I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: 'It Wasn't My Fault' and 'It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn't Been There.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'd worked at the White House for two years, and I'd read a bunch of White House memoirs because everybody who works at the White House, even for five minutes, writes a memoir usually not less than 600 pages long - and never without the word 'power' in the title.
I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.
If you write something the White House doesn't like, they take you in and say, 'If you ever write something like you did today, nobody from the White House will ever talk to you again,'
A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.
When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs.
In 2004, I wrote 'What We've Lost,' a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration's actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.
The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.
When words I uttered, believing them to be true, were exposed as false, I was constrained by my duties and loyalty to the President and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story of what I knew.
No opposing quotes found.