By Jacob Weisberg. Random House, 271 pp, $30, hardcover

The word tragedy in the title of Jacob Weisberg’s new book takes on more than one meaning as you make your way through this brisk, eye-opening psychological study of George W. Bush. Initially it has the same straightforward definition that it does in newspaper headlines: an outbreak of chaos resulting in victims and grief. “After a presidency that resembles a plane crash,” Weisberg writes in his introduction, “we need to examine the political wreckage around us to try to understand what went wrong.”

And what went wrong, he argues, has much to do with Bush’s tormented relationship with his father. That may not seem like a new approach; musings about a kind of oedipal struggle between W. and H. W. have been around since the beginning of the son’s administration. Yet in the agile hands of Weisberg, who is editor in chief of Slate, it goes a long way in explaining Bush Jr.’s weirdly arrogant conduct as a single extended attempt to escape the shadow of a father whose athleticism, business smarts, and social ease he could never match.

The president’s showy Christianity—sincerely held, the author admits, but so empty of theological content as to be “mostly atmospherics”—“frees George W. from the kind of agonizing and struggle his father went through in handling the largest questions of his presidency”. By casting himself as a leader of consequence, a Decider of history-making moral vision, he tries to distinguish himself from the cautious realism and diplomacy practised by his father. And in all of this, he is goaded onward by the fateful way in which his own weaknesses mesh with those of his advisers. Karl Rove’s political aggressions, fuelled by personal insecurity; Dick Cheney’s near-paranoid devotion to secrecy and power; Condoleezza Rice’s spouselike deference—each feeds Bush’s aversion to detail and evidence, virtually blinding him.

At these points tragedy takes on its fuller, literary sense. Throughout the book, Weisberg alludes to Shakespeare’s plays about Henry IV and Henry V, with their portrayal of a conscientious king and the dissolute son who eventually remakes himself into an eager, cold-eyed warrior. Themes of narcissism and ignorance, self-delusion and dynastic doom—the main elements of dramatic tragedy—gather weight as Weisberg tells his story. Although the author sometimes jumps to broad psychological conclusions, it’s hard to shake the feeling upon finishing the book that you’ve glimpsed Bush himself, with all of his deeply human flaws. That’s something far more unnerving than the demonization of the president that has become routine today. More importantly, it hints at the kind of insight that will be needed 20 or 30 years in the future, when the urge is bound to arise to rescue Bush’s reputation from the historical facts, just as Ronald Reagan’s is being rescued now.