An emotional George W. Bush opened up about his legacy to talk show queen Oprah Winfrey Tuesday as he released his memoirs in which he remorselessly defends the Iraq invasion and the use of waterboarding.
"Decision Points" appears a week after the November 2 elections saw congressional Republicans make a strong recovery having fallen out of favor with voters after the eight, often tumultuous years, of Bush's administration.
Bush, who has largely been absent from the public eye since he left the White House in January 2009, admitted to few errors in judgment during the hour-long show and insisted that he was unmoved by his many critics.
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"I will tell you Oprah, one of my proudest accomplishments was I wouldn't sell my soul for the sake of popularity," Bush said, adding that while the criticism may have hurt his family, it never hurt him.
"I felt so strongly about the decisions I was making and I felt that history would understand it. If I'd allowed the critics to affect me during he presidency -- the name calling and stuff -- I don't think I'd have done my job as a leader."
In the hefty, 500-page book, Bush wrote of his errors in the Iraq campaign and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, which intelligence reports strongly suggested Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had obtained.
While he told Oprah that he still feels "terrible" and "sick" about the fact that such weapons were never found, Bush insisted that Saddam had been a significant threat who needed to be removed.
"Saddam Hussein in power today would mean the world would be less stable and more dangerous and 25 million Iraqis would be living under the thumb of a brutal, ruthless dictator," Bush said.
"My point is the world's better with him gone."
The former president said the toll on American troops after eight years of war "weighs heavily" on him and became emotional as he told Oprah a story about meeting the wife and children of a fallen soldier.
"I'm kind of a weeper -- you may be able to tell," Bush said as his eyes glistened.
"I did everything I could not to weep in front of her children because I wanted her children to have the memory of the commander in chief saying your father is a hero, not a weepy commander in chief. So I fought back the tears and she passed me a note that said 'John did his job, now you do yours.'"
Bush confessed that "we could have done a much better job" during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina crisis, which some critics viewed as the low point of his presidency.
He called his New Orleans flyover, when he surveyed the damage from the air without touching the ground, as a "mistake" because it made him appear uncaring, but said landing would have diverted key resources from the rescue efforts.
Bush told Oprah his ability to respond was limited by the fact that state officials were legally charged with the disaster response and refused to ask for federal troops despite his urgings.
He also expressed deep hurt that people saw the slow response as racist because the people abandoned to the floodwaters and chaos were largely poor and black.
"I can see how the perception might be maybe Bush didn't care. But to accuse me of being a racist is disgusting," Bush said.
"There's no justification for that and frankly it speaks to the ugliness of the American political scene."
Bush also discussed his early problems with alcohol and invited Oprah's cameras to his family's sprawling vacation compound in Maine where he spoke of his family's political legacy with his father, former president George H. Bush, and mother Barbara.
When asked if there could be another Bush in the White House some day, George H. Bush said: "I don't think so but I wish there was."
Barbara joked "I think people are bushed right now" and her husband said "that's going away fast."
They all expressed hopes that former Florida governor Jeb Bush would make a run for the White House, but said he had ruled it out despite their urgings.
"We have other children. Maybe the first girl president," Barbara said.
The former president's book is expected to have a first run of 1.5 million copies, along with an e-book version containing a video message from the former president and his home movies, Crown publishers said earlier this month.
The huge print run is equivalent to that for former Democratic president Bill Clinton's book, "My Life," which was a runaway hit.
