Bush: 'I Did Not Compromise My Principles'

Bush: Serving as President 'Joyful'

Reflecting on his time in the Oval Office, Bush said that he hopes to be remembered as a president who made difficult decisions in a principled way and "didn't sell his soul for politics."

ABC News' Charlie Gibson interviews President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush.

(Eric Draper/ABC News)

He also spoke about his role as the "comforter in chief."

"The president ends up carrying a lot of people's grief in his soul," he said.

"One of the things about the presidency is you deal with a lot of tragedy -- whether it be hurricanes, or tornadoes, or fires or death -- and you spend time being the comforter in chief," Bush said. "But the idea of being able to serve a nation you love is -- has been joyful. In other words, my spirits have never been down. I have been sad, but the spirits are up."

Bush underscored his reliance on his values to guide him through tough moments.

"The thing that's important for me is to get home and look in that mirror and say, 'I did not compromise my principles,'" he said. "And I didn't. I made tough calls. And some presidencies have got a lot of tough decisions to make."

Bush said that he regrets that he was unable to change the partisan tone in Washington -- one that permeated his presidency.

"I didn't go into this naively; I knew it would be tough," he said. "But I also knew that the president has the responsibility to try to elevate the tone. And, frankly, it just didn't work, much as I'd like to have it work."

"9/11 unified the country, and that was a moment where Washington decided to work together," he said. "I think one of the big disappointments of the presidency has been the fact that the tone in Washington got worse, not better."

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Nevertheless, Bush said that he felt his administration brought significant change to Washington, with reforms like the No Child Left Behind education policy, and international relief efforts such as the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Malaria Initiative.

President Bush said that his administration responded promptly to the economic crisis.

"When you have the secretary of the Treasury and the chairman of the Fed say, 'If we don't act boldly, we could be in a depression greater than the Great Depression,' that's an 'uh-oh' moment," he said.

Through government action such as the Troubled Assets Relief Program, Bush insisted that the government has taken the necessary first steps towards economic recovery.

"Slowly but surely, the system is becoming unthawed, and it's going to take time for the system to become unthawed," he said. "What the American people have got to know is we've taken the steps to unthaw it, which is the first step to recovery."

"The American people got to know that we will safeguard the system," he said. "I mean, we're in. And if we need to be in more, we will."

While many have cast blame on the Bush administration for mishandling the economy, the president said he did not have feelings of guilt for the financial collapse.

"You know, I'm the president during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in president," Bush said. "And when people review the history of this administration, people will say that this administration tried hard to get a regulator. And there will be a lot of analysis of why that didn't happen. I suspect people will find a lot of it didn't happen for pure political reasons."