Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Bush headed to the Crawford ranch for the holiday satisfied with the victory and cautiously optimistic about his final year to come. Iraq was looking calmer, with just twenty-three American military fatalities in December, the second-lowest month since the invasion nearly five years earlier. North Korea might not make the end-of-the-year deadline for its declaration, but there was hope for progress. While Bush had gotten little of his agenda through the new Congress, he had used his veto to demonstrate he would not roll over.

  But the year would not end without more trouble. Two days after Christmas, Bush woke up to the news that the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in Pakistan. Bush and Cheney had spent much of the past months managing the volatile political situation with the critical American ally. Bush had been fond of President Pervez Musharraf but found the Pakistani leader an increasingly problematic friend. Musharraf had declared a national emergency, suspended the constitution, and fired the chief justice with whom he had been feuding, precipitating a fresh crisis. Only after months of pressure from Bush did he finally agree to step down as army chief of staff and govern as a civilian. Amid the unrest, Bhutto had returned from years of exile and was campaigning to return to power when a suicide bomber detonated explosives blowing them both up.

  Bush put on a suit and rode over to the Crawford Elementary School to address reporters. His face looked drawn and tired. “The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy,” he said.

  BUSH RETURNED TO Washington after the holiday to begin his final year in office greeted by more bad news, this time domestic. On January 2, 2008, he met with Henry Paulson, who told him that the economy had slowed significantly. For Bush, this chipped away at the one factor that had been a bedrock through international controversy. For fifty-two straight months, the American economy had added jobs, the longest uninterrupted period of job growth on record. But it was relatively weak job creation, and now a bursting housing bubble was beginning to ripple through the system.

  Warning signs had been growing for weeks, and Bush authorized Paulson to go to Capitol Hill and take the temperature for a stimulus package that would provide a jolt to the economy. After Paulson’s soundings in Congress, Bush on January 18 called for a $145 billion package. Cheney for once showed up to stand behind him during the announcement. With a surprising ease that revealed the degree of bipartisan economic anxiety, Democrats came to an agreement with Paulson and Bush within a week on a $152 billion package that ultimately would give $600 tax breaks to individuals or $1,200 per couple, plus $300 per-child credits and other tax relief for businesses. The package had come together in part because Bush pushed Paulson out in front while largely staying invisible himself.

  The economic troubles were already transforming the race to succeed Bush. Where Iraq had dominated the political debate for the past few years, the growing success of the surge had alleviated some of the public anxiety about the war, and the rapidly deteriorating economy had surpassed it on voters’ worry list. On the sidelines, Bush watched the vitriolic campaign unfold with a mixture of interest, disaffection, and relief. When Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife, was called a racist for comments he made the day of the South Carolina primary, Bush sympathized, having been there himself, and called his predecessor to commiserate.

  As it turned out, Bush had a little Clinton in him when he took the lectern in the House chamber a couple of days later, on January 28, to deliver the State of the Union address outlining the agenda for his last year. Gone were the grand dreams of remaking Social Security, immigration law, or the tax code. In their place were modest initiatives, like those Clinton used to propose, such as hiring preferences for military spouses. The confrontational foreign policy of old was replaced with talk of Middle East peacemaking and diplomacy with rogue nations.

  Bush had taken office with so much derision for his predecessor that critics defined his approach toward governing as ABC, or Anything But Clinton. He would not play “small ball” with incremental policies, he declared, nor would he coddle North Korea or waste time mediating between Israelis and Arabs. But as the end of his tenure neared, Bush appeared to be adopting some of his predecessor’s playbook. His ambitions consisted mainly in consolidating what he had achieved, such as pumping $30 billion more into his fight against AIDS in Africa, reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, and codifying policies that steered more federal funds to religious charities.

  Hoping to cement his legacy, Bush appealed to lawmakers to set aside the contest already raging for his job. “In this election year, let us show our fellow Americans that we recognize our responsibilities and are determined to meet them,” he said. “Let us show them that Republicans and Democrats can compete for votes and cooperate for results at the same time.”

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  “What is this, a cruel hoax?”

  His advice discarded on Syria, North Korea, the Middle East, secret prisons, and other issues, Vice President Cheney found a new way to express his disenchantment with the direction of the administration that winter. The issue was gun rights.

  The dispute concerned a case before the Supreme Court, District of Columbia v. Heller, which challenged the constitutionality of a long-standing handgun ban in the city of Washington, D.C. A lower court had ruled that the ban violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and for the first time the highest court planned to decide whether the amendment applied to individual Americans or simply to militias as some had long argued.

  Rather than weigh in on the side of gun owners, the Justice Department had decided to split the difference with a brief by Solicitor General Paul D. Clement arguing that the court should recognize the individual right but reject the categorical approach of the lower court and send the case back under “a more flexible standard of review” that would not invalidate a host of federal gun laws like the ban on machine guns. Joel Kaplan, the deputy chief of staff, heard of the Justice Department’s plan only the night before and was aggravated. He scrambled to see if it could be changed, engaging in a heated discussion with Clement. Finally, he and Joshua Bolten took the issue to Bush.

  “What do you want to do?” Bolten asked. “Do you want to let him file? If we try to step in at this point, there’s going to be a big dustup.”

  Bush decided not to intervene, letting the brief be filed.

  But Cheney was angry at the Justice Department’s equivocation. So when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison came to him with a friend-of-the-court brief that pro-gun lawmakers were planning to submit and suggested he sign in his capacity as president of the Senate, he was intrigued. He talked with David Addington, who assured him that he would be within his rights. A couple of days later, Cheney called Hutchison and signed on without telling anyone else in the White House.

  When Hutchison released the brief on February 8 with the names of 55 senators, 250 House members, and the vice president, the White House was caught off guard. Even though they too had been unhappy with the Justice Department brief, Bolten and Kaplan were were shocked to learn from news reports that Cheney had publicly taken a position at odds with the administration’s. Kaplan called Cheney’s adviser Neil Patel,

  “What the fuck are you guys doing?” he demanded.

  Patel had no idea, having just heard about it from a National Rifle Association lobbyist. Patel called Addington, who told him he deliberately left the staff in the dark.

  “I want to protect you so you can honestly say you knew nothing about it because the White House is going to be hot,” Addington said.

  The White House was indeed hot. “They were so angry it’s hard to say how angry they were,” said Patel.

  Bolten went to see Bush and asked for permission to chastise the vice president.

  “You can’t have more than one administration position,” Bolten said, “and the vice president can’t have a position different from the rest of the White House.”

  Bush was more am
used than angry and laughed a little. He gave Bolten permission to go see Cheney.

  Bolten walked down the hall to the vice president’s office and slipped in the door. He explained that the gun brief had crossed a line. But rather than confront Cheney directly, Bolten pinned blame on Addington.

  “It’s a process foul,” he said, “and if I may, I’m going to speak to your chief of staff about it.”

  “I didn’t know you weren’t aware,” Cheney said. “But I did it in my capacity as president of the Senate.” With a half smile, Cheney told Bolten he was free to talk with Addington.

  Bolten met with Addington to lay down the law.

  Addington, unruffled and clearly confident of Cheney’s support, reminded Bolten that he worked for the vice president, not the president’s chief of staff, and that his paycheck came from the Senate.

  “Understood,” Bolten replied, “but if we have another episode like this, I will make sure that all of your belongings and your mail are forwarded to your tiny office in the Senate and you won’t be welcome back inside the gates of the White House.”

  Addington got the point.

  The issue went away relatively quickly, and Bush never raised the matter with Cheney, perhaps uncomfortable with a direct confrontation or perhaps regretting his administration’s tepid position. Indeed, the same day the brief became public, Bush praised Cheney in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

  “He’s the best vice president in history,” Bush said, repeating a line he had used in the past, even though it seemed to slight his own father.

  Then, with a smile, he added, “Mother may have a different opinion. But don’t tell her I said this, but my opinion is the one that counts.”

  Either way, Cheney’s break with Bush on gun rights was seen in some quarters of the White House as a bold act of defiance and frustration by the best vice president in history. “Cheney’s view was that all these items—we were not doing these things due to sincerely held policy beliefs but because they were just playing better from a PR perspective,” said one White House official. “This was his just a little bit of an F-you to all that.”

  WITH ALL THE crises at home, Bush found a little respite abroad. On February 15, he boarded Air Force One for a final six-day, five-nation trip to Africa, where he had mounted an unprecedented campaign to fight AIDS, malaria, and poverty in some of the poorest corners of the world. The PEPFAR program he created had invested $15 billion in stemming AIDS on the continent, and Bush was trying to persuade Congress to double it. Another program he started called the Millennium Challenge Corporation had steered billions of dollars to nations that promised concrete progress toward reform. As counterintuitive as it might sound for a conservative Republican, Bush had arguably done more for Africa than any American president before him.

  As he made his way across the continent, Bush was showered with appreciation. In Benin, it was proclaimed George W. Bush Day. In Tanzania, tens of thousands thronged the streets to greet his motorcade, and dancing women wore skirts and blouses with his face emblazoned on them. In Ghana, a major road was christened the George Bush Motorway. At his last stop in Liberia, where Bush helped push out President Charles Taylor in 2003 and sent marines and money to help stabilize the country after a fourteen-year civil war, they sang about him on the radio, crooning his name and warbling, “Thank you for the peace process.”

  Even as Americans back home were considering electing the first black president, the current president had a devoted following in Africa. “Of course, people talk with excitement of Obama,” Jakaya Kikwete, the president of Tanzania, said with Bush at his side in the courtyard of his government headquarters in Dar es Salaam. But Kikwete added, “For us, the most important thing is, let him be as good a friend of Africa as President Bush has been.” Little wonder. In Tanzania, Bush had spent $817 million to provide medicine and other care to hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients. During his visit, the two leaders signed a $698 million, five-year Millennium Challenge contract to rebuild roads, expand electricity generation, and provide more clean water. Accompanied by Bob Geldof, the rocker-activist, Bush savored the interlude between crises and later called the trip “the best of the presidency.” Condoleezza Rice thought that may have been the happiest moment of Bush’s tenure. “He loved being in Africa,” she observed. “The last trip was very validating.”

  Bush was not as popular back home, even at the campaign headquarters of the Republican hoping to succeed him. John McCain had sewn up the nomination and was stopping by the White House for the ritual blessing from the incumbent. But that did not mean either man was looking forward to it.

  A misunderstanding sent the hates-to-wait president to the North Portico to receive McCain long minutes before the senator actually showed up on March 5. Bush kept his humor with the cameras on, even doing a playful tap dance for reporters, but aides afterward got an earful. When McCain finally arrived, the two went into the Rose Garden.

  “I hope that he will campaign for me as much as is keeping with his busy schedule,” McCain said.

  Bush was more forthright. “If my showing up and endorsing him helps, or if I’m against him and it helps him, either way, I want him to win,” Bush said.

  While McCain calculated how to distance himself from Bush, the president turned his attention to awkward personnel issues. Tim Goeglein, the White House liaison with the religious conservative community, resigned after he was discovered plagiarizing columns for a hometown newspaper. Bush was pained and summoned Goeglein to the Oval Office. “Tim, I have known mercy and grace in my own life,” Bush told him, “and I am offering it to you now. You are forgiven.” Bush was forgiving as well of Admiral Fox Fallon, the head of Central Command overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan, who seemed to suggest to Esquire magazine that he was single-handedly resisting a White House drive to war with Iran. But when Bush indicated he might let it pass, Cheney recalled his dismissal of General Michael Dugan during the Gulf War and urged the president to follow suit. “I’d fire him in a heartbeat,” Cheney told him. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, agreed and with Bush’s permission went to Fallon to tell him to step down.

  THE ECONOMIC CRISIS began to worsen dramatically the day after Fallon’s resignation. Bush was scheduled to fly to New York to give a speech at the Economic Club on Wall Street amid an accelerating collapse of the housing market and increasing cash flow problems among major investment firms. Bush was going over the text of the speech in the Oval Office on March 12 when Henry Paulson noticed that it ruled out bailouts of any investment banks.

  “Don’t say that,” Paulson cautioned.

  “We’re not going to do a bailout, are we?” Bush asked.

  He was not predicting one, Paulson said, but they did not want to box themselves in either.

  “Mr. President, the fact is, the whole system is so fragile we don’t know what we might have to do if a financial institution is about to go down.”

  The next day, Bush got a phone call from Paulson letting him know that they were on the verge of just that scenario. Bear Stearns, one of the venerable investment houses of Wall Street, was about to go under. Bear had been one of the most aggressive players investing in risky home loans and now was paying the price with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market.

  “This is the real thing,” Paulson told Bush. “We’re in danger of having a firm go down. We’re going to have to go into overdrive.”

  Bush was initially reluctant. A free-market approach had to allow for even large institutions to go out of business if they made bad decisions.

  But Paulson argued that Bear’s failure would have vast consequences for the whole system.

  On Friday morning, March 14, Paulson made clear that the government would have to intervene. “Mr. President,” he warned Bush, “you can take out that line in your speech about no bailouts.” By the time Air Force One landed in New York, Paulson and Ben Bernanke had orchestrated the takeover of Bear Stearns
by JPMorgan Chase, with the help of a $29 billion credit line from the Federal Reserve, effectively ending an eighty-five-year institution but averting a wider calamity.

  “It seems like I showed up in an interesting moment,” Bush said to laughter as he began his speech to the Economic Club of New York. He praised Paulson and Bernanke but also argued against a broader government action to turn around the housing market. “The temptation of Washington is to say that anything short of a massive government intervention in the housing market amounts to inaction,” he said. “I strongly disagree with that sentiment.”

  He compared government economic policy to driving on a rough patch. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect—because when you overcorrect, you end up in the ditch.”

  His critics were not persuaded. Before the end of the day, Democrats like Senator Charles Schumer of New York were already comparing the president to Herbert Hoover.

  “We’re going to get killed on this, aren’t we?” Bush asked Paulson.

  BUSH UNDERSTOOD THAT bailing out a Wall Street bank would not be popular, and a part of him was chagrined at that. Not Cheney. As the two of them progressed through their last year in office, their public standing had sunk so low that it had become almost like a badge of honor: what they were doing must be about principle, since it sure was not a political winner.