Q. Many Americans have thought of you as something of an unofficial chaplain to the White House for the past several Presidents. Has that proximity ever made you uncomfortable?
A. Yes, it has. Each one of them I have known before he ever got into the White House. Some of them I was very close friends with before they ever got there, like Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and George Bush.
I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became President. I remember he had wanted me to come and see the lights at the White House at Christmas. It was the year that Watergate was just beginning. I put my arm around him, and I said, "Mr. President, let us have a prayer." He said, "Billy, I would like to say something first. We have been here now four years. I thought by this time some of my enemies would have had me by now." He added, "You know, I am a hated man, going back to the Alger Hiss case, and Helen Gahagan Douglas and all that."
We had a prayer. And when I finished praying, I looked up at him and tears were coming down both sides of his cheeks. I will never forget that night.
I see him now maybe two or three times a year. The last six months of his presidency, we could not get to him. I went through every angle I knew. And he knew I was trying to get to him. But as Bill Safire says in his book, he gave orders not to allow me near him because he did not want me tarred with Watergate.
Then he went to San Clemente ((Calif.)), and he was so terribly sick, he nearly died. He came close to death. My wife Ruth hired a one-motor plane to pull a sign back and forth in front of the hospital, saying GOD LOVES YOU AND SO DO WE. And nobody knew it was Ruth.
At San Clemente he took me upstairs really just to talk in depth about his feelings and all the things that had happened, about Watergate. He was a very emotional man. People do not realize how easily he was touched by things. And he is, I think, a true believer.
Q. Did he express any regret about Watergate?
A. Oh, he apologized to me about the language. He said, "There are many words that I used that I never knew before."
Q. Is there a privately spiritual President Bush whom we do not know about in public?
A. Bush is easy to talk to about spiritual things, easier than other Presidents I have met. He says straight out that he has received Christ as his Saviour, that he is a born-again believer and that he reads the Bible daily. He has the highest moral standards of almost anybody whom I have known. He and his wife have such a relationship, it is just unbelievable. If you are with them in private, you know, they are just like lovers. When I would go and spend the night, as I did many times when he was Vice President, the room that I stayed in was right across the hall from theirs, and they always kept the door open. And there they were, you know, in bed, holding hands or reading a newspaper or reading a book.
Q. Is it true that many Presidents have offered you jobs?