Bush book starts with decision to quit drinking

FORMER US president George Bush said his upcoming book would begin with an anecdote about his wife persuading him to give up drinking by pushing him to decide whether he preferred booze to fatherhood.

Bush said Decision Points, to be published in November, opened with the scene and him questioning whether he loved booze more than his wife, Laura. He said he realised he had an addictive personality and stopped drinking. That act set him on the path to the presidency, Bush said in his address to an American Wind Energy Association conference in Dallas.

He said the book was less autobiography and more an analysis of key decisions in his life, both before and after he was elected president.

Topics will include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the troop surge in Iraq, his responses to terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, and the financial meltdown.

He said he hoped the book would be a tool for historians evaluating his presidency. “I don’t think you can come to a definitive conclusion about a presidency until the passage of time. I want to put you in my position.”

Bush, 63, who left office in January 2009 and moved with his wife to Dallas, discussed retirement, joking that he was playing shuffleboard after the speech and that his domestic agenda now consisted of taking out the rubbish and doing the dishes.

He plugged Laura Bush’s recent book, Spoken From The Heart, telling convention delegates: “You ought to buy it.”

He also joked about the comedown of post-presidential life, saying he realised how different his life was when he was walking his dog, Barney, through his new neighbourhood.

“There I was,” he said. “Former president of the US, with a plastic bag in my hand, picking up what I had been dodging for eight solid years.”

When he was not dishing out one-liners, Bush at times appeared sentimental. He praised his father, the 41st US president, for helping him become the 43rd.

“I never would be sitting here without the unconditional love of an awesome man,” he said.

Although Bush was criticised for not acknowledging errors during his presidency, he was more candid at the convention. He said his biggest regret was not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that he was misled by intelligence reports.

He said he failed at elevating political discourse and said politics were “rough and ugly”. He said he remained disappointed he could not pass meaningful reform on social security and immigration, and that it was a tactical error not to tackle immigration after he won re-election in 2004.