Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Rove had to be hoping that the truth would stay hidden.

  TWO nights later, on September 2, as wildly cheering delegates chanted “Four more years,” President Bush strode to the stage to accept his party’s nomination for a second term. It was a chance to define his presidency—and present the war on his terms.

  John Kerry, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention at the end of July, had accused Bush of having misused the WMD intelligence and of having failed to prepare adequately for the postinvasion challenges in Iraq. “I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war,” he had said. With Iraq still insecure and unstable, Kerry’s attack appeared to work. He emerged from the convention in a strong position: slightly ahead of the wartime incumbent in the polls. But the days that followed were rough for Kerry. An orange terror alert had shifted media attention to the war on terrorism—the president’s strong suit. Kerry also failed to respond quickly to the Swift Boat attacks on his war record. Although most of the charges were quickly debunked by mainstream news organizations, the political assault on Kerry’s credibility took its toll.

  Now, as Bush stood before the thousands of Republican delegates, he sought to turn the tables on Kerry in an acceptance speech that again cast Iraq in the context of the broader war on terror. September 11, he declared, “requires our country to think differently” and confront threats “before it is too late.” As the crowd chanted “USA! USA!” Bush reminded his audience that John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, had supported the October 2002 war resolution: “Members of both political parties, including my opponent and his running mate, saw the threat and voted to authorize the use of force.” The United Nations had passed a unanimous resolution calling on Saddam to disarm, but, Bush claimed, the dictator had refused. “And I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office, a decision no president would ask for but must be prepared to make,” Bush said.

  “Do I forget the lessons of September eleventh and take the word of a madman?”

  “No!” roared the delegates.

  “Or do I take action to defend our country? Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time!”

  FIVE days later, on Tuesday, September 7, Army specialist Yoe M. Aneiros Gonzalez of Newark, New Jersey, was killed in Iraq on his twentieth birthday. He left behind an eighteen-year-old widow. Aneiros, who had hoped to become a doctor, had been riding in a patrol vehicle in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. His death and those of two others killed in fierce fighting in Sadr City that day brought the American death toll in Iraq to over 1,000. News reports noted that nearly two thirds of those deaths, 647, had occurred since May 1, 2003, when President Bush had flown onto the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared the end of major combat operations while standing beneath a banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.”

  At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged this milestone, telling reporters that fighting terrorism “has its cost.” He sought to keep the number in perspective. “Hundreds were killed in Russia last week,” he said, referring to a ghastly shoot-out with Chechen terrorists at a school in Beslan. He also reminded reporters that the country was this week commemorating the third anniversary of September 11, when “3,000 citizens of dozens of countries” were killed.

  Bush issued a brief statement from the White House. “We mourn every loss of life,” he said. “We will honor their memories by completing the mission.”

  AFTER learning that Scooter Libby had not been Matt Cooper’s original source about Joe Wilson’s wife, in September Patrick Fitzgerald issued the Time reporter a new subpoena. He was demanding that Cooper testify again and hand over the rest of his notes and e-mails on the subject. Fitzgerald was, as Cooper later put it, asking “for everything in my notebook.”

  At the same time, The New York Times, led by Sulzberger, was vowing to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to keep Judy Miller from having to testify. The firm stance adopted by Sulzberger and the Times greatly influenced Time magazine executives. Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief of all Time Inc. publications, and Sulzberger had lunch. The Times publisher talked about the importance of mounting a united and total resistance to Fitzgerald. Once The New York Times became involved, one Time executive later said, “We were going to wave the flag of the First Amendment for as long as we could.” The Times was leading Time into battle.*81

  But it was a losing battle, probably doomed from the outset. Other First Amendment lawyers looked at the case and saw no way around the Supreme Court’s Branzburg decision, which stated reporters had no privilege protecting them from testifying in grand jury investigations. Moreover, unlike Branzburg, which had partly involved a reporter’s sources for a story on hashish production in Kentucky, the CIA leak investigation concerned a potential national security breach, a probe in which the stakes could be much higher. The news organizations were on weak ground. “From the start, our chances were significantly less than even,” Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment expert representing the Times and Time, acknowledged after the case was over.

  The decisions the two news organizations made at this point would later be second-guessed, and for good reason. The Times’ editors had never sat down with Miller, reviewed her notes, and determined exactly what had happened between her and Libby. They had no idea of the extent to which Libby had tried to use her to justify the administration’s prewar positions and how much he had disclosed to her about the Wilson matter. “There was a lack of due diligence,” one veteran Times correspondent later said. “They decided to fight a battle without having the basic information about what had happened.” And there was disquiet within the newsroom about Miller. After the sustained pummeling she had taken over her Iraq WMD reporting, she seemed to many of her colleagues to be a little too eager to be the star in a major First Amendment clash.

  At Time, Cooper appeared less excited about the prospect of becoming a press rights martyr, especially if it meant going to jail. But there was a way for him to avoid prison. In August, Cooper had asked Libby for a personal waiver so he could talk to the prosecutor about their off-the-record conversation. Libby, having little real choice (given the president’s admonition that everybody cooperate with the investigation), had granted it, and Cooper had testified. Cooper could have done the same thing with Rove—and put the White House strategist in the same box. The magazine’s editors and lawyers discussed this option, yet they chose not to pursue it—a decision that had the effect of protecting Rove and the president.

  There were compelling legal reasons for Time and Cooper to hold back. Any effort by Cooper to reach out to Rove would undercut the argument that Abrams was planning to make in court about the need to protect confidential sources. But according to persons familiar with the magazine’s own internal deliberations, there was another factor: Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly and other editors feared that any approach by Cooper could put the magazine in the position of influencing events. And Time didn’t want to be in such a spot, especially during an election campaign. “There was a lot of concern about getting involved in the middle of the election,” Richard Sauber, Cooper’s lawyer, later said. Another source who participated in the magazine’s discussions about the Rove matter, added, “There was an enormous reluctance to do that before the election. The idea of the magazine’s White House correspondent asking Rove what he wanted of him was deeply troubling.”

  Just as had been the case with its October 2003 cover story on the CIA leak, the magazine was sitting on vital information that would have undermined the White House’s credibility. Time’s editors, as they saw it, were acting in defense of an important journalistic principle: protecting sources. But the net result was a journalistic paradox: one of the country’s most important news organizations—whose core mission is telling the truth—was concealing an important truth about the subject of a major criminal investigation involving the White House. Its silence was en
abling Rove and the White House to maintain a false public position: that the most influential aide to the president had not leaked information about the identity of a CIA officer.

  ON OCTOBER 6, Charles Duelfer, David Kay’s successor as head of the WMD-hunting Iraq Survey Group, presented his comprehensive report to Congress. It appeared to be the final verdict on the WMD question, and it further shredded Bush’s primary rationale for the war.

  Shortly before Kay had left the post in early 2004, he had readied another report that essentially conveyed what he had told Congress: there had been no weapons of mass destruction. But once Duelfer took over, he sidelined Kay’s report. This afforded war supporters and senior CIA officials—still smarting from Kay’s “we-were-all-wrong” pronouncement—the opportunity to say, let’s see what Duelfer can find. As Rod Barton, an Australian weapons inspector with the ISG, later recalled, Tenet had visited the ISG in February 2004, as Duelfer was taking over, and conveyed this message: “There are weapons out there; we just have to find them.” Duelfer represented a last chance for administration officials still hoping to find evidence to support the dire and dramatic prewar assertions they had made to justify the war.*82

  But Duelfer let them down. His report was more definitive—and more damning—than Kay’s findings. Saddam’s WMD capability, it said, “was essentially destroyed in 1991.” The report noted that Saddam had wanted to “re-create” his weapons programs—but only after sanctions were gone and the Iraqi economy had stabilized. The report explained that Saddam’s main motivation for desiring unconventional weapons had been to deter Iran, which was presumed to have such weapons of its own. Duelfer’s report noted that at the time of the invasion Saddam had no “plan for the revival of WMD.”

  In recent weeks, Bush had repeatedly insisted that Iraq had been a “gathering threat.” But the Duelfer report showed there had been nothing gathering about it. So why hadn’t Saddam cooperated completely with the UN inspectors to prove he had no WMD programs? Duelfer personally concluded that Saddam had been engaged in an impossible double game: trying to persuade the West that he had no WMDs while maintaining enough ambiguity that his historical foe, Iran, couldn’t be certain that was true.

  The day following the release of the Duelfer report, Bush spoke to reporters about it for three minutes. “Iraq,” he conceded, “did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there.” Yet he added, “Based on all the information we have today, I believe we were right to take action…. He retained the knowledge, the materials, the means, and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction.” That is, Saddam had had everything but the weapons and the actual programs to make them. Bush took no questions.

  THE next day, October 8, Bush and Kerry held their second debate, this one at Washington University in St. Louis. During the first encounter, a week earlier, Kerry had tried several times to score points by attacking Bush and his decision to invade Iraq, calling the war a “colossal error of judgment.” Bush had assailed Kerry for having first voted to authorize the use of force and then criticizing the war, suggesting Kerry was a flip-flopper.

  At the second debate, Bush was asked by a woman named Linda Grabel if he could “please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision.” Bush looked as if he were caught off guard. He acknowledged he might have made some “tactical decisions” that future historians could question. But on the big decisions, such as invading Afghanistan and Iraq, he had no regrets. “That’s really what you’re—when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about,” Bush said. “They’re trying to say, ‘Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?’ And the answer is ‘Absolutely not.’ It was the right decision.”

  Bush then cited the Duelfer report as proof, asserting that it “confirmed that decision today, because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program.” But Bush was overstating Duelfer’s conclusions. The report said that Iraq had had no programs and had maintained only vague ambitions to pursue WMDs in the future. Bush finished his answer by noting, “I’m fully prepared to accept any mistakes that history judges to my administration, because the president makes the decisions, the president has to take the responsibility.”

  Five days later, there was one last presidential debate, hosted by Arizona State University in Tempe. The focus was domestic affairs; the war in Iraq wasn’t discussed much. Kerry said Bush had “rushed us into a war” and “we are not as safe as we ought to be.” Bush declared he had a “comprehensive strategy” to “chase down the al-Qaeda” and that he had “held to account a terrorist regime in Saddam Hussein.”

  The next morning, Rand Beers, a terrorism expert who had resigned from Bush’s National Security Council staff and now was a top adviser to Kerry, flew back to Washington from Phoenix. Sitting next to him on the plane was David Corn, who had been covering the debate for The Nation. Beers told him that he was satisfied with Kerry’s performance in the debates, but he was frustrated that Kerry’s criticism of both Bush’s decision to go to war and the administration’s poor planning for the postinvasion period was getting lost in the campaign wash. The attacks on Kerry’s war record, the claim that Kerry had flip-flopped on the war, the charge that Kerry’s plan for Iraq (which called for increasing international participation in rebuilding and securing Iraq) was not really a plan—all of that was distracting from the Kerry campaign’s efforts to highlight Bush’s pre- and postwar blunders.

  But, Corn asked, wasn’t Kerry in an impossible position? He couldn’t promise a solution to the mess Bush had created. His position on Iraq had been full of nuances that didn’t fit on bumper stickers. And consider this, Corn said: Kerry first came to public attention as a Vietnam vet who testified in Congress against the war and said, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” If he were elected president, wouldn’t Kerry—since he wasn’t in favor of a withdrawal—be doing exactly that: asking U.S. troops in Iraq to die for a mistake? And if the international community failed to respond to his call and Kerry was left to fend in Iraq alone, what would—and could—he do? Perhaps, Corn remarked to Beers, you ought to be careful what you wish for.

  Beers recognized the dilemmas at hand. His voice became quiet. He described some of his talks with Kerry about Iraq—and what they might do were Kerry to win: “Sometimes, when it’s late at night, at the end of a long day, we look at each other, and we say, ‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ ”

  ON OCTOBER 13, 2004, Judge Hogan held Matt Cooper in contempt a second time and threatened to send him to jail for up to eighteen months if he didn’t testify to Fitzgerald about all of his sources for the leak story. Hogan had also held Judy Miller in contempt the week before. After the hearing, Cooper said, “No reporter should have to go to jail for doing his job.” But he was now closer to a painful choice: reveal a source or be locked up in prison. Hogan’s decision regarding Cooper was reported the next day in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

  The day after that, Rove made his third appearance at the federal courthouse and changed his story.

  During his two February 2004 appearances before the grand jury, Rove had denied having talked to Cooper. But now Rove conceded he had spoken to the Time reporter after all. He testified that he still didn’t remember the conversation, his lawyer said later. But Rove could no longer dispute that it had occurred, for on this day he handed over what he claimed was a recently discovered copy of the July 11, 2003, e-mail he had sent to Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. This was the short e-mail in which Rove had told Hadley that “Matt Cooper called” about a welfare reform story and then switched the subject to “Niger/isn’t this damaging/hasn’t the President been hurt?” By giving this e-mail to Fitzgerald, Rove was acknowledging to the prosecutor that he hadn’t told the full story the first two times he was questioned before the grand jury.

  Rove was now in Fitzgerald’s crosshairs, and the pr
osecutor had a whole new set of questions: Why hadn’t Rove disclosed the conversation with Cooper earlier? Why hadn’t Rove, Hadley, or the White House turned over the e-mail previously? This was the sort of document covered by subpoenas from the Justice Department and Fitzgerald; it should have been produced months ago.

  Sorting this out would preoccupy Fitzgerald. He had to determine if Rove had originally lied to the grand jury to conceal his conversation with Cooper. An obvious issue for Fitzgerald and his investigators was whether Rove was now acknowledging the Cooper phone call because Cooper had just been held in contempt and might be compelled to testify about his conversation with Rove. Rove’s testimony made it even more imperative for Fitzgerald to get Cooper’s account—and his notes.

  There was another piece to this puzzle. A hard copy of the Hadley-Rove e-mail turned over to Fitzgerald (which was independently obtained by the authors) showed that it had been printed out of Rove’s White House computer on November 25, 2003. One of Rove’s assistants, B. J. Goergen, had searched the computer that day at the request of Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin. So why had it taken Rove nearly eleven months to turn it over to Fitzgerald? For a year and a half, Rove would remain in legal jeopardy, as Fitzgerald would attempt to unravel this mystery.

  But on October 15, 2004, none of this was publicly known. Reporters covering the case had no inkling that Rove’s earlier testimony was now contradicted by a piece of evidence that he had not disclosed for almost a year. The news stories that day merely reported that Rove had been spotted going into the grand jury. They quoted Luskin saying that his client was not a target of the investigation and “has been cooperating fully from the beginning.”