George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee.

• Author: Smith, Richard Norton

George Bush is the first healthy ex-president since writing a White House memoir. This is not all the two have in common. Reared in a family tradition of public service, subsequently polished at Yale, each man capably filled several appointive positions before being elevated to the presidency by a legendary sponsor whose shadow he could never quite escape. After losing a bitter three-way contest for re-election in 1912, Taft joked that no American had ever been elected ex-president by such an overwhelming majority. He went on to redeem himself as chief justice of the United States, in which position he could at last exercise the judicial temperament that had proven so ill-suited to the political arena.

Bush, too, seems a man at peace with himself, having demonstrated through his recent skydiving exploits and November dedication of his presidential library that life begins at 72. He may yet enjoy the ultimate vindication should his namesake son, currently Texas' popular governor, attain the White House in 2000. Yet the senior Bush, no less than Taft before him, appears a historical figure at odds with the prevailing culture. An establishmentarian in a country suspicious of elites, a patrician in an increasingly populist party, a gentleman in an ungracious era, Bush efforts to square the circle of his own contradictions at times approached cognitive dissonance.

That he should thrive at all in so hostile a political environment makes Bush's story interesting -- all the more so because it is told, vividly and authoritatively, by Herbert Parmet, an academic who blessedly does not write for other academics. Parmet, the highly regarded biographer of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon, gained unprecedented access to the former president's personal diaries and other papers. The result is Lone Star Yankee, a fitting metaphor for an unconventional leader who declared early in his career that "labels are for cans."

Parmet gives us a portrait of the 41st president that is often surprising and occasionally poignant, as its protagonist mulls the cost of his ambitions, a hostile press, the inevitable trimming, and various indignities inflicted upon his loved ones. "Why do we do it all?" he muses during his unsuccessful 1980 campaign. "Why, why, why"? Here is a Bush we have rarely seen, and almost never heard. In place of the tongue-tied orator is a grieving parent who writes, in eloquent recollection of his long-lost daughter, Robin, "We need a girl.... We had...