Elisabeth Bumiller reads Bush's mind

Via Spencer Ackerman and Matthew Yglesias, Russell Baker quotes this swami-like passage from Elisabeth Bumiller's biography of George W. Bush in the New York Review of Books:

[Bush] had never met anyone like Rice. She could talk baseball, football, and foreign policy all at the same time, but she did not sound like an intellectual and she never made him feel inadequate or ignorant. On the contrary, Rice made Bush feel sharper, particularly when she complimented him on his questions. Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice. It was hard not to see that she was also attractive, athletic, and competitive, and, like him, underestimated for much of her adult life.

Yglesias's reaction is to condemn Bush, but why should we trust Bumiller's account? It reads like a Woodward-style attempt to project an omniscient understanding of her subjects' thoughts. And while I'm sure she interviewed Rice extensively, there's no way Bush or Rice told her that "it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice."

Comments

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Perhaps. But it could be that Gov. Bush had occasions to discuss his fondness for working with Dr. Rice with other colleagues, and that Bumiller, who, after all, must have conducted voluminous quantities of interviews in the course of researching a book-length treatment, gathered corresponding impressions from interviewing those other individuals. You sometimes assume the worst too quickly.