Bill Clinton said he’d tried it but hadn’t inhaled. George Bush decided that it was best just to duck the issue altogether. ”I wouldn’t answer the marijuana questions,” the president told a friend and adviser during his first presidential campaign. ”You know why? Because I don’t want some little kid doing what I tried.”
The implied admission that the president used marijuana comes in a series of taperecorded conversations between the future president and Doug Wead, an author and aide to the first president Bush, published on the eve of his fence-mending trip to Europe.
In another aside, Bush displays his sense of destiny. ”It’s me versus the world,” he tells Wead. ”The good news is, the world is on my side. Or more than half of it.” The private conversations, recorded between 1998 and 2000 without the knowledge of the then governor of Texas, reveal him to be both repentant and unrepentant.
Warned that journalists were talking about his ”immature” past, including allegations of cocaine use and drunken driving, Bush insisted that he had ”not denied anything” and said that he intended to turn his past to his advantage.
”That’s part of my schtick,” he said, ”which is, look, we have all made mistakes … What you need to say time and time again is not talk about the details of your transgressions but talk about what I have learned. I’ve sinned and I’ve learned.”
The recordings, which were reported in The New York Times, show the future president to be alternately cocky, bullish, confident in his faith and concerned about the influence of Christian fundamentalists. ”I got to tell you two things right off the bat,” he says he told one prominent evangelical minister. ”One, I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”
Asked about a pledge he had reportedly made not to hire gays, he told Wead, who he referred to as ”Weadie” or ”Weadnik”: ”No, what I said was, I wouldn’t fire gays.”
Bush also revealed himself to be not averse to the mudslinging that characterises elections, while simultaneously taking offence when others got rough with him. ”He’s gone ugly on me, man,” he said after former vice-president Dan Quayle, then a rival candidate for the presidential nomination, had criticised Bush’s past. Speaking in general terms of the campaign, he said: ”I may have to get a little rough for a while, but that is what the old man [George Bush senior] had to do with Dukakis, remember?”
Wead said he had decided to make the tapes public because historical interest outweighed the personal relationship between the two men. ”Like him or not, he is going to be a huge historical figure,” he said.
The White House, while acknowledging that the recordings were genuine, refused to comment directly on their contents, saying only that ”the governor was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend”. Asked about drug use, the spokesperson said: ”That has been asked and answered so many times there is nothing more to add.” – Guardian Unlimited Â