The most intimate portrait of George H.W. Bush ever published.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first president of the United States and the patriarch of America's most powerful political dynasty, never wrote a memoir. But bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize?winning reporter Richard Ben Cramer took the full measure of President Bush in his thousand-page epic, What It Takes?one of the most influential and respected works of journalism and biography of the modern era.

Drawn from those pages and edited by Cramer shortly before he died, this book traces how seminal moments in President Bush's life formed his character and foretold his legacy. The result is a loving portrait that remains as fresh, relevant, and insightful as the day it was first published.

Richard Ben Cramer (1950-2013) won the Pulitzer Prize for Middle East reporting in 1979. His journalism has appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. He was the author of How Israel Lost: The Four Questions and the classic of modern American politics What It Takes: The Way to the White House.