by Peter Baker
As they talked about what would come next, Bush indicated he was ready to make a change at the Pentagon. When should he do it? he asked.
“As soon as possible,” Mehlman answered without hesitation. “Tomorrow, even.”
Bush was not ready to do that. Pushing out his embattled defense secretary two days before an election would reek of desperation, not to mention politicizing the war. But he used the cover of the ranch to meet secretly with Gates the next day, Sunday, November 5. Bolten and Joe Hagin surreptitiously met Gates in the parking lot of a grocery store in the nearby town of McGregor and, in a bit of CIA-style tradecraft, put him in an unmarked sport-utility vehicle and drove him to the ranch, where they took him straight to the president’s office rather than the house.
Bush and Gates hit it off. Bush said he was considering a troop buildup and strategy change in Iraq. Gates had been serving as a member of the congressionally chartered Iraq Study Group and told Bush he was supporting a recommendation for a temporary surge.
Bush offered him the job on the spot. Gates accepted.
“He’s my guy,” Bush told aides afterward. “We see it the same way.”
Bolten offered to break the news to Rumsfeld, but Bush said he wanted to let Cheney do it if he wanted. From Air Force One, he called Cheney, who was working in the upstairs family room at the vice presidential mansion. This time Bush at least let Cheney get in a word of protest.
“I disagree with your decision. I think Don is doing a fine job,” Cheney told him. “But it’s your call. You’re the president.”
“Dick, would you like to be the one to tell Don, or should I ask Josh Bolten to make the call?” Bush asked.
“I’ll do it, Mr. President,” Cheney said. “I owe Don an awful lot and he should hear the news from me.”
Cheney’s phone call came as Rumsfeld was having dinner with his wife, Joyce, and several friends.
“Don,” Cheney said, “the president has decided to make a change.”
Rumsfeld was not surprised.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll prepare a letter of resignation. It makes sense.”
Perhaps to soften the blow, or perhaps because he considered Bush’s decision political, Cheney attributed it to the election two days away.
“We’re going to lose the House of Representatives, and the next two years are going to be rough,” Cheney said.
“I agree,” Rumsfeld replied. “It’s not helpful for the military if I stay. Fresh eyes are a good thing.”
He noted that he had been thinking of resigning if Democrats won anyway. “I’m just too much of a target,” he said.
HIS DAYS NUMBERED, Rumsfeld focused on a memo laying out options for Iraq. He finished it the next day, November 6, and sent it to the president, the vice president, and others, his last shot at defining the path forward.
He agreed that the war effort was in trouble. “In my view,” he wrote, “it is time for a major adjustment. Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.” But in the three pages of options he presented, he continued to argue for those similar to the current strategy.
Among the approaches he listed “above the line,” meaning favored ideas, were “an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases” that would reduce the number of outposts from fifty-five to somewhere between ten and fifteen by April 2007 and just five by July 2007. Other above-the-line ideas were to redefine the mission and “go minimalist”; to “begin modest withdrawals” and “start ‘taking our hand off the bicycle seat’ ”; to withdraw American forces “from vulnerable positions” like cities and turn them into quick-reaction units that could swoop in when Iraqi security forces needed help; and to pull out most combat units, leaving behind enough special operations forces to target al-Qaeda, death squads, and Iranian elements. Among the “below the line” options deemed “less attractive” was a substantial troop increase.
Bush woke up that Monday morning at his Crawford ranch for the last day of the last campaign that would directly affect him. Rove briefed him on critical races. Of twenty recent polls in key districts or states, sixteen had moved in the Republican direction, and three were flat, Rove reported. While conventional wisdom had them losing the House and perhaps the Senate, Rove insisted they had a shot at holding both. He had written off ten or twelve House seats due to corruption scandals but figured Republicans could keep Democrats from capturing the fifteen seats they needed for a majority. Republicans, he added, should hang on to the Senate, albeit by a narrow margin. Bush agreed.
But this last campaign day would bring fresh indignity to the embattled president. He flew to Pensacola, Florida, as a favor to Jeb to boost the Republican candidate running to succeed him as governor, Charlie Crist. The schedule handed out on Air Force One listed Crist introducing the president at a rally. But Crist didn’t show; he was too busy, he said, to be with the president of the United States. Instead, he campaigned in Jacksonville with John McCain. Crist was hardly the only Republican eager to keep his distance from a president with a 40 percent approval rating—just the only one impolitic enough to stand him up after inviting him. Bush was irked, and Rove downright angry. Rove “ripped the guy a new one” during a phone call from Air Force One, Joshua Bolten recalled, and Bush aides took to calling the governor “Chickenshit Charlie.”
The rest of the president’s day underscored his political situation. Rather than parachute into close races where he could make a difference, he made his last two stops in states where the elections were no longer in doubt, first Arkansas, where Asa Hutchinson was heading to a double-digit defeat in his bid for governor, and then Texas, where Governor Rick Perry needed no help cruising to an easy reelection. Bush’s aides made sure Laura would be with him, knowing he was less anxious—and less testy—when she was around. At least the day ended with a raucous, pounding-music, shout-to-the-rafters rally that filled Reunion Arena in Dallas with thousands of Texans who welcomed their president with unbridled excitement. Feeling pumped up, Bush launched into a vigorous defense of his presidency and accused Democrats of opposing his national security policies without offering viable alternatives. He led the crowd in a call and repeat, telling them to ask Democrats, “What’s your plan?” Bush added, “Harsh criticism is not a plan for victory. Second-guessing is not a strategy. We have a plan. Stick with us and the country will be better off.”
But the truth was that Bush was second-guessing his own plan and had no intention of sticking with it. The next morning as the sun was rising just before 7:00 a.m., he left the ranch, his fifteen-vehicle motorcade passing the horses and goats and cows of the Texas countryside to the Crawford fire station, where he voted. Bush then boarded Air Force One bound for Washington and one of the most unpleasant days of his presidency. Arriving at the White House, he met in the Oval Office with Rumsfeld to complete the task he had assigned Cheney to start two days earlier.
“Mr. President, I’ve prepared this letter for you,” Rumsfeld said, handing him his resignation.
Bush, his family instincts kicking in, asked after Rumsfeld’s wife. “Is Joyce all right?”
“She’s fine. And she’s ready. She even typed the letter for me.” He added, “Look, Joyce and I are tracking with you on this.”
“This is hard for me,” Bush said.
Watching election returns that night was no easier. All around the country, Republican incumbents went down. Several prominent members of the class of 1994, swept in by Newt Gingrich’s revolution, surrendered seats, including Senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio as well as Representatives Charles Bass of New Hampshire and J. D. Hayworth of Arizona. Bush watched as Republicans lost seats held by scandal-tarred congressmen like Tom DeLay, Mark Foley, and Robert Ney. Worse, with the former navy secretary James Webb clutching a narrow lead in Virginia over Senator George Allen, it looked as if the Senate would fall as well. Bush called some of those who survived and then retreated to another room to smoke cigars w
ith some of the other men.
THE NEXT DAY, Bush arrived in the Oval Office and soon found Joshua Bolten coming in to brief him. Every morning, Bolten made it a habit to begin the day by thanking Bush for the privilege of serving.
“Even today,” he added on this morning.
“Especially today,” Bush retorted lightly.
The president gathered himself and headed to the East Room for a postelection news conference, marching alone down the hall along the red carpet with cameras recording each step. He made a point of being lighthearted. “Why all the glum faces?” he asked. But he acknowledged the defeat and promised to work with Democrats on issues like a minimum wage hike, energy, and immigration. “Look, this was a close election,” he said. “If you look at race by race, it was close. The cumulative effect, however, was not too close. It was a thumpin’.”
Thumpin’ or no, he refused to see it as a repudiation of his leadership, instead blaming congressional scandals, turnout efforts, and even the vagaries of ballot law. “I believe Iraq had a lot to do with the election,” he said, “but I believe there were other factors as well.”
Still, he tweaked his chief political strategist. Asked to update his reading contest with Rove, Bush said tartly, “I’m losing. I obviously was working harder in the campaign than he was.”
Rove, sitting off to the side, forced a smile and looked down at his lap.
The real news of that morning’s news conference, of course, was Bush’s decision to push out Rumsfeld in favor of Gates. The country was stunned at the bombshell. On Capitol Hill, Republican allies were spitting mad, convinced that waiting until after the election had cost them their majorities. When Bolten called Scott Palmer, the Speaker’s chief of staff, to give him a heads up, there was just angry silence on the other end of the phone. Bolten would have to drop off a presidential trip to Asia to stay home, absorb the heat, and calm the caucus. Out in the field, at least some generals and diplomats breathed relief. “We shed no tears in Kabul,” noted the ambassador, Ronald Neumann. In the White House complex itself, a day that had begun “in a complete depression” was suddenly transformed, and there was “rejoicing and celebration among White House staff,” as one National Security Council official recalled. “It was almost more important” than the election loss. “People were like, thank God, finally it is here, and why didn’t he do this earlier? It was seen as liberating at the White House.”
In the end, Rumsfeld was a contradiction; demanding yet not decisive, he ran roughshod over subordinates yet deferred to them on a failed strategy for too long. In his memoir years later, he rued not being more interventionist. Bush, though, was careful not to blame Rumsfeld. In his mind, Rumsfeld was only carrying out the direction he himself had set. After resisting pressure to get rid of Rumsfeld for years, Bush was determined to provide as graceful an exit as possible. “Don Rumsfeld has been a superb leader during a time of change,” the president said. “Yet he also appreciates the value of bringing in a fresh perspective during a critical period in this war.”
As Bush talked, he already knew what the audience did not, that he was thinking about sending more troops to Iraq rather than pulling them out as the newly elected Democrats (and even Republicans like Mitch McConnell) wanted him to do. The apostle of staying the course was laying the groundwork for a radical change of strategy. “Somehow it seeped in their conscious,” he said of voters, “that my attitude was just simply ‘stay the course.’ ‘Stay the course’ means, let’s get the job done, but it doesn’t mean staying stuck on a strategy or tactics that may not be working. So perhaps I need to do a better job of explaining that we’re constantly adjusting. And so there’s fresh perspective—so what the American people hear today is we’re constantly looking for fresh perspective.”
Even now, having announced the decision to oust Rumsfeld, Bush misled the public about how long it had been in the works. Reporters reminded him of his interview just a week earlier when the president said Rumsfeld would be around until the end.
“Did you know at that point you would be making a change on Secretary Rumsfeld?” a reporter asked.
“No, I did not,” Bush said. “And the reason I didn’t know is because I hadn’t visited with his replacement—potential replacement.”
“But you knew he would be leaving, just not who would replace him?” the reporter followed up.
“No, I didn’t know that at the time.”
While it was true that Bush had not yet met with Gates at the point he talked with the wire service reporters, he did in fact know he would be moving Rumsfeld out by that point; he had told Cheney just the day before. He did not disclose that to the reporters during either the preelection interview or the postelection news conference. Instead, he tried to parse the question by rationalizing that no decision could be made until he had his final conversation with Rumsfeld and offered the job to Gates.
Richard Keil, the reporter who had gone running with Bush on the morning of September 11, reminded the president that in the same interview he had also said Cheney would be around until the end of the administration.
“Does he still have your complete confidence?” Keil asked.
“Yes, he does,” Bush said. “The campaign is over. Yes, he does.”
“And he’ll be here for the remainder of your term?”
“Yes, he will.”
PART FIVE
29
“The elephants finally threw up on the table”
He had lost Congress, he was at risk of losing the war, and now President Bush was clenching his jaw so hard his teeth were hurting. The uncertainty of the path ahead was gnawing at him, and as he labored to maintain presidential demeanor amid the adversity, he kept grinding his teeth against each other to the point of pain. “I’m just thinking about what I’m going to do in Iraq, and I’m grinding my teeth,” he told Dan Bartlett.
Bush knew what many wanted him to do—bring troops home. The newly elected Democratic Congress, the liberal pundits, the generals, some of his father’s advisers, and even some Republican allies, all thought it was time to begin withdrawing. In those dark days following the elections, Bush felt as if he were barely holding it all together. “He really felt strongly that it was his sheer force of will that was holding the line between winning and losing the war,” recalled Karen Hughes, “that everybody else was ready to abandon it, and that only his force of will was keeping us there and that if he had backed off in any way that it could have ended very differently.”
One of the few backing him up was Vice President Cheney, who seemed impervious to outside pressure. But the relationship between president and vice president had grown strained. Bush had cut Cheney out of weeks of deliberations about what to do about Donald Rumsfeld, bringing him in only once the decision had been made. As Bush began reconsidering the transition-and-withdraw strategy implemented by Rumsfeld for three years, he had put Stephen Hadley in charge of reviewing their choices, propelled largely by the young aides Meghan O’Sullivan, Brett McGurk, and Peter Feaver.
With Rumsfeld on the way out, Cheney began to speak up. When Bush invited Cheney, Hadley, and Condoleezza Rice to come upstairs to the residence on November 9, a couple of days after the election, to talk about what to do next, the vice president urged them not to waver. He expressed concern that the election results would convince Iraqis that Americans had lost their will. Bush was on the same wavelength. Even from Baghdad, the change in tone was apparent. On the first videoconference after the election, George Casey, the general advocating a drawdown, was struck by the president’s attitude toward him. “He was noticeably colder,” Casey recalled.
Hadley gathered advisers in his office two days later to consider how to proceed. From the start, lines were forming. Rice, influenced by two advisers, Philip Zelikow and David Satterfield, argued they could not stop a civil war and should pull back, focusing on a more limited mission of striking al-Qaeda but otherwise letting Iraqi forces deal with sectarian violence and deploying Amer
ican troops only to stop widespread massacres like the one at Srebrenica during the Bosnian War in 1995.
“It should not take a large force to do that,” Rice said. “We find the lower power brokers and deter them, buy them off, cajole. The red line is no mass killings.”
Hadley, normally deferential to Rice, pushed back. “So we’ve gone from clear, hold, build to buy, deter, cajole?” he asked. “That’s moving the goal posts.”
O’Sullivan argued for an escalation of troops, and for the first time it sounded as if Hadley agreed.
Zelikow pointed out what a major gamble that would be.
“We’d be betting the whole house on it,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hadley agreed, “the house and the whole farm.”
“The house, the whole farm, and the ranch,” Rice added pointedly.
Hadley understood the risks, having just returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq. He was profoundly disturbed about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said many of the right things but “is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions,” or “his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action,” Hadley wrote in a classified memo to Bush. Even if they sent more troops, could they trust their erstwhile partner?
The new order on Capitol Hill would also be an obstacle, and Bush got a vivid taste of it on the evening of November 13. Hosting a reception for new members of Congress, the president sought out James Webb, the Democrat whose victory in Virginia had put his party over the top in the Senate. Bush had read about Webb’s emotionally powerful criticism of the Iraq War, born in part out of conversations with a son serving in the marines there. The president wanted to reach out to Webb and praise his son’s service. But Webb avoided Bush during the reception in the State Dining Room and refused to go through the receiving line to have his picture taken with the president.
