Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Political realists may find it reductive or even absurd to paint the failure of a U.S. presidency as the consequence of a son's unresolved relationship with his father.

Yet the approach was good enough for William Shakespeare, as Jacob Weisberg argues in ``The Bush Tragedy,'' an unexpectedly compelling piece of armchair psychoanalysis.

``The term `competition' doesn't begin to do justice to the Oedipal complexities of this particular relationship,'' Weisberg writes. ``George W. Bush has been driven since childhood by a need to differentiate himself from his father, to challenge, surpass and overcome him. Accompanying those motives have been their precise opposites, expressed through a lifelong effort to follow, copy and honor his father.''

Weisberg is the editor of online magazine Slate and of six popular collections of ``Bushisms,'' as he calls the president's stream of malapropisms. In his view, Bush is ``a son who tried to vindicate his family by repudiating his father's policies,'' notably by waging a catastrophic war in Iraq. He instead proved ``his father's wisdom and brought shame to his name.''

This psychology has two distinct ancestral roots, Weisberg says. The president's grandfather, Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, hewed to his forebears' ethic of ``self-restraint and public service,'' while his grandmother's family, the Walkers, were known for ``masculine risk-taking, conquest and domination.'' The current president is a ``Walker through and through,'' Weisberg says.

Familial Myths

Men from both families, he adds, subscribe to three prevailing myths, which they may on some level believe: ``I made it on my own,'' ``I'm not really rich,'' and ``I'm running to serve my country.''

Weisberg traces the ascent of George W. Bush by emphasizing the religious awakening that followed his decision to stop drinking two decades ago -- the same rebirth that shaped his political profile in Texas. Though ``The Bush Tragedy'' isn't hostile to Bush's faith, it does unsparingly dissect how Bush turned his beliefs to political use.

``His is an instrumentalist, utilitarian faith,'' the author writes, a ``self-help Methodism.'' It allowed him to win the White House, after which ``the religious aura'' of his presidency became ``mostly atmospherics.''

Weisberg introduces his chapters with quotations from Shakespeare's plays about another famous father and son who ruled the realm, ``Henry IV'' (Parts I and II) and ``Henry V.'' Here and there, Weisberg veers from his narrative to stretch literary- historical comparisons around the Bush presidency.

Rove, Cheney

He's closer to the facts, and more persuasive, in psychoanalyzing the co-dependent relationships that developed between Bush and the two men most responsible for the tragedy that ensued: his political Svengali and egger-on, Karl Rove, and his vice president and substitute father, Dick Cheney.

Rove had an egomaniacal obsession with lasting Republican Party dominance, Weisberg says. He steered the impressionable Bush ``away from being the president he originally wanted to be -- the kind of center-right consensus builder he was as governor of Texas -- and into a too-close alliance with people both of them found a bit nutty.''

As for the ``seemingly egoless'' Cheney, he appreciated that ``Bush needed to make himself his father's antithesis,'' Weisberg writes. He ``grasped that Bush's overconfidence concealed an abiding intellectual insecurity.'' On the blank slate of his boss's mind, Cheney drew a master plan to restore the authority of the chief executive -- a plan that blew up in their faces.

Damning Analysis

The war in Iraq flowed from all of the above. The book closes with a smart and damning analysis of the disparate motives and ideologies that drove Bush to war: He yearned to show up his father's seeming irresolution during the first invasion of Iraq, yet also wanted to avenge Saddam Hussein's plot to assassinate Bush senior in the early 1990s, Weisberg says.

``The Bush Tragedy'' occasionally twists itself into a pretzel in trying to fit Bush and his entourage into the paradigms of Shakespeare and Freud. Even so, Weisberg is right that we will need their help and more to comprehend the magnitude and complexity of this botched presidency.

``The Bush Tragedy'' is published by Random House in the U.S. and will be available from Bloomsbury in the U.K. starting Feb. 4 (304 pages, $26, 16.99 pounds).

(Charles Trueheart is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Charles Trueheart at charlestrueheart@yahoo.com.

Last Updated: January 15, 2008 01:21 EST