Blake Hall
Former President George H. W. Bush certainly didn’t mince words in his new skyscrapingly-titled biography, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. Particularly about his two former staffers: ol’ Dick Cheney and ol’ Donny Rumsfeld.
Considering they both worked with him and his son, George W. Bush (and perhaps labored more famously with his boy “Dubya”) there are a number of different ways you can absorb and analyze this trash talk.
Is he playing proud papa? Or is he, like his 91-year-old skin, simply being loose in his frank take on the notorious American politicos?
However you take it, take it, because we’re serving it up for you, right here …
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.”
The book is scheduled to be released on November 10.