Joshua Bolten

You could point to all kinds of statistics that show that the U.S., the view of the U.S. government was the highest in 2008, 2009, at the end of Bush's term, but there are two stories.

One is when Josh Bolton, when the Bush administration ended, Josh Bolton, who is Bush's chief of staff, decided to go, he was so moved by Pafari, decided to go and volunteer for a month in Namibia at a Maryknoll healthcare center.

And he said kids would come up to him and talked to him and he said, yeah, do you know anything about PEPFAR? And he said, they thought PEPFAR was a word.

That it wasn't this awkward acronym, it was a word.

And then there's now a new oral history book out on the Bush administration.

And Josh Bolton said, well, I never really believed that to be true.

Well, you know something, George Bush said it.

He said it publicly and he said it privately.

I'd been in the Oval Office a lot.

And when I worked for George W. Bush, I'll just finish on this note, Jim, his chief of staff, Josh Bolton, when I started to brief the president regularly in the mornings, I said, do you have any recommendations for how to do this? And he just said, yeah, it's easy.

Tell the president the truth every morning at five minutes.

And I just remember standing in front of Biden's desk.

A couple of my colleagues were already there.

And I have a scene in the book, when I worked for Bush, his chief of staff, Josh Bolton, when I started briefing the president a lot every morning, I said, "Hey, what's the b- what's the [laughs], what do you recommend to do this?" He said, "Look, it's easy.

Tell the president the truth in five minutes every morning." And I t- I told, uh, uh, Biden that morning, "We don't know this, we know this is an unprecedented event.

We don't know the scope, the scale.

So I had many emails from people back and forth.

And I saw an email, for instance, where, and I talked from Josh Bolton, who is his deputy chief of staff, to Michael Gershon, the speechwriter's primary voice.

Actually, the source of conservativism in the White House besides Bush, a very important person.

They talked about before this, well, wouldn't it be, it's actually kind of great that we have something for an AIDS in Africa and a speech that goes to war in Iraq, it kind of counterbalances it out.

I mentioned Anne Bingham being the person I worked for, uh, during the Clinton administration.

Um, I think President Bush in, uh, you know, Josh Bolten, his chief of staff, and, uh, Sean O'Keefe, who was his NASA administrator, and Steve Preston, who, um, ran the SBA and HUD, they were phenomenal, uh, public sector leaders.

Um, but the norms are pretty bad, uh, a- across the board.

It's not the expertise that you need.

This was at the height of the HIV epidemic, and millions of people were dying, in Africa especially.

And so I made a recommendation after three months, And what I had found in that three months of looking around, I mean, I meet from everybody from Condoleezza Rice to Josh Bolton to major senators and find out that there was a real bipartisan support of the United States to, you know, help do the right thing.

And, you know, that we had this thing called PEPFAR that would, you know, distribute antiretroviral drugs in Africa.

which was a highlight of the Bush administration,