WASHINGTON — Former President George H.W. Bush’s unusually sharp
indictment of his son’s presidential advisers touched off a round of
recriminations Thursday that exposed rifts within America’s leading
political dynasty and complicated its efforts to recapture the White
House.
Bush’s assertion in a new biography that Vice President Dick Cheney
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld undercut George W. Bush’s
presidency rattled the extended Bush political world and forced the
second Bush son now seeking the presidency, Jeb, to straddle an awkward
line between family and politics.
At
91 and in the twilight of a long and storied public life, the George
H.W. Bush evidently felt free to express views he had long suppressed in
the interest of family harmony. Cheney, he said, was “very hard-line”
and too eager to “use force to get our way”; Rumsfeld was an “arrogant
fellow” full of “swagger.” He used the same phrase, “iron-ass,” to
describe both men.
The comments, included in Jon Meacham’s “Destiny and
Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” to be
published by Random House next week, drew a biting retort from Rumsfeld
on Thursday. “Bush 41 is getting up in years and misjudges Bush 43, who I
found made his own decisions,” Rumsfeld said in a statement.
The father’s comments also prompted the son to come to his advisers’ defense.
“I am proud to have served with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld,” said
George W. Bush. “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.”
No one was put in a more uncomfortable position than Jeb Bush, who
has labored to define his own identity separate from that of his famous
father and brother while mounting his own campaign for the White House
this year. Once again he was compelled Thursday to talk about his family
rather than his plans for the country. On the campaign trail, he
suggested his father was trying to find a way to take the heat off
George W. Bush by faulting advisers for troubles in his administration.
“My brother is a big boy,” Jeb Bush told NBC News. “His
administration was shaped by his thinking, his reaction to the attack on
9/11. I think my dad, like a lot of people that love George, want to
try to create a different narrative, perhaps, just because that’s
natural to do.”
Jeb Bush said Cheney “served my brother well as vice president and he
served my dad extraordinarily well as secretary of defense.”
He added: “We have to get beyond, I think, this feeling that somehow 1991 is the same as 2001.”
The seemingly divergent messages from Bush family members represented
the latest chapter in a long-running and at times operatic drama. For
years, the relationship between the two Bush presidents has captivated
the nation, generating endless speculation, articles, books, television
reports and a big-screen movie — “W.” — that starred Josh Brolin and was
directed by Oliver Stone.
Caught in the middle now is the next son, who is trying to accomplish
what no family has done in U.S. history with a third Bush
administration.
Those who have worked for either of the two presidents strongly
testify to their deep love and scoff at what they call overwrought
Oedipal theories of rivalry and resentment. Last year, George W. Bush
published his own biography of his father, venerating him in loving
terms. The elder George Bush has often bristled at criticism of his son.
Both men hate being “put on the couch,” to use a phrase each one
employs.
Yet few who know them well would assert that they see the world
exactly the same way. The younger, brasher and more conservative George
W. Bush has made clear that he shaped some of his policies in the White
House based on the lessons of what he saw as his father’s mistakes.
Friends of the older, more genteel and moderate George Bush have often
said he was deeply uncomfortable with the more hawkish elements of his
son’s administration.
In the new book, George Bush expresses his love and
support for his son and sticks by his decisions to go to war in Iraq and
remove Saddam Hussein from power. But he gently chides his son for “hot
rhetoric” like his “axis of evil” speech and says the real
responsibility for the way Cheney and Rumsfeld operated belonged to the
president.
“The buck stops there,” he said.
What was so surprising about the comments was not their sentiment but
rather that the older Bush would express them in public. When Meacham
went back to show him a transcript of his remarks and ask if he wanted
to clarify, the ex-president took none of it back.
“That’s what I said,” he told Meacham.
The remarks reflect a long history with Cheney and Rumsfeld. The
elder Bush and Rumsfeld were rivals going back to the 1970s, and
although Cheney served as his defense secretary, Bush told Meacham that
Cheney had changed as vice president.
Speaking with Fox News on Thursday, Cheney took the comments in stride, saying he viewed “iron-ass” as a compliment.
“I took it as a mark of pride,” he said. Given the devastating losses
on Sept. 11, 2001, he said, many would agree that “I was aggressive in
defending, in carrying out what I thought were the right policies.”
Having never written a true memoir of his own, the elder Bush
effectively decided to use Meacham’s book as a last chance to make his
case for history.
Bush opened up to Meacham in a series of interviews from 2006 to 2015
in which he spoke more candidly than many politicians would. He
described his youth, when he “lusted” after pretty girls, including a
couple who “had nice racks.” He also mused about his friend Bill
Clinton’s marriage.
“I don’t feel close to Hillary at all,” Bush said, “but I do to Bill and I can’t read their relationship even today.”
Like so many former presidents, he measured himself against the 42
other men who have held his office. “I feel like an asterisk,” he told
Meacham wistfully one day at the family’s cliffside house in
Kennebunkport, Maine.
“I am lost between the glory of Reagan — monuments everywhere,
trumpets, the great hero — and the trials and tribulations of my sons,”
Bush reflected on another day in Houston, where he also has a home.
On still another occasion, he fretted about the judgment of historians.
“What if they just find an empty deck of cards?” he asked.
Diaries that Bush gave to Meacham opened a contemporaneous window
into his time in office. Even in private, Bush seemed determined through
the first war with Iraq in 1991 but afterward fell into an emotional
despondency, a “letdown,” once he was no longer at the center of a
profound mission. He considered not running for a second term.
“I’m not in a good frame of mind now,” he dictated into his diary
shortly after U.S. troops vanquished Iraqi forces and expelled them from
Kuwait. “My whole point is, I really don’t care and that’s bad — that’s
bad. But I’ll get in there and try.”
For a president who lost re-election in 1992 after being perceived as
out of touch, Bush sensed his political doom even when he was at the
peak of his postwar popularity.
“The common wisdom today is that I’ll win in a runaway, but I don’t
believe that,” he dictated in March 1991 as he returned on Air Force One
from a rally with troops. “I think it’s going to be the economy” that
“will make that determination. I think I can talk proudly about what
happened in Desert Storm, but I think it will be overshadowed in the
fall of ’92 by other issues.”
On that, at least, he proved prescient.
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