George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Would the Colombian government now abandon its policy of extraditing drug
traffickers?
Bush: I have no comment whatsoever on that.
Q: Did you know about it?
Bush: I have no comments on whether I knew about it.
Q: Is it true?
Bush: I can't comment on whether it's true or not.
Q: Did we turn you into this?
Bush: Yes. When I told you...that I didn't think there would be a deal [on the four-power
conference on Germany], and then they shortly made a deal, and I'm hit for decieving
you. So from now on it's going to be a little different.
Would he schedule a summit with Gorbachov for June, 1990? Bush again refused to
answer, "Because I'm not gonna be burned for holding out or doing something
deceptive." Later the same afternoon, Marlin Fitzwater, the top White House spin doctor,
attempted to interpret what had been an infantile fit of rage by assuring the reporters: "He
was just kidding. He was having fun." [fn 20] In retrospect, it is also clear that Bush's
thyroid was also on the warpath.
Later the same spring, Bush went semi-ballistic when reporters declined to join him for
jogging at 7:15 AM in Columbia, South Carolina. The White House reporters all got a
wake-up call at 7 AM calling on them to join Bush for jogging in 15 minutes; usually the
reporters watch Bush from the sidelines, but this time he was magnanimously inviting
them to come running with him. There were no volunteers. Bush then bullied Rita
Beamish of Associated Press into running with him, 13 laps around a football field for a
total of 25 minutes. But even after that exertion, Bush was still full of fury. He proceeded
to launch a diatribe at the press corps:
The rest of you lazy guys, get out there and run. A fit America is a fine America. A fit
America is a strong America. A fit America should include photo dogs [Bushspeak for
photographers] as well as print reporters who slovenly sit back in the grandstands while
some of us are out running.
Bush then attacked the "boom men," who hold microphones on long poles to pick up
Bush's remarks. Not long before, a boom man had accidentally dropped a microphone on
a table in the Oval Office, and Bush had apoplectically complained of ruined antiques;
had it been the Theodore Roosevelt desk? Bush railed that if the boom men exercised
more, they would have more "strength in the forearms to keep these microphones up in