Kean decided that fixing it was his responsibility. He returned to his hotel, the Four Seasons in Georgetown, and called Andy Card at the White House to warn him of the choice that President Bush needed to make by the next morning.
“Andy, I don’t know what you think is on the agenda tomorrow,” Kean told Card. “But the first thing on the agenda, as far as I am concerned, is the attorney general. It’s absolutely outrageous what Ashcroft is doing.”
Card hadn’t expected this, and he sensed the political danger to the president. He tried to calm Kean down, telling him the president had had no advance warning about Ashcroft’s campaign against Gorelick and the commission. As best Card could tell, Ashcroft had told no one in the White House about his plans until the day of his testimony.
Surely, Card said, whatever the commission’s differences with the attorney general, it should have no effect on the meeting with the president.
“We’re going to have a good meeting, no?” Card asked sheepishly.
Kean considered Card a friend, but his tone grew more threatening. “We are not going to have a good meeting with the president, Andy, because every commissioner is as mad as I am,” he said.
Card tried to sound conciliatory, but he was angry, too—with Kean and the other commissioners. It seemed to Card that the 9/11 commission was willing to hijack a historic meeting with the president and vice president of the United States for the sake of defending one of their own. In Card’s mind, Gorelick had a genuine conflict of interest in serving on the commission, and it was worth airing, even if Ashcroft had raised the issue in such a ham-handed fashion. “I was mad at Kean, I was mad at the commission, because I thought they were defending themselves rather than doing their job,” he said. As far as the meeting with Bush was concerned, “it’s irrelevant if Jamie Gorelick is attacked or not attacked.”
Even so, Card also knew he could not ignore Kean’s call. He would have to do something; there was too much riding on the interview with Bush, who had been preparing for days for the interview. Card went to see the president. At the commission, Dan Marcus, the general counsel, had been unable to get White House lawyers on the phone for days because they were so busy preparing Bush and Cheney for the meeting.
“We do our homework,” Card said. “Contrary to the myth, the president does a lot of homework.”
48
THE ROOSEVELT ROOM
The White House
APRIL 29, 2004
Tom Kean waited anxiously in the Roosevelt Room, across the hallway from the Oval Office, to see George Bush. The president was known for his obsessive punctuality, beginning and especially ending his meetings on time. So Kean knew he would have to wait only a minute or two before the heavy ceremonial doors to the Oval Office opened and he was ushered in to see the president.
Kean was a politician who prided himself on never raising his voice, never uttering an obscenity, rarely making an enemy. They were qualities that were all the more remarkable given the blood sport that passed for state politics back in New Jersey.
But this morning, Kean was mad, maybe as mad as he had ever been in his public life. And he worried that he was about to lose his temper in front of the president. He hoped that his warning call to Andy Card the night before had done some good. Kean knew that if Bush moved to rein in Ashcroft and his “gang” and tamp down the furor, it might put an end to the smears before they did lasting damage to Jamie Gorelick—and to the commission. Kean thought that beyond worries about her reputation, there was legitimate reason to fear for Gorelick’s safety. The death threats had not stopped.
Kean and the other nine members of the September 11 commission had arrived at the White House early that morning and were required, like most other visitors, to pass through security checkpoints; they were swept by metal detectors for weapons. They were met by White House lawyers working for Alberto Gonzales who escorted the commissioners to the windowless Roosevelt Room, which often served as the holding room for visitors before they were invited into the Oval Office.
Kean and Lee Hamilton had been invited to spend a few minutes with President Bush privately before the rest of the commissioners were brought into the Oval Office; White House aides originally hoped a few minutes of small talk between Bush and Kean, who barely knew each other, would establish a friendlier tone for the larger meeting.
But Kean had no appetite for small talk. He and Hamilton had an agenda for his private session with Bush. They wanted to talk to him about Ashcroft, about the need for the president to put an end to the attorney general’s campaign against Gorelick. Kean believed that if Bush did not do something that morning about the attorney general, things might quickly turn ugly when the other commissioners arrived in the Oval Office. It was a remarkable thing to ask a president to denounce a member of his cabinet. But Kean feared the meeting might otherwise be a disaster, both for the president and for the commission.
UNTIL THE worrying phone call from Kean the night before, Andy Card had been convinced that the Oval Office meeting would go well. He and others in the White House seemed confident that Bush, who had been in briefing sessions for days to prepare for the meeting, could deal with the commission’s questions about 9/11, no matter how tough.
Card knew that in small settings, in private meetings, Bush always defied his critics’ lowered expectations; the president invariably proved himself more thoughtful and articulate behind closed doors than his mangled public appearances would suggest. Card had mostly given up trying to defend Bush’s awkward performance on the public stage—the president’s ever garbled speech, his inappropriate smirks. Bush was just not like that in private, especially in the Oval Office, Card knew. Democrats who met privately with Bush acknowledged it, too.
Even after so many years in public office, maybe Bush still suffered something like stage fright when out in public, aides thought. Card knew the 9/11 commissioners were about to be impressed when they met George Bush in the privacy of the Oval Office. “He’s an excellent conversationalist,” Card said. “He likes to have conversations rather than performances—without cameras.”
THE DOOR opened to the Oval Office, and Kean took a deep breath, readying himself to confront the president.
“Governor, please come on in,” Bush said. “Congressman Hamilton, welcome.”
The president shook his visitors’ hands and thanked them for coming.
And then it happened. Without any prompting from Kean and Hamilton, the president apologized for the actions of his attorney general.
“I didn’t approve of this,” he said of Ashcroft’s attacks on Gorelick. “I don’t approve of this.” Bush had clearly been well briefed by Card on the need for an effusive apology early in the meeting.
Bush referred to what had happened the night before. He told Kean and Hamilton that it had been unfair for Ashcroft to post the Gorelick memos on the Justice Department’s website before the documents had been shared with the commission. “That sort of behavior will stop,” he pledged.
Kean took another deep breath. He could feel the tension rush out of the Oval Office.
CARD HAD seen it happen so often. Visitors to the White House were invited into the Oval Office and melted at the simple thrill of being there. Hostilities tended to evaporate at the door. It went beyond the normal clichés about the corridors of power; the Oval Office awed and intimidated in equal measure. Card liked to say that “the Oval Office has a way of putting oil on foaming seas.” Its magic was clearly working on Kean and Hamilton, who were relieved by Bush’s apology and were clearly overwhelmed by the president’s hospitality. Card assumed the room would work its magic on the other commissioners as well.
As the others walked in, Bush demonstrated once again just how well he had readied himself for the meeting. Clinton and Bush had the same technique in disarming potential adversaries. Bush welcomed each of the other eight commissioners by their first names, Democrats and Republicans alike, as if they were old friends, when in fact he had never
met most of them before. He complimented John Lehman on his tie as the former navy secretary entered the office. As he had with Clinton, Lehman felt himself in the presence of a natural politician who knew how to convert a stranger into an ally. “He looked everybody in the eye,” Lehman recalled. “It was all first name.”
Bush was joined in the Oval Office by Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales. The White House had insisted that the president and vice president be interviewed together by the commission. It was an obvious effort, most of the commissioners assumed, to ensure that the accounts of Bush and Cheney did not differ on the events of 9/11. The commission did not protest the arrangements, even as they became fodder for late night television comics and editorial cartoonists who pictured Cheney as the president’s ventriloquist, with Bush propped up in his lap.
Bush and Cheney took their seats in high-backed chairs in front of the fireplace, with the commissioners on couches and chairs in a semicircle around the president and vice president. Gonzales sat in the background. The Oval Office was at its best. It was a spectacular spring day. The room was bathed in brilliant morning sunlight from the southerly windows, with a view beyond them to the Washington Monument and the National Mall.
Then Bush sealed the deal with the commission: He repeated to all ten commissioners what he had just told Kean and Hamilton about Ashcroft.
He turned to Jamie Gorelick and said he wanted to apologize for the actions of the attorney general, especially the release of the Justice Department memos the night before.
“Jamie, this shouldn’t have happened,” he said, repeating that the White House had known nothing about Ashcroft’s decision to release the documents the night before; Ashcroft had made these mistakes on his own.
Slade Gorton turned to Gorelick and could see the relief on her face; Bush seemed to have defused a political fight that, for her, had turned into a personal crisis. “It blew her away,” Gorton said.
Bush’s apology to Gorelick was reported to the White House press corps later in the day. Bush dispatched Scott McClellan, his press secretary, to slap down the attorney general at the midday press briefing. McClellan said that Bush was “disappointed” with what Ashcroft had done and that the president’s frustration had been relayed to the Justice Department. “The president does not believe we ought to be pointing fingers,” McClellan said. “We ought to be working together to help the commission complete its work.”
AS HE sat in the Oval Office, Gorton marveled at the masterful performance of Bush and his staff. Bush’s apology to Gorelick had really cost him nothing—it was clear there was never much of a personal relationship between Bush and his attorney general—and it had all but guaranteed that the meeting would go well for the president.
“They knew exactly how to do this,” said Gorton. “They had us in the Oval Office, and they really pulled the talons and the teeth out of many of the Democratic questions.” Both the Republicans and the Democrats went easy on Bush, Gorton said; it was three hours of softballs, mostly. “Several of my colleagues were not nearly as tough in the White House as they were when we went in that day.”
Kean and Hamilton led the questioning at the start. Many of the early questions focused on the detailed timeline of Bush’s actions on the morning of the attacks. The president repeated what he had said so many times in the past: that the intelligence in the spring and summer of 2001 had not suggested a terrorist attack on American soil, that the August 6 PDB gave him nothing to act on, that he had not rushed out of the Florida schoolhouse after learning of the attacks that morning because he did not want to panic the kids. He said he had grown used to the grim jokes about My Pet Goat, the children’s book he had continued to page through before cameras even after he had been told of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Despite all the speculation that Cheney might feed answers to Bush, the vice president said little in the interview, answering questions only when they were directed at him specifically or when Bush turned a question to him. “There was no puppeteering by the vice president,” Gorelick remembered. “He barely said anything.”
When Kean and Hamilton were finished, the other commissioners were allotted ten minutes each for their own questions for Bush.
John Lehman thought that he asked some of the tougher questions of Bush during the session, especially about the possibility of Saudi government ties to some of the hijackers. Lehman recalled asking Bush about the news reports that checks for thousands of dollars written by the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, might have been funneled to two of the hijackers in San Diego. “He dodged the questions,” said Lehman.
When Tim Roemer’s questioning started to go beyond his allotted ten minutes, Kean interrupted, reminding Roemer of the time limit. But Bush cut off Kean, turning to Roemer.
“This is the Oval Office, I make the rules,” the president said. “Tim, go on to your next question.” Roemer, who would have been expected to be one of the toughest Democratic questioners at the meeting, was charmed by Bush, too.
The commissioners had gone into the room assuming that the meeting would not last much more than about ninety minutes, the time limit suggested informally by Gonzales’s office. They did not know that the White House had made a decision in advance to allow the meeting to go on until the commissioners had run out of questions. It would allow Bush to say truthfully on the campaign trail that he had answered every question posed to him by the 9/11 commission. The president’s schedule had quietly been cleared for the first half of the day.
The open-ended schedule ended up doing public relations damage to the commission, since the meeting went on past noon, when Hamilton and Bob Kerrey had other long-scheduled appointments across town and had to excuse themselves. Hamilton was scheduled to introduce the prime minister of Canada at a luncheon speech. Several conservative news organizations seized on the idea that Hamilton and Kerrey had snubbed the president after they were seen leaving early from the White House. The headline on the front page of the New York Post reveled in alliteration: DEM DUO DISSES DUBYA IN OVAL OFFICE WALKOUT.
The meeting, which had seemed to be such a risk for Bush, was an unalloyed victory for the president. After it was over, Bush called reporters into the Oval Office to savor the moment.
“I’m glad I took the time,” he said. “This is an important commission, and it’s important they asked the questions they asked so that they can help make recommendations necessary to protect our homeland.” That afternoon, the commission put out a statement praising Bush and Cheney for having been so “forthcoming and candid.”
Card went up to Bush afterward to ask him how the meeting had gone.
“You know,” Bush said, “it was kind of fun.”
49
THE NEW SCHOOL
New York, N.Y.
MAY 18, 2004
BUNKER BARBS STING HIZZONER (New York Daily News, JUNE 16, 1998)
BUNKER MENTALITY—RUDY’S AND SADDAM’S (Daily News, JUNE 17, 1998)
GIULIANI’S SKY BUNKER (New York Post, JUNE 8, 1999)
The headline writers in the New York tabloids were merciless in 1998 after it was revealed that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was building a forty-six-thousand-square-foot high-tech emergency command center for himself and his top aides. “The Bunker,” as the tabloids dubbed it, seemed the supreme example of how Giuliani’s ego and arrogance knew no bounds after four years in office. “Has Rudy finally gone too far?” New York magazine asked on its cover after the once secret plans for the construction of the command center leaked out. WABC Radio mocked Giuliani with a name-that-bunker contest for its listeners. Among the most popular entries: “Rudy’s Nuclear Winter Palace” and “The Nut Shell.”
While much of the criticism focused on the $15 million cost of the command center, almost as much was directed at its planned location. It was being built in, of all places, the World Trade Center complex, site of a terrorist bombing only five years earlier and almost certainly still on top of the list
of likely terrorist targets in the city. Giuliani had rejected proposals that he place the command center across the East River in Brooklyn or Queens, where it might be less of a target. He wanted it in Manhattan and thought he had found the perfect location in a building in the World Trade Center complex known as WTC 7. It was close to City Hall and across Vesey Street from the Twin Towers. While “bunker” suggested an underground compound, this would be “the bunker in the sky”—on the twenty-third floor, with panoramic views out onto lower Manhattan.
Even if the mayor could not be talked out of putting the command center in Manhattan, some of his deputies tried to convince Giuliani that it was a mistake to put it on such a high floor of the building. What if the electricity went out and the elevators stopped working? What if there was a fire or a water shutoff? Giuliani’s former director of emergency operations, Richard Sheirer, told the 9/11 commission that he had thought the command center should have been placed in a “hardened” site much closer to the ground.
“I did not agree with it simply because it was on the twenty-third floor of a building,” the severely overweight Sheirer deadpanned in his testimony to the commission. “Do I look like a guy who wants to walk up twenty-three flights?”
So what happened on September 11 was all too predictable. Giuliani never managed to get to the command center in the chaos of the attacks that morning. By about 9:30 a.m., before either of the Twin Towers collapsed, everyone in the command center was ordered to evacuate to the street because of fears that more hijacked airplanes were heading for Manhattan. The crisis center was shut down because there was a crisis. In a final bit of irony, it was determined that a fire that later destroyed WTC 7 on September 11 was probably caused by the rupture of the building’s special diesel fuel tanks; the tanks had been installed to provide emergency power to the mayor’s command center.
The Commission Page 40
