Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  IN EARLY MAY, Bush flew to Moscow for Victory Day ceremonies in Red Square marking the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Bush understood how important the celebration was for Vladimir Putin, who enjoyed being at the center of world attention. But Bush was not eager to commemorate an event that condemned half of Europe to Soviet domination for four decades, so he stopped first in Riga, capital of the former Soviet republic of Latvia, to express regret over the postwar division of Europe.

  Once in Moscow, Bush kept his criticism to himself, hoping to avoid a repeat of the blowup in Bratislava. But Putin had his own way of making a point. During a visit to the Russian president’s home outside Moscow, Putin’s massive Labrador bounded up.

  “Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner than Barney,” Putin said, referring to Bush’s Scottish terrier.

  Much to Putin’s irritation, Bush stopped on the way home in the former Soviet republic of Georgia to celebrate the democratic advances there and signal that he would not accede to Russia’s claims to its old sphere of influence. Mikheil Saakashvili, the thirty-seven-year-old revolutionary turned president who had become a favorite of Bush’s, went all out and gathered 200,000 people in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square to greet the visiting president, an enormous turnout for a country of four million and one of the biggest crowds Bush had seen in his presidency. Bush was invigorated as sunlight bathed the square. “You’re making many important contributions to freedom’s cause,” he told them, “but your most important contribution is your example.”

  The crowds overwhelmed security checkpoints, and a man in a leather coat who waited hours in the square under the hot sun muttering to himself suddenly hurled a Soviet-made grenade at Bush on the stage. The grenade bounced off a little girl’s head and landed sixty-one feet from Bush but did not explode. In the swirl of events, with so many people crowded into the square, neither Bush nor his staff even realized what had happened; it was not until he was on Air Force One flying back to Washington hours later that he learned of the assassination attempt. The attack got relatively little attention because the grenade was initially presumed to be a dud, but authorities later concluded it was live and simply failed to explode because a red plaid cloth wrapped around it prevented the firing pin from deploying fast enough.

  RETURNING HOME, BUSH found that his Social Security plan was going nowhere. He had traveled intensively, part of a plan in which he and top administration officials would hold sixty events in sixty days. He had lobbied lawmakers, and even finally embraced measures to slow the growth of benefits except for the poorest Americans in hopes of luring Congress into negotiations. But Democrats had seized on the issue to attack Bush, calculating it was a way of weakening a newly reelected president.

  Bush lost Democrats he had collaborated with on tax cuts, like Senator Max Baucus, the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, who was offended that the president visited his home state of Montana to pressure him. “Whatever we need to do to beat this thing, I’m in,” Baucus told Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader. Bush’s fellow Republicans were also running for the hills. Dennis Hastert never much cared for the plan and was now willing to let it die. No committee had even produced a written version of legislation, much less voted.

  The debate Bush had started was marked by distortion and confusion. The president repeatedly told audiences that Social Security “goes broke” in 2042, which was not exactly the case. In 2042, Social Security would not have enough money to pay out everything recipients had been promised, but it would still have enough to pay out much of it. At the same time, many Democratic opponents misled Americans into thinking the president’s plan would force them to put their Social Security money in the stock market. Actually, the plan was entirely voluntary and even then affected only those under fifty-five. Current recipients and near retirees would see no change as a result of the personal investment accounts, and anyone else who thought it was too risky to invest retirement savings in the markets could simply choose not to.

  By the time Bush’s Social Security tour reached the end of its assigned sixty days, it felt like a past-its-prime Broadway show. Not only was he no closer to success, but he had actually lost ground; support for private accounts had fallen from 58 percent the previous September to 47 percent by May. When he flew to Milwaukee on May 19 for what would amount to the seventy-eighth day of the sixty-day tour, a new poll showed most Americans agreed with his proposed cuts in future benefit increases—until they learned it was Bush’s plan. Asked whether they would support trimming the programmed growth of benefits for everyone but the poorest Americans, 53 percent of Americans agreed while 36 percent disagreed. But when the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press changed the question to add the phrase “George W. Bush has proposed,” support fell to 45 percent and opposition grew to 43 percent. Bush’s own approval rating fell to an anemic 43 percent. For a man who planned to spend political capital after the reelection, the bank account seemed to be draining quickly.

  CHENEY CONTINUED TO steer clear of the Social Security campaign, and in May two separate events made it clear that Condoleezza Rice, not the vice president, was the force now driving the administration’s international relations.

  On the evening of May 13, troops in the central Asian nation of Uzbekistan, a key ally in the war on terror, opened fire on demonstrators protesting poverty and repression in the eastern city of Andijan, killing hundreds of civilians. For Bush, the massacre pitted competing priorities—his vow to hold authoritarian governments accountable for cracking down on dissent versus his need for an airbase to support American troops in Afghanistan. Donald Rumsfeld argued for using American influence to nudge the Uzbeks toward more freedom without escalating into a major conflict. Rice, channeling Bush’s freedom agenda, maintained they could not sacrifice the moral high ground.

  “The military needs that base,” Rumsfeld said. “Our security is at stake.”

  “Human rights trump security,” Rice said.

  Rice won when Bush made no effort to rein her in.

  The other test in May dealt with the same part of the world. Rice had returned from her first trip to Europe as secretary—the “olive branch tour,” as her undersecretary, Nicholas Burns, called it—struck that the one thing her counterparts wanted to talk about was not Iraq but Iran. The Europeans were worried that Bush and Cheney wanted to go after the mullahs of Tehran next. If they wanted to rebuild alliances, Rice told Bush, they should support European efforts to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, even if it meant making concessions.

  The gestures she proposed were minor. The United States would drop its opposition to World Trade Organization membership talks for Iran and allow the sale of spare parts for American-made civilian airplanes. But they represented a sea change from the policy of confrontation Cheney had advocated in the first term. After all the talk of going it alone if necessary, Bush would now be letting the British, Germans, and French take the lead in pressuring Iran to give up uranium enrichment. Unlike with Andijan, this time Rice moved policy without a major clash. As she sat in the Oval Office one day describing her plan, even Cheney went along without protest. “That makes sense,” he said.

  The emergence of Rice underscored the evolution of Bush’s partnership with Cheney. “There certainly seemed to be a difference in their relationship,” Christine Todd Whitman observed from the outside. “At the very beginning the president did lean on him a lot in foreign policy because that was his area of weakness and Cheney’s area of strength. And then I think it got to be a little bit of a habit, it just got to be reflexive. And then he suddenly said wait a minute, I’m the president, I’m not going to cede this much, it’s getting out of hand now and I’m going to pull it back a bit.”

  Around the table in the Situation Room, it was evident just how much more of a role Rice was playing. No longer the facilitator, she was now an advocate, pushing for more diplomacy. She viewed this as a natural next step on the continuum from Bush’s
first term, which after September 11 was necessarily more hard-edged in its approach, and her influence with the president suddenly made the State Department, marginalized under Colin Powell in the first term, a more potent player, all the more so by having Stephen Hadley, her supremely loyal former deputy, now in her old job at the White House. “The interagency dynamic turned 180 degrees,” said Kristen Silverberg, a White House aide who became an assistant secretary of state. “If there’s an interagency debate and she had a view, that view was 95 percent of the time going to prevail.”

  Her elevation did not sit well with everyone. And Rice’s increasing focus on her own status sometimes rubbed the wrong way. When traveling with the president, she paid attention to which car she was assigned in the motorcade and which helicopter she would fly in. On overseas trips, Rice sometimes insisted on occupying the chair next to the president typically reserved for the ambassador. She was “very, very focused on where she fits into the hierarchy and the appropriate trappings to reinforce to everyone else how important she is,” remembered a White House aide. For an African American woman born into the Jim Crow South, life was always about proving herself. She was no longer staff, she was a principal, and she wanted to make sure she was accorded the respect she deserved. After four years in Cheney’s shadow, perhaps that was the only way to assert her newfound authority.

  CHENEY SEEMED TO disappear further into the shadows amid Rice’s rise. “I’ve never heard him talk in a meeting, not once,” said one White House aide. Frederick Jones, who worked at the National Security Council, considered Cheney as much an idea as a person. “I thought the vice president was a figment of people’s imagination,” he said, “because I never saw him.”

  When he did speak publicly, it sometimes came across the wrong way. Talking with CNN’s Larry King for an interview aired on Memorial Day, Cheney rejected the conventional Washington gloom and doom about Iraq. “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency,” he said. The comment reinforced the sense of a White House out of touch with what was happening on the ground. Even some in the White House were scratching their heads over Cheney’s assertion. “Where did that come from?” asked Meghan O’Sullivan, the former Jerry Bremer aide who had become deputy national security adviser overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the briefings provided to Bush and Cheney offered such a conclusion; in fact, killings were on the rise. In May, 1,330 civilian deaths had been logged in Iraq, twice as many as in the same month a year earlier. In the year to date, killings of civilians were up by a third over 2004. As for coalition soldiers, 366 had been killed so far that year, slightly more than the previous year.

  Cheney later explained he meant not that the fighting was ending but that the insurgency was a spent force and on the decline. The violence, he thought or hoped, amounted to “final acts of desperation, last efforts to terrorize and destroy.” But looking back, Cheney acknowledged, he “was obviously wrong.”

  Senator Chuck Hagel, a maverick Republican upset about the “last throes” comment, cornered the president after an event.

  “I believe you are getting really bubbled in here in the White House on Iraq,” he said. Are you getting other viewpoints?

  “Well, I kind of leave that to Hadley,” Bush answered.

  Hagel later went to see Hadley but remained concerned and told a reporter that “the White House is completely disconnected from reality.”

  Some Bush friends and advisers worried about the same thing. One person close to the family felt Bush did not have the network of contacts his father did from a lifetime in government and therefore the flow of information was too constricted. “It was analog, not digital,” he said. Cheney, by contrast, had such a network but allowed himself to see what he wanted to see.

  For months, Bush and his team had largely put Iraq to the side when it came to speeches and public events, a conscious attempt not to let the war consume his presidency while also allowing Iraqis symbolically at least to take the lead in their own country. But the Iraqis were not taking the lead; it had taken months for the Iraqis to settle their own differences and finally pick a prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a longtime opponent of Saddam Hussein who had returned from exile in London after the American invasion. The result was a void in leadership both in Washington and in Baghdad, resulting in shrinking public support at home. “No one other than the president was explaining the strategy in Iraq,” said Michele Davis, a deputy national security adviser. “Nobody else was echoing him, driving home for the public, here’s the path forward.”

  Finally, prompted by worried advisers, Bush agreed to reengage and give a series of high-profile speeches rallying the country. But aides disagreed on tone. Dan Bartlett, backed by Nicolle Devenish, who had succeeded him as communications director, wanted the president to acknowledge missteps to earn the public’s trust; simply claiming that the situation was on the upswing would strain credulity. Karl Rove wanted no retreat, no display of weakness. The opposition would pounce, and Bush would be on the defensive.

  On June 28, Bush flew to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to give a prime-time televised speech on the war to an audience of uniformed soldiers. Before going out in front of the cameras, he spent three hours visiting with ninety relatives of slain service members. One of the widows, Crystal Owen, a third-grade teacher, asked the president to wear a metal bracelet memorializing her dead husband, Staff Sergeant Mike Owen. Teary-eyed, Bush agreed.

  By the time he went in front of his audience at 8:00 p.m., Bush was emotionally drained. His voice lacked power; his tone was flat and subdued. The soldiers had been told to remain quiet since they were the props for a national address, but the lack of applause that normally greeted Bush in military settings further sapped the energy out of the room as the president tried to thread the needle between Bartlett and Rove.

  “Like most Americans,” he said, “I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real. Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country.”

  It was, thought some aides, a necessary corrective to Cheney’s “last throes.”

  WITH SOCIAL SECURITY going nowhere, Bush wanted to take on another domestic priority, immigration. Since his days as Texas governor, he had favored a more flexible approach to illegal immigration than many in his party, advocating a guest worker program and a route to legal status for some of the ten million undocumented immigrants in the country. It was both his personal conviction and an obvious political calculation. Two days before his first inauguration, Karl Rove had declared that making inroads among Latino voters was “our mission and our goal.”

  While Bush knew it would be an uphill challenge he figured a newly reelected president was in the best position to make it happen. But when Rove, Frances Townsend, and another White House aide, Brian Hook, went to Capitol Hill to talk with House Republican leaders on June 29, the reception was chilly. The Republicans wanted to talk about securing the border. Anything that smacked of amnesty was a nonstarter. Tom DeLay, the powerful House majority leader, called that “doing something good for someone who has broken the law,” according to a White House summary of the conversation. “There was little support among key House Republicans for a comprehensive approach,” Hook recalled. “They didn’t want to hear what we had to say on anything other than the border. The message was secure the border first and then we’ll talk reform.”

  Which was another way of saying no way.

  22

  “Whacked upside the head”

  President Bush and Vice President Cheney were having their weekly lunch on June 30 when Harriet Miers stuck her head into the private dining room off the Oval Office. She told them that Pamela Talkin, the marshal at the Supreme Court, had called to say she would be delivering a sealed envelope to the White House the next morning. Talkin did not say what would be in the envelope or who was sending it. But th
e natural assumption was that it was a retirement letter from a justice.

  The news surprised Bush and Cheney. The court’s term had ended three days earlier without any retirements, which were usually announced on the final day. Evidently, one of the justices had opted to wait until after the cameras had left. The obvious candidate, of course, was Chief Justice William Rehnquist given his health. That afternoon, Bush invited Representative Trent Franks, the conservative who had pressed him to appoint anti-abortion justices in exchange for his vote for the Medicare prescription drug program, to meet in his study in the residence.

  Bush had the list of acceptable Supreme Court candidates Franks had sent him and they talked over the possibilities. Franks again spoke against Alberto Gonzales and described Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an African American conservative just confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as his favorite. Bush thanked him for his input. That night, the president hosted a dinner party for several lawmakers and ambassadors as he tried out a prospective new White House chef. As they dined on squab, Texas Kobe sirloin steak, salad, and a chocolate mango-tango tart, the conversation turned to the Supreme Court. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana told Bush that if there ever were an opening, he should consider his home-state favorite, Judge Edith Brown Clement. Bush responded with interest but said nothing about what he knew was about to happen.

  The next morning, shortly after 9:00, Bush got a phone call from Miers. “It’s O’Connor,” she said.

  Miers had called Talkin to ask her to come a little early, and Talkin revealed the letter was not from Rehnquist but from Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court and as a swing vote its most influential member for a decade.

  Bush gathered with Cheney, Miers, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett. O’Connor and not Rehnquist? Bush and Cheney understood that would change the dynamics. If it were Rehnquist, they could nominate a strong conservative without changing the balance of power. Since it was O’Connor, nominating a true conservative would actually shift the court’s makeup—and therefore profoundly raise the stakes of the confirmation battle.