by Jules Witcover

After poring through George W. Bush's 497-page presidential memoir, "Decision Points,"

I was somewhat startled to find what he identifies as "the worst moment of my presidency."

Was it when he got word of the 9/11 terrorist attacks? When he first personally witnessed the devastation at Ground Zero? When it was confirmed that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction?

No, on pages 325-26, he writes: "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn't like hearing people claim I had lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was a racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low. I told Laura at the time that was the worst moment of my presidency. I feel the same way today."

A page earlier, the former president writes about the much-criticized Bush administration's reaction to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy: "At an NBC telethon to raise money for Katrina victims, rapper Kanye West told a primetime TV audience, 'George Bush doesn't care about black people.' "

He continues: "Jesse Jackson later compared the New Orleans Convention Center to the 'hull of a slave ship.' A member of the Congressional Black Caucus claimed that if the storm victims had been 'white, middle-class Americans' they would have received more help."

Bush then mentions his father's vote in 1968 for the Open Housing Bill in Congress, that he himself "earned more black votes than any Republican governor in Texas history," and his appointments of Condoleezza Rice as the first black female national security adviser and the first two black secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Rice.

He also cites in defense his No Child Left Behind Act "ending the soft bigotry of low expectations," of a $15 billion anti-HIV/AIDS program in Africa and his efforts to rebuild historically black colleges on the Gulf Coast after Katrina.

These are all, certainly, very commendable initiatives underscoring Bush's sensitivity toward the well-being of black Americans. But of all the worst moments of his presidency -- which included launching the invasion of Iraq based on flawed intelligence in violation of the UN Charter -- the charge of "racism" by a celebrity rapper was the one that hit him hardest?

Memoirs are by their nature reminiscences of personal recollections. Nevertheless, Bush's memoir of one of the nation's most violent and controversial recent periods, capped by his war of choice costing more than 4,000 American lives in Iraq alone and at least tens of thousands of others there and in Afghanistan, seems at times remarkably self-centered.

Of his difficulty in reaching his wife from Air Force One on the morning of the 9/11 attacks, he writes: "I placed several calls, but the line kept dropping. I couldn't believe that the President of the United States couldn't reach his wife in the Capitol Building (where she was scheduled to testify before a Senate committee.) 'What the hell is going on?' I snapped at (chief of staff) Andy Card."

When the presidential plane landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana at Secret Service insistence rather than returning to Washington, Bush was swiftly ushered into a car, he writes, "which blasted off down the runway at what felt like 80 miles an hour. When the man behind the wheel started taking turns at that speed, I yelled, 'Slow down, son, there are no terrorists on this base!' It was probably the closest I came to death that day."

Later in the book, summarizing his case against Saddam Hussein, Bush notes that he "wasn't just a sworn enemy of America. He had fired on our aircraft (monitoring no-fly zones over Iraq), issued a statement praising 9/11 and made an assassination attempt on a former president, my father."

Pointing out indications of how the president viewed the immediate events of 9/11 in personal terms is not to suggest he didn't strongly recognize their colossal significance for national and even world security. But it boggles the mind that amid all that, a rapper's remark that he "doesn't care about black people" could be to him "the worst moment of my presidency."

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Winner-Take-All Politics, How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

Decision Points

 

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