Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  She explained that the girls wore Western dress in the United States, but changed into traditional Saudi attire on the plane before they arrived home. Did she ever resent the way women were treated in her society? Not at all, she said. In fact, she viewed the veil as a way to protect her identity from the intrusion of men’s scrutiny. It made her feel more, not less, independent. But how could she see, with her face fully covered? We were so curious, she suggested we try it ourselves.

  Ringing a silver bell, she gave a servant some orders in Arabic, and promptly the woman returned with a silver tray carrying several black veils. Soon King Faisal’s daughter was expertly draping veils over Lynne Cheney, Sydney Duberstein, and me. Much to our astonishment, you could actually see through the diaphanous layers. Whether that is the way we wanted to see the world was another issue.

  As the months progressed, we learned that Cheney’s mission had been very successful in persuading reluctant Gulf leaders, including the Saudis, to permit U.S. forces to pre-position troops in their countries. The United States began a massive expansion of air bases, some secret, into the region. It became very clear that the administration was going to war. But shockingly, after a decade of spending a trillion dollars on defense, the United States was not prepared. The military had been training to fight in the desert but was buying weapons to fight the Cold War. Instead of building fast ships to move troops and equipment to the Persian Gulf, the navy had spent billions on Trident submarines and warships. As a result, the U.S. deployment took months to accomplish, and had to be synchronized with painstaking diplomatic maneuvering. To antiwar critics, the diplomacy was all for show, a delaying tactic until the troops were positioned.

  In what now sounds like a preview of more recent history, on December 3, 1990, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that they disagreed with a parade of former officials who felt sanctions could work against Iraq if given more time. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing I covered for Nightly News, Cheney testified, “While we wait for sanctions to work, Saddam Hussein continues to obliterate any trace of Kuwait and her people.”

  Cheney added, perhaps prophetically, “It’s far better for us to deal with him (Saddam) now, than it will be for us to deal with him five or ten years from now.”

  Sam Nunn, then the committee chairman, tried to make the case for sanctions: “If we have a war, we’re never going to know whether they would have worked, are we?”

  Cheney also upset some senators by suggesting that the president could commit combat troops without asking Congress to declare war, reviving a longstanding separation-of-powers dispute between the executive and legislative branches that recurs no matter which party controls the White House and which is running Congress. But Powell, now thought of as a dove in the war councils of the second President Bush, had the most hawkish line of the day. When the administration witnesses promised Congress that they were using diplomacy and the threat of force—both carrots and sticks—the senators asked, where is the carrot?

  “The carrot,” said General Powell, “is that we won’t use the stick.”

  The argument over which branch of government could declare war moved swiftly over the next days and weeks to what threatened to be a constitutional showdown. In one hearing, Senator Pat Moynihan, the Senate’s premier historian and scholar, asked Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara whether the administration was correct when it claimed that the president could send “young kids” into battle without Congress’s approval.

  Still debating his Vietnam record with himself, McNamara said, “I do not believe any single human being should take this nation to war by his own decision, and that includes the president.”

  At that point, America had gone into battle two hundred times, only five times with formal congressional declarations of war. But many in Congress were insisting on their constitutional prerogative. As the 102nd Congress convened in January, the president quickly announced what sounded like a peace initiative: Secretary of State James Baker would meet with Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, in Geneva. Democratic leaders, Tom Foley in the House and George Mitchell in the Senate, delayed a war debate until Baker had time to complete his mission. Democratic doves turned on their leaders, demanding a more forceful challenge to the president.

  As the administration expected, Baker’s ultimatum to Tariq Aziz failed to win concessions from Iraq. I packed for the Gulf, with mixed emotions. We were told to prepare for chemical or biological attacks. Everyone assumed it would be a long, bloody engagement. By then, Alan and I were living together, quietly. I didn’t want to be away from him for such a long time, but as always, my domestic instincts were fighting my hunger for adventure. It was also a career challenge: I wanted to be on the front lines of whatever was the most important breaking news of the day. But before I could leave, I had to cover the final chapter of Congress’s challenge to the president’s march toward war.

  On January 12, a Saturday, the Senate held a rare weekend debate on war and peace, a debate that remains one of the most elevated in recent memory. All of us, reporters and senators alike, knew we were witnessing an historic battle of ideas. In fact, reputations are still being made and lost over how aspiring politicians performed on that day. Al Gore, for example, was alleged to have switched his vote in exchange for an offer from the Republicans of more speaking time in the floor debate. Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming claimed that Gore arrived at the Senate that day with two speeches in hand, one for the Democrats, and one for the Republicans, and that he only voted for the resolution to use force in the Gulf because the Republicans were going to give him a prime slot for his speech. Gore has repeatedly denied the charge.

  Senator Sam Nunn was once again the most compelling voice against George Bush on behalf of the Democrats, as he had been during the Tower nomination debate. Interestingly, John Kerry voted against the war, a vote that critics in the 2004 presidential campaign cited as evidence of his inconsistency. But he was not alone among senators deeply immersed in foreign policy: Robert Byrd, Sam Nunn, George Mitchell, and Joe Biden all took the same position. The final vote approving the war resolution was 250 to 183 in the House and 52 to 47 in the Senate.

  I booked my flights for the following Friday, headed for the U.S. command post in Saudi Arabia. But then the French launched a last-minute peace initiative, hoping to win concessions from both sides before a UN deadline for negotiations expired later that week. NBC ordered me to stay in Washington long enough to cover the diplomatic maneuvering. It was a fateful decision. At seven p.m. eastern standard time, on January 16, the United States and its allies attacked Baghdad. Outside of the U.S. government, only CNN, with its intrepid correspondents in Baghdad, led by Bernard Shaw, knew it. We were all on standby, speed-dialing our sources, trying to confirm what we were watching on cable news. Knowing that the White House would have to notify congressional leaders, I called them all, repeatedly. Speaker of the House Tom Foley was out, I later learned, buying shirts at Brooks Brothers when he got the White House call. With a striking lack of creativity, the prearranged code Jim Baker used to alert Senator Jesse Helms and others not on secure telephones was, “The balloon is up.”

  Minutes later, we were able to confirm that the battle for Iraq had begun. But most phone lines in Baghdad, except for CNN’s, went down, and most correspondents were out of communication anyway, in a basement bomb shelter. The night belonged to CNN. For seventeen hours, they reported by telephone, vividly describing the American bombardment of Baghdad from where they were holed up in the Rashid Hotel. In The Washington Post the next day, Tom Shales wrote that the ultimate compliment to CNN was Tom Brokaw interviewing Bernie Shaw live by phone and praising his team’s enterprise and bravery. Brokaw told our viewers, “CNN used to be called the little network that could. It’s no longer a little network.”

  Watching Shaw and the others, I wished I’d had the guts to force my way at least to the American theater of operat
ions before the war started. I thought I’d still get there before the war was over. But fortunately for our forces, if not my war correspondent ambitions, it all ended quickly; Iraq surrendered in six weeks. People assumed that there would be enormous casualties. No one, not even the administration, anticipated how rapidly the war would progress. Most commentators and U.S. officials figured that Saddam would make greater use of his Scud missiles, especially against Israel. Few thought his air force wouldn’t even get off the ground. Our expectations, as opposed to the reality, of Saddam’s conduct of war became a dress rehearsal for what we experienced in later confrontations with him, under both Presidents Clinton and Bush.

  In retrospect, our later misjudgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were also rooted in what we learned from the first Gulf War and its aftermath. After the UN inspectors got into Iraq in 1991, we learned for the first time that Saddam had come dangerously close to developing an active nuclear weapons program and was surprisingly advanced in his manufacture of chemical and biological weapons. In fact, it took four more years, until his sons-in-law defected, for the UN inspectors to discover the full extent of his secret biological program. That critical lapse in the inspections program had a lasting impact on several of the key figures from the first Gulf War, notably Dick Cheney, who would be making crucial decisions a decade later.

  It led to much of the faulty analysis that convinced the second Bush administration once again to invade Iraq. At the time, it could have seemed reasonable: if Saddam was so expert at evading international sanctions, and had not fully accounted for the weapons he’d stockpiled before the first Gulf War, what did he produce during the four and a half years when the inspectors were out of the country, from 1998 to 2002? How could anyone be sure he didn’t still have an active weapons program? Their assumptions caused the Bush policy makers to discount warnings from UN weapons inspectors who were arguing for more time to assess the evidence of Saddam’s weapons program.

  At the end of the first Gulf War, however, few people questioned the decision to stop short of Baghdad. Dick Cheney and Colin Powell told us that occupying Iraq would saddle America with the burden of running it. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft cautioned that Iraq had been patched together by the British to start with and would likely spin apart into three ethnic divisions without Saddam Hussein. All of this sounded sensible. Why spoil a good military victory with the burdens of occupation?

  Most of us predicted that George Bush, enjoying stratospheric postwar favorability ratings, would coast to reelection. But the glory faded quickly, and we were late to capture the brewing discontent across America, as more and more people felt alienated by the stagnant economy and loss of opportunities. As Americans turned inward, away from foreign policy and toward domestic concerns, there was also an awakening of anger about civil rights and women’s issues. Bush administration policies on abortion, gun control, and race widened the growing gender gap between Democrat and Republican.

  All of these forces came to a dramatic crescendo in the Clarence Thomas hearings, a historic confrontation that crossed the divide between the political and the personal in ways never before contemplated. For the first time, America was debating racial and sexual stereotypes rarely, if ever, acknowledged, even in private. It was a bizarre dramatization at the intersection of public policy and soap opera, with testimony so shocking we didn’t know how to put it properly into any known context.

  As people watched our live coverage, they separated along lines that superseded partisan loyalties: men and women, employer and employee, husband and wife. Individual reactions depended on whether a woman had ever experienced harassment herself—and how many hadn’t?—and whether a man identified with Thomas’s dilemma. Add to all that the powerful racial component, which in many people aroused additional feelings of guilt and shame.

  This unusual national debate was triggered by what initially seemed a predictable, if not cynical, political decision. Seeking to improve his record with minorities, President Bush nominated an African-American to the Supreme Court to replace the legendary Thurgood Marshall, who was retiring. Bush’s surprising choice was a federal appeals court judge little known outside judicial circles, and not distinguished for any scholarship, Clarence Thomas. Thomas was being promoted by a group of powerful conservatives active in Republican politics. As the director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Ronald Reagan, he had been one of the most prominent African-American opponents to affirmative action. Despite a relatively thin résumé, Thomas, at best a controversial choice, was described by the president as the best qualified man in the country for the high court.

  At his initial confirmation hearing, Thomas did not impress most senators with the depth of his legal background or judicial wisdom. But politically, Democrats were reluctant to take him on, and the nomination moved forward toward a final Senate vote. Then suddenly everything was thrown into turmoil. An obscure law professor from Oklahoma came forward, reluctantly and belatedly, with startling accusations of sexual harassment. Anita Hill had confided in colleagues and the committee that she had serious concerns about Clarence Thomas’s commitment to equal justice because of his aberrant behavior when she had worked for him from 1981 to 1983, first at the Department of Education, and later at the EEOC.

  Her account was leaked to Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio, and Thomas saw support for his confirmation rapidly evaporate. But he had powerful backers shepherding his confirmation: John Danforth, who had mentored him in the Missouri attorney general’s office; Ken Duberstein, from the Reagan White House, now a lobbyist; and Ricky Silberman, who had worked with Thomas at the EEOC and was the wife of Judge Laurence Silberman, a fellow judge of Thomas’s on the U.S. Court of Appeals. In addition, Clarence Thomas had a great personal story, which Americans love. He had been raised poor in Georgia by his sharecropper grandfather, and had risen via Yale Law School to the highest levels of government.

  But Hill’s charges resonated with women in Congress, which had always been a bastion of male prerogatives. On the day a final vote was scheduled, a handful of completely outnumbered congresswomen, led by Representatives Pat Schroeder and Barbara Boxer, marched on the Senate, challenging the upper chamber to hold a more extensive debate on Clarence Thomas’s nomination, instead of rubber-stamping it. With my camera crews in full chase, the women tried to storm the weekly lunchtime caucus of the Senate Democrats as they discussed whether to reopen hearings so Hill could air her charges. The Democratic senators, outraged at the presence of House members in their midst, blocked their entrance. (The Senate’s only female Democrat at the time, Barbara Mikulski, was clearly outnumbered.) Now there are fourteen women in the Senate, including, notably, Hillary Rodham Clinton. I wonder if she could have turned that small rebellion into something bigger?

  Separately, the women House members, despite having no constitutional role in the process, tied up unrelated legislation in the lower chamber as a further protest. It was mayhem, on both sides of the Capitol. The issue of sexual harassment had struck a nerve in the body politic. Finally, late in the day, the White House caved. Bowing to the inevitable, Thomas’s supporters agreed to postpone a final vote until the charges could be heard and answered.

  I knew and trusted people on both sides of the issue, including Thomas’s principal sponsors, Duberstein and Danforth. Both swore that Thomas was incapable of behaving as Anita Hill described. Opposing them, a phalanx of Washington lawyers and Harvard scholars long active in civil rights law vouched for Anita Hill. Both Thomas and Hill had grown up poor, earned law degrees at Yale, and gone to Washington to make their way. Now their seemingly exemplary lives were going to be picked apart in what we all knew would be a brutal hearing.

  We had no idea how brutal it would be. Anita Hill arrived in Washington under heavy police guard because of telephone threats. It was a mob scene. The stage was set for the hearings to open in the fabled Senate caucus room where the Watergate hearings had been held
. Not since then, nearly two decades earlier, had there been such high drama in the Capitol. The high-ceilinged, columned neoclassical room, lit theatrically for television coverage, was jammed with spectators and reporters. We were covering it all live, all day, preempting the soap operas. The nation was transfixed. The Thomas-Hill hearings were better than the soaps; few people complained about missing Days of Our Lives.

  Thomas appeared first, anguished, nervous, defiant, and categorically denying all charges of sexual harassment. Sitting behind him at the press table, I scribbled notes furiously as he intoned in a deep baritone, “I have been racking my brains and eating my insides out trying to think of what I could have said or done to Anita Hill to lead her to allege that I was interested in her in more than a professional way and that I talked with her about pornographic or X-rated films.”

  Even more forcefully, he added, “Enough is enough. I’m not going to allow myself to be further humiliated in order to be confirmed…. Confirm me if you want. Don’t confirm me if you are so led, but let this process end.”

  I raced out to the Russell Building rotunda to go on the air, trying to summarize a denial almost stunning in its sheer emotional power. How could anyone who’d been so categorical be lying? Or had he so carefully separated his outer and inner selves that he no longer knew the truth? It was a classic case of he said, she said, and as a reporter, I had no way to discern who was telling the truth. My role was to present both sides, analyze the senators’ responses, and put it all within the context of the political outcomes yet to come.

  Anita Hill arrived next, looking young, somewhat fragile, but with a startlingly direct gaze. The contrast between the soft-spoken professor and the outrageous behavior she described was striking. At times, I felt like gasping at the horrific detail, but kept scribbling notes until my wrist was stiff and tired. For seven hours, Hill described how Thomas had allegedly trash-talked about all manner of pornography and bragged about his own sexual prowess. It was unlike anything ever heard in the Capitol or on the broadcast networks. Thomas’s Republican supporters on the Judiciary Committee were initially chastened, but then started falling all over each other to impeach her credibility. During an extraordinary three days of hearings, Orrin Hatch even seized on an excerpt from The Exorcist that sounded similar to one of her charges, to suggest she had been inspired by the book to imagine the entire episode. Strom Thurmond, to the extent anyone could understand his thick drawl, belittled her.