Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Most memorably, on the third night of the convention, Georgia senator Zell Miller, a renegade Democrat, challenged our anchorman, Chris Matthews, to a duel. Fortunately, the senator was at Madison Square Garden, where he’d just delivered the keynote address for the Republicans, and was presumably unarmed. We were several blocks away at Herald Square. The televised exchange, over the senator’s attacks on Kerry’s past support for defense cuts, escalated quickly when Miller said, “Get out of my face. If you’re going to ask me a question, step back and let me answer. I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.”

  The crowd surrounding the set was part of the problem, alternately booing and cheering so that Miller couldn’t quite be sure what he was hearing. Sitting just to Chris’s left, I tried to quiet the audience, but that seemed only to make them yell more loudly. Chris tried to persuade Miller to come over so they could continue the debate face-to-face. Miller refused, but Jon Meacham, our panelist from Newsweek, pointed out that Miller had already made history. He’d issued the first threat to kill in presidential politics since Andrew Jackson threatened to shoot Henry Clay and hang John C. Calhoun.

  The campaign was probably more passionate than any since 1972 because it was playing out against a backdrop of escalating violence in Iraq. How did a lightning-quick war turn into what some feared was becoming a nightmare occupation? Critics said there were several key mistakes, despite plenty of warning. One issue was too few troops. A month before the war, then Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress it would take several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in Iraq. Instead, the Pentagon planned a postwar occupation with only 110,000 forces, not enough to prevent widespread looting or a wider insurgency. For that, Shinseki was humiliated by the Pentagon’s civilian leaders and driven to retire early.

  The second issue was the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Coalition leader Paul Bremer had let Iraqi soldiers go home with their weapons, instead of using them to create a new security force. Before the war, former general Anthony Zinni had told Congress the United States would need five thousand police trainers. But top Pentagon officials ignored that recommendation, as well as many others, from a prewar State Department report that filled thirteen volumes.

  The White House insisted that the media were overlooking the good things that were happening in Iraq: schools were reopening, oil was being exported, Saddam Hussein’s old currency was replaced without a hitch by a new monetary system. But the threat of attack made it almost impossible for foreign journalists to risk roaming far enough to cover those “human interest” stories. And the security situation was so perilous for civilian contractors that a year after the occupation, the American-led coalition and its Iraqi partners had spent barely a fraction of the $18 billion Congress had appropriated for reconstruction. The United States was still bearing 90 percent of the costs, taking most of the risks, and suffering almost all the casualties.

  Earlier in the 2004 campaign, anger over the war among Democratic activists, as well as innovative Internet organizing and fund-raising, had briefly propelled Vermont’s former governor, Howard Dean, into the front ranks of presidential candidates. Seven weeks before the first caucus voters would even vote in Iowa, Al Gore had stunned the political world by endorsing Dean. Gore hadn’t even given a heads-up to Joe Lieberman, his former running mate, who was also seeking the nomination, albeit from the back of the pack. At the time, Dean looked formidable with his double-digit lead over John Kerry in New Hampshire. Democratic campaign activist Donna Brazile underscored this, telling us, “Howard Dean is on his way to winning the Democratic nomination.”

  At the time, John Kerry’s aides were fairly confident that they would win Iowa. They had poured in money and volunteers, and campaign advisor Bob Shrum had sharpened the message and shortened Kerry’s speeches. The crowds were building, and Kerry was connecting. Through sheer luck, the campaign also picked up an emotional endorsement from Jim Rassmann, whose life Kerry had saved in Vietnam. Kerry’s other advantage was that Dean was making mistakes, and his campaign began collapsing. As Newsweek later reported, Dean’s iconoclastic campaign manager, Joe Trippi, was by then more committed to the cyberspace movement he’d invented than to Dean’s candidacy.

  On caucus night, Kerry trounced Dean and Dick Gephardt, the presumed Iowa front-runners. John Edwards came in second. Dean’s “primal scream” to rally his troops was so bizarre—and the media response so negative—that his campaign was virtually over.

  With the administration struggling in Iraq, Democrats wanted a candidate with foreign policy credentials and military experience. At the time, they thought that this campaign would be the first since 1972 to focus on war and peace, not the economy. Who better to lead the party than a decorated Vietnam veteran like Kerry, with decades of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? One week later, Kerry won New Hampshire, as well.

  I’d been covering prewar planning, the search for weapons of mass destruction, the investigation into 9/11—all issues that were now front and center in the presidential race. With so much focus on the war, there were half a dozen investigations examining prewar intelligence. By then, no weapons stockpiles had been found and the search wasn’t likely to produce any. In fact, the administration had been forced to shift resources from the CIA’s weapons hunt to the more pressing problem of fighting the insurgency.

  On January 28, five days before the Democrats would hold primaries in seven states, there was a shocking declaration from the head of the CIA weapons search, David Kay. The prewar intelligence had been wrong. Iraq had not had large stocks of weapons of mass destruction. Had the administration misled the world, or was the rhetoric before the war the result of poor intelligence? And why had we in the media failed to uncover the real facts before the U.S. invaded?

  To better understand what went wrong, it is instructive to look at the role of David Kay. He had spent years disarming Iraq for the UN after the first Gulf War, and then, partly on my recommendation, had become NBC’s weapons analyst before this war. In that role, his confidence that Saddam was hiding weapons had helped shape my reporting. Then, in June 2003, Kay left NBC to return to Iraq, this time for the CIA. At first, he believed they would find clues to the whereabouts of the weapons by interviewing Iraqi scientists and translating thousands of pages of documents now available to them. Instead, a very different picture emerged. Some of the scientists claimed they themselves had exaggerated their progress toward developing illegal weapons to placate Saddam. Others suggested it was all an elaborate sting by Saddam to fool his neighbors into thinking he was more dangerous than he was—in a sense, a ruse like the secret plan of some Reagan advisors to persuade the Soviets that the United States was building strategic defense systems against their missiles, long before a program had even been designed.

  Whatever the truth, Kay now delivered a searing indictment of prewar weapons analysis. He told the Senate, “We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.” Saddam Hussein had not deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons, did not have biological laboratories, and had not reconstituted a full-blown nuclear program. I had to count myself among those who had thought the logic of Saddam’s behavior indicated he likely did have weapons.

  Even if the world was better without Saddam Hussein, Kay’s bold testimony destroyed the administration’s original justification for the invasion. And if U.S. intelligence couldn’t be trusted, how could the president pursue a policy of preemptive action under his Bush doctrine? That night, in an interview for my report on Nightly News, former defense secretary Bill Cohen asked, “Were there any qualifications to the assumptions (about the intelligence)? Did those get airbrushed out of existence over a period of time so that the statements became much more categorical and self-confident?”

  It had been a year since Colin Powell, with George Tenet right behind him, had firmly described Iraq’s weapons to the Security Council. Repeatedly, I have asked myself
then, and since, whether we ascribed too much credibility to both Powell and Tenet because of their prior reputations for independent thinking and their relationships with many of us in the media. While I used the conventional journalistic caveats to distance myself from their conclusions, and sought out the French foreign minister and others for alternate points of view, phrases did creep in to my reports—“Powell’s powerful presentation to the Security Council”—that sounded like an endorsement of the secretary’s weapons argument. Again, I relied on sources, not only David Kay, but other former weapons inspectors and dissidents within the State Department, to test the official assumptions. This was a case, however, where the established wisdom overshadowed the critics.

  Now, a year later, Tenet tried to explain to Congress what had gone wrong. Under a hail of questions from the Senate, the CIA chief snapped, “We’re not perfect. But we’re pretty damn good at what we do and we care as much as you do about Iraq and whether we were right or wrong, and we’re going to work through it in a way where we tell the truth as to whether we were right or wrong.”

  This was no explanation, and as we now know, there had been plenty of prewar hype. In October of 2002, a classified CIA paper said Saddam was “capable of quickly producing and weaponizing” >anthrax and delivering it by “bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives.” The agency’s public, unclassified version was even more alarming. In it, the CIA added that Iraq could also use the anthrax “against the U.S. homeland” even though air force experts told the CIA that was unlikely. At the same time, the president and Condoleezza Rice also warned ominously about the need to prevent a “mushroom cloud.” And Donald Rumsfeld said, “There is no doubt in my mind that he has weapons, chemical and biological weapons, and has been working on nuclear weapons.”

  Now, after the postinvasion search provided scant evidence of an ongoing Iraqi weapons program, the president started backing off. Suddenly, Saddam was only a “gathering” threat. With the administration already under attack, the Abu Ghraib scandal made a bad situation even worse for America’s credibility abroad, especially in the Arab world. Both 60 Minutes II on CBS and Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker got the horrific details. The press, demanding that someone be held accountable, was running wild with stories that Rumsfeld was going to be fired. I doubted it. Alan and I had been invited to a small dinner at the Rumsfelds’ to take place two days after the prison abuse story had broken. When we arrived, quite late because of my Nightly News duties, there was a motorcade idling outside. Inside, George Bush’s presence was a silent signal that Rummy was still his man.

  John Kerry was positioned perfectly to capitalize on the administration’s troubles. Yet even with the White House on the defensive over both the failure to find weapons and the prison scandal, Kerry could not seem to turn the president’s policy errors to his advantage. On March 16, the democrat was in West Virginia when a heckler pressed him on why he had opposed funding for the troops. Kerry lapsed into Senate-speak, saying, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” He was referring to legislative procedures in which several votes are taken before an issue is decided. But in the process, he had given the Bush team the ammunition it needed to reinvent Kerry as a flip-flopper who was “soft” on defense. It was the political equivalent of friendly fire, a moment as self-destructive as when Michael Dukakis climbed into that M1 tank in 1988.

  Months later, Kerry was still sending mixed signals when he tried to explain his vote against the spending bill and for the war. During an ill-fated photo opportunity in the Grand Canyon, he was asked if he’d still vote for the war, knowing what he knew now. Ceding the antiwar position he’d tried to stake out, he said, “Yes. I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.” It was an honest answer, but far too nuanced for that stage of the campaign. Now he was committed to supporting the war and the president, whatever his reservations might be. Clearly, it was a turning point for the campaign, although his advisors may not have realized it at the time.

  I’ve long thought that both candidates were much too sheltered from the give-and-take of press questions. In an April press conference, the president seemed petulant, refusing to concede mistakes. It didn’t hurt him in the polls—in fact, his stubbornness may have been an asset with the voters—but it was the same impulse to appear smug and impatient that hurt him later in the first debate. Bush had had fewer press conferences than any of his recent predecessors except Ronald Reagan. But Kerry also avoided the national press. For a senator who had made his reputation mixing it up with reporters every day, it was an odd retreat, and one that hurt him as a candidate. When you’re used to daily combat, as Bill Clinton was during his 1992 campaign, it prepares you mentally for anything the opposition can throw at you.

  The Kerry camp was painfully disorganized, but drew false confidence from the many problems the White House was experiencing. The war was going badly, and even Republicans in Congress were openly critical of the administration. When the Senate Intelligence Committee finally produced a major report on prewar intelligence, only weeks before the Democratic convention, the verdict was unanimous. The Republican-led panel called it a colossal failure. President Bush had gone to war on false assumptions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. And, despite repeated and recent suggestions by the administration, the report found no formal terror connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Republicans discounted any political pressure on the CIA, but in a strong dissent, Jay Rockefeller, the group’s top Democrat, said, “A veteran of many years there said that the hammering on (CIA) analysts was greater than he had seen in his thirty-two years of service.”

  In June, George Tenet announced that he was resigning. I had known George as a Senate staff member and a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. He had always been a straight shooter and I couldn’t fathom how this had happened on his watch. I also felt that he and the agency were not getting credit for their considerable accomplishments in Afghanistan. There, CIA special operations forces had laid the groundwork for the invasion. Tenet’s mentors, some from his years in the Senate, warned him that he should quit immediately after the Afghan success, before the Iraq invasion. But George had become obsessed with achieving the one major goal that had eluded him for years: finding Osama bin Laden.

  For seven years, ever since he’d taken over the agency, Tenet had gone to bed every night worrying about what he didn’t know. Since 9/11, he was surprised each morning that he’d gotten through one more day without America coming under another attack. He had come a long way from waiting tables at his parents’ diner in Queens, and had wanted desperately to capture the top al Qaeda leader. That was not to be, and now seven proud years of service were ending badly.

  The day after Tenet’s departure, the administration started a counteroffensive against the scorching Senate report. Appearing at a Tennessee weapons lab in front of a display of nuclear equipment retrieved from Libya, the president said, “I had a choice to make. Either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time.”

  Of course, the White House was setting up a false choice, but it was an effective political tactic. At the same time, Condi Rice went on cable networks, saying, “We did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein.” The implication was that if you criticized the White House, you had to be supporting Saddam (whom the president had called a madman that same day). And, in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the vice president accused Kerry of developing a “convenient case of campaign amnesia” by forgetting that he had voted for the war. Kerry rose to the bait, replying, “The United States of America should never go to war because we want to. We only go to war because we have to.” The problem was, of course, that he had voted to authorize the use of force.

  In a dramatic courtroom drama that July, we saw Saddam for the first time since he had been dragged out of his spider hole. He appeared before a Baghdad
judge shortly after eight-thirty a.m. eastern time, right in the middle of the Today show. The former dictator was gaunt, but defiant. When the judge asked him his name, he drew himself up and proclaimed, “I am Saddam Hussein al-Majid, the President of the Republic of Iraq.” He challenged the judge’s credentials even to hear the case, and demanded immunity. Ridiculing the tribunal, he told the court, “Everyone knows this is theater by Bush, the criminal, in an attempt to win the election.” The hearing, similar to an arraignment in this country, lasted only twenty-six minutes.

  Seeing and hearing the former dictator for the first time since his capture was electrifying television, but somehow, through a combination of errors, NBC was late in putting Saddam’s hearing on the air, and the people involved were embarrassed. NBC needed to erase the bad publicity quickly with a win. That is when I decided we had to break the next big story, John Kerry’s choice of a running mate.

  Kerry would be making his decision within a few days and announcing it in the morning, when the Today show was on the air. Every newspaper, magazine, and television network was chasing the story. I was determined that we would find out first and give the Today crew some bragging rights.

  Kerry knew that in an election as close as the 2004 contest, he needed to find someone who would give him a competitive advantage. Only one person was a big enough political celebrity to meet that standard: John McCain. For weeks, Kerry had been courting McCain, even to the point of offering him a bigger portfolio—he could be vice president and defense secretary at the same time, running the Pentagon and foreign policy.

  It was an impossible sale, largely because, despite their past disputes, McCain believed George Bush was a better war president, and likely wanted to prove his party loyalty by campaigning for Bush in order to run himself in four years. He also knew Kerry would have a difficult time turning over foreign policy to his vice president, no matter what had been promised. A similar proposal had been floated once before, in 1980, when Ronald Reagan briefly flirted with the idea of making former president Gerald Ford his vice president and virtual “copresident” on a fusion ticket. Alan and Henry Kissinger had played a part in those negotiations, but in the end, both Reagan and Ford balked.