by Peter Baker
“You cannot go out there and put the crown on your own head,” Bartlett told Bush. “You just can’t do it.”
Crucially, Laura agreed. “George, you can’t go out there,” she said. “Wait until you’ve been declared the winner.” He agreed.
Cheney urged his family to return home and rest, but they refused. The vice president sank into the chair in his office, put his feet up on the desk, and fell asleep. Mary claimed the couch in his office, and her partner, Heather Poe, stretched out between a couple of armchairs. Liz found a sofa in the Roosevelt Room and lay down there. Lynne headed to the White House medical unit, found a pillow and blanket, and slept on an examining table. They did not leave the White House until 6:00 a.m., when they headed home for showers.
THE NEXT MORNING, November 3, dawned with little more clarity. Bush woke around 7:00 a.m. after just two hours of sleep and made it to the Oval Office by 8:00 a.m. His parents had to return to Houston. Advisers discussed how to pressure Democrats without overplaying their hand. Card called James Baker, the man who had secured the 2000 victory, and asked him to see if Vernon Jordan, a prominent Democratic lawyer who had handled debate negotiations for Kerry, could get the challenger to concede. Baker tracked Jordan down at the famed Amen Corner at the Augusta National Golf Club and forwarded the request. Jordan made the call, but suspected Kerry was already getting ready to concede. Bush and Bartlett called Devenish from the Oval Office, telling her to call McCurry and figure out what was going on. She got McCurry on the line. Don’t worry, he said. “Kerry is calling now.”
While Bush sat in the Oval Office with close advisers waiting for the call, well-wishers began making their way to the White House. Among them was Rumsfeld, who showed up “grinning ear to ear,” as Scott McClellan recalled it, to congratulate the reelected president. Rumsfeld knew his future in a second term was uncertain, and Bush saw the visit in that context. “That was a job interview,” Bush told aides immediately after Rumsfeld left.
At 11:02 a.m., the president’s personal secretary, Ashley Kavanaugh, popped into the Oval Office. “Mr. President, I have Senator Kerry on the line.”
Bush picked up the phone. It was a brief conversation but civil. “You were an admirable, worthy opponent,” Bush told Kerry. “You waged one tough campaign. I hope you are proud of the effort you put in. You should be.”
Just like that, he had won. He had defied the odds, the exit polls, the pundits, and even history. He had achieved what his father could not, entering the elite pantheon of two-term presidents, just the fifteenth incumbent to be elected a second time in a row. It was hardly a landslide; he won with 50.7 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 48.3 percent, the smallest margin of any reelected president. But he was the first presidential candidate since his father’s election in 1988 to win an absolute majority, and it came without the searing asterisk of 2000. The margin was stronger in the Electoral College, where Bush picked up 286 votes to Kerry’s 251. Moreover, he was the first president since 1936 to be reelected to a second term with his party increasing its hold over both houses of Congress. He improved his showing over 2000 among Latinos, Jews, women, voters over sixty, and those without high school degrees. Bush won big among those who named terrorism or moral values as their top issue, and voters in surveys gave him credit for honesty, strong leadership, religious faith, and clear stances on the issues. While Bush lost ground among independents, the base-turnout efforts had succeeded in increasing the conservative share of the voting electorate from 29 percent in 2000 to 34 percent in 2004. Still, buried in the numbers were ominous signs. Just 51 percent of Americans still supported the decision to go to war in Iraq. Kerry won lopsidedly among voters who named Iraq their biggest issue.
The most important result for Bush and Cheney, though, was legitimacy. Now they would have four more years, enough time to finish what they had started in Iraq and bring dramatic change at home as well. Bush already had ideas about how to use the momentum. As he absorbed the news, he exhaled and teared up as he hugged advisers who had come on the journey with him.
“We’re going to have fun in the next term,” he promised Bartlett. “We’re going to have a blast.”
He called Laura in the residence to let her know. And then he opened the door and made his way out into the hallway.
“Where’s the vice president?” he called out.
Someone told him Cheney was in the Situation Room and went to get him. Bush lingered for a few moments in the corridor waiting and then saw Cheney approach.
“Congratulations, Dick!” Bush said ebulliently.
“Congratulations, Mr. President,” Cheney responded more formally.
Bush couldn’t help but smile at his famously stiff partner. He stuck his hand out. “I know you’re not a big fan of hugs, so we’ll just shake hands,” the president said.
At 3:00 p.m., the two took the stage at the Ronald Reagan Building for their delayed victory celebration. Cheney lavished praise on Bush. “He’s a man of deep conviction, and personal kindness,” Cheney told the audience. “His leadership is wise and firm and fearless. Those are the qualities that Americans like in a president—and those are the qualities we will need for the next four years.”
Bush had kind words for Cheney as well. “The vice president serves America with wisdom and honor, and I’m proud to serve beside him,” Bush said. He spoke for just ten minutes, reiterating his campaign promises and vowing to bring the country together. “A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation,” he said. “We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”
IT WAS A heady moment for Bush and Cheney. “Everybody was buoyant,” recalled Frederick Jones, who worked at the National Security Council. “People were excited. The president sensed that he could achieve his goals, and there was an optimism.”
Bush showed up the next day, November 4, at Bartlett’s communications meeting to thank the staff. He singled out Scott McClellan, the press secretary known for his loyalty and tight lips. “I want to especially thank Scotty for saying,” Bush said with a waggish pause, “nothing!”
Later that morning, he convened the cabinet and thanked them as well. But he also signaled that some of them would not be sticking around. “I expect there to be lots of rumors and speculation about changes in the cabinet for our second term,” he said. “Well, a few changes are very likely, but I haven’t had time to think about them yet.”
Cheney, who usually remained quiet in meetings like this, took the opportunity to reflect on what had changed in four years. “I remember our conversation coming off the recount of 2000 about whether to trim the sails,” he said. “You said it was not an option, and it paid off. This time around, the mandate was clear.”
In this case, the mandate included Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush mentioned that he had spoken with Iraqi leaders and they were relieved at the election victory.
“They were toast if you lost,” offered Donald Rumsfeld.
“French toast,” Bush joked.
He did not say so in front of the cabinet, but Bush was already toying with an expansive vision for the second term. He had been talking more about bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East, an idea that he had raised in speeches even before the invasion of Iraq but that took on greater resonance as the weapons rationale for the war fell apart. Now he was ready to embrace it as the central mission of his presidency, a way of laying down a historical marker that would give definition to his tenure and at the same time provide a fresh ideological underpinning to the war on terror beyond simply killing extremists before they could kill Americans. An optimistic, forward-leaning idealistic call, he felt, would be more inviting for people on both sides of the aisle at home and for skeptical governments abroad.
After the cabinet meeting, he pulled aside Michael Gerson, who was thinking about either leaving or taking on a different role in the second term.
&
nbsp; “I hear you’re thinking about what you want to do next,” Bush said, “but will you help me with my inaugural?”
Of course, Gerson said.
“I want it to be the freedom speech,” Bush said. He wanted to “plant a flag” for democracy around the world.
Bush gave a hint of the scale of his new ambition a little while later when he met the White House press corps for his first postelection news conference. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he said exuberantly. “And now I intend to spend it.”
20
“Not a speech Dick Cheney would give”
President Bush headed to Camp David to rest after the long campaign and think about his second term. He had gone full tilt for weeks, crisscrossing the country, working endless rope lines, giving the same speech day in and day out, and hitting up a long parade of well-heeled donors. He was ready for a break. He could also use a little time to reflect.
Tellingly, the advisers he invited to join him for part of the weekend were Condoleezza Rice and Andy Card, not the vice president. While Bush had put Cheney in charge of the transition before the first term, he planned to run his own transition to the second. He would consult with Cheney about policy and personnel, but he was not outsourcing them. He had definite ideas, some of which Cheney would agree with, but Bush felt no need to seek concurrence on the ones where he would not.
One thing he needed to do was to overhaul his national security team. The fractiousness of the first term had bothered him for years, and now he had an opportunity to do something about it. Since Colin Powell had told him long ago that he expected to leave after the election, Bush decided he would take advantage of the offer. He admired Powell but understood that he “wasn’t fully on board with my philosophy and policies.” Cheney supported a change. The vice president considered Powell, his once-trusted sidekick during the first Bush presidency, an increasingly disruptive force who handled policy differences by leaking and undermining the administration while building himself up as some sort of realist hero tilting at the neoconservative hard-liners. From Cheney’s point of view, Powell, Richard Armitage, and their team were essentially mounting an “insurgency against the rest of the national security team,” as Stephen Yates, a foreign policy adviser to the vice president, put it. “They felt the need to go after the right-wing nut jobs, as they endearingly referred to us,” Yates said. “We did not have a similar campaign to go after the left-wing nut jobs, or the State Department folks or the Powell-Armitage folks.” In that context, Cheney concluded, Powell’s departure “was for the best.” The feeling was mutual. To Powell and his team, Cheney and Rumsfeld had formed what Lawrence Wilkerson, the secretary’s chief of staff, called a “secretive, little-known cabal” intent on subverting the process to advance a radical agenda. “Powell really thought that Cheney and Rumsfeld were treasonous,” said a White House official, “and Cheney and Rumsfeld really thought Powell was treasonous.”
Cheney might not have grasped that removing a rival would elevate an even more powerful one. To replace Powell, Bush settled on Rice. Unlike Powell, Rice, as everyone knew, had the president’s ear, and she would have the opportunity to transform State into a vehicle for Bush’s policies instead of an outpost of resistance. In joining the cabinet, she would finally be freed from the facilitator role she played as national security adviser, making her more of a peer of the vice president than simply a staff person. If he had any qualms, Cheney knew better than to express them. Bush was announcing his decision, not asking him about it. “He had thought about it, and this is the way he wanted to go,” Cheney recalled.
Rice had a relationship with Bush like no other adviser. She worked out with him, had dinner with him and Laura in the residence, and spent weekends with them at Camp David. He trusted her implicitly, and she made clear she had no agenda other than his. They were so close that in a strange slip at a dinner party with Washington journalists, some around the table heard the unmarried Rice start to refer to Bush as “my husb—” before catching herself. Rice later denied it and in any case, few if anyone thought their relationship was in any way improper; it seemed more like a big-brother, little-sister connection. “She was treated like the kind of lonely bachelor girl,” said one top official who worked with her. Over lunch one day in the first term, Rice told Christine Todd Whitman, “I can count on one hand the days when I have not spoken to the president over the last three years.” As Whitman later reflected, “She didn’t have a life. Her life was all about that.”
The bond between the Texas cowboy and the Stanford Russia scholar confounded many around them. “He was very wary about intellectuals,” said David Gordon, a top intelligence official who worked for Rice. “Intellectuals always had to prove something with Bush. And that’s why the relationship between Bush and Condi is so interesting because Condi is a serious intellectual. She has all of these other interests obviously. She’s a Renaissance woman completely. But she’s an intellectual, yet she had developed this really fantastic relationship with the president.”
For years, people speculated about her sway over Bush. She told another friend it was the other way around. “People don’t understand,” she said. “It’s not my exercising influence over him. I’m internalizing his world.” But if she proved adept at channeling Bush, she was a figure of great frustration to other members of the team who thought she was too eager to erase differences and create false consensus rather than bring difficult choices to the president. She had not been able to manage the sharp rivalries in the war cabinet. Powell thought she should have cracked down on Rumsfeld; Rumsfeld thought she should have cracked down on Powell. And she found herself outmaneuvered by Cheney, who bypassed her on the Kyoto treaty and military commissions.
“I personally favor an NSC and national security process not where you try to bridge everyone’s difference and create a blended conclusion but rather taking the different options, different approaches, different views, shoving them up to the president, and having him make a decision,” Rumsfeld said later. “That’s the healthiest way because people then will salute and go about doing their business. If you have extended delays or you try to compromise different opinions, sometimes you end up with a solution that’s worse than either of the options.”
Through it all, Rice had somehow escaped blame for the failings of the Iraq War. “I was struck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation,” noted Scott McClellan. “No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview,” such as the missing weapons, the sixteen words, and inadequate postwar planning. “And in private, she complemented and reinforced Bush’s instincts rather than challenging or questioning them.”
TO PUT THE changes in place, Bush dropped the news on Rice at Camp David on the afternoon of November 5. “I want you to be secretary of state,” he told her.
Rice said she was honored but would need to talk about it first. While hoping he would not take it as criticism, she said they had a lot of “repair work to do with the allies” and would need “to reaffirm the primacy of diplomacy in our foreign policy.”
In effect, she was saying, his approach to the outside world had to evolve away from the perception of a unilateral, preemption-minded cowboy who did not care what others thought. She considered that a myth that fundamentally misunderstood Bush, but she also realized that the image was powerful and a major obstacle. Cheney in particular had generated suspicion and hostility unnecessarily. It was time, in her view, to put aside the vice president’s posture and return to a more constructive foreign policy like that of the president’s father, although she never put it that way publicly. What she did say to Bush was that the new approach would mean, for example, a renewed commitment to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and establishing a Palestinian state. He was skeptical but agreed.
Rice also insisted on a clear path. “I don’t intend to spend my energy sparring with Don,” she said
of Rumsfeld. “I’m going to lead U.S. foreign policy, and I don’t need his input.”
Bush seemed taken aback but agreed.
The real question was whether it was time for Rumsfeld to go. Card thought so and urged Bush to think about it. He had a long list of potential successors. Bush was open to the idea. “At times, Don frustrated me with his abruptness toward military leaders and members of my staff,” he said later. He was not the only one frustrated. Even Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, privately complained to a friend that the secretary was driving him crazy. The way Rumsfeld was handling Iraq, Wolfowitz said, “was criminal negligence.”
Bush authorized Card to contact Frederick Smith from FedEx, his original choice for defense secretary, but Smith’s daughter was ill. Bush also reached out to James Baker, but he had already been secretary of state and Treasury secretary and was not interested in a third cabinet position. Bush mulled Senator Joseph Lieberman, the hawkish Democrat whose own presidential campaign in 2004 fizzled because of his support of the Iraq War. But that did not seem like “the right fit.” It was not enough to get rid of Rumsfeld; Bush felt he had to have someone ready to take over. And Cheney strongly opposed replacing his mentor, arguing that changing a defense secretary in the middle of a war was unwise and noting that confirmation hearings would invite a fresh public debate about Iraq.
Bush had other changes to make, some easier than others. John Ashcroft had grown distant from the White House during repeated clashes over the war on terror. He had defied Bush and Cheney on the renewal of the National Security Agency surveillance program and opposed holding detainees indefinitely at Guantánamo without some form of due process. He had fought to guarantee some rights for those tried by military commissions and insisted that Zacarias Moussaoui, an al-Qaeda member arrested before September 11, be prosecuted in civilian courts for conspiring with the hijackers. Sensing he was on the outs, Ashcroft drafted a resignation letter by hand and personally delivered it to Bush on Election Day, deliberately circumventing presidential advisers with whom he had clashed. “He was not going to trust these people to spin his resignation and backstab him any more,” said Ashcroft’s aide Mark Corallo. The feelings were mutual. Bush’s aides saw Ashcroft as “a self-promoter and grandstander.”
