George H.W. Bush: Dick Cheney ‘Had His Own Empire’ At White House and I have implicated my son to invade Iraq

issuing scathing critiques of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In interviews with his biographer, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Cheney had built “his own empire” and asserted too much “hard-line” influence within George W. Bush’s White House in pushing for the use of force around the world. Mr. Rumsfeld, the elder Mr. Bush said, was an “arrogant fellow” who could not see how others thought and “served the president badly", According to what American Media said .

Mr. Bush’s sharp assessments, contained in a biography by Jon Meacham to be published by Random House next week, gave voice to sentiments that many long suspected he had harbored but kept private until now. While he continued to praise his son, he did tell Mr. Meacham that the younger Mr. Bush was responsible for empowering Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld and was at times too bellicose in his language.

“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,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Meacham. “Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.”

Asked for specifics, Mr. Bush cited his son’s State of the Union address in 2002, when he described an “axis of evil” that included Iraq, Iran and North Korea. “You go back to the ‘axis of evil’ and these things and I think that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything,” he said.

The biography, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” is coming out as the country is focused once again on the Bush family and its place in the American firmament. With Jeb Bush, Mr. Bush’s second son, struggling in his campaign for the White House, the family that has held the White House the longest in the modern age now faces the possibility that its time has passed.

But the first George Bush, now 91 and frail from a form of Parkinson’s disease, has seen his reputation rise again with the passage of time, and Mr. Meacham’s largely admiring biography offers the most definitive account to date about the nation’s 41st president. Mr. Meacham, a former editor of Newsweek and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, spent years doing research for the book, which is based in part on interviews with the former president and diaries he and his wife, Barbara, kept.

The book, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” also contains the elder Bush’s ruminations about his son, whom he praised but also called responsible for empowering Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Of Cheney, who was a member of the elder Bush’s cabinet, Bush said, “He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.”

Bush said he thinks the Sept. 11 attacks changed the vice president, making him more hawkish about the use of U.S. military force abroad.

“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,” Bush said.

Bush said Cheney “had his own empire.”

“He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer,” Bush said, according to The Times. “It just showed me that you cannot do it that way. The president should not have that worry.”

Talking about Rumsfeld, the elder Bush used stronger, more personal criticism, the newspaper reported.

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

The elder Bush did not suggest in the book that he disagreed with his son about the invasion of Iraq.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “is gone, and with him went a lot of brutality and nastiness and awfulness,” Bush said.

He said he worried that the younger Bush used rhetoric that was at times too strong, citing as an example the 43rd president’s 2002 State of the Union address, during which he described an “axis of evil.”

“You go back to the ‘axis of evil’ and these things and I think that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything,” he said.