by Peter Baker
“Who’s in charge of the city?” he asked.
Blanco looked over at Nagin but he pointed to her. “The governor’s in charge,” he said.
Bush was flummoxed.
“Somebody’s got to take charge of this,” Nagin said.
“I’d like to have a private meeting with the governor,” Bush said. Turning to Blanco, he said, “Would you come with me into my office?”
They retreated to his office on the plane, just the two of them and Joe Hagin. Bush asked her what she thought about federalizing the effort. Blanco was put off. The first she had heard about the idea had been a message Senator David Vitter had passed along from Karl Rove. The fact that Rove was mentioned set off her alarm bells. What was a political strategist doing making such a suggestion? To her, it meant the idea had more to do with politics than emergency response. Her advisers had told her federalizing the effort would make things more complicated, not better.
But then as she was leaving his office, she felt a pang of discomfort at stiff-arming the president of the United States, so she said she would consult her National Guard adjutant general. “I’ll talk to him again and I’ll let you know before twenty-four hours are out,” she said. From her point of view, she was just being courteous, not wanting to completely slam the door in the president’s face. From Bush’s vantage point, though, she sounded more forward leaning than she later remembered it, on the edge of agreeing but dawdling before making a decision at a moment when someone needed to be decisive. If anyone was playing politics, Bush’s aides thought it was the governor and her team.
After returning to Washington, Bush and his staff settled on a plan that would put all troops in Louisiana, including the National Guard, under command of the president but, in a face-saving gesture to Blanco, would have Lieutenant General Rossel Honoré, the Pentagon’s commander on the scene, report to her as well as to the Defense Department. Card had General Blum, the National Guard Bureau chief, fax a letter outlining the dual-hatted scheme to Blanco at the makeshift governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge for her signature at 11:20 p.m.
“I want you to sign it and send it back to me in five minutes,” he told her.
Blanco was taken aback. “I’ll read your letter but I’m promising you I’m not signing anything until my lawyers look at it,” she said.
“It needs to be signed tonight,” Blum insisted.
“Why does it need to be signed tonight?”
“The president wants it signed tonight.”
Blanco was aggravated. She thought the White House had been trying to pin blame on her through media leaks and now was trying to swoop in to claim credit just when the situation was being brought under control. Complicating the situation was the role of Blum, whom neither side trusted. He had told Blanco’s team just what he had told Bush about what a mistake he thought federalizing the guard would be, but now at the direction of the White House, he was repeatedly urging Blanco to sign the document. “I was in a position where I had to read the script,” he explained later, “but at that point, she knew the right answer.” Finally, Card got on the phone and told Blanco that the president planned to announce the move first thing in the morning.
“I’m not signing anything,” she told him angrily. “You guys are now trying to come in and save face. I’ve got thousands of people here in the trenches while you play your politics.”
She added that Bush had the authority to do it without her consent. “You go ahead and declare the Insurrection Act and you take it over that way,” she said. “I’m going to go out and say you all care more about politics than about saving lives.”
At that point, Bush could have invoked the Insurrection Act, as his father did to restore order during Los Angeles riots in 1992, but in that case he did so at the request of the sitting governor. The last times a president invoked the act against the wishes of a governor were during the civil rights era, when Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy sent troops to enforce desegregation orders in the South. Bush was sensitive to the image of a white male Republican president declaring an African American city with an African American mayor and a female Democratic governor in insurrection. That, he thought, “could unleash holy hell” in the South. “I wanted to overrule them all,” he later said. “But at the time, I worried that the consequence could be a constitutional crisis, and possibly a political insurrection as well.”
Moreover, he worried about sending eighteen-year-olds armed with assault rifles and trained for Iraq into the Lower Ninth Ward. Bartlett argued that the details were less important than the image of someone taking charge.
“I don’t care if we have to put corks in their guns and don’t give them bullets,” he told Bush. “We should just get them down there.”
Bush ultimately finessed the issue by deciding to send seventy-two hundred active-duty troops on a humanitarian mission, rather than in a law enforcement role that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. But even then he ran into resistance.
Card conveyed the order to Rumsfeld, only to be lectured on protocol. “Look at the chain of command,” the defense secretary berated Card. “Where’s the chief of staff? I report to the president. I don’t report to the chief of staff. If the president really wants me to do this, he’ll tell me.”
Eventually, Rumsfeld relented and issued the orders. By going house to house looking for survivors, the troops from the Eighty-Second Airborne and the First Cavalry Division freed up National Guard units that were permitted to do law enforcement. But precious days had gone by without visible action, and Bush’s public standing would never fully recover. Steve Schmidt, the vice president’s counselor, wrote in an e-mail to a colleague, “This is the end of the presidency.”
JUST AS HE turned to Cheney after September 11, Bush tried to enlist his vice president to help respond to Katrina. But this time, he was rebuffed. Natural disasters were not a Cheney specialty, nor was public empathy. When Bush told Card to ask Cheney to head a task force overseeing relief efforts, the vice president said he would only if he had real authority and could hire and fire people. He quickly concluded, however, that it was a “primarily symbolic” assignment and made clear he was not interested. “I would be a figurehead without the ability really to do anything about the performance of the federal agencies involved,” he recalled. Bush was no longer ceding power to his vice president the way he had in his first term.
Bush was a little edgy about the rejection. At a high-level meeting about the hurricane, he needled the vice president.
“I asked Dick if he’d be interested in spearheading this,” Bush announced. “Let’s just say I didn’t get the most positive response.”
He looked over at Cheney. “Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?” Bush asked.
Cheney said yes, but then added, “That’ll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise.”
The vice president went down to the region on September 8. He quickly concluded that Michael Brown was outmatched and spoke with Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary. Chertoff had already come to the same conclusion. Chertoff and Brown had been struggling for control of the crisis for days. Brown felt he needed direct access to the White House, while Chertoff was not about to be bypassed. Chertoff was annoyed that Brown was spending so much time on television instead of overseeing the crisis. He finally ordered the FEMA director not to leave the Baton Rouge operations center. “Get the fuck off television and manage the operation,” was how Chertoff remembered his message. Brown disobeyed and left Baton Rouge for a firsthand look at the damage.
Chertoff told Bush he wanted to relieve Brown. “You do whatever you have to do,” Bush told him. “It’s your show.” So Chertoff sent Brown back to Washington, benching him. On September 12, Brown resigned. Brown later acknowledged that he had become “insubordinate” but only because Chertoff “simply did not know how to respond to a disaster and was trying to micromanage our response” from Washington. In the end, the st
orm and its aftermath cost 1,833 lives, did $108 billion in damage, and left hundreds of thousands without homes. Bush asked his father and Bill Clinton to lead a relief effort.
Amid the dysfunction, Bush felt burned most of all by the accusation that he did not care about the largely African American residents of New Orleans. Whatever Bush’s faults, few who knew him included racial insensitivity among them. He told Laura that “it was the worst moment of my presidency.”
But he and Michael Gerson thought it might be an opportunity to open a discussion about race and poverty in America, and they crafted a major speech for him to deliver. On September 15, Bush flew to New Orleans, and in a prime-time national address from Jackson Square in the heart of a mostly empty, still flooded city, he promised “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.” He accepted blame for the stutter-start response, saying, “I as president am responsible for the problem, and for the solution.”
He tried to open the dialogue he and Gerson wanted. “As all of us saw on television,” Bush said, “there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”
But with so much else on his plate, that sort of broader action never took place. Bush and his wife would eventually make dozens of trips to the region, and he ultimately steered $126 billion in federal funds for response and recovery, a historic commitment by some measures equivalent to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II. But Katrina would remain etched on his record as a failure of leadership, and at times he was bitter. “Can you believe they’re blaming me for this?” he once told Kofi Annan in a private conversation.
JUST AS KATRINA took its toll on Bush’s reputation, so did it swamp his domestic agenda. By the time the government came up for air, it was clear the president’s Social Security plan was struggling. While Bush wanted to blame the Democrats for their lockstep opposition—and to be sure, Democrats made a calculated political decision not to even try to collaborate—it was the Republicans who killed it. Speaker Dennis Hastert delivered the news to Bush at the White House.
“Look, we got another situation where our guys are getting killed on it in an election, and this is a poison pill for us,” Hastert told him. “We don’t have that big a majority and it is very difficult to carry this load and I don’t think we are going to be able to pass it.”
Bush was deeply unhappy. “I wish we could be able to do this,” he said, “but let’s keep working on it and see where we are at.”
He would never formally surrender, but just like that, the top item on his second-term domestic agenda was dead.
His second-term foreign agenda was equally shaky. The Cheney camp resisted accommodation with North Korea. Robert Joseph, the hard-liner who negotiated the Libya deal and later moved to the State Department as undersecretary for arms control and international security, was now pushing for a naval blockade to keep Pyongyang from providing fissile material or technology to terrorists. He even handed out a memo outlining how it would work. “If there is a nuclear explosion, this would change the world as we know it,” he argued. But few others had much stomach for it with two other wars under way.
With support from Condoleezza Rice, Christopher Hill had labored for months to lure North Korea back into an agreement on its nuclear program, and it looked as if he were about to score a success, despite Cheney’s doubts. On September 19, North Korea agreed to scrap its nuclear program in exchange for an American promise not to attack. Bush had already indicated he would rule out hostility if North Korea had no nuclear program. The breakthrough seemed like a major victory for Rice’s new approach over Cheney’s old one.
But the next day, in quintessential fashion, the mercurial North Korean leadership backed away from its own agreement and upped the ante, demanding the United States provide a civilian nuclear reactor as a trade-off for giving up its weapons program. That was essentially the same deal that Bill Clinton had made and that Bush had abandoned after taking office. Bush had no interest in reprising Clinton’s greatest hits.
Then the standoff took a new twist. The Treasury Department declared Banco Delta Asia, a bank in Macao, a money-laundering operation for sheltering profits from the counterfeiting and money laundering of Kim Jong Il’s circle. About $25 million in North Korean accounts at the bank were frozen. The action was not part of Hill’s negotiating strategy, but it would come to dominate the talks as the regime found itself cut off from its money.
BUSH WAS IN bed with his wife on September 3 when the phone rang. As he reached for the receiver, he knew it would be bad news. No one called him at that hour with good news.
On the line was Karl Rove. Chief Justice William Rehnquist had died, he reported. The chief justice had been fighting cancer for a year, and it had been clear for months that it was only a matter of time. Bush understood immediately that it gave him an opportunity to further put his stamp on the Supreme Court. John Roberts had made a good impression with a confident demeanor during his courtesy calls on Capitol Hill and practice sessions. Now Bush had a second seat to fill.
The next move was relatively easy. While Cheney briefly floated the notion of promoting his friend, Justice Antonin Scalia, Bush instead decided to nominate Roberts for chief justice, moving him up even before he was confirmed. That had always been a contingency in the minds of the Bush team, but one that was reinforced by the smooth way Roberts handled his confirmation process. And with critics pounding Bush over Katrina, elevating Roberts was the safest choice. The president picked up the phone and called to offer him the job of chief justice, putting him on a path to succeed the man he had once clerked for. Roberts accepted and joined Bush the next morning at the White House to make the announcement.
Roberts was soon cruising to confirmation. He prepared for his hearings with a grueling set of “murder board” practice sessions, with administration lawyers throwing questions at him in a conference room at the Justice Department and measuring the length of his answers with a plastic kitchen timer. With occasional breaks for cookies from Harris Teeter, these sessions stretched on four hours a day, four days a week for four weeks. By the time he arrived on Capitol Hill, Roberts easily deflected Democratic opposition by portraying himself as a nonideological umpire calling balls and strikes.
Under Laura’s quiet pressure, Bush was determined to find a woman to fill the other seat replacing O’Connor and told Andy Card to expand the search list. “No white guys,” Card told Harriet Miers and her deputy, William Kelley. The list of women on federal appeals courts or in prominent law school positions was finite, and the vetting team quickly went through them. For one reason or another, none of them seemed quite right. Edith Brown Clement, who had made the final cut over the summer, had not impressed Bush in their interview. Edith Jones, a favorite among conservatives, was seen as too provocative. Other candidates included Priscilla Owen, Karen Williams, Alice Batchelder, Diane Sykes, Deanell Reece Tacha, Maura Corrigan, and Maureen Mahoney, but there was always something—either they asked not to be considered, had financial disclosure issues, or were insufficiently conservative. “We looked at every female appellate judge in the country who was plausibly a Republican,” Kelley recalled.
Another woman, though, had been on Bush’s radar screen even if not deemed a candidate by Cheney or his team: Miers herself. She was no constitutional scholar and had never served as a judge, but she was a pioneer in a way, the first woman to head the State Bar of Texas, a successful corporate attorney, and a former Dallas City Council member. She would bring real-world experience to a chamber filled with Ivy League credentials, just as many justices did before the modern era, when the court became increasingly the province of former appellate judges. Most important of all to Bush was that he knew her and was sure she would be a solid conservative vote. As far back as July, he had talked with Card about whether s
he might be a good candidate if a second seat opened, and Card had instructed Kelley, her own deputy, to secretly vet her.
Bush’s instincts seemed reinforced when he hosted Senate leaders for breakfast on September 21 to talk about O’Connor’s seat. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, had been impressed with Miers and declared that she would be someone he could support. “If you nominate Harriet Miers, you’ll start with fifty-six votes,” he told Bush, meaning the fifty-five Republicans and him. With Katrina, the collapse of his Social Security initiative, and the ongoing spiral of violence in Iraq, an easy confirmation appealed to Bush.
He summoned Miers to the Oval Office later that day and told her to put one more person on her list of candidates—herself.
“What do you mean me?” she asked.
Bush told her she had been vetted secretly, but she demurred, saying she was not the right choice. She still favored Samuel Alito.
“Well, Harriet, look at your résumé,” Card told her. “Is that the résumé of someone you would recommend the president consider?”
Yes, she supposed so. If Bush wanted to consider her, she would not say no.
Bush began sounding out others inside the White House. Miers was well liked within the building and respected by many for her prodigious work ethic and unshakable loyalty to the president. But few could envision this graduate of Southern Methodist University’s law school as a Supreme Court justice. She was the gatekeeper who made sure paper moved efficiently, who corrected grammar and quizzed aides about their choice of wording in memos, who once rejected the text of a White House Christmas card because she did not think it was well written. She had what the budget director Mitch Daniels called “that schoolmarm voice” that would calm a room, and she was at Bush’s side during many of his most critical moments, from Air Force One on September 11 to the USS Abraham Lincoln for his speech on Iraq. But around the West Wing, Miers was deemed pedantic, not a deep thinker. She had never expressed a rigorous judicial philosophy. She hardly filled a room as John Roberts did.
