From "The Price of Loyalty"

I just finished Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty about Paul O’Neill’s experiences as Treasury Secretary under Bush. It’s a remarkable book. One particular passage really stayed with me. It’s on page 292, and follows Dick Cheney’s extraordinary assertion: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” I’ve taken the liberty of quoting the whole thing in the extended entry, here.
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Book notes

On Saturday I went out and bought three new hardbacks:
» Ron Suskind’s “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill”
» Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century”
» David Grossman’s “Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo”
This was rather silly of me, as I was just getting started on the monumental “Wars Against Saddam- The Hard Road to Baghdad” by John Simpson, and I’m still working through “J2EE Platform Web Services” by Ray Lai. But just as I picked up “The Price of Loyalty” this morning, my wife dropped a slim volume in front of me. “Weren’t you asking about this?” she said. It was the Whitbread prize-winning “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon. The next thing I knew, I’d finished it in one sitting (pausing only for coffee). Brilliant. Essential.