Saying “I had my moment,” former President George W. Bush told Oprah Winfrey Tuesday that he is done with public life.
“I view politics as a chapter in my life, and not my life,” Bush said.
The former president, whose eight years in the White House were among the most consequential in modern history, said he’s not going to start criticizing President Obama, either.
“Zero desire,” Bush said. “You’re not going to see me out there, chirping away.”
Bush has emerged from two relatively quiet years living in Dallas to push his new book, “Decision Points,” which was officially released Tuesday.
Joking that many believed he couldn’t read, “let alone write” a book, Bush recounted for Winfrey his decision to quit drinking at age 40 and his thoughts on Hurricane Katrina, the 2001 terrorist attacks and other pivotal moments of his presidency.
Chris Reardon, a political scientist and pollster at the University of New Hampshire, said Bush’s efforts at retroactively shaping his legacy are standard fare for presidents who leave office, but that it may take a while to rehabilitate the Bush brand.
“If you look at the midterm elections, nobody seemed to mention Bush at all,” Reardon said. “His war on terror is not even part of the dialogue.”
About 44 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Bush, a slight improvement over his approval ratings at the time he left office in 2008, according to a Gallup poll. But 53 percent still view him unfavorably, the poll showed. SClBChatting with Winfrey, Bush defended the still-disputed rationale for launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying everybody believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
“When we didn’t find weapons, I felt terrible about it, I felt sick about it, and I still do,” Bush said.
While U.S. officials made a strong case in 2003 to the United Nations about Iraq’s weapons capabilities, some U.S. and international weapons inspectors and others at the time objected, saying no weapons existed.
In an earlier interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, Bush said he never considered apologizing for the mistake.
“I mean, apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision,” Bush said. “And I don’t believe it was the wrong decision. I thought the best way to handle this was to find out why — and what — went wrong, and to remedy it.”
While Bush expressed no regrets about the invasion of Iraq, his book promotion has featured significant self-recrimination about the 2005 federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
SClB”We could have done a much better job,” Bush told Winfrey.
He has repeatedly expressed anger and pique over rapper Kanye West’s claim that Bush didn’t “care about black people,” calling it the worst moment of his presidency.
“To accuse me of being a racist is disgusting,” Bush said, squinting hard.
BFor those who may be nostalgic for the former president’s unique elocutions, Bush did tell Winfrey that post-Katrina New Orleans looked like it had been hit by “a nukular bomb.”
