Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  To actually address Social Security’s financial issues would require steps like raising the retirement age, increasing payroll taxes, limiting benefits for the wealthy, slowing the growth of benefits for everyone, or some combination. Bush and his advisers debated whether to send Congress a specific plan embracing such ideas. Joshua Bolten favored a detailed proposal, and Keith Hennessey, the president’s national economics adviser, agreed, sending Bush a seven-page memo making the case that such an approach “maximizes the chance of getting a good bill,” although it “also has a higher chance of producing an unbreachable partisan split that leads to stalemate.” Rove opposed sending Congress anything specific, arguing it would just give Democrats something to shoot at and it would be better to stick to broad principles while letting Congress fill in the blanks as it did with No Child Left Behind. Bush sided with Rove.

  The president kicked off his Social Security drive in his State of the Union address on the night of February 2. “By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt,” Bush said, at which point Democrats in the chamber responded with catcalls. “If steps are not taken to avert that outcome, the only solutions would be dramatically higher taxes, massive new borrowing, or sudden and severe cuts in Social Security benefits or other government programs.”

  The next morning, Bush flew out of Washington for a barnstorming trip, picking five states that he had won in November and were home to seven Democratic senators he hoped to pressure on Social Security. Cheney, on the other hand, remained out of the picture. On the central domestic initiative for the new term, he was neither a force in the internal debate nor a major surrogate in the fight to rally the public and Congress. He would do whatever he was asked, but he was preserving his energy for other fights.

  THE UPLIFTING IMAGES of ink-stained voters from Baghdad were soon joined by scenes from Beirut, where tens of thousands were flooding into the streets demanding change in what looked to be a new “color revolution.” On February 14, the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri had been assassinated in a brazen act blamed on the Syrians, who had occupied Lebanon for three decades. Now a popular uprising released stored-up frustrations. The Lebanese were calling it the Cedar Revolution.

  The succession of developments gave Bush hope that his freedom agenda could result in tangible change. His first real test would come as he met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Bush prided himself on their friendship despite their break over Iraq. But if he was serious about challenging “every ruler and every nation” over freedom, he could hardly ignore Putin’s crackdown on dissent. Since their first soul-gazing meeting in 2001, Putin had taken over television networks, driven business moguls who challenged him out of the country, purged parliament of Western-oriented parties, and eliminated the election of governors. The arrest of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia, had shocked Bush and his team; some, like Condoleezza Rice, knew Khodorkovsky personally. Cheney was following the case and thought it proved Bush should not trust Putin.

  When the American and Russian presidents sat down for a long, private discussion in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, on February 24, Bush pressed his points about freedom, and Putin grew defensive. As he often did, Putin tried to make equivalences, justifying his actions by comparing them to situations in the United States.

  “You talk about Khodorkovsky, and I talk about Enron,” Putin told Bush. “You appoint the Electoral College and I appoint governors. What’s the difference?”

  At another point, Putin defended his control over media in Russia. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”

  Fired a reporter? “Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?” Bush asked.

  Yes, that was what he meant.

  Rather, the longtime CBS News journalist, was stepping down as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News after the previous fall’s report accusing Bush of not fulfilling National Guard service based on fraudulent documents. Bush explained he had nothing to do with Rather losing his job. “I strongly suggest you not say that in public,” he added. “The American people will think you don’t understand our system.”

  But Putin understood his own system. When the two leaders emerged for a joint news conference, a Russian reporter handpicked by the Kremlin challenged Bush on the same grounds Putin had just been citing in private.

  “Why don’t you talk a lot about violations of the rights of journalists in the United States?” the reporter asked. “About the fact that some journalists have been fired?”

  Bush understood instantly that it was a planted question. Putin had proved Bush’s point about the lack of free press in Russia.

  “People do get fired in American press,” he answered. “They don’t get fired by the government, however.”

  The encounter stuck in Bush’s craw, and he was still dwelling on it a week later when he filled in Tony Blair during a videoconference on March 1. “It was fairly unpleasant,” Bush told him. “It was not hostile. It was like junior high debating.” He recounted the Dan Rather exchange. “Seriously, it was a whole series of these juvenile arguments. There was no breakthrough with this guy.” Bush was exasperated at the memory. “I sat there for an hour and forty-five minutes or an hour and forty minutes, and it went on and on. At one point, the interpreter made me so mad that I nearly reached over the table and slapped the hell out of the guy. He had a mocking tone, making accusations about America. He was just sarcastic.”

  Still, events seemed to validate Bush’s optimism. Just four days after Bush’s encounter with Putin, fresh protests with tens of thousands in Beirut’s Martyrs Square forced the Syrian-backed prime minister, Omar Karami, to resign, emboldening the Lebanese to press Syria to finally pull out. On March 5, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria announced a “gradual and organized withdrawal” of fifteen thousand troops from Lebanon, the beginning of the end of a twenty-nine-year occupation.

  The resulting images of democracy on the march made for exhilarating days in the White House and temporarily won over some critics. Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze leader and socialist who branded American marines “enemy forces” when Ronald Reagan sent peacekeepers to his country, credited Bush for the wave of change sweeping the Middle East. “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,” he said. “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.” In the United States, Jon Stewart, the liberal talk show host on Comedy Central who spent most of his time skewering Bush, acknowledged the president might be onto something. “This is the most difficult thing for me because I don’t care for the tactics,” he said one night, “but I’ve got to say I’ve never seen results like this ever in that region.” Daniel Schorr, the National Public Radio commentator and frequent Bush critic, said that “he may have had it right.” The president’s aides were thrilled when Newsweek put the Cedar Revolution on the cover with a similar-sounding secondary headline that said “Where Bush Was Right.”

  Still, there were plenty of signs of trouble ahead. Iraq remained plagued by violence despite its elections. Lebanon was a cauldron of competing sects. Saudi Arabia permitted voting for some seats on municipal councils but continued to bar women from driving cars, much less casting ballots. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt announced he would allow challengers to run against him, but his government would still control which parties could participate.

  Bush made personnel moves intended to advance his democracy agenda. He enlisted Karen Hughes to come back from Texas and serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, asking her to take over the government’s moribund campaign to promote American values overseas and wage the battle of ideas with Islamic extremists. And he sent Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, to be president of the World Bank, where he could promote democracy along with development.

  The
elevation of Rice and the return of Hughes reflected an effort by Bush to cast off some of the unilateralist cowboy image. “The second term is going to be a time of diplomacy,” he told aides. Whatever he had to do after September 11 to meet the immediate threat, it was now time to recalibrate. “What I think happened was after 9/11 in terms of the president’s personal own philosophy there was probably more of a, maybe a pulling more away from where the president’s heart and values really were,” Hughes reflected. “And then there was a course correction while Condi was secretary of state. This would have pulled back to where the president really felt in terms of broader engagement and involvement with the world. I think one of the reasons he asked me to do what I did at State was because he wanted somebody close to him to be seen as reaching out to the world on his behalf.”

  Rice made her new mission clear from the start. She tapped Christopher Hill, a veteran diplomat and protégé of Richard Holbrooke, negotiator of the Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian War, to take over the North Korea portfolio. “Our nation has won two wars,” she told him, with a premature declaration of victory, “and now we need diplomats for this term.” Rice signaled the shift in her confirmation hearings too, declaring that “the time for diplomacy is now”—a line that generated a fight within the administration, because it either implied there had been no diplomacy in the first term or suggested a retreat from the president’s muscular approach. “What it was basically saying is we’re sorry for Iraq,” said one Rice adviser. As for Rice herself, said another adviser, “that was essentially a declaration that I’m going to now be the leader of this administration.”

  Cheney was wary. He recognized that the president was heading in a different direction. For Cheney, the second term was already shaping up as a period of waning influence.

  During a meeting with the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, his longtime friend dating back to the Gulf War, Cheney complained that others seemed to be trying to elbow him out of even the Iraq portfolio that he cared so much about.

  “Who do they think they are?” he asked. “I was reelected too.”

  WHILE BUSH STUMPED for his Social Security plan, Cheney remained focused on the issues that stimulated him. First among them was terrorism and the defense of the country.

  He was a fixture at Terrorism Wednesdays—which later became Terrorism Tuesdays—when the war cabinet gathered in the White House to talk about threats and where they were headed. These meetings, on top of daily intelligence briefings and other sessions, usually included the chief of staff, national security adviser, homeland security secretary, attorney general, director of national intelligence, CIA director, and later the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. Frances Fragos Townsend, who had taken over as the president’s homeland security adviser, had tried to recalibrate the White House approach to terrorism by changing the Threat Matrix devised after September 11 into the President’s Terrorism Threat Report, shorn of much of the more improbable intelligence so as to present a more realistic picture of actual risks. The idea, she told colleagues, was to “readjust the thermometer.”

  But Cheney’s thermometer ran hot, and he remained as seized by the grim possibilities as he was the day after September 11. While others had moved on to a certain extent, or allowed themselves to begin thinking about a domestic agenda, the vice president stayed locked on target. He was particularly interested in the threat of biological terrorism and what could be done to counter it. While there were medicines for anthrax and other threats, there was a real challenge in distributing them in time. At meeting after meeting, Cheney pushed to hand out medical kits with countermeasures that could be kept at home just in case. But the medicines required prescriptions, and the Food and Drug Administration resisted widespread distribution of drugs without doctor consent.

  The vice president was also fighting rearguard actions to protect programs he viewed as critical to the country’s security. He was intent on beating back challenges to the warrantless surveillance program and asserting the most expansive position in court fights over detention of terror suspects. He knew challenges were coming from Congress on interrogation methods and understood sentiment was growing within the administration for doing something to close the detention center at Guantánamo. Even Bush had hinted that he wanted to find a way to shutter the prison.

  If his mind dwelled on the dark side, as he called it, Cheney did have one domestic assignment from Bush in the early months of 2005. Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s health was in obvious decline; he had only just returned to the bench in March after months recovering from thyroid cancer. Since it seemed likely illness would force him to retire before long, the president asked Cheney to launch a clandestine search, in conjunction with Harriet Miers, Bush’s former personal attorney from Texas who had taken over for Alberto Gonzales as White House counsel. They wanted a replacement all but ready to go the moment the seat opened up.

  While it was unusual to have a nonlawyer head the search, Cheney immediately put together a team. One day in early spring, while flying back to Washington on Air Force Two, Cheney summoned to his cabin Steve Schmidt, his former campaign adviser who was now working as his counselor. On the floor was a large duffel bag filled with binders about possible candidates for the Supreme Court. Cheney pointed to it and told Schmidt to start studying. He wanted strict secrecy. Only a handful of people were to know.

  “You’re allowed to talk about this with me, with Karl, and with Harriet, and obviously the boss, should he talk to you about it,” Cheney instructed. “But figure it out. We haven’t done one of these in thirteen years, and there hasn’t been one in thirteen years. We think we’re going to have an opening. Come up with a plan.”

  The last time a Republican president filled a Supreme Court vacancy was in 1991, when Bush’s father nominated Clarence Thomas. The world had changed dramatically since then. From the start of the administration, Bush and Cheney had anticipated the opportunity to name one or more justices, and the president had tasked the vice president with the project. Cheney and Gonzales had assembled a team of young lawyers to research prospective nominees and write memos about them. In the spring of 2001, Gonzales began meeting with candidates. He went out, for instance, to the Virginia house of J. Michael Luttig, a judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals who was considered one of the most stellar conservatives on the bench.

  In the spring of 2005, Cheney and the team pulled out the old material and began culling through it again. This time, with the odds of a vacancy growing, Cheney wanted to meet top candidates personally. One by one, they were secretly brought to the vice president’s residence in April and May for informal interviews with Cheney, who was joined by Gonzales, Miers, Rove, and Andy Card.

  On the day of his interview, John G. Roberts, a fifty-year-old judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, drove to the vice president’s residence forty-five minutes early so as not to be late, then sat in his car until the appointed hour. Ushered into a study, Roberts noticed that most of the books on the shelves were about trout fishing.

  “Here, sit in the hot-wired seat,” Rove told him with a grin.

  Cheney nodded toward Gonzales. “Well, you’re the lawyer,” he said. “Let’s get things started.”

  Roberts was a leading legal light for Republicans and had first been selected for the appeals court by Bush’s father, but his nomination was not acted on by the Senate before the president left office. The younger Bush renominated Roberts, but it took two years to win confirmation, so Roberts had only been on the bench for two years.

  With little track record to work from, Gonzales asked Roberts a series of questions to elicit his judicial philosophy. He asked why Roberts had told senators during his 2003 confirmation hearing that he did not label himself a “strict constructionist,” the phrase often used by conservatives to signal a judge who does not overinterpret laws or the Constitution. Roberts said the term was not all that meaningful since some liberals considered themselves strict co
nstructionists, an answer that could worry some Republicans but might help him slip through the gauntlet of the confirmation hearings.

  Another candidate brought in was Luttig, a protégé of Cheney’s friend Justice Antonin Scalia. Probably no other person involved in the process that spring had as much experience with the selection and confirmation of Supreme Court justices as Luttig; as a young government lawyer, he had helped prepare Sandra Day O’Connor, Clarence Thomas, and David Souter for their confirmation hearings, and he had served as a clerk to Scalia and Chief Justice Warren Burger. But this was the first time he was on the receiving end of the questioning.

  “Do I have to do this without counsel present?” Luttig joked as he entered the conference room to find a committee waiting for him. “I want my lawyer.”

  Everyone chuckled. Because he had served as a judge since 1991, Luttig’s record as a conservative was clearer, and most of the questions were designed to get a sense of who he was as a person.

  But it was not enough to evaluate candidates. The confirmation of Thomas and the failed nomination of Robert H. Bork made clear that Supreme Court selections had become another battleground in the political wars. By filibustering Bush’s appointments to lower courts in his first term, Senate Democrats had already demonstrated an appetite for the struggle. Bush was determined to be ready as his father had not been. Rove and Gonzales invited four conservative lawyers to lunch to ask them to coordinate outside interest groups for a confirmation fight: Boyden Gray, the White House counsel to Bush’s father; Jay Sekulow, counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a group formed by the televangelist Pat Robertson; Edwin Meese III, the attorney general under Ronald Reagan; and Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society. As the White House geared up for battle, they came to be known as the Four Horsemen.