As Bush told an adviser at the time: 'If we're really looking at another Great Depression, you can be damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover.'īush acknowledges some tactical errors: He should have moved faster to deploy federal troops to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, he says. The rescue of Wall Street in 2008 was distasteful but necessary. Bush’s tax cuts were required to counteract the recessionary effects of Sept. When CIA chief George Tenet asked Bush if he approved waterboarding against terrorist suspects, the president said, 'Damn right' and he still thinks he was right. The war in Iraq turned out to be based on faulty intelligence, but the consequence of the American occupation was a chance for democracy to take root on the Persian Gulf. The war in Afghanistan was necessary to root out al-Qaida and the Taliban, and help create a 'free society' in Central Asia, he says. The former president revisits nearly all the controversial decisions of his tenure, and defends them with vigor. He also offers intimate new details on his decision to quit drinking, discovery of faith, and relationship with his family.As a justification for his actions, Bush's memoir succeeds admirably. President Bush writes honestly and directly about his flaws and mistakes, as well as his accomplishments reforming education, treating HIV/AIDS in Africa, and safeguarding the country amid chilling warnings of additional terrorist attacks. Bush brings readers inside the Texas Governor’s Mansion on the night of the hotly contested 2000 election aboard Air Force One on September 11, in the hours after America’s most devastating attack since Pearl Harbour at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq and behind the Oval Office desk for his historic and controversial decisions on the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, Afghanistan, Iran, and other issues that have shaped the first decade of the 21st century. In gripping, never-before-heard detail, President George W. Bush offers a strikingly candid journey through the defining decisions of his life. Shattering the conventions of political autobiography, George W. Decision Points is the extraordinary memoir of America’s 43rd president.

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