join a discussion on trump administration foreign policy and the midterm elections. watch live on c-span two. on "washington journal" we are looking at battleground states. the most competitive races of the midterm election. in minnesota, new york, california, pennsylvania, and florida. join us for a life campaign 2018 call in during washington journal at 7 a.m. eastern on c-span. announcer: this week on "q&a," james mann, author and resident will james mann, author and resident of the johns hopkins university school of advanced international studies. he talks about his biography of george w. bush.

brian: james mann, author of the biography on george w. bush. if a friend of yours who had never met george w. bush asked you to tell about him, what would you say? james: i would say he was a guy a who was the son of a president, had trouble dealing with that fact for the first 40 years-plus of his life, and then got his own personal life together enough to be a quite successful and shrewd politician, to be elected governor of texas, and then became president of the united states. the first thing he would be known for at the time of his presidency, now and forever more, will certainly be the fact he was president at the time of the september 11 attacks and chose to wage a war in iraq that turned out to be a disaster. brian: what were his early years like?

james: well, he followed in his father's footsteps. i say that quite literally will because he was forced, almost, to go to prep school at andover. he went to yale. he did many of the things his father did. in his mind, i think it was not him. he once said many years later there were differences between him and his father, starting with the fact that he went to sam houston elementary school and his father went to greenwich country day school in connecticut. he identified -- he grew up in texas, where his father had not. he identified with, and i think took comfort in, the image of himself as a texas good old boy. he became very good at playing that role.

brian: how about his schooling? james: he went to texas schools until eighth grade, and then his parents sent him to prep school at andover. by his own account, i think he said many years later that making the transition to andover was the hardest thing he ever did in his life, until he ran for president. he did not like it there. there are painful, funny stories of him writing his first college essay -- high school essay in his first weeks there. and he took out the thesaurus his mother had given him because he did not want to use the word tears, so he wrote the word lacerates, as in the lacerates were running down my cheek. he did not like it there and he reacted by becoming the funny guy in the class.

you there are pictures of him as a cheerleader, as a cheerleader dressed up as a woman. he was the go-to guy for fun at andover, and that very much continues at yale, where he is the head of a fraternity, delta kappa epsilon. he is the guy who organizes the toga parties. the first time george w. bush's name ever appears in the new york times, i found, was to defend his fraternity from something or other -- it may have been hazing practices, i forget what it was. he was the spokesman for the fraternity life, at a time -- this is the context -- when yale itself was changing. a there were certainly fraternities and parties and lots of other students at yale

traditionally who were the sons of former yale people. yale was gradually becoming, in the early 1960's, a meritocracy, like many other schools like yale. people were admitted on the basis of their test scores. it was becoming a more intense place. the faculty were more professional than the old, genteel faculty in the past. he did not like it. he developed such an antipathy to yale that he went three years into his presidency before he was willing to come back to the campus. he did not give, he did not like it. he eventually during his presidency made peace with it, but it was a long time coming. brian: when did he apply to law school and why wasn't he

accepted? james: a couple of years after -- when bush left yale, he lived a kind of single's life down in texas. his father -- his parents, actually, left texas in the early 1970's. first they went to china. they went to the united nations and then they went to china. but they were not around. bush lived in a single's apartment. he went into the texas national guard. there is more of a story to that because he, like the sons of other texas politicians, went into a special texas national guard unit that was really for politicians' sons and members of the dallas cowboys. this was during the vietnam war. it meant that he really didn't have to fight. there have been disputes going

back decades about how much pull was used. i found in researching the book that no one has ever found his father, george h.w. bush, intervening or making calls to get him out of the guard, but friends of his father and texas political leaders did so. brian: where did he apply for law school? and again, why wasn't he accepted? james: i am having trouble remembering that. it is probably in my own book, but i can't remember now. brian: i thought it might be university of texas. james: that is correct. bush at first when he was applying for college, actually, kind of asked to go to austin and see the university of texas. it might have been a wish, but he ended up at yale. you are right. when he tried to go to law school or thought about applying to law school and he applied to

texas at austin. brian: do you know why they didn't accept him? james: i do not at this point. brian: you point out in your book there are two words to describe his change in life, drinking and religion. explain that. james: these come together in the mid-1980's. and in the period of 1985 and 1986 -- first let's talk about what happened and then what is in the background. as far as drinking, in 1986 he celebrates his 40th birthday with friends. he is off in colorado at a hotel. he stays up late drinking with his friends. he wakes up with a terrible hangover. and he has had a drinking problem -- he sometimes describes it that way, sometimes not -- for a good while.

he has been arrested for driving under the influence. this has been a chronic problem. he wakes up the day after and says, that's it, i am not going to drink. and he doesn't, he gives up drinking. the second thing that happens is that he develops -- he becomes an evangelical christian. during this same period, begins to turn to religion regularly. now, in my view, an interesting political component to this is that both of these things happened within a couple of years after his father decides to run for president. so this sequence is that in 1984, ronald reagan wins reelection. he is obviously not able to run again in 1988.

george h.w. bush is his vice president. and in april of 1985, his father calls the entire bush family together in a meeting at camp david and he brings out lee atwater -- now famous political consultant, scoundrel, great political tactician -- and he says, this is lee atwater. and lee atwater addresses everybody and says -- i think it is atwater himself -- warns people, your father is going to be running for president, you have got to be careful. anything any member of the family does could come back to hurt him. george jr. -- that is george w. bush -- and jeb are very mistrustful of atwater. they pull him aside and say, how

do we know we can trust you? in they ask that question because atwater is a political consultant. some of his partners are consulting for a rival politician, jack kemp. atwater keeps swearing he will. jeb bush says, what we mean is if someone throws a grenade at our father, will you jump on it? they are mistrustful of this consultant, but he is telling them, stay clean. in the middle of these warnings, will george w. bush -- this is only a year before he decides to give up drinking altogether. so that is the background on drinking. he has had these warnings. he does not want to get into trouble. as far as religion, i don't want i to -- i am not going to say that someone's religion has a political component in its

origins, but i will say as soon as george w. bush becomes an evangelical christian, he becomes the liaison for his father's presidential campaign with evangelical christians. it is a role he plays throughout the 1988 campaign and up to and through the 1992 campaign. brian: how often did he run for office before he ran for governor of texas? and in the midst of all that, when did he meet laura welch and marry her? james: first, he ran for office once before his texas gubernatorial campaign. will that was in the late 1970's. he ran in 1978 for a seat in congress, and he lost.

he lost to a guy named kent hance. it is interesting in light of what we later know and think of george w. bush that in that campaign, his opponent, hance, attacked him for being this east coast, preppy guy from out of town who could not possibly know texas well. he portrayed george w. bush almost like his father. bush began to develop responses to this. bush definitely -- one thing that many people agree is that he had a good sense of humor. finally when he got tired of a being attacked -- hance at one point said, we have a candidate born in new haven, connecticut.

a he is an outsider. bush said, i was born in new haven, connecticut, because i wanted to be with my mother that day. [laughter] brian: what about laura? james: he married laura in the late 1970's. what else can i say? brian: met her where? james: friends arranged to get them together at a barbecue. they were in midland. she was a local librarian. it is interesting to me that even his choice of a spouse reflected this kind of anti-elite -- he chose someone from texas, not someone from the social set of his parents. in fact, if you read laura

will bush's memoir closely, she says quite gently, it took me about 10 years to be comfortable with barbara bush. barbara had an acid tongue. a laura is quite the reverse. brian: what was your assignment -- these are small books, under 200 pages. a they have done them on all presidents. james: i joked to my friends, the assignment is if you write more than 50,000 words, we will cut off your arm. [laughter] brian: what was your assignment? what did they want you to come up with and who did it? james: who did the book? the book, like all the others in the series, is published by henry holt, the american president series. will they want you to briefly discuss the background of presidents, then cover their presidency and briefly their

life after their presidency. in fact, the fine editor of this book at first asked me for an outline before i started writing. i turned it in and there were eight chapters, and two were getting him into the presidency and the last one was postpresidential life. he said, you hit on it, that is what all these books are. with one exception. that one exception, if we can diverge history for a minute, was william henry harrison, only president for 30-some days before he got a cold and died. in that book, the epilogue was the presidency. [laughter] brian: what is your background and what are you doing now? james: i am by profession a journalist. i spent more than 30 years of my career in journalism.

actually, this is now the 50th anniversary of the day when i decided that i wanted to be a journalist. i was about to go to medical school and i asked for a leave of absence. 50 years ago this week, i believe, i was granted a year's leave of absence from medical school. i went off and started at a small newspaper, not a very good one, in new haven, connecticut, and i never had so much fun in my life. so i may have taken another year's leave, i don't even remember now. but the minute i started, i liked newspapers. i never went back. i worked for, over the next couple of decades, that new haven paper briefly and for the washington post for three or four years. eventually was at the los angeles times for over 20 years,

both in washington and overseas. brian: and you are doing what now? james: since then, i have been writing books full-time. i did that first at a washington think tank called the center for strategic and international studies. i wrote a book that covers the george w. bush administration called "rise of the vulcans." i moved in 2004 to johns hopkins school of advanced international studies and have written books there since. brian: so here is some video, very brief, from 1988. george w. bush is here in this town working for his father in april of 1988, a short interview we did with him. i wanted you to hear him talk about texas. [video clip] >> it is a state that encourages growth and a state that has a sense of pride that i like. i just think texas has got

problems, although it is growing out of them. the opportunities in that state are enormous, and i'm a person always seeking opportunity. brian: that was 1988. what was george w. bush doing during the campaign and what do you think he was thinking at that point about his own future in politics? james: very interesting question. it is a continuation of the story i told about lee atwater and mistrusting him. george w. bush, at that point he was out of the oil business. he was relatively free. when he expressed some mistrust to atwater about how his father's campaign would be run, atwater said, if you don't trust me, why don't you -- he said to george and jeb -- why don't you come to washington and work alongside me? watch me everyday. george w. bush did. he went and worked alongside lee

atwater for over a year. he actually moved to washington and helped. his role in the campaign -- his first role, he called it, was loyalty enforcer. with all these politicians and political figures running around, he was the guy watching out for his father's interests. i am sure atwater was, too, but he wanted to double check. his own ambitions -- i think -- i became convinced and wrote that he had his own ambitions at the time. to move ahead for a second, in 1992 after his father lost, he is running for governor of texas. everybody says that he developed his ambitions after his father lost. no, i think he held his ambition in check while his father was president. in fact, barbara at one point discouraged george jr. from

running for governor of texas in 1990, because she thought it wasn't a good idea while george bush sr. was president. anything that one of them did could reflect on the other. brian: how difficult was it for him to get elected governor of texas? james: the best line on that came from his father, george h.w. bush, who was not always full of great quips, but said that for george w. bush to get elected president after he was governor of texas was like a six-inch putt. it was harder for him to be elected governor. there was a very popular, well-remembered now democratic governor, ann richards. she was the one who said of george w. bush that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

richards was quite popular, but bush jr., george w., ran hard against her. he had a very good political advisor, good at politics, karl rove. together they worked out the strategy to beat him -- excuse me, to beat her. and one of the tactics that they had, which people saw when he was president, was incredible message discipline. this was one of the characteristics of bush as politician. he would never have particularly penetrating or very long answers, but he would develop a handful, one sentence, two sentences, three sentences, and deliver them over and over.

years later, ann richards said in frustration -- she meant this as a political compliment -- but she said, if you asked george bush the time of day during that campaign, he would say, we must teach our children to read. he would give the same response to everything. brian: how did he get elected president? james: how? [laughter] he -- let's talk about his political tactics and successes. he learned from his father's loss in 1992. he developed what he felt were strategies to win where his father lost, and he noticed his father's errors.

so he needed to bring together within the republican party three different constituencies. one of them is the traditional republican, conservative constituency. the old country club constituencies, the people who wanted their taxes cut. lesson number two was don't raise taxes. that's what his father did. he needed to develop much better support from evangelical christians than his father had, and he needed support from the hawks, or neoconservatives. that was an important faction in the party. all of those wings of the party needed to give strong support to the republican candidate. people forget now, for example, but evangelicals were not always

a solid constituency in the republican party. in fact, they had supported democratic candidates for many decades. richard nixon made some inroads getting some evangelical support. they ran back to jimmy carter, a southern baptist democrat. reagan developed much more support from evangelicals. and then his father lost that kind of support. bush worked both for his father and for himself to bring evangelicals into the republican party. so that was one part of his political task that he succeeded in. as far as what i call the hawks on foreign policy, the neoconservatives, hard for people to remember now, but in

the 1992 campaign, they tended to support bill clinton. they were so unhappy with his father. this had to do with the fact that his father supported gorbachev, did not support the breakup of the soviet union, did not support an independent ukraine for a long time, a lot of other things. and bill clinton supported the neoconservatives. some of them went to work for him. bush jr. goes to work and develops their support as well. so he pulls together all the wings of the republican party. and then he campaigns -- he has no trouble winning at all, winning the republican nomination. and then running against al gore -- he runs against bill clinton and the lewinsky scandal. i am going to bring -- george w. bush says -- i am going to bring honor and dignity to the white house.

after all that, talk about all these great political stratagems, after all that it was not enough to win a majority of the country. it was enough only to produce a deadlock in the electoral college and a long supreme court battle. it was not some overwhelming victory at all. brian: as you look back on the bush v. gore decision and the fact that he ended up winning the electoral votes but not the popular vote, what is your opinion of what happened during that period? james: i thought it was a travesty. i put in in my career about eight years covering the supreme court, and one thing i thought i had learned was the court of that era and the conservatives on the court of that era -- people like justice william rehnquist -- were in favor of what they would have called federalism, states' rights.

i thought that when the florida supreme court, based on the florida constitution, awarded the state of florida to gore, that based on its own principles, i thought the supreme court would simply allow that to stand, they were not going to interfere. that is not what the court did. they developed their own theory, never made any sense to me. brian: what impact did that have on his presidency? james: less than people would think, in the sense that most people thought that, having not won a majority of the popular vote, winning such a narrow victory in the electoral college, that he would start out very carefully. that he wouldn't take any bold initiatives and that most of

what he did would be directed at winning over democratic support. in fact, bush started his presidency very boldly, asked for a tax cut in his first year. succeeded in winning just enough democratic support to get it passed. but it was quite a radical move, where people thought he was going to run from the center. he had actually been, by most accounts in texas, a centrist, moderate governor. but he ran as a very strong conservative with bold initiatives, focused in that first year mostly on tax cuts. brian: 9/11. james: i have heard of that. [laughter] brian: it is fairly obvious, from january 20 to september 11. what is that legacy?

james: the legacy is about as profound as any president has faced. it is the first time the u.s. homeland has been attacked since the war of 1812, and it changes the country automatically, immediately, into one obsessed in big ways and small with protection and security. to take the most obvious example, the way 325 million americans go through airports today started on september 12 or whenever the flights resumed and has never gone back to the way it was on september 10. it affected american foreign-policy, for the start, i think we can say it had a profound effect on bush's foreign-policy team.

that played a role, certainly, in the decision to years later -- two years later to invade iraq. brian: here is a piece of video after his book came out, "decision point," when asked about legacy. >> i don't worry about my legacy because i am still studying the -- theodore roosevelt, or harry truman, and there won't be an objective history done on this administration for a long time. james: that is a little self-serving. it is true for any president that it takes many decades for historians to judge. and that may be true with parts of what bush did. but it is not too soon to judge on some aspects of his legacy.

it is not too soon to judge on the war in iraq. why? because it didn't accomplish what he thought it was going to accomplish before he started the war. it cost 4000 plus american lives , and i write in my book, and i don't think this judgment will change, that it was one of the biggest strategic blunders in american history. so those kinds of judgments i think can be made. he is stating the truism that people's judgments do change, of presidents, as time goes on, but i do not think that one is going to change much. brian: how did he make the decision going into afghanistan and iraq? james: i would divide them.

the decision to go into afghanistan followed immediately after september 11. the thinking of the administration, within hours of september 11, was, we want to punish the people who did this. they knew at the start that this was al qaeda. and any countries that assisted them, and in this particular case, since al qaeda had been based in afghanistan, that meant afghanistan. they gave afghanistan a warning fairly quickly to turn over bin laden, and proceeded to attack within weeks. now, there is a lot more to bush because they --

gathers his war team together at camp david the weekend after september 11 attacks and there are one or two proposals that they go beyond afghanistan, that they, in one particular case, there is a recommendation to attack iraq at that very first weekend meeting after september 11. but that is generally put aside. i choose those words carefully. it is put aside, but it is not rejected. for the time being, they decide to focus on afghanistan. that takes some time. that takes a few months for them to bring in cia teams and then eventually the military, to dislodge the taliban from kabul.

now how did we invade iraq, that is a longer story. there has been this recommendation at the very first meeting to attack iraq. why? brian: we know where it came from? james: it came from paul wolfowitz. at that first meeting. get support from others there. first of all, if you can envision this meeting, it is the principals at the table, meaning members of the cabinet. cheney, rumsfeld, powell, condoleezza rice, and wolfowitz is on a backbench. this is a recommendation from the second level. it is, again, shelved at the time. after -- during those two

months, while the war in afghanistan is being fought, a couple noteworthy things happened. one is the anthrax scare. in what turns out to be something entirely unrelated to al qaeda as far as we know, people in washington and on capitol hill are opening their mail and finding these powders which may or may not be anthrax. that further really scares the top levels of the administration. i want to back up for a second there and say that the september 11 attacks had caught the administration, this is their nine months into administration, they haven't paid enough attention to the warnings they got about al qaeda.

this administration thought of themselves, i am talking about the foreign-policy team, people like cheney and rumsfeld, they are the professionals. they served in office before. they know how to run things. the clinton administration is a bunch of amateurs. that is their mindset. and they are focused also on old issues involving states. by that, i mean countries. so the issues of foreign-policy, this is before september 11, are getting out of an arms control treaty with the soviet union, maybe dealing with north korea. they have a moment with china. but they are dealing with the things that they have been familiar with in past

administrations. country to country, u.s. versus another country. september 11 hits and here is the quote that meant the most to me is actually in a memoir by bob gates, who says that these guys were traumatized by september 11. they hadn't imagined this kind of problem coming from a non-state actor, a terrorist group that was not a state, and they spent much of the rest of their time trying to make sure this could never happen again. between the lines, in gates' description, there is a lot of guilt that they had for allowing september 11 happen. after september 11, we are not going to allow this to happen again.

they get an anthrax scare. and they develop, slowly, the concern that al qaeda could somehow get weapons of mass destruction. we have to go further, weapons of mass destruction, they are concerned about nuclear weapons but they are concerned about chemical weapons and they are particularly concerned about biological weapons that somehow al qaeda could get. that is the second thing that happens. then, there is, on the political level, karl rove the political advisor plays a part in some of this. they develop the language that afghanistan is merely phase one of the war on terror. they develop this language about the war on terror, no one can quite define what that is, and they call afghanistan phase one.

by december of 2001, they have defeated al qaeda, or they dislodged it from kabul. the question starts to arise. ok, what is phase two? there is a period, and i did look at this, for a few weeks in november, december 2001, when they are thinking, should we attack? there is an al qaeda unit in indonesia. there is some al qaeda in yemen. they don't quite work as a national campaign against al qaeda. these are small units in countries of lesser importance. but meanwhile, there is iraq that is still out there. and the first sign you get of the administration thinking

about going to war in iraq is in bush's state of the union of 2002at the beginning when he talks about the axis of evil. the axis of evil is iraq, iran, and north korea. brian: let me run seven seconds of a statement of george w. bush's at that interview. >> they are asking did i make a mistake in the liberation of iraq? the answer is no i didn't make a mistake in my judgment. brian: comment? james: yes, he made a huge mistake. he -- to the extent that bush has admitted mistakes, he admits tactical mistakes that were central to the war without ever saying that the entire war in iraq was a mistake.

as we can talk -- the mistakes he has admitted, he admitted he made a mistake in the mission accomplished landing on an aircraft carrier, and he has admitted, and others have admitted, that the way they handled the post-war was a mistake by allowing the disbanding of the iraqi army, r expulsion of the party members from government decisions. it is true that he has never said the war in iraq itself was not a mistake. in fact, what you saw right there is i guess, he doesn't believe it yet but i think that is profoundly wrong. brian: in your book, you wrote a whole book on the balkans early in 2004.

how much of what george bush became was the fact that he has a lot of people around him that used to work for his father, and how long did it take him to change that? james: i thought it took well into his second term for him to change that. if you go back to his 2000 campaign, taking office in 2001, first of all, he gets attacked politically during the campaign for not knowing enough about foreign-policy. here is al gore, who has been the vice president, foreign-policy specialist before that. bush has been governor of texas but as far as foreign-policy, he would joke about his experience with mexico but that is about it.

so he gets attacked for not knowing much and he says, he doesn't say i don't have to know much but he says i have the finest group of foreign-policy advisers around, and by that he is talking about this group, the vulcans, who have served with his father. secondly, during the 2000 campaign, he chooses cheney as his vice president. karl rove doesn't want cheney. karl rove says cheney comes from a tiny state that is already republican. he won't bring votes the way lyndon johnson would carry texas for john kennedy. and he is too conservative. bush wants cheney, mostly because of his experience.

he is choosing his father's advisers and echoes all the way up to and including his own vice president. and once he takes office, he really does rely on them. he has kind of a bridging figure of condoleezza rice, a friend of his, as national security adviser. but these guys, cheney, powell, and rumsfeld, who cheney brought in as the press secretary, who are supposed to know how all this works and he relies on them. he relies on them before september 11, then he has this problem in the run-up to the war in iraq that actually, his advisers don't agree with each other. powell, excuse me, cheney and rumsfeld are very much in support of and cheney is pushing

the idea of the war with iraq, powell very much the contrary this agrees with cheney. -- disagrees with cheney. but in that case, he is still relying on cheney and powell. all the way through that first term, he tends to support cheney, what cheney wants. you get to the end of the first term, the war is not going well. the war turns out to be a bigger and bigger problem. and his advisers are bickering with each other. and he decides at the beginning of his second term that he is going to change the foreign-policy team, and the first thing he is going to do is replace powell. to powell's surprise, he thought rumsfeld would also be replaced but bush doesn't replace rumsfeld.

you are left with cheney and rumsfeld and rice becomes secretary of state. that begins to change the dynamic. the personnel are starting to change. rice becomes, is closer to bush than anyone else in the administration, including cheney, i think. and that changes the dynamic, and then this is followed a couple years later by replacing rumsfeld. meanwhile, bush is developing more confidence in his own judgment. it takes a good four years but he sees how this works and how things can go wrong. and he gets to the point where i think he doesn't rely on cheney, that's for sure. and really, is the most important person on foreign-policy in his own administration. he wasn't at the beginning.

brian: i am not going to skip it because it is not important, katrina, but we have little time. i want to make sure you give us your view of the financial crisis and how that happened and what impact that will have on his legacy. james: several interesting things about the financial crisis for bush and his team. several things bush did helped play into it. the tax cuts, this is not bush, it is the fed but interest rates were kept so low that people kept buying more houses and prices were going up. you get a classic bubble. alan greenspan insists it is not a bubble. but when it hits, the question is, and it hits in september 1988 with the collapse of lehman brothers.

when it hits, bush decides that he needs to intervene and needs to intervene vigorously. and what you see in 1988, and there is an immediate legacy over the next decade or so, is, bush refuses to go along with the sort of libertarian right wing. he develops a massive program, tarp, troubled asset relief program, to try to buy up these assets that are collapsing as a result of the financial crisis. the right-wing opposes him, and when i say the right-wing i mean in congress. it was a very, very difficult fight to get congressional

approval of this tarp program. he and cheney, himself a fairly conservative republican, are strongly in favor of this. and they succeed mostly with democratic support. this also happens in the middle of the 2008 campaign, and actually, and this is more in the book of dick cheney than anyone else, you get descriptions of this crucial white house meeting where obama comes -- let me step back. mccain said i am not going to campaign, i am going to stop campaigning. we need to have a major washington meeting to decide what to do about it. bush allows this meeting. obama is also there. you get all the congressional leaders of both parties.

and john mccain, from bush's own party, and obama, and mccain really doesn't have a lot to say. he has announced there is this crisis, but comes in and being john mccain, he is very active and sometimes irritable, but he doesn't have a lot to say and obama looks fairly calm and deliberate, as he is. cheney writes that, i think obama was more impressive than mccain. that was -- some of that came through to the public. this was the general perception of the two candidates, and it was a major help to obama. it hurt john mccain. brian: you reference this in

your book, that john lewis gaddis was here. this was george w. bush in retirement, but john lewis gaddis was here a couple months ago and i want to run what he said, because it is an interesting take on what might happen to a president. >> my wife and i happened to be in dallas promoting a book. so i had a student, several students, who worked for me. i said we would like to drop by and say hello. we did and he had us come by at some ungodly hour, like 7:30 in the morning. i asked him, how are you? he said, i am bored. i don't have enough to do. i said, you should take up painting. i told him about the churchill estate painting as a pastime. it is a small book. and the rest is art.

these turn out to be very good. brian: an ex-president come aboard. would you expect that to happen? james: yes. for a good while, bill clinton was bored. you are spending 24 hours per day, whether you are sleeping or playing golf, it is always with you until you are out. then, i think there is a tremendous sense of decompression. the interesting detail on what gaddis said is that bush began to paint, and did so, but only without telling anybody outside his family. the only reason we know about this is that someone hacked into the emails of family members and found these paintings being sent back and forth. it interests me that he took up painting, but really didn't want the public to know about it at first.

brian: here is another couple items you have in your book. you say by the time you published the book, he had made 140 speeches kicking off $15 million for him personally. and he also sold 2 million books of his own. this is in my lifetime that a former president would vehicle to speak and make that kind of money. we don't know that bill clinton has made, probably 100-some million dollars. james: particularly george w and clinton have had a lot of time to do this. i can remember right after reagan left office, he went to japan to give a speech, and he was probably paid $200,000 and that was a big deal. brian: you heard of that? he made two speeches.

james: the idea of a president speaking was unusual at that point. brian: were you able to talk to george bush during this period at all? james: i was not. i did not interview him. brian: did you want to and were turned down? james: yes. i went through james glassman who was working through him. i couldn't persuade bush to do it. brian: would that have made a difference? james: we have to go back to the word limit. i am not sure how much of a difference it would have made. you mentioned "decision point." he wrote a book much longer than this so i think i got his point of view on most things. brian: when you did the "vulcans" book, did people talk to you? james: yes, they did. brian: of all the sources you

had for this, you have the notes in the back, which would be the most valuable for the george bush presidency? george w. bush presidency? james: you mean which -- brian: which book you read would be the biggest help? if somebody wanted to study it besides your short biography. james: my own book "the vulcans," i consider for foreign policy a pretty good book. then there are the memoirs. i think bush-cheney-rice wrote an interesting memoir. rumsfeld has a memoir. i think that the memoirs, everybody shades it a little bit one way or the other from their own perspective, but they are quite good.

there is a book about cheney called "angler" that is unusually good. brian: what you think of george w. bush's own memoir? james: i thought it was ok. i thought it was actually as a memoir, it was better than bill clinton, which was not the best thing bill clinton never did. but i thought it was pretty much, pretty run-of-the-mill. brian: our guest has been james mann. he wrote the book "george w. bush," recently published. james: thanks. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] ♪

>> for free transcripts or to give us your comments, visit us on q&a.org. there are also available as c-span podcasts. >> next week on q&a, two-time pulitzer prize winner david lewis on his biography of businessman and presidential candidate wendell wilkie. up next, your calls and comments live on washington journal. we are live from the heritage foundation. howok at human rights and that should be addressed in negotiations with north korea. at noon eastern, a live debate between incumbent senator bernie sanders and republican

candidate. the c-span bus is traveling across the country. during our stop in boston, we asked which party should control congress and why. the house toke remain republican because i like the things -- the way things are going right now. i think that if it were to switch to democrat, it would lotte gridlock and not a would get done. i think the way things are going now has been one of the best runs in recent history. >> i would like the house to flip in november. i want to see a democratic majority in the house. washingtonke the way is going with the republican white house. i feel like it should be changed. i want to the house to remain in republican hands because i am tired of gridlock and things not gett