by Peter Baker
“Tell me where they are,” Musharraf demanded.
“You know where they are!” Karzai insisted.
“If I did, I would get them,” Musharraf replied.
“Go do it!” Karzai exclaimed.
Bush, wondering whether dinner was a mistake, tried to calm them. Afterward, he walked out shaking his head. “They almost came to blows,” he remarked to Rice.
Within weeks, Bush’s team concluded that the peace deal in Pakistan was falling apart. As feared, the supposed “live and let live” agreement had merely become license for fighters from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the allied Haqqani group to operate as they pleased. With each passing day, Bush and his advisers grew more aggravated. On October 13, Donald Rumsfeld shot off a memo to Hadley. “I think someone needs to talk to Musharraf—either the President, Abizaid, or I should tell him the deal made in North Waziristan isn’t working and is not likely to work,” he wrote. “The level of activity has gone up, not down.”
“LOOK, I WANT to assure you that this is not the Addington proposal,” Hadley told John McCain and other senators.
At Bush’s instructions, Hadley headed up to Capitol Hill to negotiate legislation authorizing military commissions. This time, Hadley had a message to deliver. That the president’s national security adviser would feel compelled to disavow the vice president’s chief of staff spoke volumes about the Bush-Cheney White House in the autumn of its sixth year. Hadley had been through this before and understood that Cheney’s intensity and reputation, fairly or not, had colored the talks over the Detainee Treatment Act a year earlier. But it also left McCain’s aides wondering if “Cheney was losing steam within the administration a little bit,” as one put it.
The Military Commissions Act was a response to the Supreme Court’s Hamdan ruling, putting the system on a firmer constitutional footing by winning permission from Congress first. Feeling burned by the signing statement Addington had attached to the Detainee Treatment Act the previous year, McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham were determined not to let the White House pull anything over on them. At one point, an aide ran into McCain’s office to tell the two senators that Hadley was on the phone at that very moment with the other member of their triumvirate, Senator John Warner of Virginia. McCain and Graham raced down the hall and barged into Warner’s office without knocking to ensure he did not give in to White House pressure. “We had to waterboard him,” McCain later joked to an aide.
The debate exposed an old rift. From retirement in suburban Virginia, Colin Powell finally reemerged to go public with his years-old fight with Cheney over the Geneva Conventions. “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell wrote in a letter made public. “To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”
Eventually, Hadley reached a deal with McCain, Graham, and Warner. The White House would back off the effort to narrow the application of the Geneva Conventions, but the legislation would give the president considerable latitude in determining how to meet the treaty’s obligations. Foreigners held as unlawful enemy combatants, even legal residents living in the United States, would have no habeas corpus right to challenge their detention in court. Prosecutors trying terror suspects before military commissions could not introduce secret evidence without letting the defense examine it but could still use evidence obtained from coercive interrogations if a military judge deemed it reliable. The government could detain indefinitely not only American citizens who “engaged in hostilities” against their country but those who “materially supported” the enemy, potentially allowing authorities to imprison without trial people who donated to Middle East charities linked to groups considered terrorist organizations. In the end, Bush was satisfied that the Military Commissions Act “contained everything we asked for.” Congress passed it on bipartisan votes at the end of September.
UNMOVED BY BUSH’S latest overture delivered through China’s Hu Jintao, North Korea chose the weeks before the congressional election to demand attention again. On the evening of October 8, Bush and his team got frantic messages from China that North Korea was about to test a nuclear bomb. Pyongyang had given Beijing an hour’s notice, ignoring the warnings of its most important patron. At 10:36 p.m. Washington time (11:36 a.m. in Korea), a crude nuclear device detonated at the Punggye-ri test site northwest of the capital. Bush spoke with Hu and tried to shame him into taking stronger action. “It’s a disgraceful day for China,” Bush told him. “You speak out, Mr. President, and Kim Jong Il completely ignored you.”
The next morning, October 9, Bush made a short statement in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House that laid down a new red line for North Korea. Since Bush could no longer demand that North Korea not test weapons, he insisted that at least it not give them to other rogue nations. “The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States,” he declared, “and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action.”
The explosion proved less than feared. Experts estimated the yield was barely half a kiloton, a fraction of the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and a pittance compared with modern nuclear weapons. Scientists concluded the bomb probably fizzled, although even a failure can help in understanding what works and what does not. Either way, Bush scorned the North Koreans. “Is this the best they can do?” he asked, shaking his head when advisers briefed him on the findings.
Bush wanted to press the Chinese, who seemed genuinely angry about the test. He decided to send Christopher Hill back to the region. “We cannot solve this by ourselves,” Bush said at a session in the Situation Room called to address the issue. The Chinese had to take leadership.
He turned to Hill. “Tell them that they cannot allow this to go on,” he said.
“With pleasure,” Hill replied.
Within days, Chinese pique cleared the way for the UN Security Council to impose the toughest sanctions on North Korea since the end of the Korean War, banning the sale or transfer of large-scale arms, nuclear technology, or luxury goods and imposing a travel ban and asset freeze on officials connected to the nuclear program.
Cheney was not mollified. While Bush saw the test as a chance to solidify the international coalition against North Korea, Cheney thought the episode showed the utter failure of the policy the administration had been pursuing. On yet another front, the divide between president and vice president had deepened.
WITH THE MIDTERM election drawing near, Bush tried to shift his rhetoric on Iraq. For months, he had been hammering home the need to remain steady. The question he posed after visiting Iraq in June was “whether the United States would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed.” In Milwaukee in July he declared, “We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course.” In Salt Lake City in August he vowed, “We will stay the course; we will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed.”
But support was eroding even among Republicans like Senator John Warner, who returned from Iraq to lament that “the situation is simply drifting sideways.” Ed Gillespie called to see if he really meant his comment to be taken as negatively as it was, hoping to perhaps get him to walk it back, but Warner stuck to his view. So Bush was now cutting and running from “stay the course.” A phrase meant to connote steely resolve had become a symbol for out-of-touch rigidity and an attack line in Democratic commercials.
In a head-spinning twist, Bush asserted he was never really for “stay the course” at all. “The characterization of ‘let’s stay the course’ is about a quarter right,” he told a news conference on October 11. “ ‘Stay the course’ means keep doing what you’re doing. My attitude is: Don’t do what you’re doing if it’s not working—change. ‘Stay the course’ also means don’t leave before the job is done.” Barely a week later, it was no longer even a quarter right. “Listen, we’ve never been stay the course
,” he told ABC News. “We have been—we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting the tactics. Constantly.”
At the time, that seemed more a rhetorical shift than reality. But behind the scenes, momentum for changing course in Iraq was gathering. At a meeting with Bush in the Roosevelt Room, some on the national security team suggested a radical reversal by sending more troops rather than pulling them out. The very idea shocked others, who argued that the military was already overextended. Afterward, Hadley’s deputy, J. D. Crouch, grabbed a scrap of paper and sketched out the whole plan in rudimentary form. Then, with Hadley’s permission, he assigned William Luti, a navy captain working at the NSC, to quietly study whether it would be possible given the forces available. “If you had a clean sheet of paper,” Crouch told him, “what would you do?” Luti came back on October 11 with a set of slides showing the military could muster a “surge” of five brigades. Time was running out. Less than a week later, the military in Baghdad acknowledged that Operation Together Forward II, like its predecessor, had failed to reduce the violence washing over the capital.
Unlike Bush, Cheney saw no need to measure his rhetoric on the campaign trail. It was fine for Bush to reach out to disaffected independents and moderates, but the vice president by both inclination and calculation focused on rallying the conservative base. Some aides later attributed some of the drift between the two men to this different campaign experience: Bush seeing what was necessary to appeal to a broader cross section of Americans and Cheney focused as ever on a narrower audience.
When Scott Hennen, a conservative radio talk show host from Fargo, North Dakota, showed up in the vice president’s West Wing office on October 24, Cheney vigorously defended the administration’s record.
“I’ve had people call and say, please let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we’re all for it, if it saves American lives,” Hennen told Cheney. “Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?”
“I do agree,” replied Cheney, sitting at his desk without his suit jacket on. “And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that’s been a very important tool that we’ve had to be able to secure the nation.”
“Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” the host asked.
“It’s a no-brainer for me,” Cheney said. “But for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President for Torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we’re party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture.”
It was perhaps Cheney’s most unvarnished public defense to date of waterboarding terror suspects, a “no-brainer” as he measured the trade-offs. When a furor erupted, he told reporters that he “didn’t say anything about waterboarding,” but that was the obvious reference. In the days to come, Cheney seemed more intent on denying that he disclosed a classified interrogation technique than on distancing himself from waterboarding. But his comments were a genuine reflection of his views: waterboarding did not violate the law on torture, because it did not meet the legal definition crafted by administration lawyers seeking to justify a policy. As for any moral quandaries, the only one Cheney saw was the responsibility to prevent future attacks; everything else took a backseat.
Bush, meanwhile, was determined to maintain a positive outlook in public despite private doubts. He believed that was always his role as commander in chief with troops in the field, and he knew that betraying uncertainty before the election in particular could crater what fragile support his party had left. So when he walked into the East Room for a news conference on October 25, he resolved to remain upbeat.
The first question tested that conviction. Terence Hunt of the Associated Press noted that the Iraq War had now lasted almost as long as the American involvement in World War II.
“Do you think we’re winning,” Hunt asked, “and why?”
Bush dodged, saying he was “confident we will succeed” and warning that “defeat will only come” if America backs off.
Hunt pressed for an answer. “Are we winning?” he repeated.
This time, Bush offered no equivocation. “Absolutely, we’re winning,” he said.
In private that same day, though, he offered a much different tone to a group of conservative journalists invited in for an interview. He was certain that, as he put it, “they’re coming after us,” meaning terrorists, but did not understand why so many others did not see it with the clarity he did. “I am in disbelief that people don’t take these problems seriously,” he said.
The president’s aggravation and isolation were on display. Lawrence Kudlow of CNBC told Bush he had supported the war but was discouraged.
“I need some good news, sir,” Kudlow told him.
“Yes, I do, too,” Bush replied.
“I really do,” Kudlow repeated.
“You’re talking to Noah about the flood,” Bush said. “I do, too.”
The president who kept a chart of al-Qaeda figures in his desk to cross out when one was killed or captured expressed exasperation that he could not find a tangible yardstick to point to victory in Iraq.
“I don’t know what Harry Truman was feeling like, or Franklin Roo- sevelt,” he said. “I’m sure there were moments of high frustration for them. But I do know that at Midway, they were eventually able to say two carriers were sunk and one was damaged. We don’t get to say that. A thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It’s happening; you just don’t know it. And there’s no scorecard.”
THE IDEA OF Robert Gates at the Pentagon gained favor among the small coterie of people Bush had consulted. Condoleezza Rice recommended him enthusiastically, having worked for Gates when they were both at the National Security Council. Gates, a steady figure who had served four presidents and understood the ways of Washington, could be just the ticket. Stephen Hadley had approached him once before about becoming the first director of national intelligence, only to have him decline. Bush instructed his staff to approach him again about the Pentagon.
Under tight secrecy, Bush instructed Hadley, Joshua Bolten, Karl Rove, Joel Kaplan, and Dan Bartlett to begin planning a change but kept his deliberations secret from Cheney for weeks, obviously concerned about his vice president’s reaction. There was probably no more important decision in his presidency that Bush had not shared with his vice president. It was not until October 31 that Bush finally tipped off Cheney, even as he sent Hadley to Baghdad on a fact-finding mission.
“Dick, can I talk to you for a second?” Bush asked after their morning briefings.
The two retreated to the privacy of the small hallway off the Oval Office.
“I’ve decided to make a change at Defense,” Bush said, “and I’m looking at Bob Gates to replace Rumsfeld.”
Cheney was struck by the finality of Bush’s statement. He was informing Cheney, not soliciting his views. “It wasn’t open for discussion by the time he came to me,” Cheney recalled.
While Cheney was still processing the surprise, Bush turned around and headed off, not giving his vice president a chance to object as he had so many times before.
Bush was holding back on the public as well as Cheney. Bolten and Bartlett came up with a plan to announce the move the day after the election, reasoning that it would look political to do it before voters headed to the polls. But the day after Bush told Cheney he had decided to remove Rumsfeld, he was asked in the Oval Office by Terence Hunt and two other wire service reporters, Richard Keil of Bloomberg and Steve Holland of Reuters, whether he wanted Rumsfeld and Cheney to stay until the end of his term.
Unwilling to give away his secret, Bush said yes. “Both those men are doing fantastic jobs, and I strongly support them,” he said.<
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Rumsfeld, who had sensed what was coming, was confused when he read about the interview.
ON THE SATURDAY before the elections, nothing much was going right for Bush. He woke up in a hotel in Colorado to find the first fourteen pages of the local newspaper devoted to the drugs-and-gay-sex scandal involving an evangelical pastor who had been among his staunch supporters in the conservative Christian wing of the party. The president’s visit to support a Republican congressional candidate did not even make the A section.
Bush stopped in a coffee shop, spoke at an unenthusiastic rally, and called it quits for the day, boarding Air Force One to fly home early to his Texas ranch. His staff told the traveling press corps that the president wanted to celebrate the first lady’s birthday over dinner, which was true enough. But he also wanted a chance to meet in private with key advisers to decide what to do next.
Among those at the ranch that afternoon was Ken Mehlman, the rail-thin, hyperkinetic forty-year-old chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mehlman had been a Bush loyalist from the early days—field director during the 2000 election, White House political director through the president’s first term, and campaign manager for his reelection in 2004. When it came to his frenetic television appearances, Mehlman never displayed anything but breathless boosterism for the president and the party, making him the most on-message of messengers. Just the night before, Mehlman had been on television confidently forecasting victory. “I predict we will hold both the House and the Senate,” he said. But in private, even Mehlman did not believe it.
“Mr. President,” he told Bush, “I think we’re going to lose twenty-four seats in the House.”
Bush seemed stunned. Karl Rove had told him the tide had turned against the Republicans, but he had held out hope that they could keep losses down. Twenty-four seats would be nine more than the Democrats needed to capture control of the House.
Bush told Mehlman he was too pessimistic. He thought they would lose nine or ten seats. Not twenty-four.
