Why wouldn’t George W. Bush want to tap into his father’s expertise on everything from tapping top aides to going to war with Iraq? He confronts the younger Bush and Cheney with the elder Bush’s critique.
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I’m speaking, of course, about recent revelations that Bush 41 didn’t think Bush 43 was terribly well served by Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Could it be that a similar deference to authority and protocol led George Bush 41 to hold his tongue while his son’s administration crashed and burned? The biography, which George W. Bush called “the first serious biography” of his dad, was based largely on interviews and the elder Bush’s diaries.
But Trump may end up in the White House after all.
“I said, ‘I don’t know, Lee, ‘” Trump said on CNN’s State of the Union.
“This is a man who turned on the tape recorder and told the truth”.
In 1965, after losing an election to the U.S. Senate, Bush, at 41 years old, declared his intention to become president.
“When you write the book on me, you’re not going to find anyone predicting I’m going to be president”, Bush quipped.
While the portrait painted is overwhelmingly positive, Meacham also asked Bush and former assistant Jennifer Fitzgerald about rumors they had an affair – both deny it – and he details Bush’s dishonest public response as vice president to the disclosure that President Reagan had attempted to trade arms for hostages in the Middle East. “Unworthy of his essential character”, Meacham writes.
“Dad, Gampy, he was overshadowed by a very transformative president, in that he is a one-term president as well”, George W. Bush said earlier this year.
The elder Bush was a far more emotional person than the image he presented publicly, Meacham said.
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Criticised during his presidency for raising taxes after pledging as a candidate “Read my lips: no new taxes”, Mr Bush consistently put the country’s interests ahead of his own, Mr Meacham said.
