You really zero in on the alleged October surprise of 1980. I think you make a good point in saying that nobody will ever prove that Bush himself went to Paris in the summer of 1980, but clearly there were negotiations between the Reagan-Bush camp and the Iranians.


Clearly, and there were very credible witnesses to it. But the credibility emerged after Bush was defeated in 1992, very lopsidedly. He got the weakest share of the votes, for an incumbent, since 1912. He was history, so it didn't seem worth paying attention to. That's why it's so unbelievable to me there hasn't been a willingness to look at the continuity between father and son -- the same name, the same supporters and the same preoccupation with the people at the top. The same preoccupation with the Middle East, with Iraq. This is Bush II in a very literal sense, but they're not making the connection.
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So you feel them [the GOP] moving inexorably toward disaster?

They get carried away with hubris. That was the problem for the Democrats with Johnson. After the Kennedy assassination and the Goldwater defeat [in 1964], they got so carried away they went into hubris. But, you see, the Democrats don't use any of this very well. They have very little institutional memory. Why don't they use the fact that it was Bush's father who participated in building up Saddam Hussein? They aren't good at framing any of these things. When the maneuvering towards war was beginning, there was none of this framing: Why was Saddam still there? The president's father spent six or seven years building him up. The Democrats don't have much going for them at all. You have a Michael Dukakis, then an Al Gore, who just really wasn't much of a fighter in 2000.