POLITICS - Bush on Bush

"What did Bush 41 think of his son’s presidency?  New bio reveals" PBS NewsHour 11/5/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In writing “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” Jon Meacham was given unprecedented access to the Bush family and their personal diaries.  Judy Woodruff sits down with Meacham to talk about what he learned about the former President, as well as what Bush 41 thought of his son George W.’s administration.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Biographies don’t always make news, but a new book on George H.W. Bush is garnering headlines across the country today for how Bush 41 felt about his son’s response to the 9/11 attacks and subsequent invasion of Iraq, among other things.

The book will not be published until next week, but we have an early look.  For “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” Jon Meacham, the executive editor at Random House, relied not only on extensive interviews of the president’s family, staff, and friends, but also on the nearly daily audio diaries the President recorded while in the White House.

Judy Woodruff talked with him earlier this week for the NewsHour Bookshelf.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Jon Meacham, welcome.

JON MEACHAM, Author, Destiny and Power:  Thank you, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  You had extraordinary, maybe unprecedented access to this president, all of his diaries, Barbara Bush’s diaries, the ability to interview almost everybody in the family.  Why do you think they trusted you with all this?

JON MEACHAM:  Well, I hope they felt that I would call it like I saw it, which was the sort of the mandate from the president.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  A life of privilege.  I mean, he certainly grew up in this family involved in politics, great wealth, but he also had a sense of responsibility from a very early age.  What do you think shaped him?

JON MEACHAM:  Well, you know, he comes out of the same world of noblesse oblige that shaped Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, and, frankly, some of the founding fathers.

You could argue that, culturally and temperamentally, George H.W. Bush has more in common with the founders than he does with his successors generationally, in terms of their life experience.  You know, his mother was hugely important.  She was very religious and very competitive in equal parts, I think, it’s safe to say.

And he believed in the doctrine, to whom much is given, much is expected.  What’s really interesting, I think — and I hadn’t realized this until I got into Mrs. Bush’s diary — is that there was an expectation, there was a sense that he could be president, that possibility was within the realm of the probable, as early as the 1950s.