Looking forward.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter

Looking Forward.

George Bush with Victor Gold. Doubleday, $18.95. There is nothing so galling as a good ghostwriter. Here I was primed for mining some easy humor and cheap invective out of the droll notion of George Bush writing his autobiography just in time for the Iowa caucuses. I envisioned a political version of Vanna Speaks replete with helpful hints on how to choose the proper color watchband for a state funeral. Or better yet, a political memoir filled with telling omissions and Freudian undertones. But what I was not prepared for was the competence of former Spiro Agnew speechwriter Vic Gold, who has managed to make Bush's life story half-way interesting without providing much ammunition for either cynical reporters or curious rivals. Perhaps the best thing that can be said for George Bush after reading Looking Forward is that the guy does know how to hire decent help.

Still, with a little digging we can find some inadvertent humor in this up-from-Andover saga of Bush's life through 1981, with a nervous eight pages thrown in on the Irancontra scandal. There is, for example, the gloriously obtuse footnote in which Bush purports to be puzzled by unshakable charges of "preppyism' without mentioning that he did indeed prep at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Then there is Bush's bold prediction in the book's last chapter (an ersatz question and answer session) that the dominant issue in the 1988 campaign will be "leadership itself and how the various candidates perceive it.' Connoisseurs of banal understatement might appreciate Bush's reflections on the loss of two crewmen when his plane was shot down during World War II ("I still don't understand the "logic' of war--why some survive and others are lost in their prime'). But my favorite is the historical ignorance that prompted free-market, conservative oilman George Bush to name his company after a Mexican revolutionary, because he and his partner had just seen Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata.

It is, alas, pretty thin gruel. Little in the book helps us unravel the central mystery of George Bush and his Amazing Resume: how one could have done so much, accomplished so little, and remain so unaffected by the experience? There are moments when one fears that "Doonesbury' has Bush pegged perfectly as the Invisible Man. Take Bush's reaction when he was asked to become the first outsider in history to head the CIA. Does he...