My record was strong I felt when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And-- it was a disgusting moment. BUSH: Don't care.
You're not saying that the worst moment in you're Presidency was watching the misery in Louisiana. You're saying it was when someone insulted you because of that. And it was a disgusting moment, pure and simple. Can you just give me your first reaction, your first emotions when you heard the news?
BUSH: I was sick to my stomach. Not only have they mistreated prisoners, they had disgraced the U. You said you felt blindsided by the information? Because I wasn't aware of the graphic nature of the pictures until later on. And some people in the White House expressed that-- my view into the newspapers, which then caused Secretary Rumsfeld to come in and offer his resignation.
And then he wrote a very gracious letter the second time. Which speaks to his character. I knew it would send a powerful signal to replace the leader of the Pentagon after such a grave mistake. But a big factor held me back. There was no obvious replacement for Don. Wasn't that the right message to send? BUSH: Now here's what happens. We're in the middle of war and if I couldn't have found somebody quickly to replace Secretary Rumsfeld, you'd have been on TV saying', "There's a vacuum at the Pentagon.
How can the President possibly not have found a Secretary of Defense with whom he is comfortable? And it's sending terrible signals to our troops. And the answer is I couldn't. BUSH: Drunk driving. I mean you get pulled over. I think you called it an Aussie kind of drinking. I'm-- here's the former President telling you. But I'm drinking no hands at a bar, yeah. BUSH: So he's taught me how to do this. And of course I have to be a follower at this point in time.
And so-- yeah, I drink it. I'm going ten miles an hour, both wheels on the sidewalk. And I get pulled over by Calvin, the local policeman, plead guilty, paid my fine.
I mean I guess the person closest to you knew. But it's not a story you related to anyone of importance for a very long time. I mean everybody knew. BUSH: But it-- for a while, it didn't matter. And then, all of a sudden, I'm in politics, and my girls are getting ready to drive. And it was-- I made a huge political mistake, and a miscalculation.
BUSH: Four days or five days before. BUSH: Election day. It was like, "How could he not have thought that this would get out? BUSH: I know. It's a stupid mistake. When you look back at that decision not to reveal that episode to anyone when you became a public figure-- where does that rank into decisions? Was really a bad choice.
And if I had to do it-- look, you don't get to do it over again. Bush in his first one-on-one television interview since leaving the Oval Office.
Since leaving office, President Bush has granted no one-on-one television interviews about his presidency. President Bush will talk to Lauer about the details of his upcoming book, Decision Points, to be released by Crown Publishers on November 9, and he will discuss the defining decisions he has made in his personal and political life.
There were flashes of sentimentality — almost entirely for his father — but, more frequently, there were sharp flares of the brattish bully boy one could easily imagine him having been as a teenager, and beyond. When he could tell that Lauer was about to ask a question he didn't like — why didn't he replace Rumsfeld after the Abu Ghraib scandal, what did he think when even Republicans were criticising the surge in , didn't he get only the legal advice that said what he wanted it to — Bush's response, every time, was a self-defensive smile which looked particularly weird when Lauer was reeling off details of waterboarding , followed by overly expansive hand gestures and, finally, sharp aggression shutting the question down.
Only occasionally was there any sign of self-recrimination, albeit just with his eyes, not his words:. Yet in his opinion, the worst moment of his presidency, according to Bush, and his suddenly hyperactive body language testified to the truth of his belief in this statement, was not any losses of life in Iraq, Afghanistan, New York or New Orleans — it was being criticised by Kanye West on TV who claimed that the president's slow reaction to the victims of Katrina proved he "doesn't care about black people":.
Bush made an irritated exhalation: "I also make it clear that the misery in Louisiana affected me deeply as well. But if Bush's body language was weird, than his answers at times were paradoxical to a point they could have been crafted by Lewis Carroll.
President Barack Obama is often criticised for superciliousness and arrogance. But these qualities in Bush were all too apparent in last night's interview, particularly in the way he would dance away from any acknowledgement of culpability by saying that he could "understand why people feel that way", whether it be about what he euphemistically called a "lack of a crisp response" to Hurricaine Katrina, or anger at the bank bailouts.
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