experience with his father, something he talk about previously, whereas we approached i guess it would have been the 92 election, and his father was running for re-election and the question is whether or not he should have gotten a new vice president. not to say anything negative about dan quayle, but that s one of the few things a candidate can do at that time to try to bring some new wrinkle to the campaign and i thought it was very important that he think about that. after four years i was a target for a lot of my critics, darth vader and so forth. still are. still are or i am. and i thought it should be a conscious decision and i wanted him to know that if he made the decision that if he wanted to have somebody else in that job for his second term, that was fine by me. how did that go over? well, the first couple of times he didn t pay a lot of attention to me when i said it. i went back in the third time and i said mr. president, you
or the enhanced interrogation program. the decision was respect to afghanistan and iraq. these were life-and-death decisions really. and i think as a direct result of what he did as president, we got through that period in relatively good shape. as you look back on it now i think he was a bold, decisive leader, and i give him a lot of credit for the quality, if you will, of his presidential leadership. we will take a break. coming up, how vice president cheney convinced the president to include one all-important word in a pivotal speech on iraq, and it s one that the other chief advisers didn t want him to say. that and much more straight ahead. [ fe or creates another laptop bag, or hires another employee,
president had, in fact, altered scooter s sentence. he commuted it. he commuted it. right. but nonetheless, i thought that it be appropriate that there be a pardon and scooter be pardoned. the president disagreed. he s the one that had to make the decision. at the tail end of the administration, the last week we were in office, he decided there wouldn t be any more pardons and that meant there wouldn t be a pardon for scooter. i disagreed with that. i still disagree with it. obviously i have a lot of respect for the president. i m delighted he gave me the opportunity to serve. we had our disagreements, and this was one of them. how did it go? how hard did you push? because you can be pretty persuasive. there was no question that it was his call. there was no question that i thought he should have made a different decision, and i was forthright in expressing my viewpoint. okay. we will continue. we have more with vice president
ability to track down osama bin laden and finally kill him. but i think at the time that it happened i made a public saying! that i thought president obama handled that well, that he made a good decision to send in seal team 6 and they had obviously done a good job completing the assignment. so i don t want to convey just a totally negative message where president obama is concerned in this regard, but i do feel that i wished especially the thing that concerned me was when there was talk about the possibility of prosecuting members of the intelligence community who had been involved in carrying out our policies in the pursuit of keeping the country safe. at the outset the president and his attorney general talked about doing exactly that. now eventually they backed off of it. i think there are only two individuals left whose cases are being reviewed, but all of the others had been reviewed before
really need to think about this. i m happy to continue to serve if that s what you want, but you need to know that i m perfectly happy to leave and make room for somebody else if you want to put somebody else on the ticket. so then he went away and thought about it for a few days and came back and said, no, dick, he said this is a great team and we are going to continue as we have. i was glad he picked me, but i was also glad that he felt i felt he had the opportunity to make a change if he wanted. i noticed in one of the interviews that you recently gave that there was i guess the liberal media, you know how they work, but i felt that they were trying to put a wedge between you and president obama, or for you to sort of take over and say, no, i really made these decisions. and you kept going back again and again, even on the scooter libby decision, and every other decision there was a moment are you were alone with the president and he said dick, you