{"id":15648,"date":"2015-11-06T09:02:02","date_gmt":"2015-11-06T17:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/elder-bush-unloads-unsparing-critique-of-cheney-rumsfeld\/"},"modified":"2015-11-06T09:02:02","modified_gmt":"2015-11-06T17:02:02","slug":"elder-bush-unloads-unsparing-critique-of-cheney-rumsfeld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/elder-bush-unloads-unsparing-critique-of-cheney-rumsfeld\/","title":{"rendered":"Elder Bush unloads: Unsparing critique of Cheney, Rumsfeld"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 Former President George H. W. Bush has finally revealed what he really thinks of his son\u2019s presidency, faulting George W. Bush for setting an abrasive tone on the world stage and failing to rein in hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld.<\/p>\n

In a years-long series of interviews with biographer Jon Meacham, the elder Bush frowned on the sometimes \u201chot rhetoric\u201d of George W. Bush, saying such language may get headlines \u201cbut it doesn\u2019t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

The elder Bush faulted Cheney and Rumsfeld for their \u201ciron-ass\u201d views, calling Rumsfeld an \u201carrogant fellow\u201d and saying Cheney had changed markedly from the days when he served in the first Bush administration.<\/p>\n

As vice president, Cheney \u201chad his own empire there and marched to his own drummer,\u201d the elder Bush said, adding: \u201cHe just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the elder Bush assigned fault to his son for Cheney\u2019s over-reach and for fostering a global impression of American inflexibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not Cheney\u2019s fault, it\u2019s the president\u2019s fault,\u201d the elder Bush said. \u201cThe buck stops there.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all of that, though, the elder Bush did not suggest that he disagreed with his son\u2019s decision to invade Iraq, saying Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein \u201cis gone, and with him went a lot of brutality and nastiness and awfulness.\u201d<\/p>\n

The assessments are contained in Meacham\u2019s 800-plus page \u201cDestiny and Power,\u201d the fullest account yet of Bush, the only modern ex-president not to write a full-length memoir. Meacham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Andrew Jackson biography \u201cAmerican Lion,\u201d draws on Bush\u2019s diaries and on interviews he conducted with Bush from 2006-2015. The book is being publicly released on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Jeb Bush, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said he hadn\u2019t read the book but he showed no inclination to echo his father\u2019s criticisms.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy thought was that Dick Cheney served my dad really well,\u201d Bush said in an Associated Press interview Thursday in New Hampshire. \u201cAs vice president, he served my brother really well. Different eras. Different times.\u201d<\/p>\n

George W. Bush, too, was measured in his reaction, saying in a statement that he was \u201cproud to have served with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney did a superb job as vice president, and I was fortunate to have him by my side throughout my presidency. Don Rumsfeld ably led the Pentagon and was an effective secretary of defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the book, George W. Bush was asked about his father\u2019s criticisms of his own language and allowed that his rhetoric had been \u201cpretty strong.\u201d But he was unrepentant on that count.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey understood me in Midland,\u201d he said, referring to the Texas town where he was raised.<\/p>\n

The elder Bush, for his part, said he wasn\u2019t sure what had changed Cheney, but added that he thought the Sept. 11 attacks had made him more hawkish about the use of U.S. military force abroad.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust iron-ass,\u201d the elder Bush said. \u201cHis seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

The elder Bush also speculated that the views of the vice president\u2019s wife, Lynne, and daughter Liz may have contributed to Cheney\u2019s rightward turn.<\/p>\n

\u201cLynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here \u2014 iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,\u201d Bush said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know.\u201d He said daughter Liz Cheney also was \u201ctough\u201d and influential in her father\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n

As for Rumsfeld, Bush said he had \u201cserved the president badly. I don\u2019t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks,\u2019 Bush said of Rumsfeld. \u201cHe\u2019s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rumsfeld responded in a statement: \u201cBush 41 is getting up in years and misjudges Bush 43, who I found made his own decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emails and phone calls to several contacts for the Cheney family were not immediately returned. But Meacham gave Cheney a chance to respond in the book to Bush\u2019s criticisms. Meacham wrote that Cheney smiled and murmured \u201cfascinating\u201d after reading a transcript of Bush\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo question I was much harder-line after 9-11,\u201d Cheney said, adding that the younger Bush wanted him to play a significant role on national security.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do disagree with his putting it on Lynne and Liz,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The book suggests that Jeb Bush isn\u2019t the only member of the current presidential field who has long had an interest in the White House. The elder Bush writes that when he was a presidential candidate in 1988, Donald Trump made an overture to be his vice presidential candidate, an idea that Bush found \u201cstrange and unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bush also traces his own evolution in thinking about gay marriage, writing: \u201cPersonally, I still believe in traditional marriage. But people should be able to do what they want to do, without discrimination. People have a right to be happy. I guess you could say I have mellowed.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press writers Hillel Italie in New York and Thomas Beaumont in New Hampshire contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow Nancy Benac on Twitter at http:\/\/twitter.com\/nbenac<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Former President George H. W. Bush has finally revealed what he really thinks of his son\u2019s presidency, faulting George W. Bush for setting an abrasive tone on the world stage and failing to rein in hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld. In a years-long series of interviews with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-15648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15648"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=15648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}