George H. W. Bush Goes In On Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in Upcoming Biography
In his new biography, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush, the former President reportedly takes a few good swipes at two of the most prominent sociopaths from the George W. Bush administration: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
There are at least two ways of looking at this: maybe this is a former president speaking with refreshing, mildly spicy frankness about a couple of world-historic assholes, or maybe it’s a dad working hard to insulate his son—who was the goddamn President—from responsibility for the all-time clusterfuck that is the ongoing War on Terror. Or maybe both.
At any rate, the elder Bush shared his criticisms of Cheney and Rumsfeld, according to a report from The Guardian.
On Cheney:
“I don’t know, he just became very hardline and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.”
[...]
“The reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His 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,” Bush told Meacham in the book to be published next Tuesday.
On Rumsfeld:
“I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president,” referring to his son.
“I’ve never been that close to him anyway. 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.
“Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow.”
Cheney, for his part, was unbothered by the former President’s comments, which surely represent the very-best-case-scenario for how history will remember him:
“I took it as a mark of pride,” he says. “The attack on 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor, in terms of the number of people killed, and the amount of damage done. I think a lot of people believed then, and still believe to this day that I was aggressive in defending, in carrying out what I thought were the right policies.”
People believed I was carrying out what I thought were the right policies. Uh huh.
Rumsfeld declined to comment. Destiny and Power will be released on November 10.
