by James Mann
Bush had been setting forth his ideas for this program (including the name) since the earliest stages of his presidential campaign. He proposed a new requirement that each state set a series of uniform standards for basic skills, such as reading and math, and then administer a series of annual tests to students from third to eighth grade to evaluate how they were doing. The federal government would then provide support for students who lagged on these tests. The test results were also to be made public, school by school, with breakdowns of how various groups such as racial minorities or children from low-income families were performing. The aim, Bush explained, was to make schools and teachers more accountable by enabling parents to see for the first time how one school compared to others; if a school performed poorly, parents would be able to transfer their children elsewhere.
Bush introduced the legislation for No Child Left Behind during his first week in the White House. He immediately began to cultivate the most important Democratic legislator: Ted Kennedy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee responsible for education (and, also, unofficially, the most influential of all liberal Democrats). Bush invited Kennedy to a White House showing of Thirteen Days, a movie about the Cuban missile crisis, in which Kennedy’s two older brothers had played the leading roles. He told Kennedy, “Let’s show them Washington can still get things done.” Kennedy made clear he was willing to work with Bush, sending him a note the following morning that said, “I look forward to some important White House signings.”
Kennedy’s interest lay in obtaining more attention and federal funding for the education of children in impoverished public schools. He also had a more generalized interest in winning Bush’s support for the principle of a strong role for the federal government in education. He and other Democrats were strongly opposed, however, to a provision in Bush’s legislation that would have enabled parents of children in failing schools to use vouchers, paid for by the federal government, to attend private schools.
Within four months after Bush took office, a compromise was reached. Bush dropped the proposal for private-school vouchers, in the process angering conservative educational leaders such as Reagan’s secretary of education, William Bennett. In turn, Kennedy endorsed Bush’s central idea of nationwide testing and standards, to the dismay of teachers’ unions. The unions argued that poor student performance was usually the result of underlying social problems, not educational ones, and that No Child Left Behind would thus result in blaming schools and teachers unfairly.
When the bill was signed, Bush and Kennedy stood side by side at Boston Latin School, America’s oldest public school, praising each other for their roles. Kennedy said that Bush had been “there every step of the way, making the difference on this legislation.” Bush told Kennedy, “Not only are you a good senator, you are a good man.”
With No Child Left Behind, Bush and Kennedy gave impetus to a broader movement for change in the nation’s public schools. The legislation encouraged further state and local efforts to test students regularly and to use the results to evaluate the performance of schools and teachers. However, No Child Left Behind left a decidedly mixed legacy. Critics argued that it led to an obsession with standardized testing, creating pressure for schools and teachers to devote an inordinate time preparing children for the tests. In several cities, there were cheating scandals. A few years after the program was launched, Kennedy expressed disappointment with No Child Left Behind, claiming that the Bush administration had never provided the funds that he expected and that the program had been mismanaged. Worst of all, the law established standards so rigorous that large numbers of schools across the nation qualified as low performing, thus reducing the usefulness of the rating system. Eventually, the Obama administration granted a series of waivers that freed up most states from the strict requirements of No Child Left Behind.
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By the end of his first summer in the White House, Bush seemed to be putting himself in position to be remembered as a president devoted to two signature domestic issues: cutting taxes and reforming education. He frequently took part in public events meant to demonstrate the importance of education, and he had come to refer to himself as “the education president.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush was at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, preparing to watch second-grade students in a reading lesson, when airplanes struck the two World Trade Center towers, instantaneously redefining the nature of Bush’s presidency.
4
September 11
When George W. Bush first came to the White House, most people expected that his foreign policy would be similar to his father’s. During his campaign, he had surrounded himself with members of the George H. W. Bush administration. When questioned about his own lack of foreign-policy credentials, he would reply, “I’ve got one of the finest foreign policy teams ever assembled.”
He filled out the top ranks of the administration with his father’s senior aides: Vice President Dick Cheney had been his father’s secretary of defense; Secretary of State Colin Powell had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, had served on the National Security Council staff for the elder Bush; Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, the deputy secretaries of defense and state, respectively, had also served in his father’s administration. Commentators portrayed the new team as representing continuity with the past. Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times used the word “retreads” to refer to the new Bush team. His fellow Times columnist Maureen Dowd agreed. “George II was an obedient son who emulated his father, the old king, in all respects. He felt no need to put his own stamp on his monarchy,” wrote Dowd (a perception that ran contrary to her columns, years later, about the supposedly oedipal relationship between the two Bushes).
The columnists’ misperceptions were understandable. It seems likely that at the beginning of the administration, neither George W. Bush nor even his father understood the extent of the disagreements, rivalries, and conflicting worldviews among these officials. George W. Bush had served as an occasional informal adviser in his father’s White House but only for politics and domestic policy, and he knew few of the details of either the foreign policy of that period or the personnel involved.
The most important dynamic was the unrecognized mistrust and tension between Cheney and Powell. The two men had been partners running the Pentagon during the successful wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, but beneath the surface there had been a series of conflicts. Powell had been the beneficiary of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which increased the authority of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he became the most powerful occupant of that job in history. Cheney and the civilians working under him at the Pentagon had chafed at Powell’s power, his role as a media star, and the challenge they perceived to the principle of civilian control of the military. Powell, in turn, regarded Cheney as too conservative and too remote from the lives of ordinary soldiers, because he had not served in the military. At one point during the George H. W. Bush administration, Powell had kidded Cheney that his civilian aides were “all right-wing nuts, like you.”
George W. Bush’s other appointments merely added to the internal discord. As secretary of defense, he nominated Donald Rumsfeld, who had served in the same job a quarter century earlier, during the Ford administration. In fact, Rumsfeld had been Cheney’s own boss and mentor in the 1970s, and he proceeded to align himself regularly with Cheney against Powell. Rumsfeld also developed an antipathy toward Rice, complaining that she lacked sufficient experience or stature and that she too often infringed on his authority. In turn, Rice thought that Rumsfeld had trouble treating her as an equal.
It took remarkably little time for these submerged tensions to burst forth. Less than two months after Bush’s inauguration, President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea visited Washington. Just before he arrived, the new Bush team decided to tell him that the administration planned to craft a new approach toward
North Korea. Early on the morning the meeting was to be held, however, Bush picked up the Washington Post and read a quote from Powell saying that in its North Korea policy, the new administration would pick up where the Clinton administration had left off. Furious, Bush woke up Rice and demanded she tell the new secretary of state to correct the record. Powell walked out of the meetings as they were taking place to tell reporters that the administration was reexamining in full the U.S. policy toward North Korea. Weeks later, he explained the incident away: “Sometimes, you get a little too far forward on your skis, that’s all.”
The following week, a decision by the new administration on greenhouse gas emissions pointed to another problem: some within the foreign-policy team were more attuned than others to America’s allies overseas. Bush treated the decision not to curb carbon-dioxide emissions as primarily a matter of domestic policy involving the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress. He and Cheney sent a letter to Congress setting out the new policy and, in the process, denounced the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. When Rice saw the letter, she realized that it would infuriate European leaders; she alerted Powell, and they hurriedly sought to add a conciliatory sentence saying the Bush administration would continue to work with European governments to combat climate change. Bush rebuffed their pleas, claiming it was too late. A few weeks later, Bush attended a dinner with European leaders in Sweden at which, one after another, they attacked his policies on climate change. Bush didn’t take this criticism well. “The President was really angry, and he never fully forgave what he saw as the disrespectful tone taken at the dinner,” reported Rice. The Kyoto announcement, Rice later acknowledged, helped to crystallize the European view that Bush took a unilateral approach to foreign policy.
Other actions by Bush in his early months further contributed to this perception of unilateralism. The Bush administration sought to undercut or reject several international treaties and agreements, in the process upsetting its allies overseas, especially those in Europe. Bush turned down an international protocol to enforce bans on biological weapons and asked for changes in an international agreement on the sale of small arms. In its final year, the outgoing Clinton administration had taken steps toward joining the International Criminal Court; Bush quickly reversed course.
Bush had promised during the campaign to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which stood as an impediment to the construction of missile-defense systems. In the new administration’s early months, scuttling the ABM treaty became the top item on the agenda for Bush’s foreign policy. His advisers, particularly Cheney and Rumsfeld, contended that new missile-defense systems were necessary to shield the United States against missiles from countries such as North Korea and Iran. “We had to be able to build systems that could intercept incoming missiles if we were to keep the country safe, but the ABM Treaty wouldn’t permit us to do it,” argued Cheney.
Those words captured both the spirit of Bush’s approach to foreign policy during his early months in office and its underlying defect. The new president and his more experienced advisers were trying to adapt America’s national security policies for the post–cold war world. In doing so, however, they were focused almost entirely on threats from other nation-states, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq, China, or Russia.
Bush and his advisers devoted considerably less attention in those early months to the potential threats from nonstate actors, that is, from organizations existing outside the boundaries or territory of a single country, notably the murky group called al-Qaeda. Its attacks on the United States had begun with the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, a month after the George H. W. Bush administration left office. During Clinton’s presidency, al-Qaeda had become a growing preoccupation, as it carried out lethal attacks against the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing hundreds of people, and against the USS Cole at a port in Yemen in 2000, killing seventeen American sailors. Several other al-Qaeda plots had been foiled, including one at the turn of the new millennium.
The result was a paradox: in 2001, Bush thought of his foreign-policy team as a group of old, experienced hands, but in one important aspect of national security policy, dealing with al-Qaeda, they had little experience at all. During the presidential transition, Clinton officials tried to warn Bush and his aides about the threat of terrorist attacks, but the message didn’t take hold. Bill Clinton later testified to the 9/11 Commission that before leaving office he had told Bush, “I think that you will find that by far your biggest threat is Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda.” Bush told the commission, however, that he didn’t remember being told much about al-Qaeda. Samuel D. Berger, Clinton’s outgoing national security adviser, said he delivered a similar warning to Rice, but she claimed that he spent most of the meeting talking about the Middle East peace process and North Korea. Rice kept Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism specialist, on the job, and he quickly called for stepped-up efforts by the new administration against al-Qaeda, but she was wary of him.
The new administration’s approach to terrorism in the early months of 2001 was best summarized by George Tenet, who served as CIA director under Clinton and Bush and was generally on good terms with both presidents. “At the top tier, there was a loss of urgency,” Tenet later wrote. “Unless you have experienced terrorism on your watch—unless you have been on the receiving end of a 4:00 A.M. phone call telling you that one of your embassies or one of your ships has just been attacked, it is hard to fathom the impact of such a loss.”
In May, Tenet warned Bush that U.S. intelligence was picking up growing “chatter” about a new attack by al-Qaeda. Much of the intelligence seemed to point to an attack overseas, similar to the earlier ones in Africa and Yemen. In response, security was tightened at several U.S. embassies. On several occasions, Bush asked CIA officials to examine whether there might be an attack on the American homeland. They responded with a briefing memo that was published in the President’s Daily Brief on August 6, 2001, under the headline “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Bush later maintained that this memo was of limited utility because it contained mostly historical material and lacked concrete information about how or when a new attack would be carried out.
Both the CIA and the FBI missed a series of clues to what was coming. Al-Qaeda had sent a series of operatives from abroad to the United States, and in the summer of 2001 some of them signed up for instruction in how to fly airplanes. The Bush administration, meanwhile, was moving very slowly. Its first top-level meeting to discuss a strategy for al-Qaeda was held in early September. The officials decided to launch unmanned Predator drones for reconnaissance over Afghanistan, and on September 10 Rice forwarded the decision to Bush for his approval.
It was too late. Early the following morning, al-Qaeda operatives commandeered four commercial planes and steered three of them into the two World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
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During the cold war, the U.S. government had carried out an extensive series of drills to plan what to do in case of a nuclear attack on the United States. These were called continuity-of-government exercises; they were aimed at ensuring that all of America’s top leaders would not be killed at the same time and that communications between civilian leaders and the military could not be disrupted. Cheney had taken part in these exercises and was far more familiar with them than Bush was. It was no surprise, then, that in the hours after the September 11 attacks, Cheney took charge of the administration’s decision making, operating primarily from the bunker under the White House.
On this day that would define his presidency and change the course of history, Bush unhappily found himself at the education event in Sarasota. It was Cheney who gave the tense order, amid fear of continuing attacks, to shoot down any commercial plane believed to have been hijacked. He and Bush would later claim that the vice president cleared this decision with the president over the phone beforehand, but there is no record of such a con
versation and reason to doubt it ever took place.
Bush said he wanted to come back to the White House, but his aides ordered him not to do so, because they thought Washington was unsafe and because the president and vice president should not be in the same location. “I then did something that I never did again,” Rice subsequently wrote. “I raised my voice with the president and in a tone as firm as I could possibly muster, I said, ‘Mr. President, you cannot come back here. Washington, I mean the United States, is under attack.’” Over the course of the day, Bush was flown first to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana (where he appeared in a grainy, unpolished video that his own aides admitted was far from reassuring) and then, for better communications, to the Strategic Command in Nebraska. Finally, saying that he needed to be able to speak to the nation from the White House, Bush insisted to the Secret Service that he needed to return to Washington. He landed there in the early evening, while Cheney flew off to Camp David. Bush gave a brief television address to the nation that night. “Today, our nation saw evil,” he said. “The search is under way for those who are behind these evil acts.”
Over the following days, Bush took on the role of a wartime president. He presided over a national prayer service at the National Cathedral, with his father and former presidents Ford, Carter, and Clinton in attendance. He visited Washington’s Islamic Center, where he urged the public to avoid discrimination or hate crimes against Arabs or Muslims. He went to Ground Zero, amid the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center towers. Rescue workers greeted him with chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” Through a bullhorn, he shouted to them, “The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” In a speech to a joint session of Congress, he prepared the nation for military action, declaring that the campaign he planned would not relent “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
