Bush admits some mistakes in memoir

WASHINGTON – George W. Bush knows that history will shape his legacy more than anything he can say. But that’s not gonna stop a guy from trying.

After two years of near silence, Bush is back.

With his new memoir, “Decision Points,” and a promotion tour, the president who in cockier times could not think of a single mistake he had made, lists many. He counts the years without a post-9/11 attack as his transcendent achievement. He says the economic calamity he handed off to Barack Obama was “one ugly way to end a presidency.”

“Decision Points” puts Bush back in the public eye. He’ll be all over TV this week and beyond, from news and opinion shows to Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno.

But times have changed.

Hard-driving tea party adherents, a post-Bush movement, helped to power a Republican takeover of the House and gains in the Senate in the recent elections, seemingly light years from the “compassionate conservatism” that Bush said he hoped to bring to the White House from Texas a decade ago.

For all the sour struggles of his time in Washington and the divisiveness over war policy, Bush pushed Congress to spend billions more on education and ushered in prescription drug coverage for seniors in a major expansion of health care, now overshadowed by Obama’s overhaul. Those measures, too, are out of step with the Republican majority coming in.

Bush’s mistakes? In his view now, they range from a badly named piece of legislation (the Patriot Act, implying those who opposed it were unpatriotic) to the momentously consequential claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (a justification for war) when none were found.

He writes that he cut troop levels in Iraq too quickly. And that he misjudged the severity of the economic downturn in his final months as president, believing the U.S. might still avoid a recession even as “the house of cards was about to come tumbling down.”

“The decider,” as he called himself in the White House, says the fallout over the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina “cast a cloud” over his second term.

He says he should have acted sooner to order an evacuation and send troops, and did not show adequate empathy for victims.