BW: This was George Bush Senior’s war, and the team did work well together. The theory of the case, held by Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that we had to send a force that was absolutely decisive. So we sent nearly five hundred thousand troops and airmen and navy men over to the Persian Gulf, and the war lasted, what, forty-two days?
DR: How did we get people to pay for it? The Saudis and others paid for the war?
BW: Most of it, yes. Jim Baker used to say we “tin-cupped” it. He was Bush’s secretary of state, and he went around the world with his tin cup and the Saudis and others filled it up.
DR: When the September 11 attacks occurred, you wrote a book about that. Do you think that U.S. intelligence capability today is such that we could have pieced together the intelligence and prevented that from occurring? Or are we still as vulnerable as we were before 9/11?
BW: It’s a great question, and the answer is, I don’t know. Let me just skip ahead to President Barack Obama, because I think this is important. I was thinking about this.
When I interviewed Obama for Obama’s Wars, the focus was really his decision-making in the war in Afghanistan. But out of the blue, not in response to a question—this is a question I should have asked, stupid me—he said, “You know what I worry about at night? What I worry about the most is a nuclear weapon going off in an American city.”
He said that would be a game-changer. He then went further and said that a significant number of our intelligence operations are geared to keep that from happening.
DR: Staying on Obama for a moment, how obsessed was he about getting Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind the 9/11 attacks? Was it really a matter of luck? Was it a courageous decision to go after bin Laden in light of the intelligence Obama had?
BW: A lot’s been written about that. Again, like Ali or Nixon or any of these things: the full story has not been written.
My curiosity about the bin Laden raid is that they learned that bin Laden was probably at this place in August 2010, and the raid was not until May 2011. [A team of Navy Seals killed bin Laden in Pakistan during a covert operation on May 2, 2011.] Why would it take so long if you could be sure where he was?
They said, “Well, we weren’t really sure,” but they had satellite photos. They called him “the pacer.” He was visible on satellite photos pacing back and forth in the compound. It was pretty clear it was him. So I think there are things we don’t know about that, quite frankly.
DR: Okay. Back to 9/11. When President George W. Bush was informed about the attacks, he was reading to these young children at a school in Florida. After he was informed by his White House chief of staff, Andy Card, he didn’t get up and rush out. He stayed there frozen for a while.
His explanation was he didn’t want to scare anybody. Do you accept that explanation, or do you think he wasn’t really prepared to deal with it?
BW: I’m sure he, like most people, didn’t know what it meant, whether it was true. It was incomprehensible in many ways.
DR: Later, the Bush administration’s strategy was to go into Afghanistan. That worked, but it didn’t get Osama bin Laden. Was Bush obsessed with getting bin Laden?
BW: No. It was symbolic but probably not strategically that significant to take out Osama bin Laden.
DR: You wrote another book, Plan of Attack, about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Why did the intelligence community make such a big mistake in thinking that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
BW: Because they knew that Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction. It seemed logical. [Hussein, the strongman president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003, was toppled by the U.S. invasion.] They did not look at alternative explanations seriously.
And there was a momentum to war. George Tenet, the CIA director, memorably told the president that the intelligence was a slam dunk. You notice that when people are talking about politics now and they’re sure about things, they don’t use that term anymore.
DR: Do you think President Bush would have invaded had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction there?
BW: In hours of interviews with him, I asked him about that. His answer was, “We’re better off with Saddam not in power.”
If you really look at it—and I looked at the war plans and interviewed people and interviewed Bush for, as I said, hours on that—the explanation for the Iraq War is momentum, that the military told Bush at the beginning, “Oh, it’s going to take a year, it’s going to be complicated.” Then they said it would be faster and much easier.
Each time the top-secret war plan was presented to President Bush—the code word, interestingly enough, was Polo Step—each time the Polo Step plan came to him, it looked easier and easier. I chart in detail in the book what happened each day, what Bush thought, what his reactions were.
There was no one in there saying, “What about an alternative explanation?” And I quite frankly think, in our politics today or anything else, you have to go for that alternative explanation.
DR: Was Bush ever briefed on the difference between Shiite and Sunni Muslims? Was that ever included when he was briefed about the possible problems of invading?
BW: The focus was, for him, Saddam Hussein. He became obsessed with this.
DR: The surge strategy was later used. Who do you think deserves the credit for the surge more or less working? Had it not worked, what would have been the result?
BW: To a certain extent, we know now, the surge actually didn’t work. The drop-off in violence in Iraq was attributable not to the addition of these twenty to thirty thousand troops but to top-secret intelligence operations to locate the leaders, and to the Sunni Awakening movement and some other things that happened. If you really look at that, the surge as something that put us on a better track in Iraq is a myth.
DR: You’ve met with many presidents, interviewed them. Could you give us your impressions of the great features and the weaknesses of the presidents that you have met or interviewed?
Let’s go over Nixon first. You didn’t meet him, but what would you say his greatest strength was? What was his greatest failing?
BW: The hating was his greatest failing. It just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in politics. It doesn’t work in your personal life. There is a great lesson for everyone in studying Nixon.
DR: Any strengths you’d mention?
BW: Sure. He did some important things in foreign affairs. But he was a criminal, a provable criminal.
Barry Goldwater, of all people, had Carl Bernstein and myself up to his apartment here in Washington and read his personal diary about the last days of Nixon and what happened when he and other Republican leaders went to see Nixon.
It’s an astonishing scene, because this is August 1974. Nixon knows he’s going to be impeached in the House. The question is what the Senate will do, as is always the question.
The Watergate scandal overshadowed Nixon’s foreign policy accomplishments. Here he is in 1973 with (left to right) Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet minister of foreign affairs Andrei Gromyko, and Secretary of State William P. Rogers, toasting the signing of U.S.-Soviet agreements on oceanography, transportation, and cultural exchange. June 19, 1973.
Nixon said to Goldwater, “Barry, so what do I have in the Senate? Twenty votes?” He needed thirty-four to keep from being removed from office. Goldwater said, “I just counted. And, Mr. President, you have four votes. And one of them is not mine.” The next day, Nixon announced he was resigning.
DR: What about Gerald Ford? Greatest strength?
BW: Courage. Democrats acknowledge this, with the pardon he made with the national interest in mind.
DR: What about Jimmy Carter?
BW: Whom you worked for when you were a very young aide who wrote, as I recall, a memo to the president suggesting a war on OPEC.
DR: Well, somebody leaked it to you, and you wrote about it. But yes.
BW: How old were you then?
; DR: Twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
BW: Twenty-seven, twenty-eight—what an age to have that wonderful lesson of the cleansing power of a leak. Right? You didn’t feel that way at the time.
DR: I thought I would lose my job, but that’s another matter. Maybe a war on OPEC would have worked, but that’s a separate issue. So, your impression of Carter?
BW: Carter gets a bad and unfair rap on lots of things—and, you could argue, correctly on a number of things.
But the Camp David Accords of 1978, where he invited Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, and Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, to Washington—they went up to Camp David for two weeks, and came up with, effectively, a peace treaty between the two countries. A big step forward.
I remember asking Hamilton Jordan—your boss, the chief of staff, who had a side of him that could be very candid—I said, “How did Carter pull this off?”
He said, “Look, if you’d been locked away at Camp David for thirteen days with Jimmy Carter, you too would have signed anything.”
Now, there’s a lot of truth in that. What I think is the lesson, and very much to Carter’s credit, is he was able to set a priority. He was able to say, “It’s worth spending two weeks to really do this.”
If you look at their schedules, presidents will spend maybe a half a day on something—fifteen minutes there, some calls here. It is a pressure cooker, to say the least. Presidents more often should say, “This is really the most important thing going on. Let’s try to fix it. Let’s spend time on the problem.”
DR: What about Reagan?
BW: Can I ask a question? How many people here have been involved in a negotiation at one time in your life? Raise your hands. How many people are married? It’s the same question.
And what do you learn in a negotiation? That you have to spend time, you have to listen. It gets down to one for you, one for me, one for you, one for me. That’s how you solve things.
What Reagan did is he attacked Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev verbally: “The Soviet Union is the evil empire.” Then he negotiated with him. He attacked the Democrats, and then he negotiated with Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House. As he said, the purpose of a negotiation is to reach an agreement. And that seems to be a new idea.
DR: What about your impression of George Herbert Walker Bush? Did you spend much time with him?
BW: He would never be interviewed by me. He had been the Republican National Committee chairman during Watergate and spent a lot of time going around defending Nixon. That was his duty, and I think that had an effect.
What he did in the First Gulf War was a model for how to go to war: keep it short. I think he bungled the economy, or appeared to bungle the economy, and that’s why Bill Clinton beat him.
DR: What was your impression of Clinton?
BW: Can I use the line “easier to describe the creation of the universe”? What’s so interesting about him is that his eight years as president were peace and prosperity, by and large. But the Monica Lewinsky business is going to be in the first paragraph of his obituary. [Clinton’s relationship in 1995–97 with Lewinsky, then a White House intern, caused a major scandal and contributed to impeachment proceedings against the president in 1998.]
Somebody was asking me today what I think the ratings are going to be for the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It’s going to make the Super Bowl look like an afternoon soap opera.
Trump is going to attack her, presumably: “Crooked Hillary” and “Look at all the things your husband did” and so on and so forth.
Somebody was saying, “How can Hillary Clinton deal with that?” Somebody said, “Let Trump go on and Hillary could say, ‘I forgave Bill, and that was very hard, but I forgave him.’ ” That would maybe end that issue.
DR: Two final ones. George W. Bush—what is your impression of him?
BW: He was the most open person when I wanted to talk to him. He made a mistake in Iraq, and a significant one, and we still have that problem.
DR: And your impression of Barack Obama?
BW: As one of his aides says, “Obama has the armor of a good heart.” I think he really does. If you look at his first inaugural address, where he says that “we’re going to be known for our good deeds and the justness of our cause and our sense of restraint”—it’s not the way the world works.
I remember, a couple of years ago, having breakfast with one of the world leaders who is one of our best allies. I said, “What do you think of Obama?” He said, “I really like him. He’s really smart. But no one’s afraid of him.”
There’s a lot of truth in that—the message in this world we learn as parents: sometimes you have to be tough and you want your kids to be afraid of you.
15 H. W. BRANDS
on Ronald Reagan
“Reagan was a conservative and his philosophy was 100 percent Barry Goldwater’s, but he was also an optimist. He had as much faith in the American future as anybody in American politics.”
BOOK DISCUSSED:
Reagan: The Life (Doubleday, 2015)
In the view of some scholars, Reagan was the most consequential president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That was not widely thought to be a credible possibility early in Reagan’s career (he was a B-level motion picture actor); at the time he entered politics (he was first elected governor of California in 1966); or during any of the three times he sought the presidency, finally getting elected in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine, then the oldest age at which anyone had been elected to that office.
There are, of course, more than a fair number of excellent Reagan biographies, many of which were written by those who worked with or had direct access to Reagan while they were writing. H. W. Brands brings an academic’s perspective to his subject, for he did not know or ever interview Ronald Reagan. That said, as a result of his research, Brands came to admire Reagan and his presidency. That admiration, tempered with appropriate academic evenhandedness, comes through in the interview.
Bill Brands began his academic career as a high school math teacher, but quickly realized his real passion is history, his undergraduate major at Stanford. After obtaining his PhD in history at the University of Texas, Brands began a dual career—teaching history (at Texas A&M and the University of Texas) and writing books. He has now written an eye-popping twenty-eight books, many of which are critically acclaimed biographies. Two were Pulitzer Prize finalists. His subjects have included Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson as well as Ronald Reagan.
As Brands points out in the interview, Reagan was frequently underestimated throughout his career. I know I was among those who underestimated him.
When I worked in the Carter White House as a young domestic policy staffer, my colleagues and I hoped that Reagan would be our Republican opponent in 1980. I thought that Reagan knew little about policy, and thus would stumble in a debate with a policy-focused Carter; that he was far too conservative and war-prone to capture a majority of the electoral votes; and, most important, that he was far too old at sixty-nine to campaign strenuously or to serve effectively. (I was then thirty-one but am sixty-nine as I write this; it seems closer to the prime of life than it did thirty-eight years ago.)
We were told in 1980 by Reagan’s gubernatorial opponent in 1970, Jesse Unruh, that Reagan was smarter than we thought, a more compelling speaker and debater than we thought, and more vigorous than we thought. He said that we should not underestimate Reagan. At our peril, we dismissed his view. But he was right.
Brands indicates in the interview that Reagan was underestimated throughout his life for a number of reasons: he was outwardly friendly and easygoing (hiding well any large career ambitions); he had an inner reserve that tended to keep him from developing close relationships (even with his four children); he did not seem to focus on details; and he tended to repeat his basic views over and over, and the views seemed simplistic to many. (In brief, Reagan thought
that government should be smaller and Communism had to be defeated.)
And, of course, as president he may have been initially underestimated by the Democrats in Congress, who were surprised that Reagan was able to develop the support needed to get his epic tax-cut legislation passed in 1981; by the Soviet leaders, especially Mikhail Gorbachev, who felt Reagan could not be serious about his “Star Wars” missile program; and by those (in both parties) who thought that he might be too old at the age of seventy-three to run effectively for reelection. (He won forty-nine states against the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, in 1984.)
In the interview, Brands also discusses the issue that perplexed Reagan’s authorized biographer, Edmund Morris: What really made Reagan tick? What really motivated him? How does one penetrate the invisible shield that no one, other than his wife, Nancy, seemed to penetrate? Morris famously inserted himself, as a literary device, into Dutch, the official biography, as one way to bring more color to the Reagan story.
Brands did not feel the need to do that to understand Reagan. He concluded that Reagan’s emotional shield was the by-product of Reagan’s youth (where he had to deal with the complications of a seriously alcoholic father). And he felt that Reagan was secure in who he was; knew his strengths and his weaknesses; and was able to use his charm and sense of humor, often self-deprecating, in ways that less secure leaders or political figures could not.
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