Uncommon Knowledge: George W. Bush

in this campaign season we're likely to hear about life inside the white house our guest today one of the very few in a position to do so and he'll be talking about life after the white house with us in dallas the 43rd president of the united states of america george w bush uncommon knowledge now to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson in 1994 george w bush was elected 46th governor of texas four years later he was re-elected with a record 69 percent of the vote in 2000 mr bush was elected 43rd president of the united states four years later he won a second term in november 2010 mr bush published decision points a book describing critical decisions in his personal life and his presidency the same month he hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for the george w bush presidential center located on the campus of southern methodist university just a few miles from where we're taping today the george w bush presidential center is now nearing completion mr president first things first two years in a row your beloved texas rangers have gone to the series and come away without the commissioner's trophy yes they're five games up in their division as we you and i speak could this be this is the year peter uh first of all the fact that we got to the world series uh was miraculous to many ranger fans but now that we're used to the world series uh game six of uh last year is uh still represents major heartbreak i mean it was one you were there weren't you no i wasn't there i was there for the home games but this was in st louis and so laura and i were in crawford and uh i went to the game last night with nolan ryan and it's still painful for both of us to relive the moment uh but it was listen uh we had never experienced pennant fever in the metroplex and it it was very exciting sadly lost to the giants who you're probably for and then the cardinals and uh but nevertheless it was uh it was uh really exciting this is the year this is the year this is here i don't know we'll see segment one the afterlife yeah while you were still in the white house you write in decision points mrs bush began referring to your post-presidential years as the afterlife right so here are a few model afterlives john quincy adams leaves the white house goes right back into public service serves in the house of representatives bill clinton former president clinton places himself right in the media center of the world new york city on the other hand you've got harry truman he goes home to independence missouri sets himself up totally satisfied being a prominent citizen of independence missouri and nothing else for the rest of his life how did you think through what you wanted to accomplish in your afterlife well the other person uh who has served as a role model for me for a long time is george h.w bush who famously said uh you know once you leave the stage you stay off the stage and i thought long and hard about that and decided that the uh not being on the stage was something i was comfortable with i mean peter you know there's really no sacrifice in serving the country particularly if you love the country like i do but uh if there is one it's loss of anonymity and to to a certain extent i'm trying to or as best as i can trying to regain it secondly i think it's bad for the presidency to have former presidents bloviating opining or telling people how it ought to be done uh and uh and so i'm you know this is a rare occasion for me and i'm thankful you're here but i really don't want to be in the public eye anymore and feel a certain sense of liberation not being out there you like it better you like it better i really do i mean look eight years was awesome and you know i was famous and i was powerful and uh but i have i have no desire for fame and power anymore i i don't want to undermine our president or whoever president and a former president can do that and uh i think it's bad for the presidency itself and so i'm pretty content the afterlife really what she should have said was uh we're now getting ready to start a new chapter in our life after life being the afterlife of the presidency but uh afterlife kind of gives a sense that you know something's all over right right right uh and i have found that there's you know life after the presidency is awesome presidential libraries again a couple different models the reagan library sits high on a hill in southern california magnificent structure yes isolated but magnificent then you've got your dad's library at texas a m where he made a very conscious decision to include a teaching branch of his institution with three dozen very impressive fellows at the bush school for government and public policy a grant grant awarding peace branch of texas a m so it's integrated into the academic mission of the university so how did you decide what what you wanted for the bush center what was your center we forgot to talk about the hoover institute widely admired by the way and by a lot of people including me so i wanted to figure out a way to remain engaged in policy uh i wanted to defend certain principles without being involved with politics and we just started the hoover model which is uh a place of great intellectual depth uh you know obviously i'd worked with some eddie lazier and conde and john cogan yeah cogan and taylor right all of them were really bright smart people who contribute to the dialogue on the other hand uh we wanted to be different explain what you mean by that well i mean that as a result of uh uh our kind of strategizing on certain issues and our uh our defense of certain principles there are tangible results i mean meaningful results in people's lives being changed that we can point to and so anyway so i want to be involved with um for example the defense of human freedom it's a principle i believe is important uh and i also thought we ought to be involved with higher education i thought it would add oomph to our programs and so i began to look around and smu approached us laura went to smu karen hughes went to smu harriet myers went to smu so i knew a lot of people going to smu smu happens to be located in the heart of dallas they've got an alumni base that is active and willing to spend money they were willing to contribute 14 acres of land in the heart of dallas and as importantly they were willing to negotiate a governance structure which meant we were a part of smu but the the course of the institute was not going to be determined by smu right and that's important right and we studied the hoover model by the way to determine the degree of independence that one can achieve uh uh once you become associated with higher ed last question before i want to go through these you mentioned human freedom right i want to go through a few of those last question undergrad at yale business school degree at harvard baylor is closer to crawford yeah so smu well it must have been there must have been a bidding process there a little slight uh baylor yeah they were serious contention but it turns out that uh smu for a variety of reasons some of which i just outlined became became the ideal position one of the things that makes us unique is that we uh in the middle of a big city that's easy to access and what we've got pretty good convening power so like when the dalai lama came down as a gift to the bush center it was easy for him to get here and so the facility of travel also was a part of our consideration right okay segment two global health yeah we'll take one of your big initiatives the bush institute has so far committed itself to six initiatives we probably won't have time to get through all six but i'd like to talk about a few global health education reform economic growth human freedom military service and a women's initiative yeah let's talk about global health the institute's pink ribbon red ribbon program and i'm quoting now from the institute's website quote leveraging the president's emergency plan for aids relief established under president george w bush which means we've got to step back and talk for a second about pepfar yeah the president's emergency plan for aids relief you enacted the program in 2003 committing the united states to spending 15 billion over five years principally in africa and as best i can tell you sit down today and google around on pepfar and what you get is a unanimous view that it worked according to a 2009 study this is just one of many studies in the annals of internal medicine in africa the program pepfar the program saved more than one million lives how did you come to make that decision this country had never done anything of that school correct so in life you got to set priorities um i also believe that a principle worth defending which we will defend at the bush center is to whom much is given much is required i believe we're a blessed nation that is therefore have a sense of responsibility to the extent we can to help others in this case there was a pandemic destroying an entire generation of people and i didn't see how i could be president of a powerful the most powerful and the richest nation and not lend our support to saving lives i mean it would have been unconscionable not to act and so i thought it was in our moral interest to act i thought also knew his international security interest act much of my presidency obviously was affected by uh 911 and the ideological war that 911 represented there was there's an ideological and the anime could only recruit and they find hopeless people i thought nothing that would be very difficult to find anybody more hopeless than a child who mother and dad died of aids and wealthy nations did nothing to help and so i viewed it in our national security and our moral interest to put together a strategy that was not paternalistic like many aids programs but one based upon partnership uh and a with a comprehensive strategy in the most affected nations on the continent of africa and it worked and for that i'm grateful the pink ribbon red ribbon program now we're talking about the bush institute's program to combat cervical and breast cancer specifically the program aims to reduce deaths from cervical cancer in africa by 24 in five years by the way what i just read is typical of the kind of thing you read and the bush institute website over and over we have a specific aim we intend to measure what we do and tend to be time specific yeah um how how how do you how will you build on the pepfar is this you're using relationships you've established in africa well it's actually one our ability to lay out a strategy in other words it's important for people to understand that many women who've got the aids virus also get the virus that causes cancer and that is not much to detect in other words all it requires is an effort secondly we convince the state department to allow us to add the cervical cancer cam component to the aids component on the platforms that already exist so you're adding a test adding customers and thirdly uh we've convinced drug companies and others to join us in a collaborative effort we started very much like pepfar we started with uh we're starting with the most affected nations where we know leadership will step up and so zambia is where we started first lady of zambia is very much involved with encouraging screening and helping develop an infrastructure that enables women to be screened about 15 000 or so women have been screened in zambia in the first couple of months of the program so there's a lot of awareness that's taking place the idea is to go to you know three or four affected countries and hopefully spawn copycats and we don't need to we don't need to be the author of every in every country but we'd like to be the catalyst for others to say wow this initiative works therefore let's join uh the joint venture the bush center's put together and or let's copy what the joint venture's done and what i tell people have contributed to our institute is that uh five years from now uh we will be able to show you that thousands now live and i challenge them by saying do you think it's worth it does the human condition matter one of the principles that we defend at the bush center is all life is precious that's very controversial uh in a political arena it shouldn't be but it is because obviously it connotes all kinds of issues but i think it's i think it's a principle that makes that that that helps define america in many ways you said you don't mind being a former president yeah and yet when i hear you talk you enjoy using what's left to you the bully pulpit well i do to a certain extent but people listen to you because you're you people will give money you can energize this program yeah because what you and one reason i think i can is because people realize it is apart from the political process um you know either you're in or out of politics peter and i've chosen to be out i mean you can't be halfway you you know and given the environment today with all the blogs and this that and the other i mean it's like you know i told it's a pretty unattractive metaphor but i said i crawled out of the swamp and i'm not crawling back in and uh you know i'm interested in politics i'm i'm uh you know i'm a supporter of mitt romney i hope he does well but you know he can do well without me okay last question on africa let me quote to you dambisa moyo dambisa moyo is a zambian author economist trained at goldman sachs and she's a little leery of the aids which is let me just give you the quotation yes we can send hiv drugs to africa but are we creating an environment in africa to make sure that in 10 years or 20 years african governments are going to take responsibility for this we africans are not supposed to be tapping into the american tax base yeah she's probably right in the long run in the short run they needed to tap into the american base they need somebody to pay for the antiretroviral drugs now africans are responsible for developing the infrastructure so the anti-retrovirals make it you know beyond the reaches of the capital for example uh but one of the parts of the strategy in pepfar was to convince african governments to develop a strategy and the tactics that would work and behind the u.s effort is a is a infrastructure that's now developing by africans and so so it's coming along absolutely but i mean the question is what would happen if the americans didn't intervene and therefore by the way the rest of the world following right uh and thousands if not millions would have died and then you had had a a a continent where an entire generation of people had been wiped out and then you had been dealing with a lot bigger problems right from an article earlier this month in the dallas morning news quote at home there's still no consensus about the record of george w bush in africa he's a hero i don't know how to ask this question without making it sound crass but does it irk you that you and your administration don't get more no correct doesn't bother you at all look my my time as president is over i did what i did i wrote a book and people are really interested to find out why i decided what i decided they ought to read the book but the debate's finished and i think you know kind of striving for a legacy is a complete waste of time i mean a legacy will emerge uh with the reach of time and i'm perfectly comfortable with uh you know with a couple of facts one i won't be around to read it and two that uh there are there are will be objective historians who properly analyze the decisions i made and uh my book is just a way to contribute to the eventual writing of history and uh i'm believe me i'm fine you look fine yeah i don't i i mean it's it is what it is okay segment three education reform a couple of quotations a quotation a couple of statistics quotation former first lady laura bush quote to build a more hopeful america we must help our children reach as far as their vision and character can take them beautiful close quote statistics according to a harvard study last year american students ranked 17th in world reading and 32nd in math and among african-american hispanic and native american students the figures were much worse yeah what's wrong what's wrong with america's schools um they won't change and one of the things a principle of the bush center is that we believe that you cannot have a free society without educated people and that accountability is essential to freeing people from ignorance so one of the reasons i got into politics in the first place is i was dissatisfied with the public schools of texas i tell people this story all the time about meeting a geography teacher in a high school outside of houston i said man it must be awesome to be a geography teacher he said it's terrible and i said well i said because my students can't read so what has happened is they've just shuffled kids through the school without ever asking the question do you have the knowledge necessary to move on and uh this is the beginning of the basis of what is now called no child left behind which at the state level uh you know we said in order to get state funds you have to measure and then when i got to washington i said in order to receive federal funds seven percent of this education budgets are federal money uh it didn't bother me that it was only seven percent what bothered me is that we weren't getting a good return on our dollars invested and so no child left behind demands accountability and what's it's interesting to watch accountability come under assault you've got people saying don't measure me it's unfair to hold me to account because of the social conditions that of the students and you've got people saying there is no role for government to demand accountability i strongly disagree with both arguments and the bush center in this case uh right now we're training principals to be able to use accountability better to enhance for change now if you're a reformer if you believe in reforming a system that won't change that i believe that accountability is the gateway to to reform in others you've got to have data you got to prove failure before you can demand change and so accountability is a is one of the key parts of demanding results-oriented processes can i no child i googled around before coming down here to try to figure out as i said on pepfar opinion is unanimous yeah it worked yeah now there's some carping about what was our national interest but the notion that the drug money went over and people took it and over a million lives were saved yeah everybody agrees yeah no child is not like that you've got the column in the wall street journal last year talked about quote dramatic progress especially after no child left behind well that's one thing yeah then i've got there's a cato report of just a couple of months ago saying there's no pattern of faster improvement under no child in fourth grade math improvements were faster before no child than after an eighth grade math it's essentially a dead heat and so forth so it's a mixed picture yeah all right so we got that and then i see the bush institute your program for principles is knitting together a network all over the country so i was thinking well this looks decentralized what the institute is doing now looks decentralized i may be overreading all this but but is that right i am yeah okay now the question is is no child do you think now of no child left behind as a worthy experiment that taught us the federal no question about it not only that it's decent it emphasizes decentralization nobody says here's how you have to teach the federal government wasn't saying the state government said you must do this or that what they're saying what we were saying is in return for money could you please show us if the methodology you've chosen to use works i mean you quoted statistics saying that we're like 17th in the world in this yeah and one reason is because we're not fixing problems early right and how do you determine whether or not problems need to be fixed if you don't measure and so you know i listen believe me teach the test this i've dealt with all that on my public service career i am absolutely adamant in my belief that a educational reform only works and if you prove failure or success and the only way to proof your success is to measure now when i got elected governor of texas you know they're like 25 goals too many yeah and so you know we distilled it down initially to like three or four goals one of which was you have to read at grade level by the fourth grade now if you want to improve the statistics uh that you just uh commented on which i know you do at the very beginning you got to teach kids to read otherwise you know the future engineers don't exist right and so yeah it's absolutely worthy worthy effort and it needs to be defended okay so let me get your sense of where things stand right now way back when your dad was vice president reagan years there was that famous report a nation at risk yeah and you know my feeling and my guess is it was some to some extent you were feeling too because i my guess is it was part of the impetus be behind no child left behind was that not a whole lot happened from ronald reagan straight through to 2002 when you enacted that bill correct 20 years of not much happening and now we've got your governor your brother in florida voucher programs yeah mitch daniels in indiana pretty sweeping voucher programs bobby jindal in louisiana maybe the most sweeping voucher programs in the country correct you've got that at the same time what we've got coming along now i haven't seen test results but you sure can identify the the effort you've got digital learning initiatives absolutely from the khan academy online to these rocket ship schools out in my neck of the woods near san jose to the news corporation has just put a billion dollars into k-12 digital education do you get the feeling that the country is maybe about to make a move i hope so but in order for them to do so they got to understand whether or not the schools are working or not listen most people believe the school their child goes to is excellent most people love their own congressmen too yeah but in this case uh what accountability does is it compares schools uh from district to district well that's you've got on your website and we've also got accountability from schools district to district to schools in around the world right and so my only listen this reform movement's awesome i just happen to believe that when you take the guesswork out of whether or not a school is performing it emboldens reformers i mean you got to have you got to have the case and that's why accountability is important and i'm listen uh my judgment is uh that there's a kind of a status oriented group of people they just won't change and what you're now describing is kind of beginning to kind of nibble at the edges right and uh i never worried about the delivery system wait the nature of the delivery system you got to worry about the results of any delivery system and so it's if you focus on results and demand results and provide options for different delivery systems to get those results that's what causes there to be change i want to mention this because to me it's one of the most impressive things bush institute already has a website global report card all one word globalreportcard.org you can anywhere in america you can type in your address and compare the test scores in your school district with those in other school districts in your state in the nation yeah and around the world that's right it's a very school district in suburban dallas and that thinks they're doing great and then all of a sudden you dial in relative math scores uh you know compared to gutenberg sweden or whatever it might be and you realize wow my kids uh you know kind of the test scores for my kids at my high school don't even come close to comparing to and so then the parent has a tool say why aren't we comparing right and how come we're like you know stuck in mediocrity right and but without the tool it's guesswork and people want to guess that their kids goes to a great school so that's what accountability does segment for economic growth and human freedom the bush institute has embarked on a four percent growth project you've already held a couple of conferences on growth already and just to give folks some sense of how dramatic the aim of four percent growth is last first quarter of this year the united states grew up 1.9 percent so the bush institute is arguing that the country could and should grow twice as fast as it is right now former president george w bush speaking at one of these conferences quote most of the political debate is about our balance sheet but in order to solve the balance sheet you've got to grow the private sector close quote correct brilliant whoever said that has to be a genius yeah that's right so the bush center we're defending free enterprise part part of being a free people requires an economic system that frees the talents of the individual and uh in a defense of the market you know one of the deformative experiences in my life was to go to china to visit mother and dad in 1975 where there was no consumer demand uh witness the fact everybody wore the same outfit in other words you had a you know a group of people deciding you look beautiful and gray and so does everybody else and i go back to china and consumer demand has uh in the marketplace are flourishing and it was like bright colors and it was unbelievable contrast i happen to believe uh freedom in the marketplace is uh is one of the freest forms uh of of uh possible where the collective demand of individuals decides that which is produced as opposed to a handful of people so let me ask you a question on that in that regard yeah soviet union right cold war ends and under yeltsin they move very quickly to democracy right and their economy falls apart china yeah deng xiaoping starts his work in 1979 and they open up slowly but pretty quickly yeah to free markets right and they have transformed the country but it remains a one-party state so far so far well okay that's the quest so so who got it right and do should we give the chinese a lot of credit because economic freedom is after all a form of freedom uh i'm sure you've got scholars at hoover analyzing the russian model matter of fact i think you do we do and uh so you ought to probably relate uh to their conclusion since i don't pretend to be a scholar on the other hand i did witness the decision by some to enable a handful of people to exploit russian assets which created a lot of angst angst amongst the leadership and anger people wondering in russia you know why so and so got the benefit and then i saw those people start flexing their muscle and the state pushing back and that stood in contrast of what you described in china and that is the marketplace beginning to flourish has a lot of problems of course i mean during my presence he had to deal with intellectual property rights and you know people obeying rules international trading rules and stuff but i also uh recognized during that period of time the christian church for example has flourished now it's underground admittedly but there's a lot a lot some of whom we're working with at the bush center through our freedom initiatives oh really absolutely and uh i you know i i'm uh and so yeah i mean obviously there are two different decisions made about the same period of time that have led to different consequences one is the the state has become more powerful in russia the uh the state is becoming less powerful in china right so so property rights yeah free market all of this in other words when the bush institute talks about human freedom it's not some sort of naive notion hold elections and you're done no no not at all i mean you can't i mean elections are an important step but there has to be civil society behind it there's to be market based economics to help the people the free people politically free people realize their full potential so we're big defenders of free enterprise we're big defenders of uh you know healthy societies educated society and educated societies as well freedom is our is kind of the cornerstone of the institute now here's the thing that you've got to understand about these deals if they're personality based in other words this is all about me they fail over time i mean i'm still a fresh memory i've been out of presidency for three years but 20 years from now that would be just a name in a number 43. i'll have had a record i had would have had to deal with you know 911 and uh the financial meltdown but people will long forget you know what oh 43 was like but they'll never forget i hope and one of our purposes is to remind people that freedom is universal that it's a universal right and it's not granted by the united states you know i have to believe it is a divine grant but however it's granted it's universal and that free markets are the best way for people to become prosperous or that good education systems are necessary for free societies to thrive and so those principles uh when defended through action programs in our case but through writings in your case at hoover far outlast the individual and that's why the bush institute will be enduring so for example iraq's in pretty good shape i'm here's my argument i'm just testing this it's occurring to me for the first time so if i get this wrong just kick me right in the backside right but iraq as best i can tell americans aren't all that popular in iraq they were happy to see it that's complicated but they were happy to see us go when we left but under john taylor you're under secretary of the treasury new currency yeah property rights that were fairly well established under existing law and the law was simply begun to be administered fairly and justly again yeah the kurds got away quickly with a they have a or had underlying a reality of a kind of two-party system right away so you've got this political system elections are working property rights are working there are markets now which are extracting it works basically it works yeah right i'm not surprised you're not surprised no people want to be free i mean you know implicit i know this isn't your question it had to be planted by somebody else because implicit in the question is that kind of this uh near snobbery that basically says if you don't look like me or worship like me you can't be friends this is a there's kind of a surprise right that people different from us uh are making the difficult choices for free society certainly there's a long way to go because because but but the road to democracy uh is itself unbelievably bumpy and difficult i mean condi's relatives were enslaved 100 years here right and so uh there needs to be a patience and a firm belief that people regardless of whether they're like americans or not want to live in a free society and an understanding that only free societies yield to peace so if we're in an ideological war which i think we are that the only way for there to be lasting peace is for there to be free societies which ends up marginalizing the ideology of hate but it's a hard path and by the way what i've just described to you is going to be defended at the bush institute but it is a different foreign policy from the past which was one that said what mattered to u.s interests was a stable region right but on 9 11 stability didn't work right and uh and so we we're we're uh we're going to actively advance freedom way after i leave uh you know depart the earthly the earthly shackles you're looking pretty healthy people are pretty healthy pretty good okay so the arab spring yeah you introducing one of these uh conferences on freedom yeah too quick this is pretty interesting to me first of all two quotations your second inaugural address quote the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success on the success of liberty and other lands right that may be the central line from that speech right the other one of course was that you know i i have to paraphrase but where we see tyranny we got to resist it right right president george w bush opening the bush institute's conference on the wave of freedom early lessons from the middle east in may of last year quote one of the dangers for the freedom movement around the world is that the united states grows weary yeah we've had enough we have had enough correct and that concerns you well what yeah i mean what concerns me is isolationism and uh there's been a tendency in our country to become isolationist uh over and over again yeah over and over again uh and you hear it i mean you know it's too hard or you know do we really care i mean it's like you said on pepfar when you're right people said you know what interest is is it of ours to spend taxpayers money uh to save lives for people who are we'll never know and the interest is is that we become a better nation in this case when we defend human life and it also happens to be in our interest in my judgment but it's the same thing about freedom movements and um we're concerned at the bush institute that the country will say it doesn't matter whether society is free or not and our argument is it matters a lot to our own self-interest and our national interest and therefore to the extent we can we will put programs in place that advance freedom and uh work with people that remind our country that that our isolationist past led to dire results okay uh the egyptians are giving us a case study yeah in democracy in the absence of property rights due process what do you do all right great islamic scholar bernard lewis yes he federated man by the way amazing man and by the way he's 91 or 92 and going strong so you could be running this bush institute for years to come that'd be 25 more that'd be good there you go quarter of a century so this is bernard lewis in february 2011. quote i don't know how one could get the impression that the muslim brotherhood is benign in genuinely fair and free elections the muslim parties are very likely to win and i think that would be a disaster close quote in egypt in the presidential election the candidate of the muslim brotherhood has now won correct 5149 disaster i think democracy is never a disaster the disaster of course is that people would uh suspend or forego the institutions that require that are required for democracy to thrive and go back to the era where people's voices didn't matter in other words uh one of the things that we ought to be insisting upon we the free world is that there be certain elections in other words four years from now whatever i don't know whatever the term is but there ought to be certainty that the people then get to go to the ballot box to decide whether or not the current winner fulfilled his promises right so i think people ought to investigate carefully the promise is made and then help enable the egyptian people to hold people to account for either meeting their promises or not so more democracy not less i think so yeah absolutely so you'd say so the united ought not to be in a position to say okay uh we're for elections just as long as the guy we want to win wins what we ought to be saying is is that we're for elections and give the people a chance to express themselves i haven't studied the platforms of these candidates but i bet uh they're mainly about improving the lives of their fellow citizens war doesn't improve the lives of their citizens i doubt you're going to see a candidate say please vote for me i promise you conflict and bloodshed right right the people say wait no we're not interested in you uh i i do know something about the elections that took place in gaza i was insistent upon elections because i believe that the democracy is the only way for there to be peace and i mean the idea of two democratic states living side by side in my judgment was a strategic vision that would best lead to peace but you can't have a democracy uh in gaza or the west bank without elections and the institutions that proceed and follow elections civil society so hamas wins right but look at the platform is what i would tell people it was better education better social services and by the way we're sick and tired of a political system that produced people like arafat that turns out it was there for his own self-interest not the interest of peace well hamas wins and then militamas takes over kicks out the reasonables and i don't think hamas will get much of a vote in gaza now that the now that the leadership has failed the people and my only point is is that there needs to be certainty in elections and that at the same time we ought to be helping build civil society this is why laura and i are involved with helping egyptian women because we believe women will lead the democracy movement in the middle east and we want women to have the mentors u.s mentors we want them to understand how best to develop civil society though with egyptian flavor to it we want them to attract other women to their cause to provide solace and comfort and strength and uh and so this is our contribution to the democracy movement so whatever else the united states you left office a while ago but whatever else the state department ought to be saying to egypt right now it ought not to be saying to the military shut this thing down on the contrary it's ought to be saying you do you do what you need to do to secure the country but more democracy not less yeah look the people went to tahrir square because they don't like a system that was shut down right i had to live in a system that shut them out for a long period of time and that i think it's you know really important that we stand by the principle that when the voices are heard peace is yielded over time and uh look one of my favorite stories uh about my presidency was my relationship with the japanese prime minister koizumi and so he calls me on september the 12th you know we're with you man shoulder to shoulder and we'll work to spread freedom as the alternative to the ideologues i mean that he saw it he saw it away absolutely and uh and what made the call unbelievably ironic is my father fought him and this guy didn't go to college so that he could become a bomber pilot to bomb the japanese and now the sons are keeping the peace you got to ask the question why you know what happened it wasn't inevitable that the united states and japan become friends and i ascribe that phone call mainly to the fact that japan adopts a japanese-style democracy where the people get to decide the fate of their government and same thing that'll happen the middle east and the bush center institute wants to be involved with that process as as best as we can back to the four percent growth yeah you kind of got diverted there no no nice diversion i'm not going to stop you you you've got your program a handful of quotations yeah president george w bush quote i had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system this is in the rose garden when things were bad yeah senator barack obama at the time the president-elect not too long after you made your comment quote everybody knows we're in the worst financial crisis since the great depression close quote final quotation fed chairman alan greenspan testifying to congress in the autumn of 2008 quote this crisis has turned out to be broader than anything i could have imagined the wise man of washington yeah those of us who looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equity that is those of us who suppose the free markets would work are in a state of shocked disbelief close quote okay so something big happened yes and it's pretty hard to talk about getting back to four percent growth unless we understand what it was yeah and do you feel that we understand yet quite what happened uh i'll be honest with you i don't i haven't heard an explanation that strikes me as comprehensive under explains all of the no i think it's gonna be i think you know to take a while to sort it all out no question there was a lot of liquidity in our system knows we're the most attractive place for uh people to invest a lot of money coming from overseas and uh people start inventing products and at the meantime financial products yeah financial products right and it seemed like a safe bet would be housing markets but the housing market became over inflated a bubble was created partly because congress refused i could be a little self-serving here refused to respond to the demands of president george w bush to reform fannie and freddie she had liquidity pouring in a bubble being created in the mortgage market and instruments uh kind of taking advantage of what seemed to be a bubble that wouldn't pop and it popped and so you're president you campaigned on the market he said look bad decisions ought to be sorted out by the marketplace people ought to pay for a bad decision and i'm told that you know it's a good chance you'll be overseeing a depression and the nature of the presidency is such that uh you got a stark choice to make do you gamble and hope we don't go under the depression or do you say what let's let's let's do the best we can to stop a depression i chose the latter i didn't want history to say bush could have done something about 21 unemployment and didn't right and so i made a painful decision to economy drop dead yeah that sort of thing it's painful man i came from midland texas my pal's out in the middle and i knew what they'd be saying in the coffee shop and they did say it yeah yeah loudly what happened to him you know but uh but i decided and uh i would make the same decision because people forget the interesting thing about history is people forget they forget what what what the mood in the country was after 9 11 when there was threat after threat after threat they forget that congress overwhelmingly backed me to remove saddam hussein both republicans and democrats and they forget that in the fall of 2008 there was a liquidity crisis the likes of which we have not seen in a long time now i know you're an expert on the ted spread but i wasn't and but the test spread is a measurement of liquidity and i became an expert on the test spread as i watched the ted spread say day after day after day capital's not moving right and so i decided to do something about it and moved uh moved as best as we could now the thing about interesting peter i can't prove to you that my decision prevented the depression i can tell you we didn't have one and uh you know that's the nature of the job the nature of the jobs you got to make decisions that you know will be unpopular but you think are right and you take your hits you know that's just that's just what happens amity you mentioned people forget amity schles is the director of the four percent growth program awesome person oh is she ever and she have you looked at her new book yet well it's interesting you pitched it because i was you took the words out of my mouth i was gonna i had two intentions one to pitch my own called decision points and hers on coolidge i've pre-ordered it on amazon i read forgotten man oh great book really good book really good book really good go ahead okay so now amity owes us both yeah but i was looking over and amity gave a speech uh at your conference in new york the four percent growth project and she talked about the ten kennedy tax cuts and how successful those were yeah so here's what we know coolidge his secretary they're usually called the melon tax cuts because andrew mellon was treasury secretary at the time but president coolidge cuts taxes and we get years of prosperity john kennedy proposes tax cuts lyndon johnson enacts them and the economy takes off ronald reagan cuts taxes and we get 25 years of economic expansion with only a couple of very very minor uh recessions in that long period of growth so you would think wouldn't you that if democracy were let me correct the record go ahead george bush cuts taxes and has uh over 35 months of continuous strong growth and george bush later says quote i wish they weren't called the bush taxes explain that that's a little of my mother and me because if they weren't called the bush the implication was was that they had been made permanent if they had been somebody else's tax cuts we wouldn't have been having a debate on whether they should expire or not that's what that meant uh no i was proud of him look i mean i wasn't running away from him i was basically saying i was being modest false modesty okay which obviously didn't work but the point is small government the lowest possible tax rates this works american history through the 20th century has proven again and again and again that it works and yet here we sit with the chief executive of the united states saying we need more government we need higher taxes we need the rich to pay their fair share which is another way so do you ever despair sometimes of democracy of our ability to learn as a nation so let's say uh implied in your question is am i for a form of government other than democracy no not at all that's what elections are to the bottom a little faster than i was holding that's what elections are all about i mean uh you know don't forget 2010. uh you know what i i speaking about elections let me talk about 2006. one of the interesting things i observed is power can be very corrupting and the 2006 elections were not about iraq they were about the failure of congress to for example reform social security and i say corrupting not in a money sense i mean a lot of times congress basically says i don't want to do this because i might not get reelected that's what i'm talking about right and uh so the big problems facing us uh right now what's required to grow the private sector and will we have the political courage to deal with the unfunded liabilities inherent in the entitlement programs and uh and so if you ask about private sector growth what we're doing at the bush center for example you've got to focus on a couple of things one small businesses since they create most new jobs the current income tax code is by raising income taxes by the way you affect small business growth because most small businesses pay tax under the income tax personal income tax people don't know that but most small businesses are sub chapter s or limited partnerships so you run up the top rate you're affecting the majority of the job creators uh in the four percent growth book we talk about the need for trade talk about the need for reasonable immigration policy this is a book that will be published in july yeah and another book to tout and uh anyway written by not by me written by people with a lot more credibility than i have like nobel prize-winning economists so it this is our action plan remember i told you we're action-oriented so it's one thing to hold a conference and those are good but it's more important produce results and one of the results is this book that we hope people pay attention to and it's a belief that the private sector can grow a lot more robustly than it's going and the aspirational goal is four percent growth and tax policy obviously is an important part of growing the economy about four percent and you're right that's the debate for 2012 off is basically more government versus left government military service the bush institute is dedicated to quote serving and honoring those who risk their lives to extend freedom to others now as i understand it a big part of this program is just your leading by example by spending a lot of your time with vets yeah so far so far we want to be more added value than that i mean so for example one of the things we're um beginning to explore is is is it possible to develop a set of standards to determine for others to determine whether or not the ngo to which they're contributing is results-oriented otherwise is it is it doing the job it should do but right now uh in order to honor our vets uh i'm well riding my bikes and sponsoring 100k bike up in amarillo yeah this past spring 62 mile bike ride is awesome unbelievably awesome first of all mountain biking is a thrill uh and to ride with vets who are dealing with severe injury whether they be mental or physical is a fantastic experience uh so i'll tell you a story for your listeners i mean i don't need your listeners probably understand how great america is i hope they do it's an awesome country and by the way how awesome is it a country where taxpayers contribute to save the lives of total strangers like in africa or to for young men and women to go liberate 50 million people so they have a chance to live in peace while we're defending our own security it's an awesome country and so gade major gade professor at west point one of the writers tells a story about when he came home from from the hospital he's in a wheelchair really blown up to the point where he lost his uh completely lost his right leg and his little girl said daddy would you play legos with me and gade says i can't and she says my daddy can't do anything and gay tells a room full of texans at this bike ride that is when mr president i decided i could do everything including riding bikes with you the thing that's interesting about gade is that he there's no prosthesis that would work for bike riding so he rode 100 kilometers on one leg it's uh you know we're we're we're a great country that produces people like gade military service this takes me back to a conversation i had when you were office with david chu yeah who was your undersecretary of defense for personal i remember him okay this is something that's been on my mind ever since and i can't think my way through it maybe you can and we were talking about trying to get our otc programs expanded up in the northeast and david chu said well there's a problem in certain regions in the country the northeast may be the most dramatic because during base closings those were the oldest bases up in the northeast the northeast was disproportionately hard hit by base closings you've got a lot of fancy schools up there your yale harvard my dartmouth and it turns out you've got very very minor rotc participation yale just took rotc back i believe it was last year but hadn't had it for years and so david chu said there is a danger that an entire region of the country drifting away from any contact with military culture at all and i just just to try to get a feel for it here i i looked at uh turns out that in recent years some 10 percent of ivy league graduates i don't want to make too much of the ivy league but it's it's a point they're making a lot of it 10 of ivy league grads apply to teach for america yeah way under one percent are going into rotc programs so texas is texas southwest is the southwest but is there a way to address this this regional imbalance peter i hate to i mean please take this answer for um in the spirit and which is given which is conciliatory to you but just because ivy leaguers don't go to the military doesn't mean people up east aren't uh i mean i go to uh in maine i go up to portland uh for a picnic honoring families of the fallen uh and it's packed not only with grieving family members but with the people that served alongside those uh who were killed in combat i mean we've got volunteers from all over the country uh including up east so as we say down here in texas up east but uh no i'm not worried about it the the respect for our military uh and our vets is overwhelming uh throughout the throughout the entire country and this stands in stark contrast to the vietnam era where uh veterans were disrespected uh and uh and felt it uh and but but it's changed a lot and i i hope that the country's respect for our current veterans says to those veterans of say korea or vietnam that we respect you too and i think i think the veterans are beginning to feel that last couple questions soaring deficit slow economic growth the lowest labor for force participation in many years politics very bitter edward lewis uh who uh who served for four years as the washington bureau chief of the financial times published a bush a book this past spring called time to start thinking america in an age of descent political science i like okay you're answering already political scientists and long-time washington observers norm ornstein and thomas mann have also published a book this past spring their title it's even worse than it looks so henry luce editor of time magazine right after the second world war wrote a famous essay in which he called the 20th century the american century yeah and the question is the 21st you got it yes we're the most productive nation we're the most innovative nation we've got a great higher education system uh you know we've got a lot going for us and no doubt in my mind that we'll recover from where we are and that the united states will continue to be the economic leader and hopefully the uh a leader in just causes and uh yeah i'm not look we've been through days of malaise before okay you know and there's a and there's nothing wrong with it but uh i don't i'm not a i'm not a part of the uh the handwringers about america a couple two last questions here you're known as a very avid reader of history what have you got on your book state book side table these days uh i am reading a history of joe dimaggio's history really yeah that's good uh i have got on my we don't have book stands anymore we've got ipads okay all right please i'm a little behind on that stuff yeah anyway uh uh the great debate compromise of henry clay forged right before the civil war i'm looking forward to reading a book that was just given by a fine book critic on the alamo i believe you just gave me that i did just but i am reading i'm still reading quite a bit and uh and enjoy it a lot okay last question promise this really will be the last question i've lived in california 20 years yeah i come to texas and there's something about this place the flags you see people flying from their homes the sense of openness and yet i do notice that your mom and dad spend their summers up in kennebunkport it gets warm down he's 103 degrees outside right now yeah and you go on vacation and you leave dallas for crawford you don't leave texas you go deeper into texas yeah what's texas mean to you uh you know i tell i tell people uh my dad uh bequeathed me three great gifts uh an awesome name and unconditional love no money and a uh and being raised initially in west texas and then uh in other parts of the state a texan is uh is somebody who's got a attitude that is um a little different it seems like to me it's a can-do attitude it's a very entrepreneurial state there's a culture here which if you come from uh like california if you're fortunate enough to move here uh you'd become a texan fashion you could possibly imagine because we've got a very strong culture uh and uh you know it means a lot to be a texan there was no doubt in my mind and no doubt in lara's mind that we'd be coming home to texas um we we love it here we're comfortable here we got a lot of friends here uh this state is doing uh very well somebody has to do other natural resources but a lot of it has to do with limited government we don't have an income tax do you know the texas legislature the second biggest state in the union meets four months out of every two years which meant being the governor was awesome uh but it's uh i mean it's unbelievable isn't it that we can get our budgets done and get the state's business done and send people home to be less of a politician and more of a citizen and so we've got not only an attitude but we've got a structure that supports the attitude and it's a great place honored you're here thanks for coming down thank you yeah george w bush 43rd president of the united states thank you for joining us sir peter in dallas for uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 631,805

Keywords: HooverInstitutionUK, George W. Bush, White House, President, Bush Institute, Global Health, AIDS, No Child Left Behind, Education Reform, 4% Growth, Elections, Freedom, Peace, Tax Cuts, Decision Points, Texas.

Id: 4RbAZj9RB94

Length: 63min 20sec (3800 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 17 2012

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[u/cyberklown28]

Do you guys support our huge foreign aid bill?

Bush was big on keeping Africa, etc. stable to avoid them falling into terror hives. But foreign aid usually polls low in popularity.