by Peter Baker
ONE DAY IN his new office in Dallas, a visiting former aide asked Bush the question others never would.
“You’re leaving as one of the most unpopular presidents ever,” the aide noted. “How does that feel?”
Bush pushed back. “I was also the most popular president,” he noted.
That true statement underscores a central dynamic of Bush’s presidency, the sense of lost opportunity. From the months after September 11, when he reached the stratosphere in popular support, Bush at Cheney’s urging pushed forward with a mission that ultimately frittered that away, heroically in the minds of his most fervent admirers, tragically in the minds of others. What might have been had Bush not chosen to invade Iraq?
In the years after he left office, Bush’s former inner circle debated the issue, even to the point of questioning whether he would have launched the war at all had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction. Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer, among others, concluded that he would not have. “I just don’t think he would have gone to war,” said Fleischer. “I think he would have turned up the heat on Saddam, but I don’t think he would have gone to war.” Richard Armitage agreed. “I’m convinced that President Bush would not have done it absent WMD,” he said. Others were not so sure. Rumsfeld, leaning back in a chair in a Washington office after the end of the administration, thought the war was still a worthy one. “I am very respectful of how ugly a war can be and so you say, ‘Gee, do you wish it hadn’t happened?’ The answer of course is yes,” he said. “But should it? Did the president make the right decision? Obviously, I thought so and still do. I mean, I think he was faced with a whole set of reasons which seemed to me to be persuasive then, and now.”
One thing that is not debatable is that it consumed his presidency. His second-term Ownership Society domestic agenda aimed at overhauling Social Security, immigration policy, and the tax code foundered in large part on the shoals of Iraq. The country and Congress lost interest in anything else from the Bush White House. His hopes of reorienting the Republican Party did not survive his tenure in office, and he privately rued the rise of the populist conservative Tea Party movement after he left. “It breaks my heart that compassionate conservatism has gotten a bad name,” Karen Hughes lamented. To the extent that is the case, Bush and Cheney bear responsibility. They rightly note that Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry also thought Saddam Hussein was a threat and voted for war, but in the end it was their decision. More than twenty-five million Iraqis were freed from Hussein’s tyranny, but at the cost of more than four thousand American soldiers and perhaps a hundred thousand or more Iraqis by the time Bush and Cheney departed. The vast majority of the slain civilians died at the hands of insurgents and terrorists, not Americans, but they were forces unleashed by a White House that did not fully understand what it was setting in motion. “The first grave mistake of Bush’s presidency was rushing toward military confrontation with Iraq,” observed Scott McClellan. “It took his presidency off course and greatly damaged his standing with the public. His second grave mistake was his virtual blindness about the first mistake.”
To understand it, it is important to remember the atmosphere in which the decision was made. The anthrax killings, the undisclosed biological scare in the White House, and the discovery of Pakistani nuclear scientists briefing Osama bin Laden created an environment in which the attacks of September 11 looked potentially minor by comparison to what could happen. If Hussein had such weapons, Bush and Cheney concluded, he could no longer be tolerated. “You can say he made a mistake,” Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who broke with his party over his support for the war, said of Bush. “We will be debating that part forever. But I think he did it because he really thought it was the right thing to do.” The what-ifs, however, haunt some of the war’s authors. “If Iraq had gone well,” observed Michael Gerson, “the president could have been a colossus in American politics.” But it did not, and he was not.
Even to the extent that he salvaged a failing war through the surge after years of letting his generals call the shots, Bush could not ultimately salvage his presidency, thanks to an economic crisis the likes of which no one had faced since Franklin Roosevelt. His final months in office were absorbed by a bruising series of failures on Wall Street due to years of an overheated housing market and exotic, high-risk financial instruments. Bush recognized the syndrome from experience. “Wall Street got drunk,” he once explained. “It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover.” But if Wall Street imbibed too much, Bush was among the bartenders who looked the other way. While it was Bill Clinton who signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall restrictions on banks and Democrats in Congress who helped shield Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they binged on unsustainable mortgages, Bush appointed the regulators who remained too hands-off and personally was slow to recognize the severity of the threat. His eventual response in the form of the TARP bailout was almost akin to the Iraq surge, decisively applying the overwhelming force of the federal government to intervene in the markets and prevent the country from falling off a cliff.
To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter, Iraq and the financial crash summed up the Bush presidency. Other than his response to September 11, Bush’s two greatest moments in office were arguably his responses to those two crises, ignoring political peril and discarding ideology to do what was necessary to turn things around. Sending more troops to a losing war and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out irresponsible banks had to be two of the boldest and most politically unpopular decisions by any president in modern times. And in both cases, they proved to be critical to the country.
“You have to ask the question, why were they necessary? In both cases there was a long period of antecedent neglect out of which the crisis came, to which the president heroically responded,” Frum observed. “Bush made crises through neglect and then resolved crises through courage.”
Arguably, Hurricane Katrina fit the same pattern. After stumbling in the early days after the storm, Bush then demonstrated a powerful commitment to rebuilding the region, traveling there seventeen times and devoting vast sums of money over the objections of some in his party. Even Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000 and a New Orleans native whose family was displaced by the storm, praised the “intense, personal, dedicated efforts he made to revive and restore people’s futures.” Bush, in other words, was at his best when he was cleaning up his worst.
ON A BRIGHT, sunny day in the spring of 2013, more than four years after surrendering power, Bush and Cheney reunited for the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. With thousands of administration veterans and supporters crowded outside the limestone building, Bush and Cheney emerged from the new center along with all the other living presidents and first ladies. But while Bush took a seat onstage along with his peers, Cheney stepped down into the audience to sit with the Bush children. Condoleezza Rice had a speaking role; Cheney did not.
This was only the second time the two men had appeared in public together since leaving office. The first had come when ground was broken on the library in 2010. Cheney was part of the program that day and hailed Bush. “Two years after you left office, judgments are a little more measured than they were,” he said that day, speaking of the verdict of history but perhaps also his own judgments of Bush. The former president returned the kind words. “He was a great vice president of the United States and I’m proud to call him friend.”
For friends, though, they had had relatively little contact. Most presidents and vice presidents go their separate ways after office, yet no other tandem had worked as closely together in the White House and the new distance spoke volumes about the evolution of their partnership. So did the library that sprouted out of the ground. There were exhibits featuring the first lady and their daughters, videos featuring Rice, Andy Card, and Joshua Bolten, even statues of the presidential dogs and
cat. But there was virtually no sign of Cheney. During an interview leading up to the library opening, Bush was asked about their relationship. “You know, it’s been cordial,” he told C-Span’s Steve Scully. “But he lives in Washington and we live in Dallas.” Perhaps recognizing the chill that suggested, Bush made sure at the subsequent ceremony to give a shout-out to Cheney. “From the day I asked Dick to run with me, he served with loyalty, principle, and strength,” Bush told the audience, and then repeated his words from a few years earlier. “I’m proud to call you friend.”
If nothing else, Cheney looked reinvigorated that spring day. Cheney’s heart, never strong, had caught up with him once he returned to private life. Around Christmas 2009, he was backing his car out of his garage in Wyoming when “everything went blank.” His implanted defibrillator kicked in and saved his life, as it was designed to do. But within a couple months, he suffered his fifth heart attack and by summer he was heading into end-stage heart failure. Doctors operated overnight, but Cheney was left unconscious for weeks, dreaming, oddly enough, of a countryside villa north of Rome where he passed the time padding along stone paths to get coffee or newspapers.
Then in 2012, at age seventy-one, Cheney underwent a heart transplant operation. In succeeding months, he regained strength and much of his spirit. By the time he arrived in Dallas for the library opening, he was like a new man. Wearing a cowboy hat, khakis, and a blue blazer, he showed up at a bar the night before the ceremony where more than a thousand administration veterans were partying. More animated than he had been for years, he was mobbed in the parking lot and never even made it into the bar. Instead, he stood outside, happily chatting with Karl Rove about hunting, catching up with colleagues, and posing for pictures with former aides and complete strangers. Asked about a recent documentary about his life, he cheerfully complained that the filmmakers did not include footage of him catching a large fish. He lingered until close to midnight. “Ever since the heart transplant,” his daughter Mary observed, “it’s been like a miracle.”
Never an emotive man, Cheney seemed gripped by the medical heroics that saved his life, talking all the time about the operation and the advances in technology that enabled it and even writing a book with Liz about the experience. At one point after the operation, Cheney was traveling on the West Coast and dropped by the Los Angeles house of his friend David Hume Kennerly. Sitting at Kennerly’s table, the former vice president described his health-care odyssey.
Everyone involved in a heart transplant operation, from the doctors and nurses to the family, viewed it as some sort of spiritual experience, he said.
“Well, if that’s true,” Kennerly teased, “are you now a Democrat?”
“It wasn’t that spiritual,” Cheney replied.
Kennerly knew better than to expect his old friend to change, new heart or no. Whatever else people said about him, Dick Cheney knew what he believed and felt no need to temper his views to suit others. On some level, his disregard for the vicissitudes of popularity could be seen as admirable in an era of craven politicians. Yet even aides concluded that Cheney took it to such an extreme that his failure to respond to public opinion, or at least try to shape it by explaining and defending his positions, undercut his cause and resulted in his policies ultimately being scaled back.
If Bush thought so, he kept it to himself. While he had clearly moved away from Cheney in the second half of his presidency, he was rarely if ever heard expressing anything but respect for his partner. Some of those around him, though, faulted Cheney for transforming Bush from uniter to divider. “Something happened in Washington,” said Sandy Kress, the longtime adviser from Texas who recalled how Bush worked with Democrats in Austin and then initially in Washington on education reform, “and I personally think Dick Cheney was part of the partisanship issue. I don’t get it to this day. I don’t like it, I didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now.”
And yet to blame or credit Cheney for the president’s decisions is to underestimate Bush. “Bush had a little bit of Eisenhower in him,” said Wayne Berman, “in that he didn’t mind if people thought that he was the sort of guy who was easily manipulated because it also meant that his opponents underestimated him and the people around him thought they were having more influence than they really were. And he used that always to his advantage.” While Cheney clearly influenced him in the early years, none of scores of aides, friends, and relatives interviewed after the White House years recalled Bush ever asserting that the vice president talked him into doing something he otherwise would not have done.
Bush, in the end, was the Decider. His successes and his failures through all the days of fire were his own. “He’s his own man,” said Joe O’Neill, his lifelong friend. “He’s got the mistakes to prove it, as we always say. He was his own man.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book project is a journey, some longer and more circuitous than others, and I was blessed to have the companionship and support of a phenomenal collection of family, friends, and colleagues along the way. To say this wouldn’t have been possible without them may be a cliché, but in this case it is abundantly true.
No one believed in this venture more than Raphael Sagalyn, my agent and friend now for some fifteen years whose talents for hand-holding nervous authors and eliciting their best work are boundless. No one could ask for a better editor than Kris Puopolo at Doubleday, who patiently shepherded this volume through multiple conceptions and drafts, never tiring and never pressuring but always offering insights and counsel that made it stronger at every stage.
Bill Thomas, Doubleday’s publisher and editor in chief, saw the value in attempting a neutral history of a White House about which almost no one is neutral, and his faith in that daunting mission despite the obvious challenges proved inspiring. The rest of the team at Doubleday demonstrated why they are collectively the best in the business, including Maria Carella, Todd Doughty, John Fontana, Joe Gallagher, Lorraine Hyland, Dan Meyer, Ingrid Sterner, and Amelia Zalcman.
Jake Schwartz-Forester devoted many months to helping out with research and transcriptions, and I’m especially grateful for all his hard work. He’s got a bright future ahead. Cynthia Colonna likewise turned around interview transcripts with speed and precision no matter how many noisy tape backgrounds she had to endure. Clare Sestanovich also helped decipher interviews. Andrew Prokop came along near the end to help save me from myself with a diligent and masterful dissection of flawed chapters. Others who helped with our fact-checking triage have my eternal thanks as well: Margaret Slattery, Julie Tate, Elias Groll, Marya Hannun, and Elizabeth F. Ralph. The crack photographer Doug Mills was kind enough to take the author shot for the book jacket.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars gave me a home for several months during the research for this book and I want to thank Lee Hamilton, Jane Harman, Michael Van Dusen, Lucy Jilka, Lindsay Collins, and Blair Ruble for their hospitality. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University has likewise given me several opportunities to come out for short stints that seemed particularly well timed during the process, and I’m grateful to David Brady and Mandy MacCalla.
I have been fortunate to work at the two best newspapers in the world, first at the Washington Post for twenty years and then at the New York Times for the last five. Both gave me the chance to cover the White House, which for all the tradeoffs is still one of the most challenging and invigorating assignments a reporter could have. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the chairman and publisher of the Times, has done what almost no one else has during the crisis that has transformed our business: he has reinvested in journalism, protecting the franchise at all costs against the winds of financial distress. While others shrank their ambitions, he expanded ours, and he deserves the admiration of anyone who cares about independent reporting. I’m so glad to have worked these last few years for him and for Jill Abramson, Mark Thompson, Dean Baquet, Bill Keller, David Leonhardt, Carl Hulse, Elisabeth Bumiller, Rick Berke, Richard Stevenson
, Rebecca Corbett, Bill Hamilton, Gerald Marzorati, Megan Liberman, Chris Suellentrop, Hugo Lindgren, and Joel Lovell. I will always be grateful to Donald Graham, the extraordinary chairman of the Post Company, for his own commitment to quality journalism and for everything he has done for my family over the years. There is no classier person out there.
A number of friends and colleagues played special roles in helping shape this book. Helene Cooper, my partner on the White House beat at the Times, came up with the idea of framing the history of the last White House around the unique relationship of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Michael Abramowitz, who was my partner at the Post, spent a lot of time sharing his insights into the Bush-Cheney White House and read the manuscript with a careful eye for how to improve it. Michael Shear, one of my closest friends since we were rookie metro reporters together and now also a partner on the beat, and Bill Hamilton, a first-rate editor at both papers, took time out to read it as well. My other terrific partners, Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler, put up with my absences with patience and support.
Robert Draper, a graceful writer, sharp observer of Texas and Washington politics, and the author of his own excellent book on President Bush, generously shared his research and ministered me through challenging periods with wine and cogent advice. Mark Leibovich, one of the best journalists in this town, was busy birthing his own terrific book over the same period and met with me regularly for breakfast to commiserate and regroup. Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Mark Mazzetti also shared in the joys and travails of the book-writing process.
