For George W. Bush, his father’s feelings about how his administration was run seems to be brand new news.
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According to The New York Times, Bush told Meacham that Cheney became more obstinate while serving as vice president to his son, George W. Bush, and that he pushed for an overly aggressive course of action in response to the 9/11 attacks.
His remarks come as his youngest son, Jeb Bush, struggles in his campaign for the White House. I made the decisions. Judging from his stellar first book, Barack Obama has the capacity to write one of the best presidential memoirs ever.
“It is true that my rhetoric could get pretty strong and that may have bothered a few people”. “And he served as vice president, he served my brother really well”.
The biography is set to be released later this month.
“He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with. And I accept personal responsibility for what happened, both the good and the bad'”. “He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer”, Meacham quotes Bush as saying.
“We smile about it, we laugh about it”, he told Fox News. He declined to comment to Fox about the biography.
He speculated that Cheney was influenced by his deeply conservative wife Lynne, whom Bush described as “the eminence grise”.
“I am proud to have served with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld”, he said in a statement. But George would say… “This was my philosophy”.
He said: “I disagree with his characterisation of what was going on”. “There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guys thinks”.
Bush knows Cheney well, as the latter was his secretary of defense during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, the US-led military push that liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army. “So I’m enjoying the book”.
Former President George HW Bush has launched an attack on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, accusing them of taking an “iron-ass” approach to the Middle East in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
He told author Jon Meacham that Mr Cheney was “iron-ass” and had acted too independently of his son in matters of national security.
Nevertheless, W. Bush issued a statement on Thursday, defending Cheney and Rumsfeld, two key figures in his presidency. But he was unrepentant on that count. “We did talk about the issue, however”.
“I think he served the president badly”. But Meacham gave Cheney a chance to respond in the book to Bush’s criticisms. Inspired by his parents, he has pursued a life-time of service to country, rarely bragging about his victories, accepting his defeats with grace and almost never uttering a harsh word.
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The 91-year-old uses a wheelchair because of a form of Parkinson’s disease.
