Excerpt:
Russell L. Riley writes at the beginning of "Inside the George W. Bush White House," an oral history of the Bush 43 years, that Peter Baker, a reporter for the New York Times, "speculated that the press corps gets only about 20 percent of the full story within any given White House 'in real time.'" That sounds about right to this former Bush White House staffer—I rated most stories about events in which I participated to be about 80% wrong.
That's no knock on Mr. Baker. It's nearly impossible to get the full story on what's happening inside any White House, particularly one as leak-averse as Mr. Bush's.
Hence the value of oral histories. They record the inside stories, what people knew or thought at the time but could not share. When done as well as Mr. Riley's, oral histories provide new revelations about rivalries, hidden strategies and screw ups. The second Bush administration had plenty of all three...