WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 (UPI) — Former President George H.W. Bush slams advisers to his son, former President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in an upcoming biography.
The 41st president of the United States had harsh words about the people surrounding the 43rd president. The elder Bush, 91, made the comments to his biographer Jon Meacham during interviews for the Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush biography.
Bush said Cheney carved out an “empire” in the White House during his son’s presidency.
“He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer,” Bush said, according to Meacham. “It just showed me that you cannot do it that way. The president should not have that worry.”
Bush said Cheney changed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Cheney, who served as H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary, was “a good man” but wanted to “fight about everything.”
“I don’t know, he just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” Bush told Meacham. “The reaction to [the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks], what to do about the Middle East… Just iron-ass. His seeming under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.”
Bush partly attributed Cheney’s change to the former vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney — a historian and conservative.
“You know, I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here — iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” Bush told Meacham.
On former Defense Secratary Rumsfeld, Bush said he “served the president badly,” adding that Rumsfeld was an “arrogant fellow.”
“I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the President, having his iron-ass view of everything,” Bush told Meacham. “There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that.”
Bush went on to support his son’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, praising the toppling of Saddam Hussein, but criticized his son’s rhetoric surrounding the war.
“Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem,” Bush said, adding that the phrase “axis of evil” his son introduced in the 2002 State of the Union address “might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything.”
Meacham said Cheney smiled after reading Bush’s comments on him, calling them “fascinating.”
Cheney said he “never heard any of this from 41” but admitted, “No question, I was much harder-line after 9/11 than I was before.”
