George H.W. Bush Settles Old Scores With Cheney and Rumsfeld

One of the benefits of being 91 is you don’t have to hold back anymore—you can say what you want. And in a new biography, former President George H.W. Bush tells Jon Meacham just what he thinks about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s work in his son’s administration, as reported by Fox News and The New York Times.

“He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” the elder Bush said of the man who served as his secretary of defense. “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.” He said Cheney built “his own empire.”

“I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here—iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” George H.W. Bush said. (One takeaway from the book is Bush’s love of the phrase “iron-ass,” which seems at once like a dated Yankee descriptor and also delightfully vivid.)

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He was even harsher about Rumsfeld, who he deemed an “arrogant fellow.”

“I think he served the president badly,” Bush said. “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything. 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.”

Bush—or 41, as the family calls him, in contrast to his son, 43—doesn’t let George W. Bush off the hook entirely.

“The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department,” he said. “I think they overdid that. But it’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault.” He also told Meacham, “I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there—some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him.”

The scathing remarks may be explicitly about what happened between 2001 and 2009, but they’re rooted in much longer disagreements and feuds, running back some four decades.

Most prominently, Bush and Rumsfeld have been rivals for power since Gerald Ford was president. Rumsfeld was Ford’s chief of staff, while Bush—who had chaired the Republican National Committee in the closing days of the Nixon White House—was appointed envoy to China. The resignations of Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew had left the vice presidency open, and Bush was a top candidate for the post. Rumsfeld, however, pushed hard for Nelson Rockefeller, who ultimately got the job, thinking he was a greater asset at the ballot-box. During the search process, news emerged of potential campaign-finance irregularities during Bush’s unsuccessful 1970 campaign for Senate from Texas. Some observers believed that it was Rumsfeld who had leaked the news in an effort to hurt Bush’s chances. The scandal kept popping back up to hurt Bush throughout the rest of his political career.

Ford later regretted taking Rumsfeld’s advice, choosing Bob Dole over Rockefeller for the ticket when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection in 1976.*