Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Like Rove, Bush considered the controversy over the prosecutor firings partisan posturing. Rove kept telling him it was nothing more than a witch hunt, and Bush was not about to cave in to Democrats. Bush’s loyalty to Gonzales mystified advisers, many of whom did not think the attorney general was up to the job even in better times. “That was the first time that I ever heard around the watercooler questioning the president’s decision on something,” one aide recalled, even more than the Harriet Miers nomination.

  What bewildered many in Bush’s circle was that Gonzales did not realize he should fall on his sword for the president. “I don’t understand for the life of me why Al Gonzales is still there,” a former top Bush aide groused at the time. Others thought it was time for Bush to recognize reality. “The president,” a senior administration official said, “thinks cutting and running on his friends shows weakness. Change shows weakness. Doing what everyone knows has to be done shows weakness.”

  Only now, after months of painful hearings and headlines, did Bush finally conclude that Gonzales had to go. Questions about the attorney general’s credibility on the NSA program struck at the heart of Bush’s presidency, namely national security, and risked making it more difficult to win legislation to authorize the eavesdropping. Joshua Bolten raised the issue with him one day.

  “We have a big agenda that the attorney general needs to carry for us,” he told Bush, “and Alberto can’t carry it anymore.”

  Bush was sad but did not resist. They both thought it was unfair to Gonzales. While he could have handled matters better, Bush thought, the Democrats had intentionally destroyed an honest man’s career with no real justification.

  Bush left it to Bolten to deliver the news. The chief of staff called Gonzales. He wanted to make clear in a gentle way that he had the president’s authority. “Alberto, this makes us all heartsick,” he said, “but the best thing you can do for the president right now is resign.”

  After all these years at Bush’s side, it was a hard blow for Gonzales. He insisted on hearing directly from Bush. “I want to talk to the president,” he said.

  Bolten thought it was a matter of dignity and agreed to set up a meeting. Other officials who heard about it, though, were astonished. When the president sent his top aide to tell a cabinet official to resign, he should simply resign. But Gonzales went to the president’s ranch outside Crawford on August 26. Advisers understood how difficult it would be for Bush. For all of his self-description as a decider, Bush hated firing people who had been loyal to him.

  In this case, Bush was forced to confront a good friend. As they talked, Gonzales recognized that he had no choice but to accept the decision. If he harbored any illusion that it was not really Bush who wanted him to go, or that he could appeal to his old friend, that vanished. Gonzales flew back to Washington to announce his departure, suggesting the decision was his. Administration officials quietly put out the cover story that it was Gonzales who offered to resign in a phone call to Bush and that the president was reluctant and suggested he come down for a consolation lunch.

  More bad news came on August 31, when Tony Snow announced that he too would resign. His cancer was too advanced to pretend that he would be able to return to the White House podium. Dana Perino stepped in, but a sense of grief pervaded the West Wing, both for the likable press secretary and for a presidency under siege on so many fronts.

  BUSH AND CHENEY met that day with the national security team to think about the way forward in Iraq. David Petraeus and his civilian partner, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, were due back in town soon to report to Congress, and while everyone was nervous about getting too far ahead of themselves, it looked as if they might have begun turning the situation around.

  After peaking at 126 in May, American military fatalities had fallen by a third, to 84, in August. Iraqi civilian deaths had fallen from 2,796 to 2,384 over that same period. In Baghdad, the center of the violence and the key to creating enough space for political reconciliation, civilian fatalities had fallen by nearly half, from 1,341 to 738. Something was beginning to change on the ground. At least they hoped so.

  Staring at the video screen on the wall, Bush and Cheney listened as Petraeus reviewed the situation and anticipated letting a marine expeditionary unit in Anbar go home in December without being replaced and sending the five army surge brigades in Baghdad home by July 2008. It was both an expression of confidence that they had turned a corner and a quiet recognition that the political environment back home required signs that the war was eventually going to end.

  Bush pressed Petraeus to ensure it was genuinely his recommendation, not a response to pressure from the Joint Chiefs or his commander, Fox Fallon.

  Petraeus assured him it was his own judgment.

  “The plan should be this,” Bush said. “Keep a boot on the neck and get us in place for the long term.” He was in no rush, he said, to bring the troops home if that would endanger the tentative progress on the ground.

  At this point, Fallon jumped in. He had been agitating to draw down forces in Iraq for weeks and offered the president a convoluted analogy about a fighter pilot taking more risk if an enemy had him in his sights. “That’s our situation in Iraq,” Fallon said. “The bogey on our tail is that the Iraqis still have not made any political progress. We need to force them, take on some more risk by drawing down our forces, force them to step up, take charge.”

  It was a repeat of the argument of Donald Rumsfeld, John Abizaid, and George Casey a year earlier. The question was whether enough had happened in the interim to justify returning to a transition strategy. Bush did not think so. “I’m not sure we’re ready to take on more risk in Iraq,” he said.

  While Bush was gentle in rebuffing Fallon, Cheney interjected more directly. “Fox, the whole world’s betting on our bugging out of Iraq,” he said. “You know it. Everyone’s watching, asking if we can sustain what’s working. Decisions we make now will reverberate for years. And I’m afraid what you present here, to any reasonable person, will be read as surrender.”

  Fallon was undaunted. “The point is sending a message not to the world but to the Iraqis,” he said. “Let them know that they need to step up. It’s now or never.”

  BUSH TOOK ADVANTAGE of the Labor Day holiday to make another secret trip to Iraq, this time leaving from the White House. Rather than be confined to the airport or even to Baghdad, he planned to fly to Anbar Province, once deemed lost to the enemy. It would be a daring display of progress for the audience back home and a chance for the president to see the results of the surge.

  First, he had to slip out of the world’s most heavily guarded building without detection. Bush found himself in an unmarked vehicle heading to Andrews Air Force Base and stuck in traffic on an often-clogged exit ramp in Washington. For operational security, they posed as a regular vehicle, and no roads were cleared ahead of time.

  Suddenly Bush’s aides saw a panhandler collecting coins in a McDonald’s cup making his way to each of the cars stuck at the traffic light. Bush was in the third one back. Any moment the man would reach them, peer into the window, and notice the president of the United States, blowing the secrecy of the trip.

  “Get down,” Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, told Bush.

  “What?” Bush asked.

  “Slide down in the seat,” Hagin instructed.

  Just then, a quick-thinking Secret Service agent in the car following the president’s reached into his wallet, pulled out a few dollar bills, and held them out the window. The panhandler skipped right past the president’s car to collect the donation.

  After a long flight, Bush landed in Iraq on Labor Day, touching down at Al Asad Air Base to meet with Petraeus, Crocker, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. A furnace wave of 110-degree heat washed over his face as he emerged from Air Force One dressed in a casual dark blue short-sleeve shirt and dark pants. It was an invigorating moment. “They felt the elation of the surprise visit,” Eric Draper, the White House
photographer, remembered.

  Bush met with sheikhs aligned with the Americans. Many of the sheikhs had been opposed to the new Iraqi government and worked in tandem with al-Qaeda but began switching sides before the surge in what was called the Awakening. The reinforcement of marines in Anbar Province had encouraged and accelerated a shift that was turning the region around. Bush was particularly taken with one young sheikh named Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a dashing, daring figure. “He’s sent from central casting,” Petraeus remembered. “Very courageous guy, a truly inspirational leader.”

  Abu Risha’s spirit was infectious. “My fighters will finish here and go to fight alongside you in Afghanistan,” he told Bush exuberantly.

  Bush was pumped up on his way home. Maybe this was going to work after all. Now he just had to convince Congress and the American public.

  Petraeus and Crocker returned to Washington soon afterward for their report to Congress. Not since Vietnam had there been such an anticipated appearance by a general on Capitol Hill. The liberal activist group MoveOn.org welcomed the general back to America with a full-page ad in the New York Times accusing him in advance of cooking the books and dubbing him “General Betray Us.” The inflammatory attack backfired by giving Republicans something to rage about and putting Democrats on the defensive.

  Bush watched some of the testimony on September 10 from the West Wing as Petraeus told Congress that American forces “have dealt significant blows” to the enemy in Iraq and outlined his plan to draw down the surge forces by July 2008 while warning of “devastating consequences” of a more rapid withdrawal. Enduring tough questioning from Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Petraeus and Crocker proved impressive, and it quickly became clear they had bought Bush more time.

  When he invited Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to the White House the next day, Bush seemed triumphal. “Of course, al-Qaeda needs new recruits,” he said, “because we’re killin’ ’em.” He smiled. “We’re killin’ ’em all!”

  Reid was appalled; Bush, he thought, viewed the war “as if it were some kind of sporting event or action movie.”

  That, of course, was not the tone he could take in the national address he planned following Petraeus’s testimony. By putting the general out first, Bush hoped that the timetable for withdrawing the surge brigades would be invested with Petraeus’s credibility; had Bush announced it himself, it would have been seen entirely through the lens of how people viewed Bush. But Cheney read the draft speech and concluded Bush had gone too far the other way, especially by mentioning the Baker-Hamilton report as his ultimate goal.

  “Mr. President, you can’t refer to Baker-Hamilton,” Cheney told him. “Our strategy is Petraeus-Crocker, not Baker-Hamilton.”

  Bush agreed to strike the reference. While Cheney was not the driving force behind the surge, he had become its most vocal guardian against backtracking.

  BUSH WAS PRACTICING the speech in the family theater on September 13 when word arrived that Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the young Sunni sheikh who had impressed him in Anbar Province just ten days earlier, had been killed by an explosion—the victim, it was said, of his own bodyguard’s betrayal. Bush was shaken. At this moment of progress, it was a cruel blow that one of the leaders of the turnaround had been taken down.

  Bush worried it was his fault. “Did my visit endanger him?” he asked national security aides. “Did we consider that?”

  Douglas Lute, the war coordinator, answered with resignation. “It’s just a tough neighborhood,” he said.

  That night, Bush sat down at his desk in the Oval Office for his address to the nation. He portrayed an Iraq where “ordinary life is beginning to return” at long last. “The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is ‘return on success,’ ” Bush said, adopting a new phrase coined by Ed Gillespie. “The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home.” He added, “Some say the gains we are making in Iraq come too late. They are mistaken. It is never too late to deal a blow to al-Qaeda. It is never too late to advance freedom. And it is never too late to support our troops in a fight they can win.”

  Two days later, September 15, Jack Keane showed up on the porch of Petraeus’s house at Fort Myer outside Washington. Petraeus was recovering from a weeklong blitz of congressional committees, White House and Pentagon meetings, and television interviews before heading back to Baghdad.

  “I’ve got a message for you from the president,” Keane told him.

  “Okay, all right,” Petraeus said.

  “I was over seeing the vice president,” Keane said, “and the president got word I was there and he came over to the office and he said, ‘You tell Petraeus, don’t let the chain of command filter out any requests. If he needs something, you just tell me. You get the word to me.’ ”

  33

  “Don’t screw with the president of the United States”

  No way, President Bush said. The Boston Red Sox could not hit against John Lackey.

  “What are you talking about?” replied a defiant Christopher Hill.

  It was early one morning in the fall of 2007, and the president was in the Oval Office trash-talking with Hill, his North Korea negotiator. Bush had invited Vice President Cheney and a handful of other officials to breakfast to hear Hill describe how the talks were progressing. But first he and Hill were engaged in a lighthearted debate about upcoming play-offs between Hill’s beloved Red Sox and Lackey’s Angels.

  Hill noticed Condoleezza Rice out of the corner of his eye staring at him with concern. Maybe “the hired help,” as Hill liked to put it, wasn’t supposed to argue with the commander in chief, even about baseball. But Bush liked his diplomat’s brash fearlessness. The president saw him as someone who cut through the interagency morass.

  That did not mean the president overlooked how much Cheney distrusted Hill or how the negotiator was playing his internal adversaries back in Washington to advance his cause, pushing right up against the limits of how far Bush was prepared to go to get a deal. One reason the president wanted to have the breakfast was to lay down his own priorities as they moved forward so that Cheney, Hill, and Rice would know directly what he wanted rather than arguing among themselves.

  Bush led his guests into the small dining room adjoining the Oval Office. He sat at the head of the table, with Cheney to his left and Rice to his right. Hill sat next to Rice, and Stephen Hadley next to Cheney, with Joshua Bolten at the opposite end of the table from the president. Robert Gates was traveling, so Eric Edelman, a former Cheney aide now serving as undersecretary of defense, represented him. As the navy steward worked his way around the table taking orders, most of the officials stuck with a simple fruit bowl. Cheney, on the other hand, ordered bacon and eggs. Hill was struck that the vice president would order something so different when everyone else was going light, especially since he had had four heart attacks.

  Hill had just brokered a deal in which Pyongyang would disable its nuclear facilities and provide a complete list of all its programs while the United States would remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the list of countries penalized under the Trading with the Enemy Act, as well as end the banking sanctions that had frozen its $25 million. After years of fitful negotiations and confrontations, resolution seemed possible. If Bush could salvage Iraq and rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons in his final stretch in office, it would go a long way toward shaping a more positive legacy. Cheney was not so optimistic. He saw it as one more ruse by the North Koreans, one made all the more cynical by the secret intelligence showing that Pyongyang had been helping the Syrians build a nuclear capacity, a discovery not acknowledged to the public. How could they make a deal, Cheney wondered, with a country that was double dealing like that?

  Bush understood that taking North Korea off the lists would mean little since other sanctions still applied. For years, states had been left on the terrorism and trading with the enemy lists not because they met specific criteria but simply because
they were seen as bad actors.

  “What we really need,” Bush said, “is an assholes list.” That would be more accurate.

  Edelman served as the most vocal skeptic in the room, pressing Hill about his strategy. “What are you going to do about the stuff they have already weaponized?” he asked.

  “You ought to be worried about the loose plutonium,” Hill shot back. “That is what could be used by a terrorist to blow us up.”

  Hill grew so agitated that Bush intervened. “Chris, calm down,” he said. The president made clear he wanted to get hold of all of North Korea’s weapons and fuel. “They have to give up their nuclear weapons,” he said. “That is the whole deal here. It is open kimono. He gets to have his Qaddafi moment now.”

  Through most of the discussion, Cheney remained silent, as he usually did. Bush finally turned to him. “Dick, would you like to ask something?”

  Cheney looked over at Rice and Hill. “Well, I’m not as enthusiastic as some people here,” he said, dismissing the whole venture with understatement.

  Hill was not sure whether Cheney was looking at him or Rice, but he took it upon himself to push back.

  “Mr. Vice President,” Hill said, “I want to make something very clear. I’m not enthusiastic about this. I’m simply trying to do my job and get home at night.”

  Bush interjected. “Oh, Dick didn’t mean anything like that,” the president said. “He’s just concerned about whether the North Koreans will ultimately deliver.”

  Rice picked up the ball and began explaining the strategy again. No one was overestimating how much they could trust the North Koreans, she said. But they did not have many alternatives.

  Cheney remained unconvinced. Had the North Koreans given up their missile program? he asked pointedly. He knew full well they had not and asked the question only to make the point.

  Hill started to jump in again, but Rice put her hand across his lap to restrain him and answered herself.