make for a great memoir. Or better still . . . a novel. There’s an amazing story inside that white box of a black box, full of shrieking.”