Foreign policy

Even George H.W. Bush now denounces his son's "axis of evil" speech. And he's right.

Former President George H.W. Bush criticizes some of his son's top administration officials in a forthcoming biography, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer," Bush said of Cheney, according to a New York Times story on the biography, which is by Jon Meacham. "The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department."

The elder Bush's opinion of his son's administration is not shocking: George W. Bush himself fired Rumsfeld in 2006 and, in his second term, sidelined the once-powerful Cheney. New York Times journalist Peter Baker writes in his book on the Bush-Cheney administration that Cheney's influence so eroded within the White House that Bush considered replacing him with Bill Frist, then a Republican senator.