JAMES
THEY WANTED TO INVADE Iraq from the get-go. They came in wanting to do this. They were looking for any excuse to do it. And 9/11 gave them the excuse. In that sense, 9/11 was directly connected to the Iraq War. It created the atmosphere that allowed them to begin the march toward war.
Even all these years later, the whole weapons of mass destruction debate about Iraq still drives me crazy. It wasn’t just that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz beat the drums of war. It was that a lot of people went along with it. And the standard excuse is “Look, a lot of people thought there were weapons of mass destruction; the CIA thought there were weapons of mass destruction, even Hillary Clinton thought there were weapons of mass destruction. In retrospect, we know there was flawed intelligence, but we didn’t know that.”
That is a very clever lie. It’s clever. But it’s still a lie.
All you need to do is look back at the timeline. The CIA initially believed there might be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Okay, fine. So Congress votes in October 2002 to authorize the president to use military force in Iraq.
What the apologists don’t mention is what happened after that. The United Nations inspectors spend months in Iraq, and Hans Blix tells the world that his inspectors haven’t found any “smoking guns.” On the eve of war, Walter Pincus wrote two stories in the Washington Post saying the White House had exaggerated intelligence in its fervor for war and lacked hard evidence for the existence of weapons of mass destruction, but those stories got buried deep in the A section.
By the time the Bush administration went to war in March 2003, a lot of people were dubious of the justification. It’s like the conventional wisdom that everybody thought the world was flat when Columbus sailed. Well, no, the whole educated world believed the world was round. By the time that we went to war in Iraq, many educated analysts thought it was doubtful that there were weapons of mass destruction.
We kicked out the UN inspectors. They said, “Give us another sixty days and we’ll be through,” and the White House said, “No, no, no, we’ve got to start now.”
So now, when I hear editorial writers or even some of the moderate or liberal supporters of the war say, “You know, we were duped like everybody else,” it drives me nuts. You were only duped because you didn’t read the paper and you didn’t think deeply enough about it. When somebody uses that excuse, it irritates the hell out of me. They act as if nothing happened between October 2002 and March 2003. And it’s a really annoying and dishonest view of the world.
That’s part of why the Iraq War still really bothers me. It was such a colossal mistake. It’s easy to blame Bush, and, boy, does he deserve the blame. I’m glad to heap it on him. But a lot of people who should have known better went along with it.
MARY
IRAQ EVENTUALLY BECAME SUCH an ugly topic in our house that James, all on his own, just stopped fighting me about it. He said, “It takes two to have a fight” and withdrew.
JAMES
WE’VE HAD PLENTY OF ups and downs over the years, like in any marriage. We’ve fought about things at home the way any couple has. We’d go through periods of a week or more without talking, both of us just sulking over one thing or another.
But divorce? Throwing in the towel? That’s not for me.
That’s just not what’s going to happen, from my vantage point. I can’t do anything about what she believes, politically or personally. In fact, I’ve tried to understand it. And I can understand some of the things, but most of it I’ll never understand.
It doesn’t matter. When I got married, at forty-nine, I meant it. Cutting bait and running would be the easiest thing when the ride gets bumpy. Sticking around is the tougher choice, but also the better one.
MARY
NOT FIGHTING ABOUT IRAQ had repercussions on our marriage dynamic. Suddenly we weren’t having it out—weren’t fighting about anything. That might sound peaceful. But it’s not a good thing. It’s not healthy. And it messed with the basic foundations of our life and emotions. And our disagreements about Iraq, which seemed irreconcilable, would culminate in problems down the road when the reelection came. By then, politics had taken over and everybody on the left had total and complete amnesia about the war. They were never for it. And we were suddenly the dummies who’d been misled about WMD. Man, that was unspeakably awful, so maybe it’s a good thing we weren’t speaking.
And I don’t mean to get too far ahead of our story, but the bad feelings about the war, and the weird aspect of James’s not fighting anymore, culminated in his telling me that I couldn’t become an assistant secretary of state for Condi Rice a couple years later, in the second Bush term, resulting in my huffily taking to the guest room. He claimed that the only reason I wanted to accept Condi’s offer of a job at State was ego. That still infuriates me.
JAMES
NO ONE WANTED TO BE WRONG. That’s my basic theory on how the Iraq blunder happened. People are afraid to be wrong. Unfortunately, that’s not an uncommon occurrence in Washington, or inside almost any White House. People too often simply go along with something rather than airing their reservations, because it’s tough to go against the crowd and it feels risky to be wrong.
Iraq ultimately was the Bush administration’s failure. But it also was an enormous failure of leaving your skepticism at the door. That goes for people in the White House, people in the press. A lot of friends of ours supported it. Or more accurately, didn’t actively oppose it. They just went along.
These people had no idea what they were getting into. And in many ways, I think the president and others got talked into it by this small group of people—Cheney and Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz—who were dead set on invading Iraq. They had been since 1991. It was like an academic who has an idea and goes to the ends of the earth to test it out in a real-world setting. I think they all truly thought this was going to work. It turned out to be a colossal, massive screwup.
The whole debacle underscores another truth about Washington, which a lot of people in politics don’t often acknowledge: almost all of the time, a fuck-up is just a fuckup. A cigar is just a cigar.
Most times, people do something because they actually think it’s going to work out. Most times, they are not evil people trying to undermine America. Most times, there’s not some underlying conspiracy or motive. In Iraq, it’s true that there was war profiteering. It’s true that there was a lot of oil there, which made it a strategically important place. But that doesn’t mean those are the actual reasons we decided to go to war. We went to war because people in power actually believed it was a good idea. They were dead-ass wrong, but I don’t doubt that they believed it.
It’s not that you can’t find instances where there is underlying criminality within Washington institutions. I mean, Watergate taught us that. It does happen. But in my experience, it’s the exception, not the rule. There’s a great tendency to overestimate conspiracies and underestimate stupidity. Iraq is a perfect case study of that.
And by the way, stupidity is a really good reason to vote somebody out of office. If you’re massively wrong about a massively big thing, it really doesn’t matter much that your motives were pure and that it fit with your political philosophy. That all might be true. But you blew it, partner. Time to go. That’s what the American people should have said to Bush after his first term.
MARY
THE MONTHS PASSED, my absolute six-month marker came and went with no one even complaining since it was never realistic. Then a year went by. My work kept me endlessly active, lots of ups and downs—a front-row seat to history, as they say—but no memory stands out more than my total exhaustion and unremitting fatigue. I loved my boss, my colleagues and most of the work. Other than the silent Cold War over the Iraq War that was going on at home, there was a semblance of a routine. But I was burning out.
Things that used to tickle me became p
ainful. For instance, most workdays started on the phone with an energetic battle of wits with David Gregory. He and his wife were planning a family, and we spent as much time on kid conversations as we did on policy and political ones. David made me laugh; he made me scream. And for a long while, it was a great way to start the day.
Then, suddenly, one morning when I was driving in the dark to work (as always), an unbidden thought came to my mind: if I have to listen to one more syllable from David Gregory, I am going to slaughter myself with a stapler. Suicide by stapler didn’t scare me as much as having negative feelings for no reason about a guy I knew I adored. My patience and my mind were all crashing, my priorities disintegrating.
The one consistently coherent recurring thought was that I had to leave. A departure date called to me like the green light on Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. I couldn’t look away, but I couldn’t focus either. After the events of 9/11, a succession of tough new issues kept on pushing my possible departure date further and further out of reach. Corporate scandals, recessionary dips, it kept going on and on. Every day was a barrel of monkeys in the usual White House way. Before I snapped completely and stapled myself to death, or just stapled Gregory’s mouth shut, I knew I had to tender a departure notice. Even if the date was still murky, I had to lay down a marker.
Karen Hughes decided she wanted out too. Her son didn’t like Washington and wanted to leave. Her husband didn’t like it either. All of them wanted to go back home to Texas.
Clearly, it wasn’t a good idea for Karen and me to depart at the same time. Our jobs overlapped too much, and all the accumulated institutional memory and experience between us would be lost in one blast. And on a totally shallow level—which we cared much less about—we knew it would become “a story” if Karen and I resigned at the same time. Mothers flee family-friendly White House in droves.
Karen and I weren’t fighting over who got to leave first, but let’s just say a decision couldn’t be reached because no one had a superior claim on misery. So we consulted the all-knowing, all-wise Margaret Tutwiler, our girlfriend consigliere who was the ambassador to Morocco at the time, a job that was hardly a picnic. We were kind of embarrassed to even approach her. We were miserable; she was on the firing line. After she heard both of our sides of the story, she pronounced her verdict: Karen gets to go first because she did the 2000 campaign and you didn’t, so she has suffered longer.
I considered appealing on the grounds of younger children at home, but I wasn’t sure if teenage boy wasn’t the greater defense, and in any event, there wasn’t an appellate process, so I accepted my sentence—but I did petition for a time-served reprieve that would spring me at the 2002 midterms. But then, after the midterms, a technical glitch delayed my release. I needed to remain through the State of the Union in January for reasons not worth breaking the flow of the story to describe.
I hate saying good-bye—or having parties or send-offs thrown in my honor. I kissed my great staff, packed up my kid tchotchkes and snuck out. This spared me the obligatory exaggerated accolades about how indispensable I was to the leaders of the free world. And I never got to raise a toast of my own and thank the president and vice president for their faith in me. The honor was all mine.
In any case, it was bittersweet for me, but maybe the happiest day of James’s life.
JAMES
IT WAS A HAPPY DAY INDEED. When Mary started out at the White House, it was going to be for six months, but I always imagined that really meant a year. Fine. Then 9/11 came, and that one year turned into two. She always wanted to work at the White House. I guess I’m glad that she did. But I was also glad when she left.
Looking back, it was a good thing that she got to fulfill that goal. I’m happy she had a chance to do it, and I’m happy it lasted only two years and not four.
The rest of 2003 brought a mixture of sadness and happiness.
We’d planned a big get-together over the Fourth of July at our farm out in the Shenandoah Valley in rural Virginia. A lot of friends and family were coming up, including my youngest brother, Bill.
Bill hadn’t always had the easiest life, but he was about as good a soul as you could find. Here was a guy who spent time in the army during Vietnam and came home with the mental baggage that so many other guys like him brought back from that god-awful war.
As was too often the case, he slipped into drinking too much and got mixed up with other substances. I think more than anything that it was a way of coping or trying to forget about some of the things he’d seen over there. He really struggled for years. My mother used to worry about him incessantly. All of us siblings worried about him. He was always a topic of conversation when we’d get together. Everybody would ask, “How’s Bill doing? What’s the latest with Bill?”
But by 2003, Bill really had gotten his life back on the right track. He’d stopped drinking. He’d just gotten married to a lovely woman from a wonderful family. They’d started to make a life for themselves. He’d really turned things around. For the first time, Bill wasn’t the central topic of conversation in our family. He was doing well, and we’d started to worry less and instead began feeling happy for him that things finally were working out.
Bill and his wife were driving up to our farm to celebrate the Fourth of July with us that year. In Wytheville, Virginia, just a few hours away from the farm, he died of a heart attack. He was fifty-three years old. It was awful. It ripped our hearts out.
Bill had worked so hard to get his life in order, and just when things were looking good, boom. He was a good man who deserved better.
We buried Bill in the cemetery of the Catholic church in St. Gabriel, a couple miles from where we’d all grown up, and a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River. Seven siblings gathered around to say good-bye to one of their own. It’s hard to say if Bill’s death deepened my urge to come back home again. But I do know it reminded me, in the most personal kind of way, that life is utterly unpredictable and too often unfair, and you might as well take a few chances, because you never know what lies around the next bend in the road.
Mary and I also were figuring out what lay around the next bend for us at the time. We’d been through a pretty slippery patch during the past few years.
On top of all that, I’d lost my mother and brother. And we were raising two small girls, who we adored but who also required constant attention and took up what little downtime we otherwise might have had during those tumultuous years. Needless to say, our marriage often took a backseat to other priorities.
I’m not the sort of guy to make grand romantic gestures. But I felt like I needed to do something to show her how much I still loved and appreciated her, even though we so often felt like two ships passing in the night and even though I’d spent much of the past few years generally pissed off and irritable about having Bush in the White House and my wife there working for him.
Our tenth wedding anniversary was coming up that Thanksgiving of 2003, and I got this idea to throw a party out at the farm. Unbeknownst to Mary, I called up her dad and also her best friend from high school, and they helped me plan a big shindig. We invited some of the people who were at our wedding a decade earlier in New Orleans. We even did a reenactment ceremony and let eight-year-old Matty preside over it. At one point she said, “By the power invested in me . . . Actually, I don’t really have any power.” Everybody cracked up.
It was a great night, a great Thanksgiving, a great anniversary. It was a moment in our marriage when the timing was just right. We needed something like that right about then.
For whatever reason, it helped us out a lot and gave us a fresh start. The future seemed wide open.
8.
Remarriage
MARY
HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I married James? Aside from Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, we might be the most remarried couple in history. We’ve managed to walk down the aisle three times already (an
d counting). The only difference is that we never bothered to get a divorce in between. Not that it was all bliss.
We survived the Florida recount.
We survived the Iraq War.
We survived the death of our parents and a sibling.
We survived teenage girls. (So far.)
You would think, after all those traumas, we could peacefully get through the day-to-day stuff.
But James has a verbal tic, which has caused a similar affliction in me. It goes that like this:
“Is that new?”
“Seriously? That has been in five houses of ours already and this is the fiftieth time you’ve asked me if it was new.”
Or “Seriously? Do you know how many times I’ve worn this?”
Or “I traded for it.”
“And how much did that cost?”
“What?”
“That.”
“Got it on sale.” Or “I forgot.” Or “Two hundred dollars.”
“What’s this table here for?”
“That’s a center hall table.”
“I got that. It’s flat-damn in the center of the hall.”
“It’s where people gather, and where they put their drinks when they are standing around at a party.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Okay, honey. Let’s just give it a chance. See how it works at the next party.” (Patient smiley face.)
“I been holdin’ my own damn drinks all my life. Who needs a table flat-damn in the middle of the hall to put a drink on? Who puts their drinks down anyway?”
Love & War Page 20
