Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  So when Bush ushered Hu into the East Room for the lunch of butter heirloom corn broth, Alaska halibut, snap peas, and sweet potatoes, he largely ignored the corporate titans from General Motors, Home Depot, Goldman Sachs, and Caterpillar to hurriedly rearrange the seating chart. Michelle Kwan, the Olympic figure skater; Richard Levin, the Yale University president; and Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, were shifted around so that Bush sat on one side of Hu and Rice on the other.

  “Condi and I have something to talk to President Hu about,” Bush apologized.

  Speaking softly so no one other than the translator and Hu could hear, Bush and Rice then outlined their idea.

  “I want you to know I’m serious about this,” Bush said. “I’m going to follow up on it, but if he’ll give up his nuclear weapons, I’m ready to end the Korean War basically and to give him a peace treaty, and we need to talk about how to make this happen.”

  Hu seemed taken aback, so Bush kept repeating himself.

  “I understand,” Hu replied.

  He agreed to deliver the message and ordered a lieutenant to leave Washington immediately for Pyongyang.

  26

  “I’m not sure how to take good news anymore”

  President Bush was already in the Oval Office by the time Joshua Bolten arrived at 6:45 each morning, sitting behind his desk and studying the blue sheet listing overnight casualties, which he had often circled with his Sharpie pen. Iraq was always on Bush’s mind. Aides who showed up to talk about other issues often found him distracted and disinterested. Everything kept coming back to Iraq.

  Bush was hearing criticism from many different quarters, including friendly ones. On April 23, he paid a courtesy call on Gerald Ford at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, and the ninety-two-year-old former president took the opportunity to lecture him about what was going wrong in Iraq. Ford said he had supported the invasion but felt Bush had done a poor job explaining to the public why it was important and made a mistake by predicating the war on the supposed weapons. “I don’t think he admits it,” Ford confided to the journalist Tom DeFrank after the meeting, “except that it’s a fact.”

  The news out of Iraq that spring was so grim, so unrelenting. The report Bush got each evening provided increasingly dismal reading—bombings, assassinations, ethnic cleansing, political gridlock, sectarian strife. There were periodic updates on the investigation into the deaths of twenty-four Iraqi civilians, including unarmed women and children, killed in Haditha the previous November by marines upset after a roadside bomb killed one of their own. A trip report prepared by his aide Brett McGurk, who was just back from Baghdad, noted that American civilian officials could leave their fortified Green Zone headquarters only twice a week and with forty-eight hours’ notice. Even then, trips were often canceled for security reasons.

  In the face of that, it was hard even for the perennially upbeat Bush to keep an optimistic perspective. The jovial demeanor was gone; his face was etched with lines of worry. What could stop the cycle of violence? What could he do? He would later call it “the worst period of my presidency” and confessed that “I thought about the war constantly.” For the first time, he worried he would not succeed in Iraq, that he had gotten himself and the country enmeshed in another Vietnam—again with devastating consequences for the country.

  He was determined not to show it. “He keeps a lot of that very, very locked up inside himself,” one longtime friend said. Constitutionally, Bush disdained hand-wringing and what he would mockingly describe as “woe is me” self-pity. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of everyone watching him. From observing his father’s presidency, he understood how a White House takes its cues from the man at the top, and it would be even worse if soldiers in the field saw him “wallow in public” and thought he was losing heart. “Can you imagine the signal I would have sent,” he asked a visitor after leaving office, “had I said, ‘Ah, why me? Why am I thrust in the middle of all this stuff?’ ”

  Bush was a study in contrasts with his fellow Texan LBJ, who agonized over Vietnam. “He never became a Lyndon Johnson figure, oppressed by the office,” Michael Gerson believed. “I never saw any of that.” Stephen Hadley said that “if he has dark nights of the soul, he doesn’t show them to us.” Dan Bartlett came to work every morning expecting Bush to finally succumb to the pressure. “He stunned me day after day,” Bartlett said. “I am kind of like, this is going to be the day he breaks. This is the day. This has got to be it.” Yet it never happened. Laura worried as well and made a point of regularly inviting over the president’s brother Marvin, who lived in the Washington suburbs. Despite their ten-year age difference, “Marvelous,” as the president called him, was closer to Bush than his other siblings. They sat together on weekends watching sports.

  But he was consumed by the war, and friends could tell it was eating away at him even if he refused to admit it. “He did get kind of down,” remembered Joe O’Neill, his childhood pal from Texas. “He feels that pain all the time,” observed Jim Langdon, another Texas friend who lived in Washington. Bush prayed every day and leaned on religious advisers like Kirbyjon Caldwell, the Texas minister. “Putting parents, children, in harm’s way weighed very heavily on him,” Caldwell said. The upbeat image Bush conveyed veiled his internal reality. “Anyone who said he didn’t care about that, they are just wrong,” Caldwell said. “Just flat wrong about it.”

  Those who saw him for hours a day, like Bolten and Bartlett, noticed the impact in small ways. “It isn’t like he’s blowing up in rooms and throwing people out or things like that,” Bartlett said. “Maybe a little shorter, but I would bet that the typical White House staffer who maybe runs into him every once in a while wouldn’t notice it. It was us that were with him all the time and where he is sharing his frustrations” who could tell. “It would always show itself in different ways. It could be ‘What the fuck did Rumsfeld say today?’ ” Or it could be a quiet spell. “Every day would kind of demonstrate and reveal itself in different ways. But he was never sullen. It would be closer to frustration and pissed more than depression and sullen.”

  How much he blamed himself was unclear. Most of the killings were committed by al-Qaeda affiliates, Shiite or Sunni militias, or other violent elements, not American troops, but he was the one who had failed to foresee the turmoil that would follow the ouster of Saddam Hussein, and he had stood back as it spiraled out of control. His approach was to trust and delegate to his generals and subordinates. “You fight the war, and I’ll provide you with political cover,” he told them over and over. But it had left him oddly passive as conditions deteriorated. He interposed no objections when Jerry Bremer overruled the plan Bush had approved for how to handle the Iraqi army and Baath Party, nor did he intervene when the six-month time frame he initially imagined extended to a year, then two, then three.

  By late spring, whatever blend of optimism, confidence, and wishful thinking had propped up the White House on Iraq had faded. Through the end of 2005, Bush and Cheney had been able to hang on to the timetable of events they had laid out: Just get to the election for the interim government. Wait till the new constitution is written. Once it’s ratified that will make a difference. Look toward the election of a permanent government.

  The series of deadlines became beacons for eventual victory but turned out to be false hope. Instead of looking at the bigger picture, the White House had been fixated on the next date on the calendar. “There’s always this kind of optimism, looking toward the next milestone,” Frederick Jones of the National Security Council later reflected. “That’s why it’s always been hard to look back and say cumulatively, this has been a fiasco. It was hard on the inside to look back in a cumulative way.” Now there were no more artificial milestones, no more illusions of progress.

  McGurk and his boss, Meghan O’Sullivan, were quietly trying to send Bush a message through their nightly reports. An Oxford-trained scholar with little practical Middle East background before the invasion, O’Sulli
van by now had as much experience in Iraq as any American official. She served as an aide to Bremer, negotiated the interim constitution, and was once forced to escape a hotel hit by a rocket by climbing out the window onto a tenth-floor ledge. She had deep contacts among Iraqi political figures and was controversial among some Americans on the ground for trying to orchestrate the situation from the White House, an “eight-thousand-mile screwdriver,” as some termed micromanagers in Washington. But she had come to the conclusion that the strategy put in place by Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, and backed by Donald Rumsfeld, was failing. Underlying the strategy was the assumption that control had to be turned over as quickly as possible to Iraqis so that America could reduce its footprint and not be seen as an occupier. It was a reasoned analysis, informed by long study of the region by Abizaid, a Lebanese American who spoke fluent Arabic and was viewed as “our version of Lawrence of Arabia,” in the words of John Hannah, who had taken over as Cheney’s national security adviser. Perhaps a quick handover at the beginning of the war might have averted the backlash that followed, but there seemed no one capable of leading the country at the time. By the spring of 2006, more than three years after Saddam Hussein was toppled, it was too late to pretend Americans were not occupiers. And the theory that security would follow political reconciliation was proving hollow.

  One morning that spring, Bush looked up from a blue sheet casualty report and shook his head.

  “This is not working,” he said to Stephen Hadley. “We need to take another look at the whole strategy. I need to see some new options.”

  “Mr. President,” Hadley said, “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  WAYLAID IN HIS PLAN to push out Donald Rumsfeld, Joshua Bolten focused on other changes he thought were needed to shake up the White House. To replace Scott McClellan as press secretary, he came up with a surprising choice—Tony Snow, a high-profile Fox News commentator who had worked as a speechwriter for Bush’s father.

  Not since the Ford administration had a White House press secretary come directly from the media, but Bolten thought Snow had the right combination of brash charm, nimble debating skills, and disarming humor to pull it off. Moreover, Snow had been tough on the president in his columns and radio show, so he would have credibility. Snow had lambasted Bush as an “impotent” president with a “listless domestic policy” who had “lost control of the federal budget.” At one point, Snow said, “George Bush has become something of an embarrassment.”

  When Bush made the announcement on the morning of April 26, he said slyly, “I asked him about those comments and he said, ‘You should have heard what I said about the other guy.’ ”

  Snow’s arrival transformed White House press relations. He was the first press secretary for the talk show age, turning daily briefings into cable-style debates with reporters. In a marked shift from the hypercautious McClellan, Snow was not afraid to use bold language and glib repartee that went well beyond the staid talking points. He became an instant rock star, signing autographs, posing for pictures, hitting the lecture circuit, and appearing on television public affairs shows. While his freewheeling style sometimes crossed a line, and his attention to precision was episodic, almost overnight he provided a more popular face for a White House badly in need of it.

  Bolten also made two other key changes. Porter Goss, who was constantly at war with the establishment at the CIA, was pushed out as director and replaced by Michael Hayden, the NSA director and architect of the warrantless surveillance program. Engaging, confident, and wise to the ways of Washington, Hayden was a Bush favorite. Now Bolten was ready to reshape the economic team by ousting Secretary of the Treasury John Snow. While Snow got along better with Bush and Cheney than his predecessor did, he was not seen as a powerful public advocate for the administration’s economic policies. Besides, Bolten had a nagging sense that the country would be facing a financial crisis before the end of Bush’s presidency, just based on the law of averages if nothing else. He figured it would be an international currency crisis of the sort that confronted Bill Clinton, missing early warning signs that it was actually the housing market that was overheating in a dangerous way.

  Either way, Snow was not a markets expert, so Bolten set out to find one. Bolten, a former Goldman Sachs executive, pursued Henry Paulson, a onetime junior Nixon White House aide who became chief executive of the storied Wall Street firm, but Paulson said no. Bolten went to other leading Republicans in the financial world, including Charles Schwab, founder of the investment brokerage that used his name; John Thain, chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange; and Kenneth Chenault, chief executive of American Express. But he kept coming back to Paulson, making it a mission to change his mind and devoting hours a day to the project. Paulson was a formidable personality who filled the room. “He’s hard to ignore,” noted Michele Davis, later one of his chief advisers. “He’s tall, but he’s even more just gangly with arms flailing and just takes up a lot of space.”

  With Bush’s help, Bolten finally wore him down, much to the chagrin of Paulson’s family. His mother cried when Paulson told her he would take the job and expressed hope the Senate would not confirm him. “You started with Nixon and you’re going to end with Bush?” she said. “Why would you do such a thing?” Paulson’s wife, Wendy, a college classmate of Hillary Clinton’s, and their son, Merritt, also opposed his taking the job, although their daughter, Amanda, supported his decision. “You’ll be jumping onto a sinking ship,” his mother said. But if he was, Paulson at least negotiated terms to his liking. He would run economic policy, not the White House, and not the vice president, who to the outside world seemed to have his hand in every pot.

  Actually, Cheney’s role was shrinking by the hour. Even as Paulson was boxing him out of economic policy, Rice was elbowing him out of foreign policy. While Iraq was the dominant priority, she was looking for opportunities to make progress on other fronts and saw Iran as a possibility. One night she went home to her apartment in the famed Watergate complex and wrote out a plan for a diplomatic opening in a color-coded chart that proved so complicated only she could read it. But the idea was to propose that the United States come to the negotiating table if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment. At Rice’s urging, Bush had been calling other leaders to sound them out. He faced considerable skepticism from some, especially the Russians, who thought the American-led pressure campaign against Tehran risked becoming a repeat of the war in Iraq. “Utter bullshit that I’m going to attack Iran,” Bush told Igor Ivanov, the Russian national security adviser, during a visit early in May. “For effectiveness, we can’t take the military option off the table. The most important thing is to keep a united front so that there is no way for them to wiggle out of the box.”

  As Memorial Day approached, Bush finally agreed to make the overture to Iran, if only to keep the Europeans together. Recognizing that the Cheney wing would find it hard to swallow, Rice invited hard-liners to her apartment on the holiday to explain the policy and address objections. She had her collaborator, Nicholas Burns, her undersecretary, lay out the strategy for skeptics like Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser, and John Hannah, Cheney’s adviser. Then she invited John Bolton, the hard-line ambassador to the United Nations, to dinner the next night at her favorite restaurant at the Watergate. “I just want to know we are all on the same page,” she told him. She announced the new policy the following day, Cheney and his allies quietly going along.

  ANOTHER MOMENT OF friction between Bush and Cheney that spring would come over the unlikeliest of issues. On the night of May 20, the FBI raided the Capitol Hill office of Representative William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat caught with $90,000 hidden in his freezer. The raid triggered an eruption of anger in Congress that crossed party lines. To lawmakers, it was a violation of separation of powers and the speech-and-debate clause of the Constitution that protects them while performing their duties.

  Speaker Dennis Hastert was “livid,” as he later r
ecalled, and gave Bush an earful about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Air Force One returning to Washington from an event in Illinois.

  “This is just unacceptable,” he told Bush. “I think you ought to ask for the guy’s resignation.”

  Bush was not about to force Gonzales to resign but grew emotional, with tears in his eyes, during the heated exchange with Hastert. “Let me look into it,” he said.

  Cheney sided with Hastert and Jefferson. For a vice president fixated on the power of the executive branch, this was one instance where he believed the executive had encroached on the legislative branch.

  The White House convened a conference call to review what had happened. David Addington “was just so exercised” and peppered the Justice Department officials with “very tough, aggressive questions” demanding to know the constitutional basis for conducting a search on Capitol Hill, according to Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general. McNulty argued that separation of powers did not make congressional offices immune from law enforcement, noting that a judge had authorized the search. Bush and Cheney then summoned McNulty to the White House to hear for themselves why the Justice Department thought it had the power to raid Jefferson’s office. Bush noted that he had gotten an earful from Hastert, while Cheney pointed out that he was an old House guy and sympathized with their resistance to executive interference.

  The dispute put Gonzales in an awkward position, torn between his inherent loyalty to Bush and his responsibility to defend his department. He began shuttling between the White House and the Justice Department looking for a solution, only to return to his office one day having surrendered.

  “Well, basically here’s the deal,” he told aides. “We have to give the evidence back. We have until midnight to give the evidence back, or they are going to order us to give it back.”