Reply #58: In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President, NYT

[imenja]

Bush admits to drug use.


In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: February 20, 2005 New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20talk.html?hp&ex=1108962000&en=de99ea0739b1d129&ei=5094&partner=homepage

"WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality.

In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them.


Variously earnest, confident or prickly in those conversations, Mr. Bush weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses campaign strategy and comments on rivals. John McCain "will wear thin," he predicted. John Ashcroft, he confided, would be a "very good Supreme Court pick" or a "fabulous" vice president. And in exchanges about his handling of questions from the news media about his past, Mr. Bush appears to have acknowledged trying marijuana. . . .

He mocked Vice President Al Gore for acknowledging marijuana use. "Baby boomers have got to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do them," he said. "