Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Cheney’s public battle with Obama, though, seemed almost like a proxy for his private battle with Bush. Out of deference and his deep respect for protocol, Cheney could say only so much as he watched Bush compromise again and again in their final years in office. But now he could lash out with a Democrat as the target, making the same argument to the nation that he had made in the Situation Room. “He’ll never criticize Bush directly,” observed David Gordon, an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, “but even the way he criticizes Obama, I think, is implicitly a criticism of the last couple of years” of the Bush administration. In Cheney’s mind, the betrayal of the CIA officers became an extension of the betrayal of Scooter Libby. They were all men left behind on the battlefield. “Dick was terribly upset that he didn’t pardon him, get him off the hook,” recalled his friend Bernie Seebaum. “The man did what he was expected to do, and then he got in trouble for it. Nobody came to his rescue.” Cheney felt almost unshackled. “The statute of limitations,” he told associates, “has expired.” And in the end, Cheney felt he had shifted the public debate; eventually, the Obama administration dropped the investigation.

  SITTING IN DALLAS, Bush watched with interest and a little ambivalence. He quizzed visiting friends and former aides on what they thought of the vice president’s public campaign but generally did not share his own opinions. He spent his days writing his memoir, building his presidential library, and establishing a public policy institute focused on six main areas: democracy promotion, global health, economic growth, education reform, military service, and women’s rights. He gave dozens of speeches and traveled to Africa, expanding his work combating AIDS and malaria to target cervical cancer as well.

  He was particularly engaged with veterans. He hosted injured soldiers for hundred-kilometer “wounded warrior” bicycle marathons and visited military hospitals unannounced. He showed up one day at a Texas airport to greet troops coming home from Iraq, a moment that would have gone unnoticed but for the phone cameras that recorded the event and uploaded it to the Internet. Iraq was never far away; he told one former aide who visited him in Dallas that he thought about it every single day. The attention to veterans was his way of grappling with the decision to go to war. “This is not the right word, but that absolves him of guilt,” said one friend. “I don’t think he feels guilt in any respect or remorse. I think he feels sorrow and sadness for what he’s seen have been the consequences of war, but I think the relationship with the military families is a huge part of his life these days.”

  Bush was determined not to be dragged back into “the swamp,” as he put it. No more politics. He told a group of visitors in Dallas that he felt liberated on the day of Obama’s inauguration. “When I saw his hand go up, I thought, ‘Free at last,’ ” Bush said. He stayed off the campaign trail during the 2010 midterm elections. When Karl Rove regaled a dinner party at the former president’s house in Dallas one night with his analysis of the congressional contests, Bush paid little attention, cracking jokes instead with the wife of a guest sitting next to him. His entire involvement in the 2012 presidential campaign was to offer a four-word endorsement of Obama’s Republican opponent when a reporter pursued him after an unrelated event. “I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush said simply as elevator doors shut.

  Beyond the largely closed-door speeches and low-profile policy work, Bush enjoyed going to Texas Rangers games, took up painting much as Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill had done, and picked up golf again, years after giving it up out of deference to troops at war. “He’s a golf-a-holic now,” said his friend Charlie Younger. Bush often played with the first four people who happened to show up at a course, and the Bush family competitive gene kicked in. “I decided I was going to get better at golf, not just play golf,” he told Walt Harrington, a writer and friend, one day, putting his golf-shoe-clad feet up on his desk and chewing on an unlit cigar. “I have gotten better. The problem is I’m never good enough. That’s the problem with the game. It requires discipline, patience, and focus. As you know, I’m long on”—and he paused with a smile—“well, a couple areas where I could use some improvement.”

  Wayne Berman, who hosted Bush for dinner in Washington after he left office, was struck by his serenity. “I’ve never seen a happier, more relaxed man than George W. Bush since he left the presidency,” he said. While Bill Clinton found departure from the White House a wrenching experience and often talked of how he wished he could have had a third term, Bush seemed to actually mean it when he disclaimed any longing for power. “I’m often asked, do you miss the presidency?” he told one audience. “I really don’t.” He explained it during a rare visit to the capital to unveil a collection of interviews with dissidents from around the world fighting for freedom in their countries: “I actually found my freedom by leaving Washington.”

  NEARLY A YEAR to the day after flying home to Texas, Bush returned to the White House. Arriving early, he roamed the halls and greeted the ushers and Secret Service officers by name, joking in a familiar, comfortable way. He had come in response to a request by Obama to team up with Clinton to lead the recovery effort for Haiti after a devastating earthquake. It was Bush’s first time back in Washington, and Obama aides were nervous about seeing him, but within a few minutes he had put them at ease. “It was more like meeting an old friend,” Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior adviser, said afterward.

  And in a way it was. As much as Obama had run against Bush’s legacy in 2008, he ended up embracing much of it in 2009. He kept Bush’s defense secretary and many other top national security figures, and he decided to follow Bush’s plan for a three-year withdrawal from Iraq. While he jettisoned the term “war on terror” and banned the harsh interrogation techniques that had been so controversial, Obama failed to close the Guantánamo prison, just as Bush had, kept the terrorist surveillance program, authorized the use of military commissions, and decided to hold some terror suspects indefinitely without trial, albeit with more procedural protections built into the process. He more or less adopted Bush’s policy toward North Korea, only somewhat modified the approach to Iran, effectively copied the Iraq surge by sending more troops to Afghanistan, and expanded the drone campaign in Pakistan. Arguably, Obama validated some of Bush’s most important decisions. By 2013, Ari Fleischer was claiming that Obama was “carrying out Bush’s 4th term.”

  There were more pronounced differences over domestic policy, most notably Obama’s expansion of health care and support for marriage and military service for gays and lesbians. But even at home, the new president preserved many of Bush’s initiatives. Obama completed the financial and auto industry bailouts that Bush began, largely kept No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug prescription program, and built on his increases in fuel economy standards and incentives for renewable energy. While Obama ran against Bush’s tax cuts, he ended up reauthorizing roughly 85 percent of them, reversing them for just the top 1 percent of American taxpayers. And Obama made one of his highest second-term priorities an overhaul of the immigration system, moving to complete Bush’s unfinished mission.

  The disparity between Obama’s campaign trail rhetoric on national security and his actions upon taking office shocked some of his supporters but should have come as little surprise to anyone who watched the evolution of the previous administration. Obama essentially ran against Bush’s first term but inherited his second. By the time Bush left office, he had already shaved off the harsher, more controversial edges of his war on terror, either under pressure from Congress, the courts, and public opinion or out of a conscious effort to put his policies on a firmer foundation with more bipartisan approval. He had emptied the secret CIA prisons, cleared out many of the prisoners at Guantánamo, approved no waterboarding after 2003, and secured the approval of lawmakers for military commissions, expansive surveillance, and other elements of his program.

  Bush followed the historical pattern of governments in times of crisis or war, when presidents push the boundaries of the law in the name o
f protecting the country. Eventually, the system corrects itself and scales back the extremes. John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts that jailed opponents for their political speech. Andrew Jackson forcibly removed Indian tribes that resisted eviction from lands east of the Mississippi. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and put American citizens on trial before military commissions even in areas not in rebellion. Woodrow Wilson allowed the imprisonment of a 1912 election opponent for speaking out against World War I. Franklin Roosevelt forced 110,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II for no other reason than their ethnic background. Bush and Cheney did not go as far as many of these precedents. Although hundreds of Muslims were swept up in the early days after September 11, largely on immigration violations, the wave of arrests paled by comparison to the Japanese roundup in the 1940s, and it subsided quickly. Bush made a point of visiting a mosque, hosting iftar dinners at the White House, and repeatedly making clear that he considered Islam a peaceful religion that had been distorted by a relative few radicals. The brutal interrogation techniques used by CIA officers were applied to no more than three dozen prisoners, and just three were waterboarded, although one of them was subjected to it a stunning 183 times. Political opponents were free to lambaste Bush and Cheney as vigorously as they wished without fear of imprisonment. “There’s no doubt that whatever President Bush did to curtail civil liberties in the war on terror, a case can be made that a lot of what he did was far less than what other presidents have done in wartime,” said Jay Winik, the historian who met with Bush on a few occasions. “In each case our system righted itself. With President Bush, he did respond over time and as conditions allowed.”

  Still, if history is a defense to an extent, it also is an indictment. Rather than learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, Bush and Cheney repeated them. The most controversial actions of American presidents have proved more durable when they obtained buy-in from other sectors of society, particularly Congress. Bush and Cheney preferred instead to operate on their own, reasoning that disclosure of some techniques would jeopardize security and asserting that the executive had vast, unchecked power when it came to guarding the nation. Congress and the courts would only get in the way. The threat was too serious.

  Any number of Bush aides reached the conclusion that it was a mistake, from Jack Goldsmith, the Justice Department lawyer who reversed some of the most sweeping legal interpretations in the terror war, to Donald Rumsfeld, who argued after leaving office that the president would have been better off engaging Congress more. Eventually, Bush came around to the same view. “In retrospect, I probably could have avoided some of the controversy and legal setbacks by seeking legislation on military tribunals, the TSP, and the CIA enhanced interrogation program as soon as they were created,” he wrote in his memoir, using the initials for Terrorist Surveillance Program, the administration’s name for its warrantless eavesdropping. “If members of Congress had been required to make their decisions at the same time I did—in the immediate aftermath of 9/11—I am confident they would have overwhelmingly approved everything we requested.” Or at least forced compromises that might have averted some of the worst abuses.

  The unnecessary controversies combined with the devastating misjudgments in Iraq ended up detracting from what otherwise might have been a solid record for the forty-third president. Bush logged major achievements both at home and abroad. He pushed to make education better and saw test scores rise. He helped the elderly afford prescription medicine. He lowered taxes not just for the wealthy but for the middle class and freed millions of lower-income Americans from income taxes altogether. He helped spur a domestic energy boom in both traditional and renewable sectors that dramatically reversed American dependence on foreign oil. He expanded free trade and reduced the nuclear arsenal. He helped arrest the AIDS epidemic in Africa, saving millions of lives. He put two strong conservatives on the Supreme Court. He spoke out for democracy in the Muslim world at a time when others believed it impossible, then took great satisfaction in the Arab Spring that toppled dictators after his presidency. Perhaps most important, while any number of factors were at work, he and his vice president could reasonably claim to have protected the country following September 11.

  Whatever the president’s virtues, though, they remained unappreciated in his own time. To say that Bush was unpopular only begins to capture the historic depths of his estrangement from the American public in the years before he left office. He was arguably the most disliked president in seven decades. Seventy-one percent of Americans interviewed in a Gallup poll disapproved of his job performance during the worst of the financial crisis in October 2008, the highest negative rate ever recorded for any president since the firm began asking the question in 1938. And while Harry Truman and Richard Nixon at their worst had even fewer supporters—Truman once fell to 22 percent in his job approval rating and Nixon to 24 percent, compared with Bush’s low of 25 percent—no president has endured such a prolonged period of public rejection. The last time Bush enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans was March 2005, meaning he went through virtually his entire second term without most of the public behind him. Academic scholars, generally more liberal and never fans of Bush’s anti-intellectualism to begin with, ranked him among the five worst presidents in parlor-game polls.

  Cheney fared even worse. In Gallup’s tracking, which asked about the vice president much less frequently than the president, Cheney slipped into the thirties in 2006 and never recovered. His low of 30 percent found by Gallup in mid-2007 was actually higher than other polls found. At one point in 2006, shortly after the shooting accident, just 18 percent of those surveyed by CBS News approved of the vice president’s performance, a number so profoundly low for a political figure of his stature that it became the source of numerous jokes at Cheney’s expense, including by the president.

  Cheney was unapologetic in the years to come. When he released his own memoir and did the requisite media tour, he gave no ground as he was pressed again and again on issues of torture, war, and surveillance. Asked if the decision to invade Iraq was still the right one given all the costs, he said, “Oh sure. I don’t think it damaged our reputation around the world. I just don’t believe that.” He added, “It was sound policy that dealt with a very serious problem and that eliminated Saddam Hussein.”

  Bush, never much known for introspection, nonetheless was more willing to identify mistakes, whether it be not sending more troops earlier to Iraq or not acting more decisively to respond to Katrina. But he too stood by the most fundamental decisions, and professed serenity about history’s judgment, noting that if George Washington’s legacy can still be debated, then his own would not be settled until long after his death. “There’s no need to defend myself,” he said at one point. “I did what I did and ultimately history will be the judge.”

  He likewise rejected any suggestion that the myriad crises that confronted him on his watch had weighed him down. “The tendency in life is to feel sorry for yourself—like, ‘Oh, man, why me?’ You know?” he told an audience at a conference closed to the general public in March 2011. “And particularly when you’re president, you know? And then you read about Abraham Lincoln, and you realize that he had a really tough presidency. And so, you know, it helps keep your life in perspective.” Bush said he focused on history and tried to avoid the cable chatter. “I didn’t watch any TV. ‘You didn’t watch the news?’ I said, ‘Hell, no, I didn’t watch the news. You know, I was the news.’ Abraham Lincoln motivated me a lot. He was a great president. Abraham Lincoln understood the president’s need to stand on principle no matter how tough the politics might be. So he said all men are created equal under God. In 1863, you know, that wasn’t necessarily a given. Lincoln made a great presidential decision in spite of the politics of the moment.”

  Bush’s graceful post-presidency seemed to temper judgments. As he hit the television circuit in 2010 to promote Decision Points, his memoir, he found a count
ry a little more open to him, and the book rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists. Most Americans still did not view him favorably, and many still reviled him for invading Iraq, waterboarding terror suspects, and presiding over the worst financial crisis in decades. He was still a punch line, to many a failed president, the source of today’s economic and foreign policy troubles. Yet with his successor facing his own difficulties and “Miss Me Yet?” T-shirts with Bush’s face on them for sale at Washington’s Union Station a short walk from the Capitol, Obama’s blame-Bush strategy did not stop voters from returning Republicans to power in the House and handing them more seats in the Senate that fall. By 2013, polls suggested a softening of opinion, with 49 percent of Americans now expressing favorable views, compared with 43 percent who saw him unfavorably, the first time in five years that he enjoyed a positive balance.

  In part, that reflected disenchanted Republicans and conservative independents returning home, especially as they found Obama more unpalatable than Bush. There was also a certain newfound, if limited, appreciation among moderates and some liberals, who contrasted Bush’s views on immigration, education, Medicare, and AIDS relief with the harder-edged Republican Party that suceeded him. Senator Charles Schumer, the liberal Democrat who compared Bush to Herbert Hoover in 2008, credited him in 2013 along with Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke with having “saved us from another Great Depression.” Many presidents have been viewed more generously in later eras, like Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Even Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon experienced moments of reassessment, their failures in Vietnam and Watergate mitigated to a degree by appreciation for the Great Society or the opening to China. Still, their disappointments seem indelibly marked in the history books, and it may be hard for Bush to shift the narrative as much as he would like. “Decades from now,” he wrote, “I hope people will view me as a president who recognized the central challenge of our time and kept my vow to keep the country safe; who pursued my convictions without wavering but changed course when necessary; who trusted individuals to make choices in their lives; and who used America’s influence to advance freedom.”