DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711060618

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY ROSS C. REEVES

                                            LENGTH:   80 lines

BUSH BIOGRAPHY LACKS REAL THOUGHT

[GEORGE BUSH]

The Life of a Lone Star Yankee

HERBERT S. PARMET

Scribner. 576 pp. $32.50.

The Life of a Lone Star Yankee, Herbert Parmet's new biography of George Bush, is a disappointment. A retired City College professor and author of numerous undistinguished presidential biographies, Parmet is simply not up to the task of culling the important from the irrelevant. His overly elaborate prose, which crams every sentence with random facts and borrowed observations, cannot disguise the absence of thoughtful scholarship.

It is certainly not for lack of subject matter. It has often been observed that George Bush has the best resume in America - a statement designed to damn by faint praise but nonetheless truthful. Bush excelled at Andover before passing up college to enlist as an airman at the outset of World War II. Advanced to officer rank, he became the youngest naval aviator in service history to receive his wings and served three years as a carrier pilot in the Pacific theater. There he garnered a Distinguished Flying Cross after being shot down over Saipan. At war's end Bush, now married to his high school sweetheart, entered Yale, where he became an inductee of Phi Beta Kappa, excelled in sports, and received the award for top all-around student.

Rather than follow the natural road to Wall Street, Bush departed for the Texas oil boom, working in equipment sales and oil field investments. Striking out on his own, he helped found what became the premier company for production of offshore drilling rigs. A millionaire at 35, he entered local politics. After serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, he fell to Lloyd Bentsen in a tight senatorial campaign that put him in the national spotlight.

He successively served as chairman of the Republican National Committee, head of the American U.N. delegation, the first ambassador to China, director of the CIA and Reagan's vice president. His crowning achievement as president, of course, was the extraordinary accomplishment of bringing Congress, the American public, the U.S. military, and scores of foreign nations into the Gulf War alliance. From stratospheric popularity after the conflict, he fell precipitously to defeat in a three-way race with Ross Perot and Bill Clinton - the first president since Herbert Hoover to be turned out at the polls.

Given all this, one may well wonder how Parmet came up with such a tedious and unenlightening biography. Bent on retrojecting the campaign criticisms of 1992 into Bush's prior experiences, he insists on repeatedly psychoanalyzing Bush as someone who bent to authority at every turn. Supporting his theory with no more than the offhand observations of distant relatives and political enemies, he simply ignores Bush's decisions to buck the family's wishes by joining the Navy, marrying Barbara and moving to Texas.

The book repeatedly describes Bush in the terms favored by his Democratic opponents: born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Yet Bush's long and uncomplaining tours in the Navy, and his subsequent decision to make it on his own in the oil patch, suggest instead a man who was never content to take the beaten path. The Bushes raised a family from tract houses in Odessa and Midland, Texas, not a mansion in Houston.

Similarly, Parmet dismisses Bush's exemplary career at Yale as the country club track of a wealthy young man. Parmet notes that, in becoming a first class student leader and new father, he nevertheless found time to head the United Negro College Fund drive at Yale; yet he disdainfully muses on ``the lack of any other social and political involvement, even during college years as a mature war veteran.''

The problems of The Life of a Lone Star Yankee go deeper than Parmet's intellectual lassitude and smirking reverse snobbery. It is simply tedious, a mind-numbing chronology built on secondary sources from Kitty Kelley to Molly Ivins. Aside from the psychobabble, there are no unifying themes to add meaning to the man or dimension to the events he shaped.

Biographies are the most engaging form of history - in the hands of an author who is sure enough of his subject matter, and possessed of sufficient intellectual rigor, to sift enlightening information from a mass of data and opinion. Parmet's failure to meet this standard makes it all the more regrettable that George Bush has announced that he will not publish his own memoirs. MEMO: Ross C. Reeves is a corporate attorney with Willcox & Savage in

Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

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