Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  The final draft of the speech had Bush call for a new national goal of stopping the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. But rather than outline specifically what needed to be done to achieve such a goal, the president would lay out broad parameters and describe “the right way” and “the wrong way” to proceed. “The wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy,” Bush said in the Rose Garden on April 16. “The right way is to set realistic goals for reducing emissions consistent with advances in technology, while increasing our energy security and ensuring our economy can continue to prosper and grow.”

  In the end, Cheney’s office had muddied the language enough that no one even realized the president had agreed to a cap-and-trade system. “Most people looked around and had no idea what he just said because it was a big muddle,” Patel said. “It was so embarrassing for the Bush folks that they just dropped it.” Connaughton was among those who wished the words “cap and trade” had been in the speech. “Looking back, maybe we were too cute by half,” he said. “But our intention was to create an opening for the conservatives to engage because that was the only way to get a bill through.”

  ON THE INTERNATIONAL front, Bush was also rushing to put in place what he could for his successor. He promoted David Petraeus to take over for Fox Fallon as head of Central Command and put Ray Odierno in charge in Iraq. After a furious debate, Bush agreed to go public about what the administration knew about the Syrian nuclear plant. Michael Hayden and other intelligence officials were “going fucking crazy” that they could not even tell Congress what they knew about North Korean involvement in proliferation even as Christopher Hill was closing in on a deal with Pyongyang.

  On the Middle East, Bush learned from Rice that the Israelis were willing to make a major breakthrough proposal. While in Jerusalem, Rice had dinner with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who outlined a far-reaching plan to finally bridge the differences with the Palestinians. He would give the Palestinians 94 percent of the disputed land as long as they swapped some other territory, and he would agree that Jerusalem would be divided into an Israeli capital in the west and a Palestinian capital in the east. Israel would provide security for the holy sites and would accept the return of some Palestinians, perhaps five thousand. Rice was so excited as she listened she had to force herself to concentrate. Maybe the Annapolis initiative she and Bush had started would yield results.

  “It sounds like he’s serious—really serious,” Bush said when she returned to Washington and briefed him in the Oval Office.

  “Yes, he is,” she said, “and he knows he’s running out of time.”

  So was Bush. He took a short break from the White House to fly back to Texas for his daughter Jenna’s wedding. The twin girls had outgrown their wild college days. Jenna had spent time in Latin America on a UNICEF internship, ultimately writing a book about an HIV-infected single mother she had met. Now she was marrying Henry Hager, a young former assistant to Karl Rove whom she had met during the reelection campaign.

  She opted against a fancy White House wedding and for a simpler outdoor ceremony on May 10 at the Crawford ranch, officiated by Kirbyjon Caldwell, the president’s minister friend who, as it turned out, was supporting Barack Obama to replace him. Cheney and the rest of the White House team were not invited. Rove, Hager’s former boss, was the only boldfaced name outside the family who was present. The president walked his daughter down the aisle to the sound of a mariachi band playing “Trumpet Voluntary” and teared up as the young couple exchanged vows. The early-to-bed president stayed up until 1:00 a.m.

  He returned to work shortly afterward and soon found himself on Air Force One to Israel, where he addressed the parliament, reassuring it of his enduring friendship for the Jewish state. He later flew to Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort, where he planned to give a strongly worded speech on May 19 reaffirming the vision of his second inaugural address and pressing President Hosni Mubarak to loosen the reins. The speech named Ayman Nour, the opposition leader who had been imprisoned by Mubarak. But on the plane to Egypt, Bush had it rewritten. Mubarak had decided to sit onstage with Bush during the address, presumably assuming the president would be reluctant to challenge him to his face. Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Ed Gillespie wanted to keep the reference to Nour, but Rice argued to take it out. It came out, and the speech touched more lightly on the problems with Egyptian autocracy.

  If Bush was wary of offending a longtime ally, he found increasingly that longtime allies were no longer wary of offending him. About a week after he returned to Washington, Bush’s former press secretary Scott McClellan published a book casting the presidency in a harsh light. He called the decision to go to war in Iraq “a fateful misstep” based on “ambition, certitude, and self-deceit” and a “divinely inspired passion” for a freedom agenda. The war would go down in history as “a serious strategic blunder,” and he said Bush’s White House had decided “to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

  McClellan was hardly the first to turn on Bush, but it pained him nonetheless. McClellan had been part of the group that came up from Texas, once the most loyal of loyalists. Now he joined a line of disaffected aides and supporters speaking out publicly, including Matthew Dowd, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, Lawrence Wilkerson, John DiIulio, David Kuo, Richard Haass, Kenneth Adelman, and Paul O’Neill.

  By this point, so many friends had turned on him that Bush could hardly muster the outrage his aides felt at what they saw as McClellan’s betrayal. When Dana Perino, who had been one of McClellan’s deputies before succeeding Tony Snow as press secretary, expressed her indignation, Bush sighed and told her to find a way to forgive McClellan or risk being consumed with anger. Karen Hughes was struck by his evolution; the Bush of 1994 might have been mad, but he had grown more forgiving over the years.

  Cheney’s reaction to the book was one of resignation; he had seen it so many times he was hardly surprised anymore. Sitting at a table waiting for the president to arrive for a meeting shortly after the book came out, Cheney listened as some of the aides expressed their shock.

  “The only reason I have the job I have now, or had the job before I have now,” he said, “is because I didn’t write a book about my last job.”

  IT WAS NO surprise that another prominent Republican also kept his distance. Having wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain made clear he wanted nothing to do with Bush, except to tap his fund-raising network.

  For what would be their only appearance of the campaign together, McCain invited Bush to a fund-raiser in his home state of Arizona on the day after Memorial Day. What was supposed to be a high-profile convention center event was abruptly switched at the last minute to a private residence closed to journalists.

  When advisers told him of the change, Bush snapped, “If he doesn’t want me to go, fine. I’ve got better things to do.” When an aide said McCain was having trouble generating a crowd, Bush was exasperated. “He can’t get five hundred people to show up for an event in his hometown?” Bush could not believe it. “He couldn’t get five hundred people? I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford.” He shook his head. “This is a five-spiral crash, boys.” After a few minutes, he returned to the topic. “What is this, a cruel hoax?”

  In the end, the only public view of the two men together came after the evening news when McCain saw Bush off on the airport tarmac. The presidential limousine pulled up to the foot of Air Force One, and Bush and McCain emerged from opposite sides, circled around to stand side by side, and waved at the assembled cameras for a total of fourteen seconds. Bush then pecked the senator’s wife, Cindy, on the cheek, shook McCain’s hand, and sprinted up the stairs, disappearing into the plane. It would be the last time the president and the man running to succeed him would see each other for four months.

  Obama, on the other hand,
seemed to be growing on Bush. The day after the Illinois senator became the first African American to clinch a major-party presidential nomination, Bush raised the subject with aides in the Oval Office.

  “What do you guys think about Obama?” he asked.

  “He’ll be formidable,” Ed Gillespie said evenly.

  Bush was struck by the history of the day.

  “I think it’s an amazing moment for America,” he said. “Just an amazing moment.”

  Bush seemed to detect discomfort in Gillespie. “Hey, Ed, don’t worry,” he said. “Now we’ll kick his ass.”

  ACTUALLY, IT WAS the Supreme Court that kicked Bush’s ass. On June 12, the justices once again inserted themselves into the war on terror to rein in the president, rejecting part of the compromise Bush had forged with McCain in the Military Commissions Act. In Boumediene v. Bush, the court ruled 5 to 4 that foreign prisoners at Guantánamo Bay had a habeas corpus right to challenge their detention, throwing out the provision stripping federal courts of the jurisdiction to hear such complaints. The Constitution stated that the right of habeas corpus “shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The court ruled it applied even to noncitizens held offshore. “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Bush’s appointees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, dissented. The White House was so mad it sent out strident talking points for the State Department to use in making a public response; traveling in Paris, Condoleezza Rice agreed with her spokesman, Sean McCormack, that the talking points all but accused the justices of having blood on their hands and she refused to use them or let the department use them.

  Bush received happier news when he turned on his television on June 27. North Korea had finally turned over the declaration of its nuclear programs, nearly six months late. It was a deeply flawed document, full of holes and questionable assertions. It did not disclose exactly how many nuclear bombs the country had, nor did it admit to having a secret uranium enrichment program in addition to its public plutonium fuel-making facility. But in Bush’s eyes, it was progress. In exchange, he announced that he would follow through on his promise to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror. “We’re just signing a piece of paper,” he said repeatedly. Cheney’s camp bristled. Eric Edelman, the Cheney aide now serving as undersecretary of defense, passed along a message to Robert Gates requesting not to be asked to testify before Congress on the deal because he would have to criticize it.

  On that Friday, North Korean officials demolished the cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear weapons plant. Christopher Hill had wanted to go in person, only to be overruled by Rice, who wanted to avoid alienating the Cheney wing by looking as if her side were taking a bow. A cooling tower is not the most important part of a nuclear program and can easily be rebuilt. But on televisions around the world the images of the conical tower disappearing in a puff of smoke served as a stark visual of change.

  “Now that’s verifiable,” Bush said with satisfaction as he watched.

  35

  “Our people are going to hate us for this”

  President Bush leaned forward in his chair in the Oval Office, his face alive with irritation. It was his final summer in power, and he found himself besieged by a group of erstwhile supporters accusing him of selling out the principles of his presidency in a vain pursuit of posterity.

  He was meeting with conservative scholars and thinkers who had been among his strongest intellectual advocates in the past. Now they were disillusioned and getting in his face about the turnaround they detected, in effect voicing the concerns that Vice President Cheney shared but did not directly confront Bush with, at least not in front of others.

  A lot of people think you’ve changed from your first term to your second term, said Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Bush interrupted.

  Undaunted, Boot continued with the bill of particulars: Iran, North Korea, Egypt, Middle East democracy. Bush, it seemed, was settling for less than he once demanded. Surely, the first-term Bush would not have gone along with the false concessions of a deceptive North Korea the way the second-term Bush had. Surely, the president who envisioned the end of tyranny in his inaugural address would not accept backsliding by Arab autocrats.

  Bush snapped back. “That’s not true,” he said, glaring straight at Boot. Bush seemed most angry at the implication that he was not as committed to his freedom agenda, which in his view had become the philosophical centerpiece of his presidency. “I’ve been fighting for this from day one,” he said. “It’s part of everything I do.”

  Boot remained unimpressed. He cited a column in that morning’s Wall Street Journal by John Bolton, Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations and a Cheney ally, lacerating the administration for agreeing to lift some sanctions on North Korea in exchange for the incomplete accounting of Pyongyang’s nuclear program. “Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse,” Bolton had written.

  Bush grew more agitated at the mention of his own former senior diplomat. “Let me just say from the outset that I don’t consider Bolton credible,” the president said bitterly. That was quite a statement. Bush, after all, had been the one who sent Bolton to the United Nations in the first place. He had defied the Senate when it refused to confirm Bolton and gave him a recess appointment. Now he was dismissing him as not credible, clearly resenting what he saw as betrayal. “I spent political capital for him,” Bush said, and look what he got in return. The president went on to defend his North Korea decision, saying his “action for action” approach held the most hope of getting rid of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons.

  Bolton had become something of a public spear-carrier in the private struggle between Bush and Cheney over foreign policy in the final year in office. A colorful figure with a distinctive bushy gray mustache, Bolton had been part of the recount team in Florida and was among the allies Cheney had sprinkled throughout the administration. Cheney urged Colin Powell to appoint Bolton undersecretary of state and later Condoleezza Rice to send him to the United Nations. At the United Nations, Bolton made a point of calling Cheney or his aides anytime he sensed backsliding in Rice’s State Department.

  Since leaving the administration, Bolton had become increasingly vocal in columns, speeches, and television appearances lambasting the president’s second-term shift, although he generally blamed Rice for leading Bush astray. His barrage of criticism, seen by some in the White House as tacitly encouraged by Cheney, aggravated the president and his aides. Christopher Hill, a frequent target of Bolton’s barbs, dismissed him as a fringe figure, calling him “Phyllis Schlafly with a mustache.”

  Bush did not view his policies as changing so much as moving to the next natural step in a continuum. He was acutely aware of the diminishing time left, calculating that it was worth making concessions he might not have made in the past in hopes of leaving his successor a better situation. North Korea was the classic example. “Do you really want to overturn the apple cart and confront the new administration with a crisis in North Korea policy in addition to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the long list of things?” Stephen Hadley recalled. “I was influenced, and I think the president was influenced, by the fact that probably not.” Cheney disagreed. Bush’s concessions to North Korea “seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded way I’d seen him make decisions in the past.”

  CHENEY COULD STILL assert himself on selected issues. More than anyone in the White House, he remained focused on the war on terror, and so while he would engage on other matters like climate change or Middle East peace from time to time, one friend said, “he was only going to fight to the extent that it didn’t cost him when he needed to really try to get the president to remain steadfast” on what he considered the central issues.

  On
e area where he called in chits was the warrantless surveillance program he had helped usher into existence after the September 11 attacks. Bush had decided to seek congressional authorization for the program, and lawmakers had already passed a short-term bill making clear it was legal. But as that measure approached expiration, the main sticking point remained immunity for the telecommunications firms that had cooperated with the government from the beginning.

  In Cheney’s view, it would be an act of treachery to expose companies that had done what their government asked to endless litigation. When some White House political advisers and lawyers at the Justice Department argued for backing off on immunity, Cheney fought even harder. “Cheney won that one, and he did it in a Cheney way,” said the friend. “He had different people making different arguments in different places.” On July 9, Congress passed the bill permanently authorizing the surveillance program and exempted the telecommunications firms from liability for past actions. Bush and Cheney actually won greater authority from Congress than they had claimed on their own. “On balance,” said Michael Hayden, the CIA director, the new law gave the government “far more” latitude, confirming to some in the White House that they would have been better off going to Congress in the first place.

  On another important decision in the terror war, Bush and Cheney agreed. For more than a year, officials had been developing a new strategy for the tribal areas of Pakistan where many Islamic militants were hiding. President Pervez Musharraf’s deal with tribal leaders had collapsed, and the CIA was detecting signs that al-Qaeda was training a fresh class of terrorists, this time with American passports. To many administration officials, it was clear that relying on the Pakistanis was no longer a tenable strategy, especially with Musharraf embattled at home. The past year had seen little progress. “We have been 0 for ’07,” complained Hayden, overstating slightly for effect. “We’re seeing a dangerous accumulation of breathing space for al-Qaeda,” warned Juan Carlos Zarate, the president’s deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism.