Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  The court’s Lincoln Town Car carrying Talkin pulled in to the White House driveway at 10:15 a.m. Miers accepted the plain manila envelope, walked it into the Oval Office, and handed it to Bush. “It has been a great privilege, indeed, to have served as a member of the Court for 24 Terms,” O’Connor wrote. “I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the Court and its role under our Constitutional structure.”

  Some later interpreted that language as an implicit slap at Bush from the justice who wrote in the Hamdi case that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President.” O’Connor, who had arguably been the critical vote sealing Bush’s path to the presidency nearly five years earlier, had grown deeply disenchanted, viewing him as reckless and radical. “What makes this harder,” she later told Justice David Souter, “is that it’s my party that’s destroying the country.”

  But if Bush harbored any resentment of his own, he kept it to himself. At 10:18 a.m., he picked up the phone to call O’Connor for what ended up being an emotional conversation. She had spent nearly a quarter century on the bench, becoming in the process the most powerful woman in public office in American history. And now it was coming to an end.

  “You’re one of the great Americans,” he told her. Bush could hear her voice breaking with the weight of the moment. “I wish I was there to hug you,” he said.

  He added a few more words of praise and then concluded in a brotherly tease, “For an old ranching girl, you turned out pretty good.”

  Bush invited her to the White House to make the announcement together, but she declined, saying she was heading to the airport to escape the inevitable media frenzy.

  WITH O’CONNOR’S DECISION, Bush and Cheney finally set in motion a game plan that had been in the works for more than four years. Lawyers working under Cheney had already produced dossiers on eleven candidates, some extending to a hundred pages summarizing information in the public domain, including biographical sketches, journal articles, and past rulings. Bush took the files with him to read on Air Force One during a trip to Europe a few days later.

  But even before he had a chance to sort through his choices, he found one of his favorite confidants under attack. Within hours of the O’Connor announcement, conservatives launched preemptive assaults on Alberto Gonzales, concerned that Bush would find the prospect of nominating the nation’s first Hispanic justice too appealing. The conservatives viewed Gonzales as a closet moderate, an assessment that overlooked the fact that he approved legal opinions disregarding the Geneva Conventions, ended the long-standing practice of giving the American Bar Association a chance to review judicial nominees in advance, backed Cheney’s court fight over the secrecy of his energy task force, and oversaw a judicial selection process that had produced nominees filibustered by Senate Democrats.

  Conservative activists focused on a case from his days on the Texas Supreme Court when he voted to allow a seventeen-year-old girl to consult with a judge before having an abortion instead of her parents. Gonzales wrote that while the decision might conflict with his personal beliefs, he had no choice because of state law. But it was enough to convince critics that he was another David Souter, the justice nominated by Bush’s father who became a mainstay of the court’s liberal bloc. Some joked that “Gonzales is Spanish for Souter.” The Four Horsemen went to the White House to warn Andy Card and other Bush aides against Gonzales. “He doesn’t quite fit the mold we are looking for,” Leonard Leo told the White House officials delicately. “You can and should do better,” Boyden Gray said. They recommended, in order, Judges John Roberts of the D.C. Circuit, Samuel Alito of the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, Michael Luttig of the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, and Michael McConnell of the Tenth Circuit in Denver.

  The attacks on Gonzales angered Bush, who finally lashed out while in Denmark on July 6, his fifty-ninth birthday. “I don’t like it when a friend gets criticized,” he told reporters testily. “I’m loyal to my friends. And all of a sudden this fellow, who is a good public servant and a really fine person, is under fire. And so, do I like it? No, I don’t like it at all.” In other words, lay off. But that did little to quell the storm, and for all his irritation Bush turned to other candidates as he returned from Europe, unwilling to push ahead with Gonzales without the support of his base.

  He also got some unexpectedly public advice from his wife, who was traveling in South Africa on July 12 when she was asked whether a woman should replace O’Connor. “Sure, I would really like for him to name another woman,” she said.

  The comment stunned many back in the White House, who knew that was not the direction the search was heading and were unaccustomed to the first lady weighing in publicly. Even the president was surprised. “I didn’t realize she’d put this advice in the press,” he said when reporters asked about it. “She did? Well, good. I’m definitely considering—we’re definitely considering people from all walks of life, and I can’t wait to hear her advice in person when she gets back.”

  By this point, Bush had settled on five finalists, including one woman. All were appellate judges interviewed in the spring by Cheney, and three were on the list of the Four Horsemen: Roberts, Luttig, and Alito plus J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth Circuit and Edith Brown Clement of the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, the judge recommended to Bush by Senator David Vitter. Aides wanted to bring the candidates for interviews to Camp David to preserve secrecy, but Card knew he could sneak them into the White House without anyone noticing. He had them brought one at a time through the little-used east entrance and taken up to the residence, where they would not be seen even by other presidential aides.

  The first was Wilkinson, who came late in the afternoon on July 14. Luttig and Roberts were brought separately the next afternoon. The next day, Bush had lunch with Clement and then interviewed Alito. As was customary, Bush avoided questions about specific legal issues, for fear of looking as if he were applying a litmus test, and instead focused on life questions, both great and trivial, as he tried to get a sense of the candidates. He also gave each a tour of the residence, showing them the Lincoln Bedroom and the Truman Balcony.

  Bush asked Wilkinson about his exercise regime. Wilkinson said he ran three and a half miles a day but had ignored his doctor’s advice to do more cross-training. Bush gently scolded the judge, warning that he would blow out his knees. With Luttig, a fellow Texan, the president swapped stories about the Lone Star State and then asked if there was anything that would be particularly controversial if he were nominated. Luttig mentioned that his father had been killed in a botched carjacking in 1994 and that the murderer was executed in Texas in 2002. “Why would that be controversial?” Bush asked. Ever since, Luttig explained, some lawyers had tried to disqualify him from death penalty cases. After Luttig left, Roberts was brought in, having just flown in from London, where he was teaching a summer class. Roberts’s timing could not have been better; his appeals court in Washington just hours earlier had issued a ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in which he had voted to put aside the Geneva Conventions and support Bush’s plan for military tribunals developed in response to O’Connor’s decision in the Hamdi case. More important, Bush clicked with Roberts, finding the judge’s charm, confidence, and intellect appealing.

  After interviews the next day with Clement and Alito, the choice came down to Roberts and Luttig. Wilkinson was courtly and impressive but also sixty years old, and Bush wanted someone young enough to serve for decades. Clement was being pushed not just by David Vitter but also by Bush’s longtime friend Donald Ensenat, the State Department chief of protocol. As a woman, she would have Laura’s support. But Clement did not have the stature among legal conservatives the others did, and she did not impress Bush during their interview. Alito was Miers’s choice; she worried that Roberts did not have the record to prove his conservative bona fides. But Alito was a more reserved figure, without Roberts’s easy charm or Luttig’s forceful intellect. Cheney supported Luttig, the favorite of conservatives. So di
d Gonzales. During fourteen years on the bench, Luttig had taken strong stands on hot-button issues like abortion and was seen as the next generation of his mentor, Antonin Scalia. He was the one they had been waiting for. But Roberts had the support of many conservative lawyers who had cycled through the White House counsel’s office over the past four years as well as Card and Rove. While he had been on the bench for only two years, he had argued before the Supreme Court thirty-nine times and was considered brilliant. And his decision in Hamdan seemed to answer any questions about his judicial viewpoint. Once again, Bush opted against Cheney’s choice.

  Given that it was O’Connor’s seat, it was easier to nominate someone without a record as a full-throated conservative. Roberts might be as conservative as Luttig—indeed, they were close friends, Luttig having served as a groomsman in Roberts’s wedding—but Roberts was polished, without Luttig’s sharper reputation. At a party in July filled with big-name Washingtonians, someone asked what it meant that O’Connor had retired and not Rehnquist. Boyden Gray and Senator Charles Schumer, a leading Democrat, answered simultaneously, “It probably means Roberts and not Luttig.”

  Roberts, who had returned to London after his interview, was asked on July 18 to turn around and come back to Washington. That night, Card ran into Clarence Thomas at a state dinner for the prime minister of India. “You’re going to love who the president picks,” Card reassured him. The next day, Bush excused himself from lunch with the prime minister of Australia to call Roberts at home at 12:35 p.m. and offer the nomination. Bush was exultant, realizing he had made a decision that could shape American jurisprudence for decades. “I just offered the job to a great, smart fifty-year-old lawyer,” he told aides.

  William Kelley, the deputy White House counsel, picked up Roberts and drove him to the White House. Roberts’s family later joined him and the president and first lady for dinner in the residence at 7:00 p.m.

  “Does your mother know?” Bush asked.

  Roberts’s wife, Jane, had called and told his mother to watch the news without saying why.

  Bush insisted on calling her.

  “Hello, Mrs. Roberts? This is the president,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know I’m going to be nominating your son tonight.”

  At 9:00 p.m., Bush and Roberts strode into the East Room for the announcement. Roberts’s four-year-old son, Jack, nearly stole the show, dancing around in short pants and mimicking Spider-Man as Bush spoke. “We’re gonna have to grab him,” Dan Bartlett whispered to Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman who had been tapped to manage the confirmation battle. “If we grab him, he might scream,” Gillespie countered. “Right now, he’s not on camera.” In fact, the cameras caught the antics, but it proved to be a crowd-pleasing moment.

  Bush was pleased too. Two nights later, he appeared at a fund-raiser and saw Boyden Gray, who had helped his father make his own Supreme Court nominations.

  “Congratulations on Roberts,” Gray told him.

  “Yes, I spent a lot of time on that,” Bush said. “I hope he is twenty years from now the way he is today.”

  Just as he had reversed what he saw as his father’s mistakes on Iraq and taxes, Bush now believed he was exorcising the ghost of the David Souter nomination.

  At the Capitol a few days later, he ran into Representative Trent Franks, the conservative who had pressed him to name anti-abortion justices. “I’m glad you liked my appointment,” Bush said. “I told you you would, didn’t I?” Franks did like the Roberts choice. “Well,” Bush added, “I am just getting started.”

  THE DAYS LEADING up to Bush’s vacation proved busy ones. John McCain was introducing legislation to ban torture in terror interrogations. Cheney, through his counsel, David Addington, quietly slipped a veto threat into an administration statement in response. At the same time, six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program reopened in Beijing, again under Cheney’s watchful eye. As he and Donald Rumsfeld feared, Uzbekistan retaliated for Condoleezza Rice’s tough position on the Andijan massacre by kicking out American troops using the airbase in Khanabad. And Bush decided to defy Senate opposition by using a recess appointment to install John Bolton, a hard-line Cheney ally at the State Department, as ambassador to the United Nations.

  Bush had another problem. The CIA leak case had been accelerating that summer. Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, had been jailed for refusing to disclose her sources, while Matthew Cooper of Time reached a last-minute agreement with Karl Rove’s lawyers allowing him to testify about their conversations. News reports revealed that Rove had, in fact, talked with Cooper and Robert Novak about Joseph Wilson’s wife. Scott McClellan, who had vouched for Rove from the podium, felt as if he had gotten “whacked upside the head with a two-by-four.” Rove had lied to him, he felt. Rove did not agree, arguing that he did not leak Valerie Wilson’s identity; he simply told the reporter he had heard the same thing.

  Rove tried three times to apologize to McClellan, once by phone, once in a note, and again at the morning senior staff meeting in front of their colleagues. But he was careful to say he was sorry for what McClellan was going through, not for misleading him. McClellan was not satisfied, and their rift cast a pall on the West Wing. Bush avoided intervening, and with Rove now at risk the president refined his previous promise to fire anyone “involved” in the leak. “If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration,” he said at a news conference, a new formula that meant Rove would be pushed out only if charged and convicted.

  Happy to escape the tension, Bush boarded Air Force One on August 2 for the flight to Texas. It was his forty-ninth trip to the ranch since taking office, and he planned to stay nearly five weeks, his longest stretch away from the White House. By the time he landed, it would be his 319th day either partially or entirely spent at the ranch, or roughly 20 percent of his presidency. Bush was on track to overtake the most famous presidential vacationer in modern times, Ronald Reagan, who spent 335 days at his ranch in California over eight years; if Bush stayed as long as planned, he would beat Reagan’s record with three and a half years remaining in his tenure.

  The long getaway touched off the predictable late-night jokes and partisan jibes, reinforcing the impression that Bush took a lackadaisical approach to the world’s most important day job. It had not gone unnoticed that Bush spent a month at the ranch before September 11, a period when many believed he should have been more attentive to warning signs. Sensitive to criticism, Bush aides now packed his schedule with plenty of events to foster the image of a “working vacation” at what they styled the “Western White House,” right down to a customized “Western White House” seal as a backdrop for press briefings. Bush was slated to leave the ranch at various points to visit seven different states, mostly quick day trips. He would sign energy legislation, host President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia, and then bring down Cheney and the war cabinet for consultations.

  It was true, though, that the ranch appealed to Bush in a visceral way. Aides noticed him starting to get visibly excited whenever Air Force One approached Texas airspace. He loved the seclusion, the distance from Washington. He loved the mountain bicycle rides over rough terrain and relished exposing aides and reporters to hundred-degree heat. He loved jumping into his pickup truck and driving himself, something the Secret Service allowed only on the ranch. And he loved clearing brush, of which there seemed to be endless supplies.

  Aides would be recruited to join the brush clearing and judged on their prowess and endurance in the sweltering heat. Stephen Hadley, the new national security adviser, was teased for showing up in tasseled loafers. (In fact, they were leather shoes with laces, but the loafers legend stuck.) “There was like a hierarchy that was completely different from any other hierarchy,” said Steve Atkiss, the president’s trip director who traveled regularly with him. “When you start, your job is basically, after someone cuts down a tree, to drag it out of there and put it wherever it is going
to go. Then, if you really did good at that, the next level up was you could be in charge of making a pile of all the things that had been dragged over so that it burned well when you lit it on fire. If you were really good at that, you might be able to, one day, get to use a chain saw.”

  EVEN SO, IT was hard during those sweaty summer afternoons to avoid the grim news coming out of Iraq. Bush started each morning with a blue sheet overnight intelligence report that among other things listed overnight casualties. On his first morning at the ranch, the blue sheet reported a devastating roadside explosion that killed fourteen marines, ten of them from the same Lima Company of reservists from Columbus, Ohio, that had already suffered extensive losses, including six other marines killed in an ambush two days earlier. Reservists represented the heart of the military, men and women who detached from regular jobs to serve limited tours of duty before returning to civilian life. To have one unit of citizen soldiers hit so hard, so fast was numbing. “That really got him,” Hadley remembered.

  It got many other Americans as well. As Bush brought Cheney and other advisers to the ranch to talk about Iraq, just 38 percent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of the war, and more than half said they believed it was a mistake to invade and favored withdrawing some or all troops.

  Bush found a reminder of that closer to home. Just three days after he decamped to the ranch, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, arrived in Crawford aboard a bus painted red, white, and blue and emblazoned with the slogan “Impeachment Tour.” She was stopped by police as she tried to approach the ranch, then settled in on the side of the dusty road, vowing to stay until Bush met with her.