[NYTr] Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Sep 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/washington/02book.html


In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy

By JIM RUTENBERG

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.”

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agreement that they would not be published until shortly before the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.”

But as Mr. Draper described it, and as the transcripts show, Mr. Bush
warmed up considerably over the intervening interviews, chewing on an
unlit cigar, jubilantly swatting at flies between making solemn points,
propping his feet up on a table or stopping him at points to say
emphatically, “I want you to get this” or “I want this damn book to be
right.”

Mr. Bush went on to share private thoughts that appeared to reflect a
level of sorrow and presidential isolation that he strongly implied he
took pains to hide, a state of being that he seemed to view as coming
with the presidency and with which he professed to be at peace.

Telling Mr. Draper he likes to keep things “relatively light-hearted”
around the White House, he added in May, “I can’t let my own worries —
I try not to wear my worries on my sleeve; I don’t want to burden them
with that.”

“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Mr.
Bush told Mr. Draper, by way of saying he sought to avoid it. “This is
a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”

In the same interview, Mr. Bush seemed to indicate that he had his down
moments at home, saying of his wife, Laura, “Back to the self-pity
point — she reminds me that I decided to do this.”

And in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, he continued, “This
group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one
person that can decide, and that’s the president.”

Mr. Draper said Mr. Bush took issue with him for unearthing details of
a meeting in April 2006 at which he took a show-of-hands vote on the
future of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was among his
closest advisers. Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper he had no recollection of
it, but he said he disagreed with the implication that he regularly
governed by staff vote. (According to Mr. Draper’s book, the vote was 7
to 4 for Mr. Rumsfeld’s ouster, with Mr. Bush being one of the no
votes. Mr. Rumsfeld stayed on months longer.)

In response to Mr. Draper’s observance that Mr. Bush had nobody’s
“shoulder to cry on,” the president said: “Of course I do, I’ve got
God’s shoulder to cry on, and I cry a lot.” In what Mr. Draper
interpreted as a reference to war casualties, Mr. Bush added, “I’ll bet
I’ve shed more tears than you can count as president.”

Yet Mr. Bush said his certainty that Iraq would turn around for the
better was not for show. “You can’t fake it,” he told Mr. Draper in
December.

Mr. Bush conveyed a level of sanguinity with his unpopularity. Mr.
Draper recalled that in their last meeting, in May, Mr. Bush pointed
outside to his dog, Barney, and said, “That guy who said if you want a
friend in Washington get a dog, knew what he was talking about.”

He otherwise addressed his unpopularity as a tactical issue. For
instance, in May he said that this fall it would be up to General
Petraeus to convince the public that the Iraq strategy is working.

“I’ve been here too long,” Mr. Bush said, according to Mr. Draper.
“Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and
then it doesn’t make it on the news.”

But he said he saw his unpopularity as a natural result of his decision
to pursue a strategy in which he believed. “I made a decision to lead,”
he said, “One, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you
of unilateral arrogance, and that may be true. But the fundamental
question is, is the world better off as a result of your leadership?”

Mr. Bush has often said that will be for historians decide, but he said
during his sessions with Mr. Draper that they would have to consult
administration documents to get to the bottom of some important
questions.

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq
when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy
was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq
administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s
dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush
said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy,
what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of
this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security
adviser.

Mr. Bush said he believed that Mr. Hussein did not take his threats of
war seriously, suggesting that the United Nations emboldened him by
failing to follow up on an initial resolution demanding that Iraq
disarm. He had sought a second measure containing an ultimatum that
failure to comply would result in war.

“One interesting question historians are going to have to answer is:
Would Saddam have behaved differently if he hadn’t gotten mixed signals
between the first resolution and the failure of the second resolution?”
Mr. Bush said. “I can’t answer that question. I was hopeful that
diplomacy would work.”

It did not, but soon enough, somebody else will make the decisions on
Iraq. And then, Mr. Bush said, he would still be pursuing his “freedom
agenda” at his institute, modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution,
where young democratic leaders from around the world would study.

“Sixty-two is really young,” Mr. Bush said, “and yet I’ll be through
with my presidency.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times