Speculation about how President Bush runs his administration has been put forth since the first day of his presidency. In “The Price of Loyalty,” Ron Suskind teams up with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to give a detailed look into how our government is being run at the executive level.

Much of the book is devoted to establishing O’Neill’s credibility as an “honest broker,” determined to develop economic and governmental policy based on sound research and facts. As secretary, O’Neill signs the dollar bill and makes provisions to ensure the economy is sound, and he instills investors with confidence in the markets.

Suskind lays out O’Neill’s past as a man who has straddled the line between Washington insider and Washington outcast. He grows up poor and then comes to work under the administrations of Ford and Nixon. O’Neill then takes over as chief executive officer of Aluminum Corporation of America, one of the largest aluminum manufacturers in the world.

After winning the presidential election, Bush and Dick Cheney hand-picked O’Neill to be Treasury secretary, interviewing him over a meal of hamburgers in a darkened hotel room.

O’Neill’s first few months at the Treasury are devoted to stabilizing the economy after the recession that marked the end of the Clinton presidency and finding a way to spend the $5 trillion surplus to shore up Social Security and Medicare, as well as assuage the federal debt.

Finding his ideas at odds with the Bush administration’s plans for tax cuts and a war with Iraq (the president assigns tasks dealing with a strike on Iraq to every member of the National Security Council at its very first meeting), O’Neill becomes discouraged and makes public statements that get him into trouble.

O’Neill’s centrist, transparent and “process” thinking clash with the ideological and secretive administration, and O’Neill becomes more frustrated at a president who refuses to even so much as ask questions during his weekly meetings with the Treasury secretary.

The administration, equally as frustrated with what it sees as a “loose cannon” in O’Neill, ends his term with a phone call from Cheney, who says, “Paul, the president has decided to make some changes in the economic team. And you’re part of the change.”

“The Price of Loyalty” has received much press attention because of the number of rather damning passages and facts it contains — for instance, the assertions that Bush insisted on a war with Iraq essentially from day one of his presidency and changed his stance on the environment completely from his campaign promises and the graphic detail of numerous scripted and one-sided meetings with Bush.

Phrases like ” … the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection,” coming from the former Treasury secretary, cannot fail to attract the attention of the reader or the media.

Though the book contains a number of surprises, it also reiterates what has been circulated about the presidency for years, but from the perspective of a powerful person with firsthand knowledge.

Suskind sells the book as more than just the account of Paul O’Neill, claiming to have used various other interviews to support O’Neill’s story, but few of these additional interviews actually surface in the book.

Though Suskind spends a large portion of the book establishing who O’Neill is and how much credibility he has, it seems a bit overdone at points. It’s difficult to count how many times Suskind reminds the reader just how much of a pragmatist and centrist O’Neill is, but by the first third of the book this fact is more than established.

Also, there is a lot of technical economic jargon, presumably coming from the mouth of O’Neill (this line between author and subject is often blurred) which makes the reading a bit tasking for a layperson with no background in economics; however, this serves to illustrate how O’Neill’s stances on economic policy are based on reason and research.

“The Price of Loyalty” is shocking in its truth-telling and thought-provoking as to how America is and should be run. O’Neill nowhere comes off as bitter in his account — just eager to tell his experiences working under an administration that shows him little leadership or reasoned foresight.

“The Price of Loyalty” deserves a read from people of all political stripes before they vote next fall. Those who support the president wholly may want to see what he’s like firsthand, and those who have unfounded and radical doubts about his actions will be pulled a little more toward reality.