Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  As the national security team gathered one July day in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the residence, there was a powerful if largely unstated recognition that this might be the last chance to shape terrorism policy before Bush and Cheney left office—and perhaps their last chance to get Osama bin Laden. The plan called for a much more muscular decapitation campaign aimed at killing key al-Qaeda leaders using unmanned drones armed with missiles. Instead of waiting for Pakistani permission, the CIA would strike unilaterally, assuming it had gathered enough indications that there was a high-value target on the ground and that civilian casualties could be kept to a minimum. It would inform Pakistan either as the strike took place or afterward. Special Forces in Afghanistan would also be authorized to conduct raids across the border.

  What would make the campaign more effective, Bush was told, was the development of much more intense surveillance of potential targets. Instead of relying simply on fragmentary information from informants or short-lived satellite passes, the CIA was now able to station drones hovering over a target undetected for days or even weeks at a time, gathering a complete picture of a suspected hideout and its occupants. The analysis of what CIA officials called “pattern of life,” combined with what Hayden would call “a Home Depot–sized warehouse full of detainee information” gleaned from interrogations, gave agency leaders and commanders a better understanding of the enemy than they had had since September 11. “You need human penetrations, you need signals intelligence, but finally that persistent, godlike stare, unblinking, builds up a level of confidence,” Hayden said, referring to drone operations in general.

  With so many drones occupied in Iraq, the al-Qaeda hunters until then had been having trouble getting enough to roam the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan. The strategy was not without risk; hit the wrong house, kill too many civilians, and Pakistan could erupt in an anti-American frenzy. As aggressive as he had been elsewhere, Bush had always taken a measured approach to Pakistan, and had resisted concerted pressure from the military to send troops over the border from Afghanistan for fear of destabilizing the Islamabad government. But with half a year left, Bush was willing to gamble. “We’re going to stop playing the game,” he told advisers. “These sons of bitches are killing Americans. I’ve had enough.”

  IN A NONDESCRIPT suburban office tower across the Potomac River in Virginia where John McCain based his campaign, the putative Republican nominee and his team were trying to figure out how to disinvite the president and the vice president of the United States from their own party’s convention.

  Bush was arguably the most unpopular president in modern times. His 69 percent disapproval rating in April was the highest of any president since Gallup began polling, surpassing Harry Truman at his worst at 67 percent and Richard Nixon at his worst at 66 percent. By July, as McCain was gearing up for his general election run, just 28 percent supported the president, and 81 percent said the country was on the wrong track. The “Bush Lied, People Died” mantra had been set in concrete for many. For some, normal political opposition had even evolved into deep loathing. By this point, two authors had written fictional books contemplating Bush’s assassination, and a filmmaker had made a docudrama about the same scenario. Bush was regularly called a Nazi and depicted on protest signs with a Hitler-like mustache. Beyond the fringe, mainstream pundits debated whether he would go down as the worst president in history.

  Democrats asserted that electing John McCain would amount to a “third Bush term,” an ironic notion given that the senator had spent much of the previous decade at odds with the president. A USA Today/Gallup poll that summer found that 68 percent of Americans were concerned that McCain would pursue policies too similar to those of Bush. “He became an albatross,” recalled Senator Joseph Lieberman, the independent Democrat who was supporting McCain.

  So McCain and his team brainstormed how to do the unthinkable and keep the sitting president away from the convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. “It wasn’t fair,” said Charles Black, a McCain strategist, “but the president was unpopular.” Eventually, Black was deputized to suggest to the White House that Bush skip the convention in September and leave the country altogether. Perhaps he could go to Africa and beam in a televised message from there highlighting his work against AIDS and malaria, one of the indisputably positive aspects of his legacy.

  The idea did not go over well at the White House, where Bush aides grew angry at the affront and thought it was a mistake for McCain to go too far distancing himself from a president who retained the support of a conservative base that distrusted McCain. The McCain staff was already riven between longtime loyalists to the senator and those brought in from the Bush years. “It was so ingrained in the McCain world to hate Bush, and Bush people,” said Nicolle Wallace, the former Bush White House communications director who had gone to work for McCain. “I remember being sick at the thought of nickel-and-diming the president of the United States. He was going to be more beloved in the hall than we were. It was awful.”

  And if Bush was not welcome in McCain’s world, Cheney was even less so. The vice president and the senator had clashed most recently over interrogation policy, and feelings were still raw. When McCain kicked off his presidential campaign a year earlier, he had said that Bush “listened too much to the vice president,” whom he blamed for the “witch’s brew” of a “terribly mishandled war.” In hopes of keeping Cheney off the stage at the convention, Black was sent on a separate but parallel mission to ask the vice president whether he would be willing to stay away. “His attitude was, look, I want to help, I’m not sure you’re right about this, but I’ll think about it because I want to help you win,” Black recalled. But in the end, Cheney decided to go to the convention.

  While McCain barnstormed the country promising a new start, Bush stewed in the White House, railing about the campaign’s undisciplined approach. Through much of 2008, the two men whose relationship had been so fraught for the past decade kept getting crosswise, intentionally or not. Bush was miffed when he hosted the leaders of Mexico and Canada for a summit meeting in New Orleans to show off its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, only to have McCain show up in the Lower Ninth Ward two days later denouncing the administration’s response to the storm as “disgraceful.” When the two both showed up in Iowa to inspect flood damage, they were just thirty miles apart but effectively undercut each other’s effort to show concern. And the McCain camp was aggravated that Bush endorsed lifting restrictions on offshore drilling a day after the candidate did, fueling the “third Bush term” attack line.

  Bush understood the treacherous terrain facing McCain and regularly told associates that if he were running as a Republican, he would keep his distance as well. “Republicans will be saying, ‘Bush screwed it up,’ ” he told visitors one day. “If I were running, I guess I would say the same thing. You cannot, I don’t care who you are, embrace George W. Bush.” But understanding the approach intellectually did not mean he had to like it, and at times Bush thought McCain was taking it too far.

  Cheney was just as aggravated at being muzzled. “Personally, I felt that a straightforward defense by the president and me would be better than no rebuttal at all from the White House,” he later wrote, “but it was John’s campaign and he deserved to run it the way he wanted.”

  While nursing his frustration, Bush received bad news. On July 12, he learned that Tony Snow had lost his battle with cancer. Five days later, Bush paid tribute to Snow at a Catholic service at Washington’s National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, packed with more than a thousand mourners. “He had the sometimes challenging distinction of working for two presidents named Bush,” the president said from the pulpit. “As a speechwriter in my dad’s administration, Tony tried to translate the president’s policies into English. As a spokesman in my administration, Tony tried to translate my English—into English.”

  Bush could have used Snow as he tried to cement his achievements and forestall a new crisis. With
Iraq calmer, he was trying to negotiate a strategic agreement with Baghdad that would be the framework for American troops remaining after a UN mandate expired at the end of the year. In Baghdad, though, the pact was seen as an occupation agreement.

  In a videoconference, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pushed for a withdrawal date. “Mr. President, it is in this garden of success that we can discuss a timetable,” Maliki told him. “In the past, to mention a timetable was provocative because it meant enemies could wait and destroy Iraq. But now the enemies cannot defeat the state, so we should not be so sensitive to discussing a timetable.”

  Bush broke with five years of his own policy. “I agree with you,” he said. “And if it’s all right with you, I’ll put out a statement after this meeting to say I agree with you. Is that all right?”

  Maliki said yes. Just like that, Bush was working to seal an agreement that would effectively end the Iraq War. Just a year after it looked as if all were lost, now it seemed possible to negotiate an exit that, if not a clean victory, at least would not look like a retreat under fire.

  It had been a long journey. Bush was not one given to reflection, at least not out loud. Yet one day after a meeting, he seemed in a rare introspective mood. Sitting in the Situation Room while waiting for another meeting to begin, the president looked at Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, who had succeeded Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and harked back to the critical days in 2003 before he launched the war that had become so problematic. “You know,” he recalled, “when I made the decision on Iraq, I went around the room to everybody at that table, every principal. ‘You in? Any doubts?’ Nothing from anybody.” For Bush, it was a rare moment of doubt. Was he ruing his own flawed judgment? Bitter that he had been led off track by advisers? Or both? He didn’t say.

  In the days to come, Bush signed two pieces of important legislation. One expanded his PEPFAR program another five years, allocating $48 billion to fighting AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, an extraordinary sum of money to be dedicated to the world’s poorest continent. The other made tax dollars available to backstop the two government-chartered housing corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bush had fought to reform the two entities repeatedly over the years, only to run into a buzz saw of opposition in Congress. “It was literally like William Wallace fighting the British,” said Tony Fratto, a deputy press secretary who specialized in economic issues. “It was a slaughter.” Now with a housing crisis in full flame, the question was whether it was too late.

  A week later, John McCain began airing a new ad with a theme typically used by the party out of power. “We’re worse off than we were four years ago,” the ad said.

  ON AUGUST 8, Bush was standing in a reception line in Beijing about to shake hands with President Hu Jintao marking the opening of the Summer Olympics when his deputy national security adviser, James Jeffrey, sidled up and whispered in his ear. Russian troops were marching into neighboring Georgia after the smaller country shelled a breakaway republic aligned with Moscow. Years of tension had finally exploded into full-fledged war. Caught in the middle was Bush, who had labored so long to keep a constructive relationship with Vladimir Putin but who had also taken great satisfaction out of the democratic revolution that had vaulted Mikheil Saakashvili to power in Georgia.

  As he absorbed the news, Bush noticed that just a few places ahead of him in the receiving line was none other than Putin. Although Putin in technical conformance with constitutional term limits had turned the presidency over to his protégé Dmitry Medvedev and assumed the prime ministership, there was little doubt that he was still the country’s paramount leader.

  Bush chose not to say anything to Putin right then, reasoning that the ceremony presented the wrong venue for a confrontation over war. Besides, protocol demanded that he deal with Medvedev as a fellow head of state. So he waited until he returned to his hotel to call Moscow. He found Medvedev “hot,” but “so was I.”

  “My strong advice is to start deescalating this thing now,” Bush lectured him. “The disproportionality of your actions is going to turn the world against you. We’re going to be with them.”

  Medvedev pushed back, comparing Saakashvili to Saddam Hussein and accusing the Georgians of killing fifteen hundred civilians in shelling the pro-Russian separatist republic of South Ossetia. (Later reports indicated only a fraction of that many were actually killed.)

  “I hope you’re not saying you’re going to kill fifteen hundred people in response,” Bush said. “You’ve made your point loud and clear. I hope you consider what I’ve asked very seriously.”

  But Bush was dealing with the wrong man. While critics at home casually assumed Cheney was really pulling the strings in the White House, in Russia it was true that the number-two official was the real power. As the opening ceremony for the Olympics commenced, Bush found himself seated in the same row with Putin, so he had Laura and the king of Cambodia shift down a few seats so that the Russian prime minister could sit next to him. Aware of the television cameras focused on them, Bush tried to avoid causing a scene but told Putin that he had made a serious mistake that would leave Russia isolated if it did not get out of Georgia. Putin countered that Saakashvili was a war criminal who had provoked Russia.

  “I’ve been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded,” Bush told Putin.

  “I’m hot-blooded, too,” Putin countered.

  “No, Vladimir,” Bush responded. “You’re cold-blooded.”

  The sudden war in the Caucasus presented a dangerous test for the president. He and his aides worried that Georgia was just the first stone to fall; if Moscow were allowed to roll over a weak neighbor, then it could next try to seize the Crimea region in Ukraine or even make a move in the Baltics, where it ruled until the fall of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the last thing Bush wanted to do was turn a volatile situation into a Russian-American confrontation and spark a new cold war.

  Meetings at the White House were unusually emotional. Saakashvili had cultivated supporters in the administration, particularly in Cheney’s camp. When a junior aide suggested that the United States had to step in, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, interrupted.

  “Look, I’m already in a war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. He did not want another, especially with Russia.

  Mullen was virtually the only American able to reach his counterpart in Moscow. Most Russian officials were ignoring their phones, but Mullen had perhaps seven or eight conversations with General Nikolai Makarov, the Russian chief of staff, over the course of a few days, trying to keep the Russians from marching all the way to the Georgian capital. To avoid framing it as a Russian-American clash, Bush turned to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who held the rotating presidency of the European Union, and asked him to take the lead in negotiating a cease-fire. In the meantime, some in the White House kept looking for possible responses, even military ones. Among the options was bombing the Roki Tunnel to block any further Russian advance into Georgia. Cheney had received a call from a frantic Saakashvili requesting military equipment such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

  The question came up at a meeting after Bush returned from Beijing. Cheney noted the Stinger request from Saakashvili.

  “I need to give him an answer,” the vice president said.

  Condoleezza Rice thought there was “a fair amount of chest beating” and “all kind of loose talk” about a muscular response.

  Finally, Stephen Hadley cut to the chase. “Mr. President, I think you need to poll your national security advisers as to whether they recommend to you putting American troops on the ground in Georgia,” he said.

  Bush looked at Hadley as if he were crazy.

  “I think it is important for the historical record to be clear as to whether any of your principals are recommending to you the use of military force,” Hadley said.

  At that point, Bush got it. Hadley was protecting him, calling the bluff of Cheney and the other hawks. Wer
e they really ready to go to war with Russia over Georgia?

  Hadley wanted the principals to give their positions explicitly so they could not later write in their memoirs that they had disagreed with the president.

  Picking up on that, Bush posed the question. “Does anyone recommend the use of military force?” he asked.

  No one did. “It is a very serious matter, but, Mr. President, I think that would be a mistake,” Cheney said.

  The next day, August 12, Sarkozy reached a cease-fire agreement with both sides, but he had been snookered. The Russians had insisted on a fifteen-kilometer “exclusion zone” for their troops, but the French did not realize that was enough to encompass the Georgian city of Gori. The Russians took advantage and moved in even after the cease-fire. They were on the doorstep of Tbilisi, with regime change as their goal.

  “I want to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Putin told Sarkozy.

  “Hang him?” Sarkozy asked.

  “Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

  “But do you want to end up like Bush?”

  “Ah,” Putin replied, “there you have a point.”

  Bush decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines. He sent Rice to mediate and authorized humanitarian aid sent on military cargo planes to make a point. With American military planes on the runway at Tbilisi, he calculated, the Russians would be foolish to attack the Georgian capital.

  Rice flew to Paris and confronted the French. “Did you look at a map?” she asked.

  No, they had not.

  Only after consulting their ambassador did they realize she was right and that Gori was within the “exclusion zone.”

  Rice then flew to Moscow and Tbilisi to broker a new agreement. Walking through the government building in Tbilisi, she and her staff noticed there were no pictures on the walls, just hooks; the Georgians were so panicked about approaching Russian troops they were on the verge of fleeing.