In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy
by: arhan | Total views: 131 | Word Count: 776 | View PDF | Print View
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — When President Bush is asked what he plans to
do when he leaves office, he often replies curtly: “I don’t have that
much time to think beyond my presidency” or “I’m going to sprint to the
finish.”
President Bush at the White House earlier this year with the author Robert Draper.
But in an interview with a
book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he daydreamed
about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.
First,
Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’
coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21
million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more
than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of
money.”
Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where
he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute”
promoting democracy around the world. But he added, “I can just
envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”
For
now, though, Mr. Bush told the author, Robert Draper, in a later
session, “I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the
Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him
achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in
a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about
sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”
But fully aware of his standing in opinion polls, Mr. Bush said his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would perhaps do a better job selling progress to the American people than he could.
In
his nearly seven years as president, Mr. Bush has rarely let his guard
down with journalists to reveal much of his personal side. But over the
course of six roughly hourlong interviews with Mr. Draper, Mr. Bush
shared his inner life at the White House. He at times mused
philosophically and introspectively, and at others spoke forcefully
about his confidence in his own decisions.
Mr. Draper agreed to
share parts of his transcripts from those interviews, and the book
itself, with The New York Times under the agreement that they would not
be published until shortly before the book, “Dead Certain” (Free
Press), is officially released on Tuesday.
The transcripts and
the book show Mr. Bush as being keenly interested in what history will
say about his term despite his frequent comments to the contrary; as
being in a reflective mode as his time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
dwindles; and, ultimately, as being at once sorrowful and optimistic —
but virtually alone as commander in chief, and aware of it.
Aides
said Mr. Bush agreed to speak so freely with Mr. Draper only after
years of lobbying, in which Mr. Draper said he finally convinced Mr.
Bush and his aides that he was writing about him as “a consequential
president” for history, not for the latest news cycle. And aides said
they saw the book as the first effort to write about Mr. Bush in the
context of nearly his entire presidency.
The lobbying
culminated at a meeting at the White House last August in which Mr.
Bush grilled Mr. Draper on why he should cooperate with him of all the
authors likely to come knocking. Mr. Draper replied that his book could
provide “the raw material” for others after him, a point Mr. Bush
apparently came to embrace.
Mr. Draper, a Texan like Mr. Bush and
a former writer for Texas Monthly, spent hours interviewing Mr. Bush
and his close circle of aides in 1998, when he wrote an early, defining
article on Mr. Bush’s budding presidential candidacy for GQ magazine.
Mr.
Draper’s family also has a history with Mr. Bush’s. Mr. Bush’s father
in 1982 was an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of Mr. Draper’s
grandfather, Leon Jaworski, a special prosecutor in the Watergate
scandal.
As Mr. Draper described it, Mr. Bush began the interview
process over lunch last Dec. 12, in a week when he suddenly had free
time because his highly anticipated announcement of a new Iraq strategy
had been postponed.
Sitting in an anteroom of the Oval Office,
he eschewed the more formal White House menu for comfort food — a
low-fat hotdog and ice cream — and bitingly told an aide who peeked in
on the session that his time with Mr. Draper was “worthless anyway.”
About the Author
arhan
Rating: Not yet rated
