DOUG WHO?:

From Psst to Oops: Secret Taper of Bush Says History Can Wait (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 2/24/05, NY Times)

All week, Doug Wead has said the reason he secretly recorded some of his phone calls with President Bush was for history's sake.

But Wednesday, after a blast of criticism, Mr. Wead abruptly decided he had spoken too soon. "History can wait," he said, promising to turn over the tapes to Mr. Bush.

The disclosure that he had such tapes, recordings that spanned two years before the 2000 presidential election when he was an evangelical adviser to Mr. Bush, was published in The New York Times on Sunday.

Since then, Mr. Wead has appeared on several television news and talk shows to defend his actions, insisting several times that he had never sought to profit from the tapes and had decided to release some of them only after the president's re-election.

"My thanks to those who have let me share my heart and regrets about recent events," Mr. Wead wrote in the statement, posted on his Web site Wednesday. "Contrary to a statement that I made to The New York Times, I know very well that personal relationships are more important than history."

Mr. Wead, an author who drew on the tapes obliquely for one page in his recently published book, "The Raising of a President: The Mothers and Fathers of Our Nation's Leaders," said, "I am asking my attorney to direct any future proceeds from the book to charity and to find the best way to vet these tapes and get them back to the president to whom they belong."

The White House declined to add to its previous statements that Mr. Bush "was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend."

It's obviously easy for the President in this instance, because the "revelations" are so complimentary to him, but note how blithely he's ignored the whole dust-up in stark contrast to Democrats of late.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2005 11:09 AM