“The suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low,” Mr. Bush told a surprised Matt Lauer on NBC on Monday night.
“I didn’t appreciate it then; I don’t appreciate it now,” he added fiercely. “I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency.”
There was something jarring about suddenly seeing George W. Bush on screen again and it wasn’t just déjà vu. It was more like running into a former spouse after many years: no matter how bitter or amicable the separation, that first reunion is disconcerting — the ex seems both eerily the same and weirdly diminished. Two years ago he left office with two wars raging and an economy in free fall, an embattled commander in chief with the lowest approval ratings of any modern president. Now Mr. Bush is offering himself up as a chatty president emeritus, sometimes defiant and other times cheerful, on a media blitz to promote his memoir, “Decision Points.”
It was a fascinating, at times disarming, performance, but also a confusing one: a plea for understanding from a president who says he doesn’t give a fig about popularity. At one point, Mr. Bush boasted that when an acquaintance told him his approval ratings were up, he retorted, “Who cares?”
In the hourlong NBC News special, Mr. Bush talked about himself with the blend of candor and self-serving boilerplate that almost all book-promoting celebrities master on a publicity tour.
He told the very personal story of how as a teenager he drove his mother to the hospital after she suffered a miscarriage, and discovered how “straightforward” she was when she showed him the remains of the fetus in a jar.
He also gave an example of how out of control he could be before he gave up drinking. “So, I’m drunk at the dinner table at Mother and Dad’s house in Maine. And my brothers and sister are there, Laura’s there. And I’m sitting next to a beautiful woman, friend of Mother and Dad’s. And I said to her out loud, ‘What is sex like after 50?’ ”
When Mr. Lauer pressed him about his more critical decisions in office, Mr. Bush was both forthcoming and maddeningly opaque. He scoffed at the notion that he cared that critics viewed him as a puppet manipulated by his strong-willed vice president, Dick Cheney, then kept underscoring ways he had defied his No. 2, including by refusing to grant Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., a pardon after Mr. Libby was convicted of lying during the investigation into the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative. (Instead, Mr. Bush commuted his sentence.)
Mr. Bush ruefully acknowledged that he mishandled the Hurricane Katrina crisis, even writing a new script for his first trip to the disaster area. “I should have touched down in Baton Rouge, met with the governor, and, you know, walked out and said, ‘I hear you,’ ” he said. “And then got back on a flight up to Washington. I did not do that. And paid a price for it.”
But he refused to apply hindsight to the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Lauer asked him whether he would do the same thing again if he had known then what he knows now. Mr. Bush replied: “I, first of all, didn’t have that luxury. You just don’t have the luxury when you’re president.”
He added, “I will say definitely the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, as are 25 million people who now have a chance to live in freedom.”
It was a curious form of hedging from a president who prides on himself plain speaking.
There were other moments when Mr. Bush was defensive, but for the most part he looked more relaxed and unguarded than that at any time in his presidency, even chuckling about history’s final verdict. (“I hope I’m judged a success, but I’m going to be dead, Matt, when they finally figure it out.”) Throughout his tumultuous two terms, Mr. Bush rarely looked comfortable in formal interviews and news conferences.
This new book-tour persona harks back to his days as a presidential candidate, before the attacks of Sept. 11 and other crises curbed his breezy confidence and stiffened his demeanor.
Mr. Bush, who in the coming days will sit down with Oprah Winfrey and many other celebrity interviewers, says he wrote his book to give readers — and future historians — a sense of what his days in the White House were really like. Mostly, however, the NBC interview offered viewers a visceral reminder of what Mr. Bush was like before he entered the Oval Office.
