"This is a valuable work for anyone interested in the history of the presidency in wartime, the war on terror, or the responsible role of historians in public debate."—H-Net Reviews
"Rush to Judgment will alternatively boil one’s blood and cast a chill on one’s hopes for our constitutional republic. Blood will boil in indignation at the derelictions of academic, journalistic, congressional, and judicial duty that Knott exposes, while the chill will come as one surveys the accumulated results: a constitutional order out of whack, a political class overreaching, academic fields politicized, and a democratic citizenry dangerously misinformed and misguided."—Perspectives on Political Science
“Knott shows that the Bush Administration could claim constitutional support for its controversial terrorism policies from Franklin Roosevelt to Abraham Lincoln back to Alexander Hamilton. But he goes further. He also calls to account the many historians, both professional and popular, whose criticism of the 43rd president ‘bordered on the unprofessional and made a mockery of the principle of academic objectivity.’ . . . Knott shows that the prerogative is no mere innovation of modern presidents but enjoys an ancient paternity.”—The Claremont Review
“As Knott methodically demonstrates, Bush’s wartime conduct was fully consonant with that of his predecessors most celebrated by progressive historians, including Founders like Jefferson, populist Democrats like Andrew Jackson, and modern Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy . . . all in an effort to establish that ‘the use of history as ideology, as a partisan tool, also means the corruption of history as history.’”—The Weekly Standard
“A provocative book that, while not intended as a defense of the Bush years, argues that [these] scholars, from the very beginning, ‘abandoned any pretense of objectivity in their critiques and seemed unwilling to place Bush’s actions in a broader historical context.’”—The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies
“Provides a clear-eyed view of Bush’s policies—and shows that much of the criticism and commentary of the Bush years was incoherent and hysterical.”—Michael Barone, Senior Political Analyst, Washington Examiner, and Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
“An impassioned and well-argued reappraisal of the presidency of George W. Bush and its use of executive power in prosecuting the war on terror. . . . The first shot in the inevitable revisionist reevaluation of the Bush administration.”—Peter R. Mansoor, author of Baghdad Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq
“A terrific book and a much-needed corrective to the distorted accounts that dominate public discussion of Bush. Should be required reading.”—John Ehrman, author of The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan