Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Bush interrupted. “Strom Thurmond Jr., huh?” he said. “Is that Strom Thurmond Jr. as in Strom Thurmond?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Bush thought for a second, then said with a smile, “I hate a fellow who trades on his daddy’s name.”

  THE TAX CUT plan was proving to be a defining test for the new president. He had flown to twenty-six states in his first hundred days in office to rally the public behind him. Success would breed success; if he demonstrated he could push through his tax cut plan, he believed, it would help with education, Medicare, Social Security, and every other priority. And never far from his mind was his father’s read-my-lips reversal. That was one mistake he would not repeat.

  Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill had urged him to consider triggers that would scale back the tax cuts if the government’s fiscal situation worsened. But Bush resisted. “I won’t negotiate with myself,” he said. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chief who had collaborated with O’Neill on the triggers idea, had assumed Bush’s unyielding stance was a bargaining position as with any White House. “I did not foresee how different the Bush White House would be,” he said later.

  So when Nick Calio, Bush’s chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill, came to the president and reported they could get a deal that fell short of $1.6 trillion, Bush sent him back with a firm no.

  “Nicky,” he said, “don’t wobble. One-point-six, keep saying one-point-six.”

  Not long after, Calio returned. If Bush wanted it, Calio had an agreement with two conservative Democratic senators, John Breaux and Ben Nelson, for $1.375 trillion. But Calio told Bush that Senate Republican leaders thought they could get more.

  Bush turned to Cheney. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Well, I think at this point,” Cheney said, “we have to stick with our horses.”

  Bush agreed and sent Calio back again to keep pushing for more.

  The tax cut issue would soon cost Bush politically. As debate opened on the Senate floor on April 2, the body was sharply divided along party lines. Cheney watched on television from his Senate office as a vote came down to the wire on a budget amendment that would preserve the $1.6 trillion in tax cuts against Democratic efforts to trim it. Senator Lincoln Chafee, one of the moderate Republicans who met with Cheney after the recount, switched his aye to nay. Cheney stood up, strode into the chamber, and cast his first tie-breaking vote.

  But the war was not over, and Cheney was still trying to lock down enough votes for the tax legislation itself. His main target was Senator James Jeffords, another of the moderates, who was now demanding the tax cut be pared back and $200 billion be devoted to special education for children with disabilities. Cheney summoned Jeffords to his Senate office. Exactly what happened in the flurry of conversations that followed became a point of dispute. Trent Lott thought Jeffords had committed to voting for the tax cut; Jeffords thought he had a deal with Lott to divert some of the tax cut money to special education. By the end of the day, it was clear neither understood the other. Cheney later summoned Jeffords back to his Senate office, which Jeffords’s staff had begun calling “the Torture Chamber,” but the two got nowhere. Karl Rove would later suggest that Jeffords, chairman of the Education Committee, had been jealous that Bush bypassed him to work with Senator Judd Gregg on the No Child Left Behind education legislation. From Jeffords’s point of view, the president and the vice president were unreasonably governing from the right even after losing the popular vote. Jeffords began contemplating his options.

  On the evening of May 21, Andy Card got an urgent message from Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, warning that Jeffords was preparing to leave the party and hand control of the 50–50 Senate to Democrats. Alarmed, Card invited Jeffords to the White House to meet with Bush at two the next afternoon. The meeting did not go well. Jeffords found Bush “relaxed and charming,” but he had clearly made up his mind on the tax plan and was not open to persuasion.

  “Here we are in the Oval Office,” Bush told him, “and you are contemplating something that’s going to have a profound impact on the country—something that will affect my ability to get things done on behalf of the American people, and I just want to know: Why? This is a historic move; can you tell me why?”

  Jeffords talked about his support for special education and argued that Bush should govern from the center. He warned that Bush would follow in his father’s footsteps and become “a one-term president if he didn’t go beyond the conservative Republican base on such issues as providing greater resources for education.”

  Bush countered that the senator was already positioned to advocate for his issues. “You are the swing vote,” he said. “You can have enormous influence.”

  Jeffords was not moved. Bush and Cheney thought it was less about the way they were governing and more about the committee chairmanship Democrats were offering. “It was clear that the deal had been cooked,” Nick Calio recalled. Cheney argued against giving in to what he saw as blackmail. If they caved to Jeffords to keep him in the majority, then it was not really a workable majority. “He just said there will be no end to it and that’s not what he wants us to do, it’s not defensible, we’re not going to do it,” recalled Lott, “and I could have kissed him.”

  On May 24, Bush watched on a television on Air Force One en route to a speech in Cleveland as Jeffords announced his decision to leave the party and caucus with the Democrats. Just like that, Bush had lost control of the Senate, four months after taking office. “It was a big body blow,” Ari Fleischer concluded.

  Still, Jeffords agreed not to block the tax cut. Cheney brokered the final deal, scribbling down $1.425 trillion on a yellow napkin and passing it to Senator Ben Nelson in a meeting; ultimately, it was negotiated down to $1.35 trillion, and included a clause making the tax cuts expire after a decade unless renewed. But it was a major victory. The final version lowered the top rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent and the three next-highest rates by three percentage points each. A new, lower 10 percent bracket was created for the working poor, child tax credits were increased, the estate tax was to be phased out, and the so-called marriage penalty reduced. The bulk of the cut would go to the highest-income Americans; however, as a percentage, their share roughly mirrored their share of the tax burden. The lowest-income Americans, who do not pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes, were not affected. On May 26, the House approved the plan 240 to 154, and the Senate followed barely an hour later with a 58-to-33 vote.

  After passage of the tax cuts, Lincoln Chafee, one of just two Republicans to vote no in the Senate, asked to see Bush, and it proved a testy meeting. Chafee warned Bush that his sharply conservative agenda was risking Republican seats in 2002, including those of Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon.

  “Don’t worry about Susan and Gordon,” Bush told him.

  Chafee asked why he was so uncompromising on abortion. “Even Laura is pro-choice,” Chafee said, guessing the first lady’s position without really knowing it.

  Bush grew irritated but did not deny it. “Don’t you bring my wife into this,” he said.

  Although the Senate was back in the Democrats’ hands, their 51-to-49 edge was as perilous as the Republicans’ had been. Bush decided to reach out again to Senator Tom Daschle, the new majority leader, renewing his peripatetic search for another Bob Bullock. He invited Daschle and his wife, Linda, to dinner with Laura in the White House. At the last minute the first lady flew to Texas to be with one of their daughters. Over enchiladas, Bush talked at length about how lonely the White House could be, especially on weekends. He felt like a prisoner, unable to leave his own house without a spectacle. “That’s the reason I like to go back to Texas,” he said. As Bush walked the Daschles to the elevator on the third floor to say good night, it occurred to the senator how disarmingly charming Bush could be. “I’d finally gotten a firsthand taste of George Bush at his best,” he later reflected.

  But the pressures ag
ainst bipartisan cooperation were powerful. Although he had secured the tax cuts, Bush was facing a revolt from within his own party over his education program. The House Republican leadership showed up in the Oval Office one day over the summer to tell him conservatives were balking at the No Child Left Behind initiative. For a party that had long urged the elimination of the Education Department, voting to expand the federal role in schools was a lot to swallow.

  Dennis Hastert, the Speaker; Dick Armey, the majority leader; and Tom DeLay, the majority whip, pressed Bush to abandon his alliance with Ted Kennedy.

  “Mr. President, conservatives are very unhappy with this; they don’t agree with it,” DeLay said. “We can get all the votes on the Republican side. We need to go partisan on this, not bipartisan.”

  Bush understood that going with only Republican votes would mean big compromises in the program. But he also felt he had to trust his party’s leadership. Simply disregarding their advice would be problematic.

  But Nick Calio urged him to stick with his plan. “Mr. President, I got to tell you, I think on this one, you started it out bipartisan. I think you have to see the course through.”

  AS SUMMER ARRIVED, Bush prepared for his first trip to Europe. He had agreed to meet with Vladimir Putin, the former KGB colonel turned president of Russia.

  The relationship with Russia had changed drastically since his father’s presidency, when the Soviet Union was collapsing. A decade later, the rocky 1990s had soured Russia on democracy, and the ascension of Putin heralded a new era of centralized power. Bush was wary of Putin—“one cold dude,” he had called the Russian leader—but he was interested in forging a working relationship with Putin if only because he saw the real threat to the United States elsewhere. When he met with Russian scholars invited by Condoleezza Rice, Bush agreed with Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor, who told him that keeping Russia “inside our tent” was the best course.

  “You’re absolutely right,” McFaul remembered Bush answering, “because someday we’re all going to be dealing with the Chinese.”

  On June 16, Bush arrived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, for his introduction to Putin. The two met in a gold-draped room in a sixteenth-century castle. Putin immediately showed that he had done his homework.

  “I did play rugby,” Bush replied. “Very good briefing.”

  Bush recalled his own briefing on Putin. “Let me say something about what caught my attention, Mr. President, was that your mother gave you a cross which you had blessed in Israel, the Holy Land,” Bush said.

  Putin was caught by surprise. “It’s true,” he said.

  “That speaks volumes to me, Mr. President,” Bush said. “May I call you Vladimir?”

  Though baptized by his mother secretly during Communist times, Putin had made little public demonstration of religiosity, and as she watched the exchange, Rice found it hard to believe he was genuinely a man of faith. If so, it was hardly in the same wear-it-on-your-sleeve way that Bush was. But his time in the KGB stationed in East Germany had taught him how to gain trust and cooperation from a contact. So, sensing that Bush judged others in part through the lens of his own Christian faith, Putin launched into a story about how his country house once burned to the ground and the only thing he recovered was the cross.

  Bush came away encouraged. While he had excoriated Bill Clinton for personalizing the Russian-American relationship through his friendship with Boris Yeltsin, Bush began to do the same with Putin. When reporters asked Bush if he trusted Putin, it occurred to Rice that they had not prepared the president for that question. Bush winged it, calling Putin “an honest, straightforward man.” He added, “I looked the man in the eye,” and “I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Rice stiffened, worried the answer might be too effusive, but said nothing.

  Back in Washington, Cheney and his staff were even more disturbed. The vice president saw Russia as simply a weaker version of the Soviet Union, a view that traced back to the fight over Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Ford White House, and the skepticism about Mikhail Gorbachev in the first Bush administration. Every time Cheney saw Putin, he privately told people, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB.” The president’s soul-gazing comment provoked disbelief. “A lot of us were kind of rolling our eyes about that,” Eric Edelman, Cheney’s deputy national security adviser, said later.

  Cheney had other things to worry about. On June 30, he checked into the hospital for an operation to insert a pacemaker and defibrillator. The sophisticated device, implanted near his left collarbone, would act as both a traditional pacemaker speeding up a heart that beat too slowly and a miniature defibrillator that could stabilize an irregular heartbeat. The decision to insert the device reinforced concerns about his health, making White House aides nervous. He left the hospital the same day and to prove his vigor gave three radio interviews when he returned to work on July 2.

  Cheney then slipped away for a fishing trip out west. Out on a boat with his friend Jack Dennis, Cheney nodded off. Just days after the defibrillator surgery, Dennis was nervous enough to check to see if he was still breathing.

  “Well, so what?” Cheney snapped. “What would happen if I wasn’t? Will you just not worry about me? Leave me alone and whatever happens happens. I can’t think of a better place to die.”

  AS THE VICE president recovered his strength, the nation’s intelligence agencies were collecting increasingly alarming reports suggesting a major al-Qaeda plot in the works. There was no hard information about where and when, but it was chilling enough that George Tenet later said it “literally made my hair stand on end.” On July 10, he called Rice and asked to see her immediately. Tenet and a couple of aides raced to the White House and told Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Richard Clarke that a “spectacular” attack seemed likely in weeks or months.

  “What should we do?” Rice asked.

  “This country needs to go on a war footing now,” said Cofer Black, the CIA’s counterterrorism chief.

  Rice said she would take it to the president. In her own memoir years later, she remembered the warning more vaguely but said alerts were raised and efforts made to prod allies to help pick up extremists like Abu Zubaydah. Still, it would take another two months for new strategies against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to reach a point of decision. By then it would be too late.

  IN JULY, BUSH made his first visit to see Tony Blair in Britain. As a gift, Blair had sent Bush a Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill for the Oval Office that the British government lent him for the remainder of his presidency. Realizing from their Camp David meeting that the president did not care for stuffy diplomatic formalities, Blair invited the Americans to Chequers, the sixteenth-century mansion used as a country getaway by British prime ministers. Intent on keeping the visit relaxed, Blair and his wife, Cherie, decided that while aides could join official meetings, only family would stay at the estate. When Rice asked to stay as well, the Blairs said no.

  Cherie Blair was later surprised when the person running Chequers told her, “I’ve managed to accommodate Mr. Bush’s doctor. I’ve put him in my room.”

  “What doctor?” Cherie Blair asked.

  “Dr. Rice.”

  The Bushes arrived by helicopter on July 19. The president had doffed his tie, and the two leaders went for a long walk alone, then joined aides upstairs for a discussion of the Middle East. Over dinner, they were joined by their wives and the Blairs’ children. One of the kids brought up capital punishment. As governor of Texas, Bush had presided over 152 executions, more at that point than any other politician since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

  Cherie Blair, a formidable lawyer, jumped in. The death penalty was inherently wrong, she argued. If a mistake was made, it could not be corrected.

  “Well, that’s not the way it is in America,” she remembered Bush saying. “We take the eye-for-an-eye view.”

  A good-natured debate persisted through much of the meal; it was unusual for a president to be challenged so
frontally at dinner.

  “Give the man a break, Mother,” said Euan, the Blairs’ son.

  BACK IN WASHINGTON, Rumsfeld was trying to force a broader reassessment of Iraq policy. In a four-page memo marked “Secret” that he sent to Cheney, Rice, and Powell on the afternoon of July 27, the defense chief proposed meeting to discuss three options: give up the no-fly zones and sanctions since they were no longer effective; approach “our moderate Arab friends” to explore “a more robust policy” aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein; or open a dialogue with Hussein to see if he was ready “to make some accommodation.” Rumsfeld painted a picture of gathering danger.

  “Within a few years the U.S. will undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons,” he wrote. While he did not suggest direct military action, Rumsfeld concluded that “if Saddam’s regime were ousted, we would have a much-improved position in the region and elsewhere.” But the meeting he sought never happened.

  BUSH AND CHENEY were finding a good working rhythm. Cheney exercised his greatest influence in the weekly lunches with Bush and on other occasions when the two met alone. Cheney usually showed up with three or four items he wanted to talk about, and sometimes Bush came with something on his mind as well. “I always felt there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t talk about,” Cheney said. “It was an opportunity, sometimes, to argue issues.” The conversations ranged widely. “Sometimes it was family; sometimes it would be personnel matters related to the cabinet and the Congress,” Cheney said later. “Sometimes it would be policy where he would tell me about decisions he had made.” Whatever was said at those sessions, though, remained among the biggest secrets in the White House. Sometimes Bush or Cheney might share a bit with aides, but more often they did not.

  How much Cheney was quietly steering decisions through those private meetings or by shaping choices before they were presented to Bush became a constant source of speculation in the West Wing. Cheney got three bites at any major decision: his staff sat on committees that developed policies, the vice president participated in cabinet-level meetings that debated proposals, and then he had a chance to talk with Bush about them alone. Sometimes his impact was clear; other times it was just assumed. “Cheney’s role was like watching iron filings moving across a tabletop,” said David Frum, the speechwriter. “You know there is a magnet down there. You know the magnet is moving. You never see the magnet.”