In an interview with Fox News’ “Special Report With Brett Baier,” former Vice President Dick Cheney responded to former President George H.W. Bush’s charge that he was an “iron-ass.”
“I took it as a mark of pride,” Cheney said.
Bush’s criticisms of Cheney’s character come from a new biography, “Destiny And Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush,” by Jon Meacham. According to The New York Times, Bush told Meacham that Cheney became more obstinate while serving as vice president to his son, George W. Bush, and that he pushed for an overly aggressive course of action in response to the 9/11 attacks.
“He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” Bush said. “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.”
“The attack on 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor in terms of the number of people killed and the amount of damage done,” Cheney said. “I think a lot people believed then, and still believe to this day, that I was aggressive in defending, in carrying out, what I thought were the right policies.”
“I fully admit that after 9/11 I saw my role as being as tough and aggressive as needed to be to carry out the president’s policy, 43’s policy, to make sure we didn’t get hit again.”
In the book, Bush also suggested that Cheney’s wife and daughter pushed him to act more hard-nosed: “I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here – iron-ass, tough as nails, driving,” Bush said.
Cheney rebuffed the notion that he was influenced by his family members.
“[I] got there all by myself,” he said.