In his farewell Washington Post "White House Watch" blog entry, journalist Dan Froomkin mentions Ron's first book on the Bush Administration, "The Price of Loyalty" as well as singles him out for his reporting on the Bush Administration.
Froomkin had been a columnist for the Washington Post since 1997. He was editor of the washingtonpost.com from 2001 to 2003. His "White House Watch" series provided a fantastic analytical look at the inner workings of the past two administrations.
"It's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road - either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming - and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind...."
Also this
"I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard," intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy."
