An insider's account of the way George Bush governs, or misgoverns, should please the President's critics, writes Marian Wilkinson in Washington.
The weekend after September 11, George Bush's then treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, sat down at Camp David, the presidential retreat, to devour a pile of intelligence documents on al-Qaeda compiled by CIA boss George Tenet.
A two-day crisis meeting of Mr Bush's senior advisers had ended, and the President had gone to bed. Across the room, Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was singing hymns, accompanied on the piano by the Christian fundamentalist Attorney-General John Ashcroft.
Leafing through the CIA documents, Mr O'Neill was astonished to read plans for covert assassinations around the globe to remove opponents of the US Government. The plans had virtually no civilian checks and balances.
"What I was thinking is, 'I hope the President really reads this carefully'," Mr O'Neill says. "It's kind of his job. You can't forfeit this much responsibility to unelected individuals. But I knew he wouldn't."
Mr O'Neill's account of that cabinet meeting is one of many surreal episodes he recalls from his two-year tenure as President Bush's top economic official in The Price of Loyalty, the controversial new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind. The 328-page book was released in full yesterday with the subtitle George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill.
Mr O'Neill's story, backed by thousands of pages of documents, is the first inside account by a top Bush Administration official that strips away the well-crafted image of President Bush as a "can-do" president. It reveals what many have long suspected, that Mr Bush is often disengaged from policy debates, lacks intellectual rigour, runs on instinct and is heavily influenced by conservative advisers.
Mr O'Neill's revelations have been dismissed by White House officials as the revenge of a sacked cabinet officer.
In the book, President Bush describes his love of "comfort food" - home-made chicken noodle soup and sandwiches on freshly-baked bread. When Mrs O'Neill asked what comfort food his mother Barbara Bush cooked, George Bush replied bluntly: "You got to be kiddin'. My mother never cooked. The woman had frostbite on her fingers. Everything (was) right out of the freezer."
Mr O'Neill portrays Vice-President Dick Cheney as a cross between a string-pulling Rasputin figure and a "can-do" Max Moore-Wilton, Prime Minister John Howard's former top mandarin.
Mr Cheney's central role in driving Mr Bush's economic policy, according to Mr O'Neill, from enormous tax cuts to the ballooning budget deficit, will no doubt strike fear into the hearts of fiscal conservatives at home and abroad. Mr O'Neill was sacked largely for opposing Mr Bush's second round of deficit-busting tax cuts, which were skewed heavily to the top 5 per cent of income earners.
In a bitter argument with Mr Cheney, Mr O'Neill warned in late 2002 that the US was moving towards a fiscal crisis and he says he tried to point out "what rising deficits will mean to our . . . fiscal soundness".
But, according to Mr O'Neill, Mr Cheney cut him off. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. Mr O'Neill, a former CEO of Alcoa and long-time fiscal moderate, was appalled by former president Ronald Reagan's deficits during the 1980s. He was not impressed when Mr Cheney went on to claim that the tax cuts on corporate dividends were "their due" for winning the mid-term elections that November.
According to Mr O'Neill's account, backed by an internal White House transcript, even Mr Bush worried that the last round of tax cuts overly benefited the rich. At his last divisive meeting with Mr Bush and his economic team at the White House, Mr O'Neill recalls how the fight over the President's second round of tax cuts and the looming budget deficit spun out of control.
Mr Bush's budget director Mitch Daniels warned, with Mr O'Neill, that the budget hole was getting deeper. When the debate turned to tax cuts for the wealthy on their corporate dividends, Mr Bush asked his team: "Didn't we already give them a (tax) break at the top?"
Economic adviser Glenn Hubbard reassured the President: "Mr President, remember the high earners are where the entrepreneurs are." But at several points during the debate, Mr Bush kept demanding explanations and asking: "Won't the high end benefit most?"
Mr O'Neill says he couldn't believe the incompetence on display at the meeting, which ultimately helped put America on the path to the staggering deficit it labours under today.
He believes that basic questions, involving such matters as policy costs, are ignored by the Bush team. "It's like junebugs hopping around on a lake," he told Suskind.
On the eve of the book's release, Mr O'Neill said he did not believe the White House would punish him "for telling the truth" and that he was "too old and too rich" to be threatened.
But after a barrage of attacks from the White House and being targeted by an official Treasury investigation over whether he leaked classified documents to Suskind, Mr O'Neill has been backpedalling in the past 24 hours.
He told NBC's Today show that he regretted describing the President as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people". He also agreed with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Mr Bush's policy to remove Saddam Hussein from power from day one was also former president Bill Clinton's policy.
But on whether that policy justified a war on Iraq, Mr O'Neill took another swipe at Mr Bush. He says he never saw "concrete evidence" that Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction.
"That also doesn't make a point that we shouldn't have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not making that case," said Mr O'Neill. "I'm making a really clear case that I know the difference between evidence and what is illusion and assertion."