Bush not bothered by Cheney book

Speaking with reporters before a charity golf event in Dallas on Thursday, former U.S. President George W. Bush said he is not bothered by the reaction of White House colleagues to the new memoir written by Dick Cheney, NBC reports.

The tell-all, called In My Time, went on sale on Tuesday. In it, the former U.S. vice president chronicles the numerous ways his Bush administration colleagues – including the President himself – disappointed him.

"I'm glad members of my 'family' are giving their version of what it was like to serve our country,” Bush said. “I did the same thing, I put my version out there. And eventually objective historians will analyze our administration and they'll draw objective conclusions."

In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Cheney was wrong to accuse her in the book of misleading Bush about nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.

"I kept the president fully and completely informed about every in and out of the negotiations with the North Koreans," Rice said. "You can talk about policy differences without suggesting that your colleague somehow misled the president. You know, I don't appreciate the attack on my integrity that that implies."

Rice also disputed a scene in the memoir where Cheney described her as being tearful. "It certainly doesn't sound like me, now, does it?" Rice said.

On Sunday, Rice's predecessor, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Cheney's book hurls "cheap shots" at Bush administration officials. Powell’s disagreements with Cheney on Iraq and other issues were common knowledge before the book came out.

According to the Washington Post:

Powell challenges the account in which Cheney suggests that the secretary of state was pushed out at the end of Bush’s first term. Cheney “takes great credit for my resignation in 2004. Well, President Bush and I had always agreed that I would leave at the end of 2004,” Powell said. “I always intended to just serve one term.”

He also disputed Cheney’s suggestion that Powell had a tendency to withhold his views from Bush and instead aired them outside the administration.

“The president knows that I told him what I thought about every issue of the day,” Powell said.

Rice declined to speculate why Cheney might have mischaracterized events. "I am not going to question the vice president's motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect," she told Reuters.