Bush made the comments to Peggy Noonan, a family friend who was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. She is a columnist for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which published the remarks.
Since his June 16 summit meeting with Putin in Slovenia, Bush has been lambasted by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill for saying that in their 90-minute session he got a sense of Putin's "soul'' and decided the leader was trustworthy.
In the Noonan interview, Bush compared his statement to Reagan's famous remark to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Trust but verify.''
"I just didn't complete the Reagan sentence,'' Noonan quoted him as saying. "Reagan said, 'Trust and verify.' My attitude was, I said, 'Trust.' Sophisticates surely understand that once you lie, you know, that trust isn't forever, trust is something you must earn. But when I looked at him I felt like he was shooting straight with me.''
Noonan wrote that she had requested the interview for a book about Reagan, and later received permission to use Bush's remarks about his five-nation trip from June 11 to 16.
Bush apparently was eager to put a new gloss on several episodes from the trip. It has been widely reported, for example, that his dinner in Sweden with the 15 heads of state of the European Union was dominated by criticism of his decision to reject the Kyoto global warming treaty.
Bush said he "patiently sat there as all 15 in one form or another told me how wrong I was'' about the Kyoto accord. "And at the end I said, 'I appreciate your point of view, but this is the American position because it's right for America,'" Bush said.
"With all due modesty, I think Ronald Reagan would have been proud of how I conducted myself,'' Bush told Noonan in the Oval Office. "I went to Europe a humble leader of a great country, and stood my ground. I wasn't going to yield. I listened, but I made my point.''
Most reports have said Bush encountered broad skepticism from European leaders about his plans for a global missile shield. But he told Noonan that he thought the Europeans seemed "a little more forward-leaning'' on missile defense.
Bush also said Putin agreed, without hesitation, to a one-on-one dialogue over missile defense between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Putin's top security adviser, Sergei Ivanov. Bush said he found Putin to be "a man who realizes his future lies with the West'' but does not want Russia to be "diminished'' by the United States.
"I've been noticing some of these guys popping off saying Bush shouldn't have used the word 'trust,'" he said. ''My attitude is, and this is Reaganesque in a sense, 'Yes I trust him, until he proves otherwise.' But why say the 'proves otherwise'? To me that goes without saying.''
Noonan said Bush apparently felt sympathy for Putin before their joint news conference on June 16 because the Russian is six years younger and in some ways unused to the demands of the world stage. "I knew what to expect,'' Bush said. "I knew there were going to be essentially softball questions by those reporters.''
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