When President Bush is asked what he plans to do when he leaves office, he often replies curtly: “I don’t have that much time to think beyond my presidency” or “I’m going to sprint to the finish.”
But in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office last December, he daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.
First, Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”
Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will run what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute” promoting global democracy. But he added, “I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”
For now, though, Bush told the author, Robert Draper, in a later session, “I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”
In his nearly seven years as president, Bush has rarely let his guard down with journalists to reveal much of his personal side. But over the course of six roughly hourlong interviews with Draper, Bush shared his inner life at the White House.
Draper agreed to share portions of his transcripts from those interviews, and the book itself, with The New York Times under the agreement that they would not be published until shortly before the book, “Dead Certain,” is released Tuesday.
The transcripts and the book show Bush as being keenly interested in what history will say about his term and, ultimately, as being at once sorrowful and optimistic — but virtually alone as commander in chief.
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Bush appeared to reflect a level of sorrow and isolation that he strongly implied he took pains to hide. Telling Draper he likes to keep things “relatively light-hearted” around the White House, he added in May, “I can’t let my own worries — I try not to wear my worries on my sleeve; I don’t want to burden them with that.”
“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Bush told Draper. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”