Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  The photogenic trip, with its air of mystery and danger, pumped up Bush, but it did nothing to ameliorate the struggle within his team over what to do about Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Iraq shortly after Bush’s visit and all but washed his hands of Bremer and his operation. In an airport lounge, Rumsfeld told Bremer it was clear he was reporting to Bush and Rice.

  “I’m bowing out of the political process,” he told Bremer. “Let Condi and the NSC handle things.”

  That had become a running theme with Rumsfeld. As far as he was concerned, if others wanted to do his job, fine, let them take responsibility. Leaving a West Wing meeting one day, Rice, a couple of steps behind Rumsfeld in a stairwell, asked him to call Bremer with instructions on something. He refused. “He doesn’t work for me,” Rumsfeld said. While he maintained he was responding to legitimate chain-of-command issues, colleagues thought he was trying to distance himself from the increasingly messy situation. “Rumsfeld was so disengaged from the political process in Iraq—he had no interest in it at all,” said Dan Senor, the Bremer aide. “Rumsfeld kind of tuned out after Baghdad fell,” said Richard Perle, who was advising him as a member of the Defense Policy Board. “He was so fed up with the internecine warfare, the interagency warfare, that his basic attitude was, ‘Let them do it.’ ”

  BUSH WAS AT Camp David on December 13 when Rumsfeld called.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “first reports are not always accurate, but—”

  Bush interrupted. “This sounds like it’s going to be good news.”

  Rumsfeld said General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, reported that the military might have caught Saddam Hussein.

  “Well, that is good news,” Bush said. “How confident is Abizaid?”

  “Very confident.”

  Acting on information from a captive, Special Forces had raided a remote farm eight miles outside Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown, and found a bedraggled, bearded man in a shallow spider hole. The man had a pistol but put up no fight. “I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate,” he said. A soldier replied, “President Bush sends his regards.” The man had a bullet scar on his left leg and distinctive tattoos known to be on the real Iraqi dictator, but the Americans knew he had used body doubles in the past, so they wanted to confirm his identity before making an announcement.

  Bush, excited but trying to remain calm, called to inform Rice, who was home in Washington preparing for a Christmas party whose guests were to include Rumsfeld.

  “Don just called,” Bush said. “The military thinks they’ve got Saddam.” “I’m skeptical,” he added. “But we’re not breathing a word of this.”

  “It’s probably a double,” said Rice.

  Bush asked her to let Andy Card and Colin Powell know. He tried to call Cheney, but the vice president was on Air Force Two heading to Newburgh, New York, for a fund-raiser. Cheney got the message when the plane landed and called back. The two connected at 3:43 p.m.

  “Dick,” Bush began, “it looks like we’ve captured Saddam Hussein.”

  Cheney agreed they should proceed cautiously.

  Moments after Cheney hung up, Rumsfeld called and said they planned a DNA test to match Hussein with genetic material from one of his slain sons. Assuming it was him, Rumsfeld said, they would announce it the next day. Cheney worked the phone for the next hour and a half as he gathered information, leaving well-heeled Republican donors waiting.

  After finally making it to the event, Cheney headed back to Washington and suggested to his daughter Mary, who was traveling with him, that they drop by Rumsfeld’s house for his own Christmas party. Lynne Cheney had gone on her own. But Mary thought it was odd since it was already 9:00 p.m. Her father gave her a hint after the plane landed and they had flown by helicopter back to the Naval Observatory grounds. Walking to the limousine that would take them to Rumsfeld’s house, Cheney quietly told his daughter there was news out of Iraq but she had to stay mum since it was not confirmed. Once in the car, he handed her a note saying that a “high-value target” had been captured and was being identified by DNA.

  Cheney did not say anything more about it for the duration of the party, but he and Rumsfeld were in a festive mood and at the end of the evening sat around a coffee table swapping war stories from the Nixon and Ford administrations. Only after the Cheneys returned to the residence and no one else was around did the vice president finally tell Lynne Cheney that they might have captured Hussein.

  Just after three o’clock in the morning of December 14, Bush was jarred out of sleep by a call from Rice.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, sir,” she said, “but we got him.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Bush said. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said. She had just heard from Bremer that it really was Hussein.

  Among the people Bush told at that point was his father. This was as big a moment for the elder Bush as for the younger. The scourge of their family, the man who had vexed father and son for a dozen years, was now in custody.

  “Congratulations,” the father told the son. “It’s a great day for the country.”

  The son corrected him gently: “It’s a greater day for the Iraqi people.”

  A few hours later, Bremer appeared before reporters in Baghdad to announce the news. “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him,” Bremer said to raucous cheers from Iraqis in the room.

  Rumsfeld was annoyed. He had called Ricardo Sanchez and told him to make the announcement; after all, it was the military that had captured Hussein. Rice had a different reaction. It should have been not Bremer or Sanchez but an Iraqi who made the announcement. It was a lost opportunity, she thought, to showcase the fact that Iraqis were taking control of their own fate from the dictator who had brutally repressed them. Still, she did not mention that to Bremer; instead, she called to praise him for a “really first-rate” news conference.

  Either way, the capture gave the Bush team hope that Iraqis would see they no longer had anything to fear from Hussein and could therefore embrace the future of their country. Hussein would be put on trial by Iraqi prosecutors in an Iraqi court, albeit with substantial American help, to send a signal: it was time to move on. The picture of a disoriented and disheveled Hussein released by the American military was meant to be a powerful reinforcement of that lesson. “We really believed it was a key to ending the insurgency,” Rice remembered.

  From the Cabinet Room later that Sunday, Bush made that case directly. “I have a message for the Iraqi people,” he said in remarks televised at 12:15 p.m. Washington time. “You will not have to fear the rule of Saddam Hussein ever again. All Iraqis who take the side of freedom have taken the winning side.”

  He added, “In the history of Iraq, a dark and painful era is over. A hopeful day has arrived. All Iraqis can now come together and reject violence and build a new Iraq.”

  THE CAPTURE OF Hussein seemed to help the United States in Libya as well. American and British experts had been secretly visiting Libya and inspecting its weapons program since the outreach from Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son back in March. To make sure the rapprochement worked, Bush had kept it secret from even top cabinet officers as he personally oversaw negotiations. “The president was the principal action officer orchestrating the Libya action plan,” recalled Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who led the effort for Bush. By tapping Joseph, one of the administration’s most vocal hard-liners, Bush reassured Cheney.

  The Libyans had acknowledged a nuclear weapons program and twenty-five tons of mustard chemical weapon agent. They had agreed to submit to international inspections and provided nuclear weapons design materials acquired from A. Q. Khan, the charismatic father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb and mastermind of an illicit proliferation network. But after months of haggling over the details, the Libyans were suddenly ready to finalize the agreement on December 16, just two days after Hussein’s capture was announced. Two days later, Tony Blair called Bush. He had reac
hed out to Qaddafi to persuade him to approve the agreement and had promised he and Bush would reciprocate with positive statements.

  Bush agreed. At the White House the next day, December 19, he waited for Qaddafi to issue the statement, but hours passed with no word from Tripoli. As morning turned to afternoon and evening, Rice tried “to manage the anxiety” of the president. Only later did they learn Qaddafi was waiting for an important soccer match to finish first. While he was supposed to deliver the statement personally, in the end he put it out in writing. Bush decided that was good enough.

  Finally, at 5:30 p.m., the president marched into the briefing room to welcome the agreement. It sent a message, he said, that “leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations.”

  The Libyan disarmament was an important victory for Bush and Cheney not only because it took a potentially erratic nuclear player off the board but because it helped finally unravel the nuclear schemes of A. Q. Khan, who turned out to be perhaps the most prolific distributor of dangerous material, technology, and know-how in modern times. As investigators chased his trails, they discovered that he had been a one-man shopping channel not just for Libya but also for North Korea and Iran. Within weeks of the Libya deal, Washington had pressured Pakistan into placing Khan under house arrest and forcing him to issue a public confession.

  Just as important, Libya allowed Bush and Cheney to assert that the Iraq War had made it easier to bring other rogue states to the bargaining table. Not every potential threat would require military force if Iraq served as a demonstration project of sorts. “Just simply the fact that Qaddafi gave up his nuclear program because he didn’t want to end up like Saddam Hussein is an example of what took place because of what happened,” Rumsfeld said years later. But the disappointment for Bush and Cheney was that other states like Iran and North Korea did not follow suit.

  WITH THE APPROACH of Christmas, Bush was feeling the effects of time. He was fifty-seven years old and had been running most days since 1972, an activity he pursued with relentless fervor to help clear his head and keep his equilibrium. But now his right knee was hurting, and doctors gave him a magnetic resonance imaging test, or MRI. They concluded he had worn out his knees and needed to give up running and switch to cross-training. It was a significant adjustment, a sign of advancing age, not to mention the stresses of the office.

  Bush had little time to get used to the changes in his personal routine. Intelligence agencies had reports of terrorist plots on planes bound for the United States from Europe. It was probably the most serious worry about a specific threat since September 11, and Bush and Cheney were confronted with the question of how to respond: Should they alert the public and cancel planes at the risk of overreacting, disrupting a major holiday, and being accused of stoking fear for political purposes? Or should they let the planes fly, do what they could to hunt down plotters, and pray nothing happened?

  “Which one of you, based on this information, would put your family on one of those flights?” Bush asked during a meeting with Tom Ridge and other advisers.

  No one said they would. That made the decision easy. The targeted flights would be canceled. The next day, Ridge raised the national threat level to high risk. No attacks materialized, and the holiday passed safely.

  For Bush and Cheney, though, the end of the year still brought bad news. John Ashcroft had recused himself from the CIA leak case because Karl Rove used to work for him, so the matter had fallen to his deputy attorney general, James Comey. In turn, Comey had decided to turn it over to a special prosecutor. On December 30, he announced that Patrick Fitzgerald, a boyish-faced U.S. attorney in Chicago and a close friend, would lead the investigation of the White House.

  17

  “We were almost all wrong”

  On January 21, 2004, Vice President Cheney’s phone rang. It was his daughter Mary. I need to talk, she said.

  There was no mistaking the urgency in her voice, and he told her to come right over. Lynne and Liz Cheney soon heard and rushed over as well. Liz Cheney came so quickly she did not have a chance to change clothes and strode past the Secret Service officers into the West Wing in jeans in violation of the president’s dress code.

  For the Cheneys, it was a crisis like no other, a clash between personal principle and political loyalty. Mary had agreed to duplicate her 2000 role as her father’s campaign operations director heading into 2004, but now she was not sure she could work for a ticket headed by President Bush. In the three years since they took office together, the vice president had never been torn from Bush in such a personal way.

  The issue was same-sex marriage. The day before, Bush in his State of the Union address had defended “the sanctity of marriage,” which was code for opposing legally sanctioned marriage between gay couples. In an election year, it was an obvious appeal to Bush’s conservative base, a way of reminding them that whatever their misgivings about his other policies, this was a president in tune with their social views. But when Mary saw a copy of the speech the day before it was to be delivered, she was shocked. She had planned to sit in the House gallery for the speech but abruptly canceled. “I sure wasn’t going to stand up and cheer,” she later wrote.

  Mary was no liberal; she supported her father on many issues. But this was an existential question. Could she serve a ticket that now officially stood for discriminating against her because of her sexual orientation? Several campaign operatives stopped by to see her at headquarters to express solidarity. It was striking how many people working for the president did not agree with him, a sign of a broader generational shift already under way. They told Mary that it was not that big a deal since no state actually recognized same-sex marriage, but that was little consolation. She felt she should quit, pack her bags, and head back to her home in Colorado. She had a long, heart-wrenching phone call with her partner, Heather Poe.

  On January 21, the four Cheneys closeted themselves in the vice president’s office as Mary vented. The vice president had made clear before that he split from conservative orthodoxy when it came to gay rights, declaring in his 2000 debate with Joseph Lieberman that “freedom means freedom for everybody.” Now he counseled his daughter that if she felt she had to resign, he would support her. But he said she had played an important role in 2000 and would again if she stayed. The discussion went round and round.

  Finally, Cheney noticed the time; he had to leave for New York for a fund-raiser, with Mary slated to join him in her campaign role. Lynne spontaneously decided to go along. While the vice president posed for photographs in a Manhattan apartment, she and Mary found privacy in a bedroom and sat opposite each other on twin beds talking. “If you feel like you have to leave,” Lynne said, “then that’s the right thing to do.”

  Ultimately, Mary calmed down and decided to stay. Quitting would call more attention to her. She did not want to be “the vice president’s lesbian daughter” or a symbol for a movement; she bristled when activists put her picture on milk cartons because she was “missing” from the fight for gay rights. She loved her father, she supported his political career, and she did not like being used as a wedge against him.

  The momentary crisis underscored a rare fault line in the Bush-Cheney partnership. Since the two teamed up on the Republican ticket in the summer of 2000, Bush and Cheney had agreed more than they disagreed. But the signs of change were increasingly there. Bush’s brief flirtation with the idea of replacing Cheney “to demonstrate that I was in charge” betrayed his sensitivity. It gnawed at him that they had failed so far to find the weapons Cheney had told Bush were in Iraq, and some close to the president wondered whether he had let himself be led down a dangerous path. By this point, Bush was already talking with Condoleezza Rice about ways to repair the damage with allies and put more emphasis on diplomacy. For his part, Cheney had enjoyed a longer stretch of influence than anyone had
expected. When they took office, some on Cheney’s team figured the vice president’s outsized sway would last six or nine months until Bush grew more comfortable in the job and did not need to lean on his more experienced number two. But Cheney’s clout had endured, partly because of the national security issues suddenly thrust to the fore and partly because of his skill at advancing his viewpoint while remaining deferential to Bush.

  In the focus on same-sex marriage, Cheney saw the hand of Karl Rove, another powerful force in the White House who had circled carefully around the vice president since arguing against his selection in 2000. Cheney and Rove avoided issues where the other specialized, a tacit arrangement that since September 11 had left the vice president in the dominant position. But now it was 2004 with the next election in sight, putting Rove back at the helm. Rove had been invested in Bush’s political success since volunteering in the failed 1978 congressional campaign. A bare-knuckled operative who rattled off poll numbers and election results like others memorized baseball statistics, he orchestrated Bush’s two gubernatorial campaigns and the 2000 presidential campaign, then outlasted the other two members of the Iron Triangle, Karen Hughes and Joe Allbaugh, although Hughes still parachuted in at times. Bush called him the “boy genius” when he was happy with him and “turd blossom” when he was not. Critics dubbed him “Bush’s brain,” underestimating Bush and overestimating Rove.

  Heading into 2004, Rove had something to prove. The 2000 campaign that was supposed to be a masterstroke of Rovian politics came unraveled at the end, and now he and Bush both wanted to show they did not need the Supreme Court to win an election. If it took tough tactics, Rove would not shy away; he knew the Democrats would not either. As a result, Cheney figured the line in the State of the Union would probably not be the end of the matter. Armed with Matthew Dowd’s analysis of the shrinking political center, Rove was pursuing a strategy focused as much on bolstering Republican turnout as on reaching swing voters.