Washington Post Book Reviews
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Wednesday July 7, 2010
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THE WHITE HOUSE DOCTOR: My Patients Were Presidents -- A Memoir
Connie Mariano
Thomas Dunne/St
ISBN 978-0312534837
300 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Aaron Leitko
Connie Mariano has seen George H.W. Bush naked. It's very likely that she's seen Bill Clinton in the buff, too. Don't get the wrong idea, though; it was strictly professional. Mariano, a Filipino-American Navy doctor, spent nine years serving as White House Physician -- tending to the health of the U.S. commander in chief. Her memoir, "The White House Doctor," provides a peek into the tedium of treating the president's every cough, sniffle and golf-course-induced blister. And then some. "The Secret Service calls it the 'kill zone,'" she writes. "To be in the presence of the president is to stand in the kill zone and to sense the rarefied, exciting, and potentially deadly experience of being in close proximity to an assassin's most prized prey."
Luckily, Mariano's tenure -- which encompassed the final year of George H.W. Bush's term and the entirety of the Clinton administration -- was a relatively quiet one. Tense moments, when they arrived, were not explosive in a literal sense. Mariano performed the Heimlich maneuver on a guest at the Bush family's holiday party, treated Hillary Clinton for a blood clot and accidentally flooded the toilet aboard the king of Spain's yacht.
As far as juicy White House-insider commentary goes, Mariano's not much of a gossip. Non-presidential patients frequently remain anonymous, and if she's privy to details regarding Clinton's late-'90s philandering, they are not included here. Mariano is a self-made woman -- the first female White House physician, the first woman director of the White House Medical Unit and the first Filipina to become a Navy rear admiral -- and "The White House Doctor" is mainly about her accomplishments as a medical professional. In that spirit, Mariano keeps doctor-patient confidentiality intact.
Aaron Leitko can be reached at leitkoa(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE PRESUMPTION OF GUILT: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr
Palgrave
ISBN 978-0-230-10326-9
256 pages
$25
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
The reversal in the title of this book -- the presumption, of course, is supposed to be one of innocence -- has to do with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., on July 16, 2009, in Cambridge, Mass., after a neighbor alerted police to what she thought might be a break-in. Other salient facts: The house broken into was Gates' own (he had forced his way in because the front door was jammed); he is a Harvard professor; and he is African-American. President Obama commented on the incident, accusing the Cambridge police of acting "stupidly" and then inviting both Gates and the cop to join him at the White House for what became known as the Beer Summit.
Ogletree, who teaches law at Harvard, represented Gates in the controversy, and by his own admission "The Presumption of Guilt" has an agenda: to place his client's case in the context of the racial profiling that is often the lot of black Americans. Among the examples he gives is a practice that held sway in Maryland during the 1990s, when police were trying to intercept crack cocaine on its way through the state: "Police reports indicated that 70 to 75 percent of people searched on I-95 were African-Americans, even though African-Americans represented only 17 percent of those driving on the highway and only 17 percent of traffic violators." After Robert Wilkins, a member of a prominent black family, complained, the state agreed to modify the policy. The book ends with a long catalog of those who have been subjected to racial stereotyping. Among the complainants are actor Lou Gossett Jr., who won an Oscar only to be offered what he considered "derogatory" roles; and the incumbent attorney general, Eric Holder, who recalls being stopped while driving in the 1970s, when he was a college student, by a police officer who told him to open the car's trunk because "he wanted to search it for weapons."
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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