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JUAN GONZALEZ: Ambassador Wilson, we were talking before the break about your leaving Baghdad back in the first Gulf War. You came home. You were met by President Bush at the time, and he expressed enormous gratitude for your work there. I’m wondering if, in the last four years, you took the opportunity at any time to try to reach out to him, to Bush’s father, to talk about what has been happening with you and your wife under the administration of his son?

JOSEPH WILSON: Juan, it’s absolutely true that when I arrived back in Washington on January 13, the very next day I was in the Oval Office. The President of the United States and his War Cabinet were there. The President introduced me to his War Cabinet as a true American hero. I spent a lot of time with the President and subsequently went over with him to meet Mrs. Bush. I have a picture in my scrapbook of walking through the rose garden with President Bush about thirty-six hours before the bombing of Baghdad that kicked off Desert Storm, during which time the President was asking me precisely those questions that one would want one’s commander-in-chief to ask on the eve of sending Americans off to kill and to die in the name of the American people. It was a very personal and very emotional meeting, and I retain an enormous amount of respect for the President and his team, of which I was part, in the management of the international crisis that was created by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

I had spoken to him several times and communicated with him several times in the run-up to the second Gulf War. I shared with him a number of articles that I had written, most particularly the first article I wrote in October of 2002 on this matter. I spoke with him shortly after my second — my New York Times article appeared, the “What I Did Not Find in Africa” article. I have found it, and I’m sure he has found it, too painful to communicate personally now, and so I have not spoken to him or had any written correspondence with him for several years. This fight with his son has become, as you can imagine, personal, and certainly for the administration’s side, obviously very bitter, since they have mobilized the most efficient character assassination and smear team that the nation can produce in order to try and rid themselves of this meddlesome priest, to quote Shakespeare.

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