Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  He told aides they had to respect the Israeli decision and keep quiet about it. “Look, they view this as a matter of national security, and I’m not going to interfere with their national security, and if this is what he wants to do, everybody shut up,” Bush said.

  Cheney considered it a lost opportunity. “You can say I am wrong, you can argue with me, but I would have pursued a more robust course in the second term than we did,” he said after leaving office. “I would have taken out the Syrian reactor, partly because I thought that had multiple benefits—shut down a major source of proliferation and deliver a real shot across the bow of the Iranians. It would rock the North Koreans back on their haunches in terms of thinking they could peddle their nuclear technology and get away with it. It would mean that our red lines meant something. We threaten action if they proliferate—they proliferate, they get action. But we didn’t do it. We passed up the opportunity to really give meaning and substance and consequences to our diplomacy.”

  CHENEY FOUND HIMSELF embroiled in multiple disputes as summer progressed. In June, House Democrats accused him of acting above the law by refusing to comply with an executive order governing the handling of classified information. Cheney defied the order and the conventions of government on principle. But his explanation held him up for ridicule. The vice president did not need to comply with executive branch rules, David Addington argued, because as the presiding officer of the Senate, he was not strictly an executive branch official.

  He had a point. Until recent decades, in fact, the vice president was associated as much with the legislative branch as with the executive branch, working out of the Capitol rather than the White House. But in modern times, that seemed like a mind-boggling argument and triggered an avalanche of criticism from Democrats, mockery by late-night comics, and irritation among the president’s team. In their view, just as with the energy task force records, Cheney was stirring trouble unnecessarily. Why not simply comply with an obscure executive order that established a uniform system for safeguarding classified information?

  The order, first signed by Bill Clinton in 1995 and later updated and reissued by Bush in 2003, required that any “entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information” report annually how much it was keeping secret—not even what it kept secret, just the quantity. Cheney’s office filed reports in 2001 and 2002 but stopped filing in 2003. By 2004, the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration responded by ordering an inspection of Cheney’s office to see how sensitive material was handled, but his staff blocked the examination. The vice president’s team later proposed amending the executive order to abolish the Information Security Oversight Office altogether.

  Bush found such disputes baffling. With so much else going on, he was interested in one last chance to achieve a historic domestic initiative, not to poke at a hornet’s nest. He was in Rhode Island on June 28 giving a speech on Iraq at the Naval War College when Ted Kennedy called. His on-again, off-again partner asked Bush to press Harry Reid to keep trying on immigration reform. Bush was dumbfounded. If Reid would not listen to Kennedy, he surely would not listen to Bush. Within hours, immigration reform was dead as supporters failed to overcome a filibuster mounted by conservatives who opposed anything they thought smacked of amnesty for foreigners who broke the law to sneak into the country.

  Bush looked uncharacteristically dejected as he approached a lectern set up at the war college, fiddling with papers as he talked and avoiding the sort of winking eye contact he often made with reporters. Then he did something he almost never did: he admitted defeat.

  “A lot of us worked hard to see if we couldn’t find a common ground,” he said. “It didn’t work.”

  With that desultory appearance in a college hallway, Bush’s second-term domestic legislative agenda died. The Ownership Society he once envisioned had gone nowhere. Social Security, tax reform, and now immigration overhaul had all been thwarted. He had remained supremely confident even in the face of broad opposition; just seventeen days earlier, while in Bulgaria, he had brushed off pessimism about immigration, saying, “I’ll see you at the bill signing.” Now there would be no bill signing.

  This one was especially painful. “The president believed as strongly in that issue as any issue in his time in the White House,” Michael Gerson said. White House aides blamed Reid, believing he just wanted to deprive Bush of a bipartisan victory. In any case, Bush and Karl Rove later regretted putting Social Security first in the second term, concluding they should have led off with immigration, where there was at least a possibility of consensus. Now his agenda on Capitol Hill would be defensive, blocking measures he opposed, like stem-cell research, another version of which he just vetoed.

  BUSH WAS IN Kennebunkport hosting Vladimir Putin on July 2, when he received word of another thorny challenge. A three-judge appeals court in Washington had ruled that Scooter Libby had to begin his thirty-month sentence immediately. For Bush, there was no more delaying the hard decision. Either he intervened on behalf of a convicted perjurer, or he let one of the early architects of his administration turn in his coat and tie for a prison jumpsuit. He knew Cheney considered it an illegitimate prosecution by an out-of-control prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. “He thought that guy is a zealot,” said Alan Simpson, Cheney’s friend. But Fred Fielding, the former 9/11 commissioner who had replaced Harriet Miers as White House counsel, did not see it that way and was loath for the president to substitute his judgment for that of a jury that had heard all the evidence.

  Bush kept his deliberations exceedingly private, consulting only a handful of advisers like Fielding, Joshua Bolten, and Dan Bartlett. Friends who called the White House to lobby on Libby’s behalf were told to stay out of it. Justice Department lawyers who normally reviewed clemency requests were not involved. Nor was Fitzgerald, even though it was typical for the prosecutor to be asked for an opinion. Around the White House, the topic was discussed largely in whispers. As Bush returned to Washington aboard Air Force One, he split the difference: he commuted Libby’s prison term without issuing a full pardon voiding the conviction. Two and a half years in prison seemed extreme, but he was not willing to go as far as Cheney wanted him to. “I respect the jury’s verdict,” Bush said in a written statement crafted with Fielding. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.” Libby would still have to pay the $250,000 fine and surrender his law license. Bush was careful not to antagonize Fitzgerald; while acknowledging that critics questioned the legitimacy of the prosecution, Bush called Fitzgerald “a highly qualified, professional prosecutor who carried out his responsibilities as charged.”

  As a political matter, Bush’s decision was the worst of both worlds. Democrats excoriated him for protecting a political crony from justice, while Cheney and his allies grew bitter that he did not overturn the conviction altogether. Moreover, Bush only postponed a final reckoning; as long as he remained in office, he would be under pressure from Cheney to go the next step and grant a complete pardon.

  AT HOME, THE political ground on Iraq was crumbling. Bush had figured he needed to beat back any congressional efforts to pull out troops until September, when Petraeus would return to report on the results of the surge. But now it looked as if he might not even survive July without a complete collapse in political support. Senator Richard Lugar, one of the leading Republican foreign policy voices, broke with Bush over Iraq. Representative Roy Blunt, the number-two Republican in the House, told Bush, “You have no credibility on communicating about Iraq.” And Senator John Warner came to the White House to tell Stephen Hadley he did not think he could hold the line until September—and was unsure even of his own vote if Congress decided to step in. Hadley pleaded for sixty days but got no assurances.

  On July 7, Hadley convened a conference call with other White House aides. If Republicans abandoned the war, it was all over. Relating the Warner conversation, Hadley
suggested they begin talking about a partial pullout by the end of the year.

  “The surge can’t last forever—we all know that—so if it would help in the Congress, maybe we can discuss goals for withdrawing some troops,” Hadley said.

  Karl Rove pushed back hard. “No, no, no,” he said. “If we show weakness or let the president talk withdrawal, then we’re on a slippery slide. It’ll be seen as panicking to the Pelosi-Reid crowd and too enticing to Republicans. No way.”

  Ed Gillespie, who had replaced Dan Bartlett as presidential counselor, and Candida Wolff, the chief White House legislative liaison, concurred. Hadley backed off.

  The next day, Hadley called Cheney aboard Air Force Two as he flew back to Washington from a Wyoming break to tell him about the conversation. It did not escape Cheney’s notice that he had not been included in the discussion, and he concluded that even if he had been in town, they might have excluded him since they knew he would disapprove of anything resembling a concession.

  Once again, Cheney picked up the newspaper the next day, July 9, to find more evidence of waffling, this one a New York Times article reporting that the White House was preparing a narrower mission with a staged pullback if it could not hold political support through September. Cheney noticed at a meeting later that day that no one questioned the validity of the story, only who leaked it. Cheney told them they were panicking and misreading Congress. Afterward, he called Senator Trent Lott, his old friend, and asked him to privately conduct his own vote count.

  Concerned that Bush or his people were going soft, Cheney did something the next day that he rarely did. At the weekly Senate Republican lunch, he stood up to press the caucus to stand by the president and the troop buildup. That night, several Republican senators joined him at the vice president’s residence for dinner. Lott was there and reported that he thought they had enough votes to make it until September. Mitch McConnell, now the Senate Republican leader, came over as the dinner was breaking up to make the same point. That did not stop the House from voting two days later to pull most troops out by April 2008, but as long as Senate Republicans held firm, they could block a withdrawal.

  Hadley and others thought Cheney misunderstood their concerns. “He thought we were going wobbly, which is completely nuts,” Hadley said later. “What we were really trying to do was to use the surge to see if we had a chance of getting a bipartisan consensus on the Hill in support of our surge policy.” Another official thought Cheney’s interpretation of what was happening showed “that he really wasn’t in the loop because nobody on that call was thinking of short-circuiting the surge or changing policy. It was really about what’s our narrative that could help hold this Congress.”

  AMID ALL THIS, David Petraeus made a surprising proposal: he wanted to go to Syria to confront President Bashar al-Assad about the foreign militants crossing the border into Iraq to fight Americans. Intelligence agencies believed Syria was the main pipeline for Arab radicals, with as many as 80 percent flying into Damascus and then driving into Iraq. What, if anything, to do about that had been a sore point for months. At one meeting, Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser, literally pounded the table insisting on action such as bombing the Damascus airport and cratering its runways someday at three o’clock in the morning to stop the flow. But others resisted, unwilling to widen the war by bringing in another Muslim country.

  Petraeus reported that Assad through intermediaries in the Iraqi government had invited him to visit. He thought it might be an opportunity to tell Assad there would be consequences if he did not shut off the flow of fighters. “I wanted to respectfully confront him on Syria being a transit location for al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Petraeus said later. The message would be one of self-interest for Assad: “You’re basically allowing poisonous snakes to have a nest in your country with the understanding they only bite the neighbors’ kids and sooner or later that backfires and they end up biting your kids and then they do worse.” Bush made clear he did not want Petraeus to go, but the general kept raising it. Finally, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, privately told him to stop asking. “Forget it,” he said. “It’s not going to happen in your lifetime in uniform, so there’s no reason to bring it up again.”

  What Petraeus did not know at first was that Israel had already told Bush that it planned to bomb Syria to destroy its fledgling nuclear reactor. Having Petraeus in full military uniform chatting with Assad in the days or weeks before then could send mixed signals. On September 6, Israeli warplanes swooped into Syrian airspace and destroyed the nuclear plant under cover of night. Israel kept quiet about the operation, calculating that Syria would rather absorb the blow in silence than suffer the humiliation of publicly admitting that the Jewish state had successfully raided its territory. The Americans had assumed there would be an uproar in the Arab community. But it turned out the Israelis knew their neighborhood better. Syria kept quiet.

  ON JULY 21, Cheney once again took over as acting president while Bush underwent a colonoscopy. Just as he had in 2002, Bush signed letters temporarily transferring power to the vice president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The letters were faxed to Capitol Hill at 7:16 a.m., and Fred Fielding called to inform David Addington, who in turn called Cheney at his weekend home in St. Michaels, Maryland, to let him know he was now in charge. A five-doctor team at Camp David led by Colonel Richard Tubb, the White House physician, removed five polyps from Bush during the procedure. The White House then faxed fresh letters from Bush at 9:21 a.m. reclaiming his powers.

  Conservatives playfully imagined all that Cheney could do during his 125-minute presidency—National Review collected ideas online, like bomb Iran and pardon Scooter Libby—but the acting president spent his brief administration writing a letter to his grandchildren as a keepsake.

  Dear Kate, Elizabeth, Grace, Philip, Richard and Sam,

  As I write this, our nation is engaged in a war with terrorists of global reach. My principal focus as Vice President has been to help protect the American people and our way of life. The vigilance, diligence and unwavering commitment of those who protect our Nation has kept us safe from terrorist attacks of the kind we faced on September 11, 2001. We owe a special debt of gratitude to the members of our armed forces, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies and others who serve and sacrifice to keep us safe and free.

  As you grow, you will come to understand the sacrifices that each generation makes to preserve freedom and democracy for future generations, and you will assume the important responsibilities of citizens in our society. I ask of you as my grandchildren what I asked of my daughters, that you always strive in your lives to do what is right.

  May God bless and protect you,

  Richard B. Cheney,

  Acting President of the United States

  (Grandpa Cheney)

  A real Cheney presidency would certainly be different. The troubles in Iraq had clearly limited Bush’s ability or willingness to use force elsewhere, or even to threaten it as a tool of coercive diplomacy, and Cheney bristled at what he saw as creeping passivity. When Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates visited Saudi Arabia on July 31, one of Cheney’s contacts in the traveling party called him in alarm to tell him the defense secretary had forsworn the use of force against Iran. Gates and Rice had joined King Abdullah in Jeddah, sitting around a modest coffee table with bowls of candy. Abdullah was pressing to better understand Bush’s strategy on Iran. But Gates shut down talk of a military strike. “The American people won’t stand for it,” he said. Abdullah started to respond when Gates added, “In fact, he will be impeached.” Abdullah was furious, and even Rice was flabbergasted. By the time word got back to Cheney, he was both. He sent a message to the Saudis that the defense secretary was freelancing. But as long as Bush resisted any serious discussion of military options against Iran, Cheney’s position did not matter much.

  Gates was clearly not in sync with the vice president on many of the divisive issues of the latter part of
the administration, whether it be Iran, Syria, Guantánamo, or other matters. “In terms of thinking about these kinds of problems, he was a lot closer to Condi than he was me,” Cheney said later. With the ascendance of the two secretaries as well as Stephen Hadley and Douglas Lute, it was, in the words of Douglas Ollivant, an NSC official, the “revolt of the radical pragmatists.”

  In those steamy summer days, the changes in the White House seemed to be coming in rapid succession. In early August, Karl Rove told Bush he would be leaving. The last election was behind him, as was the CIA leak case. He kept in his desk drawer a picture of Scooter Libby clipped from the newspaper the day he was convicted, a reminder of the damage done—and of what Rove himself had avoided. His name was thrown around a lot in the U.S. attorney scandal because he had passed along complaints about some U.S. attorneys who got fired and helped install one of his protégés in one of the prosecutor slots. But that did not concern him much. He saw that as just more partisan noise, and after everything he had been through, he had pretty effective earplugs.

  For Rove, it was time to move on. After so much time away, his marriage was in trouble, and he was ready to establish his independence financially and professionally. He wanted to be more than “the Bush guy,” as he put it.

  Still, he felt guilty. “I feel like I’m deserting you in a time of war,” he told Bush.

  ALBERTO GONZALES, ON the other hand, refused to leave. Gonzales’s tenure as attorney general had become so tumultuous that it was distracting the administration—not just the furor over the U.S. attorneys, but his handling of disputes over the National Security Agency eavesdropping program. Recent congressional testimony by Gonzales on the surveillance program had been so unsteady, so marked by memory lapses and contradictions, that even some inside the White House worried he faced possible perjury prosecution. When White House lawyers asked, David Addington refused to confirm that Gonzales had testified accurately about events surrounding the NSA program.