Here? inquired Bandar, expecting they would go to the governor's mansion or office.
Yes, I prefer it here.
Bandar had been a Saudi fighter pilot for 17 years and was a favorite of King Fahd; his father was the Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan. Bush had been a jet pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. They had met, but to Bandar, George W was just another of the former president's four sons, and not the most distinguished one.
I'm thinking of running for president, said Bush, then 52. He had hardly begun his campaign for reelection as governor of Texas. He had been walking gingerly for months, trying not to dampen his appeal as a potential presidential candidate while not peaking too early, or giving Texas voters the impression he was looking past them.
Bush told Bandar he had clear ideas of what needed to be done with national domestic policy. But, he added, I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy.
My dad told me before I make up my mind, go and talk to Bandar. One, he's our friend. Our means America, not just the Bush family. Number two, he knows everyone around the world who counts. And number three, he will give you his view on what he sees happening in the world. Maybe he can set up meetings for you with people around the world.
Governor, Bandar said, number one, I am humbled you ask me this question. It was a tall order. Number two, Bandar continued, are you sure you want to do this? His father's victory, running as the sitting vice president to succeed the popular Reagan in the 1988 presidential election was one thing, but taking over the White House from President Bill Clinton and the Democrats, who likely would nominate Vice President Al Gore, would be another. Of Clinton, Bandar added, This president is the real Teflon, not Reagan.
Bush's eyes lit up. It was almost as if the younger George Bush wanted to avenge his father's loss to Clinton. It was an electric moment. Bandar thought it was as if the son was saying, I want to go after this guy and show who is better.
All right, Bandar said, getting the message. Bush junior wanted a fight. What do you want to know?
Bush said Bandar should pick what was important, so Bandar provided a tour of the world. As the oil-rich Saudi kingdom's ambassador to the United States, he had access to world leaders and was regularly dispatched by King Fahd on secret missions, an international Mr. Fix-It, often on Mission Impossible tasks. He had personal relationships with the leaders of Russia, China, Syria, Great Britain, even Israel. Bandar spoke candidly about leaders in the Middle East, the Far East, Russia, China and Europe. He recounted some of his personal meetings, such as his contacts with Mikhail Gorbachev working on the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. He spoke of Maggie Thatcher and the current British prime minister, Tony Blair. Bandar described the Saudi role working with the Pope and Reagan to keep the Communists in check. Diplomacy often made strange bedfellows.
There are people who are your enemies in this country, Bush said, who also think my dad is your friend.
So? asked Bandar, not asking who, though the reference was obviously to supporters of Israel, among others.
Bush said in so many words that the people who didn't want his dad to win in 1992 would also be against him if he ran. They were the same people who didn't like Bandar.
Can I give you one advice? Bandar asked.
What?
Mr. Governor, tell me you really want to be president of the United States.
Bush said yes.
And if you tell me that, I want to tell you one thing: To hell with Saudi Arabia or who likes Saudi Arabia or who doesn't, who likes Bandar or doesn't. Anyone who you think hates your dad or your friend who can be important to make a difference in winning, swallow your pride and make friends of them. And I can help you. I can help you out and complain about you, make sure they understood that, and that will make sure they help you.
Bush recognized the Godfather's advice: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. But he seemed uncomfortable and remarked that that wasn't particularly honest.
Never mind if you really want to be honest, Bandar said. This is not a confession booth. If you really want to stick to that, just enjoy this term and go do something fun. In the big boys' game, it's cutthroat, it's bloody and it's not pleasant.
Bandar changed the subject. I was going to tell you something that has nothing to do with international. When I was flying F-102s in Sherman, Texas, Perrin Air Force Base, you were flying F-102s down the road at another Texas base. Our destiny linked us a long time ago by flying, without knowing each other. He said he wanted to suggest another idea.
What?
If you still remember what they taught you in the Air Force. I remember it because I spent 17 years. You only spent a few years. Keep your eye on the ball. When I am flying that jet and my life is on the line, and I pick up that enemy aircraft, I don't care if everything around me dies. I will keep my eye on that aircraft, and I will do whatever it takes. I'll never take my eye off.
Former President Bush continued in his efforts to expand his son's horizons and perhaps recruit future staff.
George W, as you know, is thinking about what he might want to do, he told Condoleezza Rice, the 43-year-old provost of Stanford and one of his favorite junior National Security Council staffers from his White House years. He's going to be out at Kennebunkport. You want to come to Kennebunkport for the weekend?
It was August 1998. The former president was proposing a policy seminar for his son.
Rice had been the senior Russia expert on the NSC, and she had met George W. in a White House receiving line. She had seen him next in 1995, when she had been in Houston for a board meeting of Chevron, on which she served, and Bush senior invited her to Austin, where W. had just been sworn in as governor. She talked with the new governor about family and sports for an hour and then felt like a potted plant as she and the former president sat through a lunch Bush junior had with the Texas House speaker and lieutenant governor.
The Kennebunkport weekend was only one of many Thursday-to-Sunday August getaways at Camp Bush with breakfast, lunch, dinner, fishing, horseshoes and other competitions.
I don't have any idea about foreign affairs, Governor Bush told Rice. This isn't what I do.
Rice felt that he was wondering, Should I do this? Or probably, Can I do this? Out on the boat as father and son fished, the younger Bush asked her to talk about China, then Russia. His questions flowed all weekend—what about this country, this leader, this issue, what might it mean, and what was the angle for U.S. policy.
Early the next year, after he was reelected Texas governor and before he formally announced his presidential candidacy, Rice was summoned to Austin again. She was about to step down as Stanford provost and was thinking of taking a year off or going into investment banking for a couple of years.
I want you to run my foreign policy for me, Bush said. She should recruit a team of experts.
Well, that would be interesting, Rice said, and accepted. It was a sure shot at a top foreign policy post if he were to win.
Bush raised an important issue with his close adviser Karen Hughes, then 43, a former television reporter who had worked for five years as his communications czar in Texas.
He said he needed to articulate why he wanted to be president. You know, there has to be a reason, he said. There has to be a compelling reason to run.
Hughes set out to come up with a central campaign theme. She knew Bush had three policy passions. First, there were the so-called faith-based initiatives—plans to push more government money to social programs affiliated with religious groups. That enthusiasm was real, but it couldn't be the backbone of a presidential campaign.
Second, Bush cared about education. But America's schools are run at the state and local level. It would be tough to run for president on a national education platform.
Bush's third belief, in tax cuts, held promise. It could provide the rationale. The campaign autobiography Hughes wrote with Bush—A Charge to Keep, released in November
1999—included 19 provisions about education and 17 entries under taxes. Faith-based organizations are mentioned three times. The phrase foreign policy occurs twice, both in the context of free trade. There was a single reference to Iraq, no mention of Saddam Hussein, terrorists or terrorism.
During one of the 2000 primaries, Bush called Al Hubbard, a former deputy chief of staff to his father's vice president, J. Danforth Quayle, and one of a group of advisers the elder Bush had recruited to tutor his son on economic issues.
Hubbard, Bush exclaimed. Can you believe this is what I'm running on! This tax cut!
Bush invited Richard L. Armitage, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, to join his team of foreign policy advisers. Armitage, 54, was Colin Powell's best friend. Barrel-chested with a shaved head, a weight-lifting addict who could bench-press 330 pounds, Armitage was a 1967 graduate of the Naval Academy. He signed on because he believed that the Clinton administration had no theory or underlying principle for its foreign and defense policies. It was ad hoc. The Republicans had a chance of getting it right. Armitage was an admirer of Bush senior, who he felt understood the necessity of a strong foreign policy tempered by restraint.
The U.S. military was preeminent in the world and could dominate or stabilize any situation, in Armitage's view. Clinton and his team had failed to develop adequate exit strategies for getting out of foreign entanglements such as Bosnia or Kosovo in the Balkans.
A big job for the next president, he thought, was no less than figuring out the purpose of American foreign policy. Rice's team called themselves the Vulcans. The name started out in jest because Rice's hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, known for its steel mills, had a giant statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metal. But the group, which included Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary for policy in Cheney's Pentagon, liked the image of toughness, and Vulcans soon became their self-description.
In 1999, Armitage attended five meetings with Bush and various Vulcans. He found good news and bad news. The best news was that Bush wanted Powell to be his secretary of state.
At the first Vulcan meeting in February 1999, Bush had asked, Is defense going to be an issue in the 2000 campaign? The advisers said they didn't think it would. Bush said he wanted to make defense an issue. He said he wanted to transform the military, to put it in a position to deal with new and emerging threats.
To do that, the advisers said, the military would need new equipment to make it more mobile and modern, and more advanced training and intelligence gathering. This might take 15 to 20 years before the real advantages would be realized. It would certainly be beyond a Bush presidency, maybe not in their lifetimes.
Bush indicated he was willing to make that investment. Armitage and the others worked on a speech that Bush gave at The Citadel, the South Carolina public military university, on September 23, 1999.
I will defend the American people against missiles and terror, Bush
said, And I will begin creating the military of the next century.
... Homeland defense has become an urgent duty. He cited the potential threat of biological, chemical and nuclear terrorism….Every group
or nation must know, if they sponsor such attacks, our response will be devastating.
Even if I am elected, I will not command the new military we create. That will be left to a president who comes after me. The results of our effort will not be seen for many years.
Armitage was pleased to see realism in a presidential campaign. He thought that terrorism, and potential actions by rogue states such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea, could be trouble, but not lethal. The big issues in defense policy were the great power relationships with Russia, China and India.
But there was also bad news about Bush. For some reason, he thinks he's going to be president, Armitage told Powell. It was like there was some feeling of destiny. Bush talked as if it was a certainty, saying, When I'm president... Though not unusual for candidates to talk this way in speeches, Bush spoke that way privately with his advisers. It was as if Bush were trying to talk himself into it.
And there was Bush's smirk, Armitage said.
The big problem, Armitage thought, was that he was not sure Bush filled the suit required of a president. He had a dreadful lack of experience. Armitage told his wife and Powell that he was not sure Governor Bush understood the implications of the United States as a world power.
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Among the Vulcans was another veteran of the Cheney Pentagon, Stephen J. Hadley, who had been assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. It was the post Armitage had held in the Reagan administration—a kind of State Department within the Pentagon focusing on foreign relations. Hadley, 52, was as quiet and soft as Armitage could be vocal and hard. Raised in Ohio, Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell and with a Yale Law degree, Hadley was a student of national security with early service on the National Security Council staff in the Ford administration.
Hadley had helped in the preparation of Bush's Citadel speech. When Bush said he wanted a reform or transformation agenda for the Pentagon, several Vulcans demonstrated their knowledge of Army hardware by reeling off the names of some of the lighter vehicles that could be used to replace the heavy tanks. Bush began asking questions about the kinds of lighter vehicles and their various merits.
You really don't want to go there, Hadley told Bush, because if you start proposing an alternative to the tank, there are 200 specialists in Washington all ready to jump on what you're saying and say, 'This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.' So stay away.
Let me tell you how I think about elections, Bush replied. I want to reform the Defense Department. Now, I run and don't mention it, when I'm elected and go to the Joint Chiefs and say, 'By the way, I want to reform the Defense Department,' they'll say, 'Who are you? You've been elected. You'll be gone in four years. We'll be here. Thank you very much.'
If I go to the American people and say, 'I'm going to reform the Defense Department. Here's why. Here's what I'm going to do.' And when I get elected and I go to the Joint Chiefs and I say, 'The American people have just elected me to reform the Defense Department. Where do we start?' That makes a big difference. He apparently didn't know that the Joint Chiefs, the heads of the services, serve only four-year terms. He clearly thought of them as a monolith.
At another meeting during Bush's early candidacy, the Vulcans were discussing arms control. Bush had lots of questions and he was getting lots of answers. Hadley told Bush, They're very good on this stuff. You don't need all the technical stuff. You've got great instincts. If I could urge you to do one thing, it would be 'Trust your instincts.'
Bush had no problem trusting his instincts. It was almost his second religion. In an interview with me several years later, on August 20, 2002, he referred a dozen times to his instincts or his instinctive reactions as the guide for his decisions. At one point he said, I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player.
In addition to seeking foreign policy tutors for his son, the former president spent his post-presidential years defending his decisions in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The United Nations had authorized the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein's army from neighboring Kuwait, which Saddam had invaded the previous summer. It was a specific mission, endorsed by most of the world's nations. Saddam's army had been driven out of Kuwait, but because he survived the war and stayed in power, a number of critics, many Republican conservatives, said Bush had screwed up and should have pushed on to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.
On February 28, 1999, the former president was the honored guest at a gathering of some 200 Gulf War veterans at the Fort Myer Army base, just across the Potomac River from Washington.
It burned him up when people said they hadn't finished the job, he said. Had we gone into Baghdad—We could have done it. You guys could have done it. You could have been there in 48 hours. And then what? Which sergeant, which private, whose life would be at stake in perhaps a fruitless hunt in an urban guer
rilla war to find the most-secure dictator in the world? Whose life would be on my hands as the commander-in-chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we're going to show our macho? We're going into Baghdad. We're going to be an occupying power—America in an Arab land—with no allies at our side. It would have been disastrous.
As George W. Bush locked up the Republican presidential nomination, Prince Bandar kept in touch. Over the weekend of June 10, 2000, Bandar attended a surprise party for Barbara Bush's 75th birthday at the family retreat in Kennebunkport. Bandar thought it was quaint and old-fashioned, complete with the Bush family members putting on a 45-minute variety show with comic skits. The effort put into these family spoofs astounded him but he found the show hilarious.
George W. pulled Bandar aside.
Bandar, I guess you're the best asshole who knows about the world. Explain to me one thing.
Governor, what is it?
Why should I care about North Korea?
Bandar said he didn't really know. It was one of the few countries that he did not work on for King Fahd.
I get these briefings on all parts of the world, Bush said, and everybody is talking to me about North Korea.
I'll tell you what, Governor, Bandar said. One reason should make you care about North Korea.
'All right, smart aleck, Bush said, tell me.
The 38,000 American troops right on the border. Most of the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division was deployed there, along with thousands of other Army, Navy and Air Force personnel. If nothing else counts, this counts. One shot across the border and you lose half these people immediately. You lose 15,000 Americans in a chemical or biological or even regular attack. The United States of America is at war instantly.
Hmmm, Bush said. I wish those assholes would put things just point-blank to me. I get half a book telling me about the history of North Korea.
Bob Woodward Page 2
