by Peter Baker
By chance, that night Bush hosted the annual holiday dinner for his senior staff. Joshua Bolten stood and led a toast, reviewing the history of gifts the staff had given the president at Christmas over the years.
“And this year, Mr. President,” he said, “we chipped in and we bought you Chrysler.”
BUSH HOSTED THE world’s most exclusive club on January 7, inviting Obama and the three other living presidents to lunch to share their wisdom and experience. The Wall Street bailout had arguably headed off another Great Depression and stabilized the situation, but the country still faced deep problems. Soon Bush would hand them over to Obama, and he was doing what he could to help his successor. Obama was grateful to Bush for how he was handling the transition and expressed no second thoughts about any of the decisions the outgoing president made during the interregnum. “Bush has been extraordinarily gracious toward us,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser.
Joining Bush and Obama that day were Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and the president’s father, George H. W. Bush. Clinton, to no one’s surprise, did most of the talking. Carter stood off slightly to the side, awkward even with fellow Democrats. The outgoing president was a little antsy. He struck Obama as relieved, clearly ready for the weight of the presidency to be lifted from his shoulders and to escape to Dallas, where he and Laura had bought a retirement house near the site of his future presidential library at her alma mater, Southern Methodist University.
Whatever relief Bush felt, he refused to feel sorry for himself, at least publicly. During his final news conference on January 12, he mocked the phrase “burdens of the office,” as if anyone should feel bad for the most powerful man on earth.
“You know, it’s kind of like, why me?” he said sarcastically. “Oh, the burdens, you know. Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch? It’s pathetic, isn’t it, self-pity?”
The next day, he invited a group of historians to the Oval Office, including John Lewis Gaddis, Jay Winik, Allen Guelzo, Walter McDougall, and Michael Barone. He was thinking about his memoir, and the historians offered thoughts about how to write it, while Chris Michel, a speechwriter who would help with the book, took notes. Bush’s father had never written a traditional memoir, instead publishing a compilation of letters written over a lifetime and a separate foreign policy book with Brent Scowcroft. The younger Bush was mulling a book that, rather than a cradle-to-grave biography, would focus on a series of important decisions and how he confronted them. He had read Clinton’s loquacious memoir and wanted something crisper. He mentioned Ulysses Grant’s memoir, generally considered the best among presidents, and the historians told him it was a classic because it was spare and unadorned. McDougall also mentioned Harry Truman, who used his book to “remind and explain” after a presidency beset by crisis. Guelzo suggested he focus on four themes: the election and recount; the war on terror; his initiatives in education, faith-based programs and AIDS in Africa; and an articulation of conservatism that understands what government can and cannot do.
It was a long meeting, and Bush was in no hurry. He seemed eager to make sense of his eight years. Some of the visitors were struck by how serene he seemed after everything that had happened. “The presidency did not eat him up or beat him down,” Gaddis recalled. “He was still upbeat and optimistic and energetic, as much as when I met him the first time five years earlier.” Gaddis had been one of the inspirations for the second inaugural address vow to seek the end of tyranny, only to be disappointed that Bush “never really did anything with the idea.” But he respected Bush for his conviction and fortitude.
At one point, one of the historians mentioned Cheney. Bush seized the moment to make a point, saying with a laugh that outsiders imagined his vice president exerted more influence than he really did. He pointed to a telephone on a table beside the sofa and said too many people had the impression that all Cheney had to do was call him up and he would do whatever he was told. He rattled off a series of decisions where he had overruled Cheney, even citing dates. Unknown to the historians, Bush and Cheney at that moment were wrestling over the possible pardon of Scooter Libby, but it was clear the president did not want anyone walking out thinking his vice president had been in charge. “It just came out very quickly,” Gaddis said. “He was determined we got that point.”
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“Such a sense of betrayal”
The clemency process had long left a sour taste in President Bush’s mouth. His father had been heavily criticized for issuing a series of politically charged pardons in his final weeks in office, most notably to Caspar Weinberger, the former defense secretary under investigation in the Iran-contra affair. Bill Clinton had left office in scandal over his last-minute pardons of a series of sordid characters, including his half brother, Roger; his former business partner Susan McDougal; and, most notoriously, the politically connected financier Marc Rich, who had fled the country to avoid tax fraud and racketeering charges. (Among Rich’s lawyers at one point? Scooter Libby.) Bush had not forgotten being kept waiting in his motorcade after church on the morning of his own inauguration eight years earlier because Clinton was not ready to receive him for the traditional White House coffee after spending much of the previous twenty-four hours signing pardons.
Bush was so turned off that he became one of the stingiest presidents in American history when it came to executive clemency. Over the course of eight years, he granted just 189 pardons and 11 commutations, far fewer than any president in at least a century, with the exception of his father. Further coloring the process heading into his final days in office was a little-noticed debacle. Two days before Christmas, the president issued a series of pardons, including one for Isaac Toussie, a Brooklyn developer who had pleaded guilty to mail fraud for falsifying documents for would-be home buyers seeking government-backed mortgages. Toussie’s case did not qualify under nonbinding Justice Department guidelines, and the pardon attorney who typically reviewed all applications before they were sent to the president never examined the case. But Toussie had hired Brad Berenson, a former Bush White House lawyer, and the man’s father had given $28,500 to the Republican National Committee in April plus another $2,300 to the presidential campaign of John McCain.
When the New York Daily News reported the contributions, Joshua Bolten called Bush at Camp David to tell him. The president was already there for Christmas with his family, their final holiday at the presidential retreat. He was irritated. How had they let this happen? This made it look as if he were doling out pardons for political contributors, much as Clinton had seemed to do. Bolten was just as angry.
Bolten found William Burck, the deputy White House counsel.
“Figure out some way to undo this,” Bolten told him. “Find out when a pardon is effective. Has the president signed the orders?”
“Yes.”
“Have they been notified?”
“Yes.”
“Have we announced it?”
“Yes.”
Bolten told Burck to research the matter. Burck came back and said a pardon would not be effective until it was delivered to the recipient.
“Where is it?” Bolten asked.
“It’s in the pardon attorney’s office, and he’s gone home for the weekend.”
“You call him up,” Bolten said. “You meet him as early as he’s willing to come in on Saturday morning and you stand outside his office until he shows up and you don’t let anybody in or out until you retrieve that pardon grant.”
Burck went to the Justice Department to personally retrieve the pardon. “This is a good decision,” the Justice Department lawyer who handed him the documents said, “because I don’t know if anybody could survive this.”
Fred Fielding, Burck’s boss, then fell on his sword in a public statement explaining that he had been the one who reviewed the application and recommended it to the president. The only saving grace was that because they did it on Christmas Eve, the reversal drew relatively little attention. For
once, the Bush team had caught a break.
But it only reinforced Bush’s feelings about the system. “This process is broken,” he railed to aides. “It is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Why is it that somebody who knows somebody in the White House gets to have a better shot than somebody who doesn’t know somebody in the White House?” It irritated him even more that he was coming under pressure from all directions that season. His lifelong friend Joe O’Neill had written him a letter on behalf of a bank officer who had served time for falsifying documents and was now dying. Another childhood friend from Texas, Charlie Younger, pressed him to pardon a fellow doctor who had served time on child pornography charges. Clay Johnson, his Yale friend and White House aide, was lobbying Bush to commute the sentence of David Safavian, an administration official convicted in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Supporters importuned Bush on Scooter Libby’s behalf in the receiving line at White House Christmas parties. Bush deflected them. “Not a chance,” he told Younger.
FOR VICE PRESIDENT Cheney, the Libby situation was aggravating. He was bitter that Richard Armitage had admitted to prosecutors that he was the one who originally leaked Valerie Wilson’s identity, and yet neither he nor Colin Powell told their colleagues that. “The Powell-Armitage thing was such a sense of betrayal,” Liz Cheney said. “They sat there and watched their colleagues in the White House—Scooter and everyone else—go through the ordeal of the investigation, and all that time they both knew Armitage was the leaker.” Armitage and Powell maintained they were constrained by lawyers who told them to keep silent. Besides, Armitage said, he was not the one who put others in jeopardy. “I didn’t have anything to do with Scooter and Karl,” he said.
Aware that his chances were grim, Libby contacted Bolten to ask if he could talk with Bush directly, man-to-man. It seemed like the Texas thing to do.
“I’m sorry, Scooter,” said Bolten, who considered Libby a friend. “In fairness to the president, I can’t permit that.”
Then Cheney went to Bolten.
“Scooter would like to visit with the president.”
“I know,” Bolten said. “I’ve already told him no.”
“I’m asking you,” Cheney said.
Bolten stuck to his guns and said no.
“I’d like you to ask the president directly,” Cheney said finally.
“I wish you wouldn’t ask me to do that,” Bolten said, “but obviously the president would not want me screening him from any request of yours.”
In the end, Bush backed up Bolten, refusing to see Libby. Bolten suggested Libby see the White House lawyers instead.
On the final weekend of the administration, as Bush retreated to Camp David for his last getaway, Libby sat down with Fred Fielding and William Burck in a booth at McCormick & Schmick’s, a chain seafood restaurant on K Street a few blocks from the White House. It was just after 11:00 a.m. on a weekend, and they hoped no one would recognize them.
For the next ninety minutes, Libby made his case, but the White House lawyers were not swayed. Uncomfortable grilling a former colleague, they nonetheless started going through the evidence. Isn’t it possible? What about this witness? No, Libby insisted. The point was not what was in the trial record but what was not. The prosecutors had suppressed expert testimony about the unreliability of memory that Libby was sure would have exonerated him. They should look at that, he insisted.
Then Fielding and Burck raised another point: pardons in the modern era were typically issued not to people claiming to be innocent but to convicts who had paid their debts to society and were seeking forgiveness. Under Justice Department guidelines at the time, the pardon attorney who prepared recommendations for the president did not even accept requests until at least five years after applicants had completed their sentences. That did not mean a president could not pardon someone who did not fit that criterion—under the Constitution, the president’s pardon power is virtually without limit—but it indicated what was considered an acceptable case for a pardon.
Fielding and Burck asked Libby if he would be willing to admit guilt and ask for forgiveness to obtain a pardon.
No, Libby said. “I am innocent. I did not do this.”
FOR A MAN about to win his own freedom, Bush was awfully grumpy. He was at Camp David on that frigid final weekend to mark the end of his presidency and the beginning of a new life back in Texas. With him were his family and a few select friends and advisers, including Bolten, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Paulson, and Stephen Hadley. He had been looking forward to this moment for some time.
If other presidents were reluctant to give up power, Bush was eager to escape Washington and the burdens of an administration that had been consumed by terrorism, war, natural disaster, and now a financial crash rivaling the Great Depression. For this final weekend at the retreat in the Maryland mountains, he planned to celebrate, to focus on the triumphs, not the setbacks, to reflect and remember and soak in his dwindling hours in office. But he was distracted. His mind kept wandering back to his fight with Cheney.
While the rest of his clan was in another room, Bush found a telephone and called Dan Bartlett back in Texas.
“This sucks,” Bush said. “Here I am, supposed to be trying to have a great weekend with my family, last weekend, and here I am knowing what a difficult decision it is going to be.”
Bartlett reassured him. “You are making the right decision,” he said.
Still, Bush’s advisers were worried. Bolten felt he had failed the president because he should have protected him from having to confront his own vice president. Rice, who was closer to him than any other adviser, watched Bush as he sulked in the living room of Laurel Lodge and thought he needed to be shaken out of his funk.
“Can I talk to you a minute?” she asked.
They slipped away to the lodge’s small presidential office with the sloped ceiling and wooden bookcases.
“Don’t let this be a pall over your last days as president,” she told him. “You deserve better and you’ve done so much and you’ve secured the country and you’ve done all these things, and this shouldn’t be the way that you spend your last hours as president.”
Bush nodded. He understood, but he could not help it.
Finally, it fell to his wife, Laura, as it often did, to ground him.
“Just make up your mind,” she told him. “You’re ruining this for everyone.”
He and Laura returned to Washington that Sunday afternoon, January 18, and went to dinner at the spacious home of their friends Jim and Sandy Langdon in the Spring Valley neighborhood of the capital. They had visited any number of times over the past eight years, but this time an official photographer came along to record the evening, a sign of the impending end.
Jim Langdon knew of the president’s struggle and interrupted dinner.
“I got this list of people that I need pardons for,” he announced jokingly.
Bush laughed.
THE FIGHT OVER the Libby pardon was not the only drama shadowing the final days of the Bush-Cheney administration. By the weekend before the inauguration, intelligence agencies had picked up signs of a plot to attack Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. A group of Somali extremists was said to be heading over the border from Canada intent on exploding a bomb on the Mall on Inauguration Day, “the manifestation of one of our worst nightmares,” as Juan Carlos Zarate, Bush’s counterterrorism chief, put it.
The Bush team briefed their counterparts in the emerging Obama administration, and together they confronted hard choices: An assault on the inaugural ceremony, literally the transfer of power, the most exalted symbol of American democracy, would be devastating, even if it failed to kill the new president. A scene of chaos on the podium could cripple a new commander in chief. What does Obama do if in mid-speech a bomb goes off? asked Hillary Rodham Clinton, the incoming secretary of state, when the two teams met together in the Situation Room. “Is the Secret Service going to whisk him off the podium so the American people see t
heir incoming president disappear in the middle of the inaugural address?” she asked. “I don’t think so.” No one had a good answer.
The two sides agreed that Robert Gates, who would stay on as Obama’s defense secretary, should be kept away from the ceremony to preserve the chain of command in case of disaster. As a sitting cabinet officer with the imprimatur of the new president, Gates was the logical choice to take over the country if everyone above him in the line of succession were to perish. Eventually, the threat turned out to be what intelligence professionals call a “poison pen,” when one group of radicals plants a false story to get Americans to take out rivals. But Bush and Cheney could hardly have left their successors a more vivid demonstration of what they had been dealing with for more than seven years or a more fitting lesson in the murky nature of terrorism—distinguishing between what was real and what was not, tracking down where threats began, figuring out the right response, and finding a balance between acknowledging danger and projecting confidence.
On his last full day in office, January 19, Bush put on a suit and arrived at the Oval Office by 7:00 a.m. as usual. He was scheduled to make back-to-back farewell calls to thirteen world leaders, starting with President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia at 7:00 a.m., Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at 7:10 a.m., President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea at 7:20 a.m., and so on. The talking points on the presidential memo consisted in their entirety of the following fourteen words:
· “Enjoyed working with you.”
· “We have accomplished a lot together.”
· “Wish you continued success.”
The biggest debate was whether to call both Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. Protocol would usually have the president call only his formal counterpart, which would now be Medvedev. But Bush decided to call both; after all their time together, after all the moments of collaboration and tension, he wanted to say good-bye to “my friend Vladimir.” Despite the rupture over the Georgia war, just five months before, Bush wistfully recounted the many visits they had made to each other, at Crawford and the Moscow dacha, in St. Petersburg. He recalled their cooperation on Iran, North Korea, the Middle East, terrorism, arms control, and economics. They had, Bush told Putin, “many fond memories.”
