by Peter Baker
“We have a predicament here,” Bartlett told him. “The Post has the ticktock on the chronology of the pictures.”
Bartlett suggested they leak to the Post that the president was “not happy” about the delay and that he had told Rumsfeld so. That would take the heat off Bush and put it where it belonged.
“This is why we have cabinet secretaries,” Bartlett told him. “This is why they take the heat.”
“I agree,” Bush said. “But make sure you let them know what you are going to do.”
Bartlett called Larry Di Rita, Rumsfeld’s spokesman, to give him a heads-up but never anticipated how the mild phrasing would look. “Bush Privately Chides Rumsfeld,” the front-page headline in the Post read on May 6. Bartlett got to work that morning at 6:10, certain it was going to be an ugly day. Sure enough, minutes after he arrived, he heard the White House intercom that announced Bush’s movements declare: “Trailblazer departs residence.” A couple minutes after that, Bartlett’s phone rang summoning him to the Oval Office.
This was your work? Bush asked.
It was, Bartlett acknowledged.
“All right,” Bush said.
Rumsfeld was angry about the leak—how did airing their dirty laundry help? This was a White House out of control. When he and Bush talked by phone, the defense secretary remonstrated with the president.
“You need to get ahold of your PR team,” he complained.
For whatever reason, Bush felt the need to exonerate his political guru. “Don, it was not Karl Rove,” he said. He did not volunteer that it was Bartlett, although Di Rita knew.
The next day, May 7, Rumsfeld appeared at a congressional hearing to take responsibility for the scandal. Asked if he might step down, Rumsfeld said, “Certainly since this firestorm has been raging, it’s a question that I’ve given a lot of thought to.” He added, “If I felt I could not be effective, I’d resign in a minute.” At the White House, it was their turn to be irritated. Rumsfeld had put the president in a box.
Bartlett called Di Rita and pulled him out of the hearing.
“What’s he doing?” Bartlett demanded.
“He’s telling the truth,” Di Rita answered. “He’s answering the question.”
Others, though, thought it was a mistake to keep Rumsfeld. Matthew Dowd, the reelection strategist, marched into campaign headquarters and pressed for action.
“Rumsfeld has got to be fired,” he said. “We can’t just blame this on some National Guard general or some shit. This is the guy who ran for office as the accountability president. When are we going to fire somebody?”
Ken Mehlman seemed sympathetic. “I know, I know,” he said.
But Rove saw it as giving in to political opponents and the media. “How quickly, Dowd, you throw someone under the bus,” he scolded in a phone call.
ON SATURDAY, MAY 8, when few were in the White House to notice, Cheney had an appointment with Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the CIA leak. In four months on the case, Fitzgerald had brought Rove, Robert Novak, and Scooter Libby before the grand jury. Joseph Wilson had just published a book on the episode, assailing Bush and Cheney. The situation had put a chill over the White House, where aides worried but were barred from discussing it with one another. Cheney, sour from his fight with James Comey over the surveillance program, viewed Comey’s friend Fitzgerald warily. Cheney believed he might be the real target.
But Bush had insisted on cooperation, so Cheney sat down with the prosecutor and gave his account in a matter-of-fact manner while repeatedly saying he did not remember virtually anything of consequence to the investigation. Eventually, he tried to wrap it up by telling his questioners that he had other duties to attend to. Fitzgerald’s team had been asking White House officials to sign waivers of any confidentiality agreements with journalists, freeing them to testify about their conversations. When they asked Cheney to sign one, he said he would think about it.
Cheney turned back to the drama involving his friend and mentor. On May 9, Rumsfeld sat down, pulled out stationery emblazoned, “The Secretary of Defense, Washington,” and wrote out another letter to the president, this one two pages and more explicit.
Dear Mr. President,
…By this letter I am resigning as Secretary of Defense. During recent days I have given a good deal of thought to the situation, testified before Congress, and considered your views. I have great respect for you, your outstanding leadership in the global war on terror and your hopes for our country. However, I have concluded that the damage from the acts of abuse that happened on my watch, by individuals for whose conduct I am ultimately responsible, can best be responded to by my resignation…
Respectfully,
Don Rumsfeld
When Bush and Cheney came to the Pentagon the next morning for a briefing on Iraq and to look at the Abu Ghraib pictures, Rumsfeld handed Bush the new letter.
“Mr. President, the Department of Defense will be better off if I resign,” Rumsfeld said.
“That’s not true,” Bush responded, and pushed the letter back across the table.
Rumsfeld said his mind was made up, but Bush asked for time to think about it. Then they headed to the Pentagon briefing room, where Bush, flanked by Cheney, expressed unstinting confidence in Rumsfeld.
“You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror,” Bush told him before reporters. “You’re doing a superb job. You are a strong secretary of defense and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.”
Privately, Bush asked Cheney to talk with his old friend. Cheney went back to the Pentagon the next day, May 11. He sat at a small table while Rumsfeld stood at the standing desk he used near the window.
“Don, thirty-five years ago this week, I went to work for you,” Cheney said, “and on this one you’re wrong.”
Rumsfeld relented and stayed. But he would come to regret it. “It was like a body blow,” he said of Abu Ghraib years later. “Unfortunately, the way the chain of command works, there wasn’t an obvious person who ought to be fired. I had already replaced some of the senior people of both the administrative and the operational chain of command for different reasons, and so most of the people were brand-new and some of them had just gotten there and were understaffed. And I felt that there really wasn’t anyone where you could pin the tail on, and so I stepped up and said if I can’t find anyone better than me, it better be me.” Looking back, he mused, “Maybe it would have helped the military; maybe it would have helped our cause.”
As it was, Bush was left to do damage control. “The pictures made me sick to my stomach,” he told the visiting president of Angola. “It hurt us. It gave enemies of freedom the chance to say look at these people.” But he said they would also “show the nature of a free society” by having a full investigation and bringing the guilty to justice.
FOR DIFFERENT REASONS, Colin Powell was also contemplating leaving. He had stayed despite his embarrassment over the UN presentation and his battles with Cheney and Rumsfeld. He had stayed even when his deputy and close friend, Richard Armitage, had urged him to resign because he felt Powell had become an enabler for the Bush team, exploited for his political credibility to help every time they got in a jam. But now he was weary of it all and he met privately with Bush to tell the president that he planned to step down after the first term. He then used the opportunity to vent about a dysfunctional war cabinet.
“As I said at the beginning, I only wanted to serve one term, and so after the election I should go,” Powell told the president. “But there is another reason, and that is your system is not working well. We are of too many different philosophical views, and we are not reconciling them.”
Bush brushed off the criticism. Every administration had tension, particularly between secretaries of state and defense, and he recalled the famous battles between Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz in the Reagan administration.
“Different views are essential,” Bush said. “Just like Weinber
ger and Shultz.”
“Mr. President,” Powell replied, “I lived through Weinberger and Shultz. I was there. And yes, they had their differences. But they had a system for resolving them. We don’t now. We sort of each go our own way and go around.”
Bush had heard this from others too. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice all complained about each other. Rumsfeld had told him that Powell’s State Department regularly leaked to the media to fight internal battles. Powell bristled at this. Did his team leak? Of course it did. Everyone did. But he could point to particular Rumsfeld advisers who met with reporters to air administration disagreements. And he thought his department’s leaking was nothing like that of the White House, including Cheney’s office.
Either way, he told Bush, it was time to start fresh. “You need to reconcile this for your second term,” Powell told the president, “and I think you should get a whole new team, and it begins with my departure because I am so different from the rest of your team. But I really think you need a new team.”
EVEN AS BUSH was trying to manage his fractious team, he was also busy trying to cut off another architect of the Iraq War. For months, he had been stewing about Ahmad Chalabi, the former favorite who had alienated even his admirers in Washington.
Bush was irritated to look up during his State of the Union address and see Chalabi in the first lady’s box, and he was angrier when he was told later about an interview where the Iraqi exile bragged about getting the Americans to topple Saddam Hussein even with bad intelligence. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told the Telegraph of London. “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.” Bush was “really frosted,” Condoleezza Rice told Jerry Bremer. Chalabi tried to repair the damage by sending a message through an intermediary to the White House clarifying he did not mean he manipulated intelligence, but it was too late. “That statement finished him,” said Richard Perle, his patron.
By the time May rolled around, evidence emerged that Chalabi had told Iranian intelligence agents that the United States had broken their secret codes.
“What the hell is this?” Bush asked at a meeting.
“This is a compromise of potentially significant ramifications,” said Michael Hayden, the NSA director.
Paul Wolfowitz, still sympathetic to Chalabi, warned that they should “make sure this is not something the Iranians are using” to discredit him.
Bush noted media reports that Chalabi’s group was still receiving $350,000 a month in American money.
“Who does Chalabi work for?” Bush asked Rumsfeld. “Who pays him?”
“I don’t know,” Rumsfeld said.
Bush turned to George Tenet. “George, who does he work for?”
“He doesn’t work for us,” Tenet said, and turned to a deputy. “Isn’t that right?”
The deputy said Chalabi was being paid by the Defense Intelligence Agency, part of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.
“If we’re paying this guy and he’s giving away our secrets,” Bush said, “it needs to stop.”
Bush was also preparing that spring to replace the two senior Americans on the ground in Iraq. Jerry Bremer and Ricardo Sanchez would both leave with the transfer of sovereignty as part of a transition in leadership. On his way out, Bremer decided to push for more troops. He had watched the situation for a year and concluded that security was slipping away. One day he asked Sanchez what he would do with another two divisions. “I’d control Baghdad,” he said. So on May 18, Bremer sent a note to Rumsfeld by courier recommending two more divisions, or thirty thousand to forty thousand troops.
The first time Bush heard about it was two days later, on May 20, when Rumsfeld mentioned it during a meeting. Sanchez was in Washington and in attendance. He remembered Bush and Rumsfeld focusing on why Bremer did not go through the chain of command rather than on the substance of his suggestion.
“What are we going to do about it?” Bush asked.
“Mr. President, you ought to be glad he didn’t send it to you, because now you don’t have to respond,” Condoleezza Rice said. “Bremer is ready to leave. He’ll be writing his book. He needs to go.”
“Well, this is amazing,” Rumsfeld said, shaking his head. “Mr. President, you don’t have to do anything. He addressed it to me. I’ll take care of responding to him.”
After the meeting, Rumsfeld sat down with Sanchez in the Situation Room to tell him the president was not sending his promotion to a fourth star to Congress because of the political debate that would ensue. Instead, he was being replaced in Iraq without the new assignment he expected. Without saying so, Bush had just made Sanchez the highest-ranking officer punished for Abu Ghraib.
And with that, no more was heard by Bush or Cheney about Bremer’s proposal for more troops. “I was not pleased that Bremer was recommending more troops for the first time as he was on his way out of Baghdad and not in person to provide his reasoning,” Rumsfeld later wrote. Yet Rumsfeld did not contact Bremer to ask his reasoning. Instead, Rumsfeld sent the issue to Richard Myers, who did not respond for two months and then reported that John Abizaid thought he had enough troops. Bush and Rumsfeld had decided that as long as the commanders did not ask for more troops, it was not their business to send more.
What escaped the Bush-Cheney team was that their calculations of how many troops would be needed in Iraq had initially depended on two assumptions that ultimately were not borne out. They had assumed a substantial portion of the Iraqi army would remain intact and that other Arab countries would contribute troops as they did in the Gulf War. After both of those proved false, no one ever thought to compensate for the missing forces. “We never connected it up,” Hadley said. “I don’t know why. It seems, in retrospect, very clear.”
ON JUNE 2, Bush was flying out to Colorado to deliver the commencement address at the Air Force Academy when George Tenet called Andy Card to say he needed to see the president urgently. Tenet did not say why, but Card could guess. Card told Tenet to come by the White House at 8:00 p.m., when the president would be back.
Card ushered Tenet into the residence that evening, and the three men sat down. “It’s time for me to go,” Tenet said. “I’ve been doing this a long time. I have a boy who needs me, a family that needs me. I’ve done all I can do.”
Tenet made no mention of the real reason for the decision, his estrangement from the White House. Unlike with Rumsfeld, Bush did not try to change his mind.
“When do you want to announce it?” the president asked.
“Tomorrow morning,” Tenet said.
The next day, as Bush headed to Marine One to begin a trip to Europe, he stopped and told reporters Tenet was stepping down. Tenet did not join him. “He’s been a strong leader in the war on terror,” Bush said, “and I will miss him.” Cheney would not. He thought Tenet was cutting and running. “For him to quit when the going got tough, not to mention in the middle of a presidential campaign, seemed to me unfair to the president, who had put his trust in George Tenet,” Cheney observed.
Tenet’s departure coincided with a broader turning point for the agency. Less than two weeks after he decided to step down, the Justice Department pulled the plug on the CIA interrogation program Tenet had ushered in. Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel who had objected to the secret NSA surveillance program, was now back announcing that he was withdrawing the August 2002 opinion largely authored by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee authorizing waterboarding and other brutal methods of questioning terror suspects. Once again, he was declaring that the president had exceeded his authority.
Goldsmith’s decision came just days after the original memo leaked to the media; coming in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, it painted the picture of a government that had crossed too many lines in the name of national security. Withdrawing an OLC opinion was a rare and extraordinary action, but Goldsmith felt he had no choice, and while some of his colleagues we
re shocked, he encountered no resistance and heard no one other than David Addington defend the now discredited opinion. At the same time, he knew he could not continue to work in an administration where he was so out of step with important people who doubted his “fortitude for the job.” So the day after withdrawing the opinion, Goldsmith handed John Ashcroft his resignation letter.
THAT SPRING, BUSH sought rapprochement on another front. Unlike his father, he had no primary challenger, but he knew he would be better off if he could reach an accommodation with John McCain. As it happened, McCain’s camp reached out first. The rivalry between the two men had been fueled by a long-standing feud between their strategists, Karl Rove and John Weaver, two old Texas hands who fell out in 1988 over money. But in early 2004, Weaver called Mark McKinnon, the Bush media adviser, and told him it was time to settle matters with Rove. McKinnon arranged a peace gathering at a Caribou Coffee shop near the White House, where they agreed to put their differences behind them. Within weeks, McCain began campaigning with Bush.
The two traveled together on June 18 to Fort Lewis in Washington State and met privately with families of slain soldiers. Weaver thought “some unspoken bond” formed between Bush and McCain in that moment. All the bitterness was forgotten, at least for a time.
But it was a painful morning for Bush. “You are as big a terrorist as Osama bin Laden,” a woman who lost her son in Iraq told him.
Bush did not think there was much to say in response.
During the same session, he met another mother of a slain soldier, Cindy Sheehan, whose twenty-four-year-old son, Casey, had been killed by a rocket-propelled grenade in Sadr City.
Sheehan had grown frustrated with the war and convinced that Bush had “changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached” but chose not to register her complaints to him directly. Instead, she left the meeting feeling at least somewhat warmly toward the president. “I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,” she told her local newspaper. “I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss.”
