The new president had to assure the world that the United States was fully capable of and prepared to secure the nation, our allies and global freedom. With the whole world listening, he had to describe the measures being taken and the programs being established to “harden” the vulnerable target that America had unbelievably become. Our plans for retaliation and bringing justice to the evildoers had to be front and center. And while he was at it, he needed to comfort a stunned nation that hadn’t been attacked on her own shores for more than a generation. He had to acknowledge the nation’s grief and steel it to move on with resolve.
Speechwriting is always a collaborative undertaking at the White House, but in this case, the OVP, taking on the daunting task of adding flesh and bones and muscle and grit to the President’s emotional speech on the evening of 9/11, had the singular task of contributing most of the Homeland Defense piece of it. Time was short, the situation urgent. And while we had been working on the concept of homeland defense for a few weeks prior to 9/11, we still hadn’t officially consulted with all of the relevant congressional committees, subcommittees, chairmen and ranking members, which meant a multitude of governmental straphangers—who could make or break policy.
There was no time for multiple megameetings with all these people and entities. Not for the first time, I thanked God for the vice president’s and Scooter’s long familiarity and experience in this complex field, because when the rubber hit the road, the president knew he could rely on the vice president. So there we were, the three of us, the VP, Scooter and I, grouped around one desk, scrambling to put the finishing touches on a critical defense and security measure for the president to share with the world.
We went over names of individuals we thought could honcho Homeland Defense. Obviously it had to be a person of experience, credibility, gravitas, maturity, and someone with the right executive skills to know the way stuff works in government. Giuliani was first on our list, even though he was obviously completely taken up with the restoration of his city. We also instantly considered Tom Ridge, but I never thought he’d take the job in a million years; he was a sitting governor of a major state and he had small children at home. Nobody in that situation was likely to pick up and move to Washington, and then have to work 24/7 for who knows how long. But these were pressing times, and good people were called, and they came.
By necessity and philosophy, there was no desire to create a whole new department of government. And it’s no state secret that the vice president was adamantly opposed to it. His guiding principle in life and politics was always “less is more.” A new department would create more problems than it would solve. It would add another layer, take months to pull off, and produce chaos not security.
There were myriad structural and policy shortcomings that led to 9/11 that suddenly had to be corrected overnight—and not just for the purposes of the president’s imminent speech, obviously. There was a whole pre-9/11 mind-set that now had to be overhauled. Intel fiefdoms built up over decades and turf battles seemingly as old as Sparta and Athens had to be wiped out. Permanently, if peace were to reign in the land.
And, if history was any guide, it would be mere moments before the unstoppable force of “politics abhorring a vacuum” would kick in. We needed a central clearinghouse with immediate and unfettered access to the president where disparate pieces of intelligence, offense and defense activities could be synthesized.
The vice president was trying to reconcile opposing strategies. How to find a place where “less is more” meets “weakness invites provocation,” aka “peace through strength”?
During one brainstorming session with the vice president and Scooter Libby, I blurted out my sense that the words homeland defense sounded “kind of pre-9/11.” It was more like a not-crazy conversation with myself than anything else. My mothering instincts rather than my political instincts were trying to get some clarity. We have to telegraph a lot with minimal language, I was thinking. Every word has to count. And I don’t want to feel defensive. I want to feel secure.
The vice president and I had one of our many Jedi mind-meld moments—we were often on the same page without having to spell things out too much. Hence, without further discussion, the name Homeland Security was adopted. In the scheme of all the decisions made that day, that week, that month or year, it is almost too minor a contribution to mention. But I note it here because you’d be shocked how many things—big and small—happen like that, off the cuff, while making policy or history.
Or maybe you wouldn’t.
Being an assistant to the president requires a top-level security clearance, and once you go through all the checks, oaths and such, and you are “cleared”—then you are declared, in the vernacular, “read in.”
Being read in allowed me to see or read the hot, top-secret classified stuff. This level of access came with certain responsibilities, which are very serious and must be respected in all cases. So obviously there are some things I can’t talk about to this day. There are other things I am free to discuss, such as the anthrax vaccination shots I was offered, which would keep the senior White House staff alive, theoretically, if there was an act of bioterrorism involving anthrax. The vaccination series took nine months in all, and was so awful, and hurt so much—you couldn’t move your arms for days after a shot—I decided that I’d rather take my chances and just avoid opening mail. I stopped the regimen.
Another thing I declined, after a couple weeks of exposure, was the opportunity to continue availing myself of the “raw” overnight worldwide intelligence.
Every morning, after the senior staff meeting, I grabbed a cup of bad coffee from the West Wing Mess, crossed over to the OEOB and started my workday locked in the special room inside the office of our national security genius, Eric Edelman, and read these strange dispatches of raw data. At first, the stuff was utterly meaningless to me and I’d have to ask Eric what it meant. Eventually, I started getting a better sense of how to process it. But it was time consuming, and it felt like learning a new language. You didn’t really know what you were hearing or seeing. It was a mosaic of ambiguous information, glimpses of things going on—or possibly going on, you never knew. It was like looking at shadows in a cave. You knew it was a reflection or a rendering of a reality of some kind. But you weren’t sure what you were looking at, except that you knew it was dark and ugly.
Most of the conversations were in code. The bad guys were evil but they weren’t stupid; it didn’t require genius to figure out we were listening.
Even in this obscured form, pure evil was jumping off the pages. All I could think about was the ending of The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, the devil’s discourse against democracy.
The point of this listening exercise was to expose myself to the way the enemy thought, to inform my own thinking for the purpose of being able to communicate the nefarious and dangerous force we were confronting. For the same reasons, I went to in-depth intel briefings on germ warfare and other terrorist tradecraft—which is when I figured out that women are much more obsessed with germs than the many other unthinkable options for mass annihilation.
I don’t even like scary movies. And growing up in the Midwest didn’t exactly prepare me for tunneling inside the minds of America-hating terrorists, so it wasn’t a bad idea in theory. I’d been on the political team for Gulf 1, so I thought I wasn’t a complete newbie in terms of warfare and security threats, but this was different. I had never sat in a room alone before, getting inside the heads of barbaric mass murderers, while at the same time acutely aware of my kids at home, who were possibly not safe in their cozy little beds anymore.
Every morning, after unlocking myself from the special security room, I walked back to my office furious—totally enraged. And after about three weeks, I had to stop completely. I couldn’t spare the time or the emotional energy. It was counterproductive.
Hoping to find a better way—more organized
and less evil—to get informed, I began consuming everything I could about the history and culture of the long-troubled Middle East and increasingly extreme political Islamism. We all had to take every available opportunity to learn more. Karl Rove’s shop set up in-house seminars with military historians and Middle East experts, such as Bernard Lewis and Victor Davis Hanson. I read all their books and more. And, of course, I was at the elbow of the greatest font of historical and practical knowledge, one Richard B. Cheney.
By the time we returned from our walk-up-to-the-war trip, visiting twelve Middle Eastern countries in ten days, I knew more than I wanted to. You don’t go about your day in the same way after you’ve drenched yourself in this kind of stuff. But at the same time, I didn’t want it to change me. I knew there must be a way to do my job well without getting all twisted up inside or corroding my naive, believe-in-the-basic-goodness-of-humanity mind-set for good.
The VP had multiple deep intel briefings every day. Eventually, I knew I could learn everything (and more than I ever wanted to know) from them. Security and conferring with the president about possible threats to the country was the VP’s major task. But unlike the way he’s been portrayed in the media, supposedly cherry-picking intelligence to make a case for invading Iraq, the opposite was true. Cheney was skeptical, more likely than not to disbelieve the chatter—and he spent a lot of time at the various intel agencies at every level, asking questions, following up with the people who were on the front lines gathering the raw intelligence in real time. Because, by the time the intel made its way up the chain of command, it was often diluted and distorted. Cheney knew this firsthand from his experience with the faulty intelligence during the buildup to the first Gulf War. How the raw intelligence is gathered, and by whom, was critical in determining its reliability.
Intelligence isn’t a science. It’s more like guessing how a puzzle is going to look when you have only a fraction of puzzle pieces on the board. Experienced and trained professionals can make amazingly coherent deductions and solid assumptions from disparate and fragmentary pieces of microdata. Decisions and policies have to be made on the basis of these probabilities. There are no surefire strategies. Yes, it is much more than random guessing—and the efforts to verify, augment and refine are ongoing and endless. Still, by necessity, at some point you must go with “guesstimates.” Believe me, no one but no one wants to be wrong about these things. At the same time, there is no certainty. The absurd accusations that we were making these decisions and policies using some political calculus still makes me sick to my stomach. Though I have to confess some gratifying schadenfreude while recently watching President Obama and Secretary Kerry labor and squirm their way through the same stupid accusations they once hurled at us.
JAMES
IN A STRANGE WAY, 9/11 was good for me and Mary too. I hate to say 9/11 was good for anybody, of course, because it was such an awful experience for so many people. But we had been so at odds for so much of the past year, and that terrible event brought us together again. It obliterated a lot of the tension that had been there, hovering in the house for months and months. It gave us perspective.
MARY
EVERYONE YOU CAN TRUST on a campaign or in the White House is a foxhole buddy. You need each other. You’ve got each other’s backs. Focusing on gender is not something you have time to do—or, at least, it’s not something that women do, because it would be way too girly and a huge waste of time. You don’t need to talk, you just get it. Female foxhole buddies get each other’s complicated lives, tethered to the push and pull of the personal versus the professional, and therefore how crucial it is to get stuff done quickly and well without dragging your fat ego into every meeting.
Unlike in real life, women in a high-stress and fast-paced work environment preen and posture less than men do. In the natural order of things, the male species gets to have striking plumage, but since political males are denied any fun colors or cuckoo getups—being restricted to a bland uniform of gray slacks or khakis, navy jacket, button-down shirt and striped rep ties—the only outlet for their unremitting peacock instinct becomes the meeting.
This strikingly male behavior, also known as prolong-the-meeting-so-every-person-of-the-male-persuasion-can-strut-his-stuff, is not peculiar to the political business. It just seems far more pronounced and problematic in government, given the endless nonstop urgency of every minute of every day.
In fairness, the Bush White House was way better than most on this front, owing to the fact that George W. Bush was a meeting speed demon and notoriously disdainful of time wasters.
But in our early White House months, pre-9/11, there was an excruciating number of meetings. We had lost important transition weeks during the recount and had to scramble to set things up. There were meetings about infrastructure, substance, personnel—all critical—but there were far more meetings about what kind of meetings to have and who should/could attend them (really important because if you are not invited to the right meetings, you have no White House whack). Then we had follow-up meetings to make sure something actually got done. And, of course, there were meetings to ensure that credit for getting anything done was assigned appropriately.
I am not being critical. This is simply the law of the political jungle. One giant saving grace was we were all issued brand-new BlackBerries and everyone, including the men, did their real work on them while attending the right meetings. Impressive facility with a BlackBerry is actually the one area where men truly exceed women in multitasking. Karl Rove could work countless devices simultaneously while running a meeting and making lucid, often spot-on points and handing out orders.
Seating is the next all-important pecking-order revealer in a meeting. Some of this is set by protocol—some by habit. But after six months of sorting this out like a pack of dogs, the White House became a well-oiled meeting machine, which everyone assumes is an inborn Republican trait. But then the terrorist attack pushed us to retool again.
On the morning after 9/11, we went back to basics, starting with a roundup of the political girl-squad. For the 101st time, I leaned once again on my friendship with Maria Cino, my old grunt-gal roommate from the Reagan-era days who was, perfectly enough, now the deputy secretary for the Department of Transportation, which gave her dominion over water evacuation in the event of an attack. (I admit that I thought of this immediately, as my family—my girls—lived right on the banks of the Potomac.) Maria was essentially doing for Norman Mineta, the transportation secretary, a version of what I was doing for Cheney. And there was Torie Clarke, another longtime close friend from the Bush 41 days. She was at the Pentagon, doing another version of the same job, as deputy for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
Condi Rice of the Bush 41 days was now National Security honcho; Margaret Tutwiler, going back to the Ford days, was now (the first female) ambassador to Morocco (yikes, in a 9/11 world); and Karen Hughes, longtime superstar at media and everything else, was not just the Queen of Queen Bees, but the Master of the Universe for the Grand Pooh-Bah.
It felt like everybody I loved, girlfriendwise, was attached to principals who were largely longtime friends, and the deputies were all old friends. This is one of the things that people outside of Washington criticize—the insiders’ game. And while there are downsides—mostly the kvetching of the chattering class, who are themselves the most cloistered of incestuous insiders—when planes are flying into American institutions and there are big guys with big guns across the street in Lafayette Park and vigilant snipers on the roof of your place of employment, you tend to put a premium on getting things accomplished a lot faster, which is greatly enhanced when you know whom to call, how to reach the right deputy, and when you can quickly assemble a team of people who worked together before. Like The Avengers, it’s especially useful for fighting evil. One of my lasting remembrances of 9/11 was the sense of coherence and focus among those gathered in or communicating with the PEOC. And much of this had to do
with the personal relationships between the individuals.
The women of the White House doubled as my workout buddies. Months before, in the spring, after so many meetings and sitting in chairs, we realized that we had totally different rhythms from the guys. For one thing, they all went to lunch every day. We ate at our desks. They went out to dinner at night, obligated to conduct various important meetings in various restaurants around town. We stayed in the office until it was time to go home.
We wanted some kind of outlet. And there was something else. All that chair time causes unfortunate changes to one’s shape. Our rumps were expanding.
We needed exercise. And we needed a break from all those endless meetings and our increasingly painful carpal tunnel syndrome from BlackBerry overuse. One day we just said, “What the hell? It’s bad enough we’re not having lunch. Why can’t we get a workout in?” We were all kind of physical. Karen Hughes is a real athlete and a dedicated swimmer. Condoleeza Rice is an athlete and a lifelong runner. I can’t remember what (the domestic policy genius) Margaret Spellings’s sport was, officially, but you know all these Texans are physical people. They ride. They hunt. They clear brush and build bonfires.
I have always needed exercise, but unlike James, I hate running. B.O.R.I.N.G. Nothing is worse for me than grinding it out on the street, getting into the flow, and then running into people I know. How are you supposed to keep your heart rate up with the constant distraction of political gossip? I like a good basic sweaty workout and have been going to the gym since I was a little girl, when I made my dad, a total health nut, drag me along. He taught me how to lift weights, work various muscle groups and enjoy a good sweat and a relaxing steam afterward.
Love & War Page 17
