by Peter Baker
(illustration credit 1.1)
Copyright © 2013 by Peter Baker
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
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DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Jacket design by John Fontana
Jacket photograph by John Chiasson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baker, Peter
Days of fire : Bush and Cheney in the White House / Peter Baker.—First edition.
pages cm
1. United States—Politics and government—2001–2009. 2. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946– 3. Cheney, Richard B. I. Title.
E902.B353 2013
973.931092—dc23
2013018745
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53692-9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-52518-3
v3.1
To Susan and Theo
And to my parents
for a lifetime of love
For a half a century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical. AND THEN THERE CAME A DAY OF FIRE.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH,
SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS, JANUARY 20, 2005
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: “Breaking china”
PART ONE
1 “One of you could be president”
2 “To be where the action is”
3 “The fire horse and the bell”
4 “We wrapped Bill Clinton around his neck”
5 “I’m going to call Dick”
6 “Iron filings moving across a tabletop”
PART TWO
7 “Somebody’s going to pay”
8 “Whatever it takes”
9 “The first battle of the war”
10 “We’re going to lose our prey”
11 “Afghanistan was too easy”
12 “A brutal, ugly, repugnant man”
13 “You could hear the hinge of history turn”
PART THREE
14 “Maybe we’ll get lucky”
15 “Mr. President, I think we’ve got a problem”
16 “Welcome to Free Iraq”
17 “We were almost all wrong”
18 “When are we going to fire somebody?”
19 “The election that will never end”
20 “Not a speech Dick Cheney would give”
PART FOUR
21 “Who do they think they are? I was reelected too”
22 “Whacked upside the head”
23 “This is the end of the presidency”
24 “You could have heard a pin drop”
25 “Please do not let anything happen today”
26 “I’m not sure how to take good news anymore”
27 “Make damn sure we do not fail”
28 “Don’t let this be your legacy”
PART FIVE
29 “The elephants finally threw up on the table”
30 “Everybody knew this was the last bullet in the chamber”
31 “I’m going to fire all your asses”
32 “Revolt of the radical pragmatists”
33 “Don’t screw with the president of the United States”
34 “What is this, a cruel hoax?”
35 “Our people are going to hate us for this”
36 “I didn’t want to be the president during a depression”
37 “Such a sense of betrayal”
Epilogue: “There is no middle ground”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits
About the Author
Illustrations
Other Books by This Author
PROLOGUE
“Breaking china”
George W. Bush was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum, staring, and listening—in fact listening longer than usual. He did not like long discursive reports. But this one weighed on him.
“Do you think he did it?” Bush asked.
“Yeah,” the lawyer said, “I think he did it.”
The nation’s forty-third president had just days left in office, and the Decider, as he had memorably dubbed himself, was struggling with one final decision. His vice president, the man who had been at his side through every crisis for eight tumultuous years, was pressing him as never before. For two months, Dick Cheney had been lobbying for a pardon for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, who was known to all as Scooter and had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that had its roots in the origins of the Iraq War. Cheney would not let it go. He brought it up again and again, to the point that the president did not want to talk with him about it anymore.
Bush’s gut told him no pardon, and he usually followed his gut. He had long bristled at the notion of people trading on connections to win executive clemency. The whole pardon process seemed corrupted to him, and now here was the ultimate insider seeking a special favor. Yet how could he tell Cheney no? How could he reject his partner of two terms on the one thing Cheney cared about most? For a man who valued loyalty above almost all else, it cut against the grain.
To help make a decision, Bush personally asked White House lawyers to reexamine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel who had also served in the same role for Ronald Reagan, and William Burck, his deputy who had been a federal prosecutor in New York, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised. Now they were in the Oval Office to report back that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” Burck was saying to Bush, tempering his “he did it” judgment just a bit. “But if I were on that jury, I would probably have agreed with them. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.”
Libby had been convicted of lying to federal investigators about whether he had divulged to journalists the name of a CIA officer married to a critic of the vice president. Libby insisted he simply remembered events differently from other witnesses. However, his story clashed not just with that of one person but with those of eight other people, including fellow administration officials. To believe Libby, the lawyers concluded, would be to believe that all those other people were wrong in their recollections or that Libby’s memory was so faulty that he did not remember repeated conversations about a topic that clearly consumed the office of the vice president.
“All right, all right,” the president said finally, which his aides took to mean he would not grant the pardon. “So why do you think he did it? Do you think he was protecting the vice president?”
“I don’t think he was protecting the vice president,” Burck said.
“So why do you think he did it?” Bush asked.
Burck said he thought Libby assumed his account of events would never be contradicted because prosecutors would not force reporters to violate vows of confidentiality to their sources. “I think he thought that would never be broken, and I think also Libby was concerned because he took to heart what you
said back then, which is that you would fire anybody that you knew was involved in this,” Burck said. “I just think he didn’t think it was worth falling on the sword.”
Bush took that in but did not seem convinced. “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney,” the president said. He did not say so, but it seemed that Bush believed that Cheney had a personal stake in this, that in effect it was a conflict of interest. Now the vice president was just one more supplicant trading on personal connections in the pardon process, in this case seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself for Cheney.
Bush sighed. “Now I am going to have to have the talk with the vice president,” he said gloomily. That was the sort of unpleasant business that for eight years he had left to Cheney. It was the vice president who had delivered the bad news to people like Paul O’Neill and Donald Rumsfeld when they were fired.
Bolten spoke up. “I can do it,” he volunteered.
“Nah, nah, I can do it,” Bush said.
But he was dreading it.
FOR EIGHT YEARS, George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney had been partners in an ambitious joint venture to remake the country and the world. No two Americans in public office had collaborated to such lasting effect since Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Together they had accomplished significant things. They lifted a nation wounded by sneak attack on September 11, 2001, and safeguarded it from further assault, putting in place a new national security architecture for a dangerous era that would endure after they left office. At home, they instituted sweeping changes in education, health care, and taxes while heading off another Great Depression and the collapse of the storied auto industry. Abroad, they liberated fifty million people from despotic governments in the Middle East and central Asia, gave voice to the aspirations of democracy around the world, and helped turn the tide against a killer disease in Africa. They confronted crisis after crisis, not just a single “day of fire” on that bright morning in September, but days of fire over eight years.
Yet for all that, their misjudgments and misadventures left them the most unpopular president and vice president in generations. They had unwittingly unleashed forces that led to the deaths of perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis while squandering America’s moral authority, failing to rescue a great American city from a biblical flood, presiding over the worst financial crisis in eight decades, and leaving behind a fiscal mess that would hobble the country for years. For good or ill, theirs was a deeply consequential administration that would test a country and play out long after the two men at its center exited the public stage.
That their final hours together would be consumed by their private argument over the pardon underscores the distance the two men had traveled. Theirs is a story that may seem familiar on the surface, but in fact the real tale of Bush and Cheney and their eight years together is far more complicated than the simplistic narrative that developed over time. Hundreds of interviews with key players, including Cheney, and thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos, and other internal documents paint a riveting portrait of a partnership that evolved dramatically over time. Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned number two, Bush was hardly the pawn nor Cheney the puppeteer that critics imagined. But if the vice president won most of the fights in the first term, he had grown increasingly marginalized by the second. Restless and disaffected, Bush sought out new paths to right his presidency and no longer paid as much heed to his vice president on everything from North Korea to gun rights. Cheney became alienated sitting in his West Wing office watching their efforts in his view run off course, undermining much of what he had accomplished. His fight for Libby was in a sense, then, a fight for redemption from a president who had turned away from him. In pressing for clemency, Cheney was seeking one last validation of their extraordinary tandem—one that Bush was ultimately unwilling to give.
“Friendship” is a word that does not fully capture the relationship between Bush and Cheney. They did not see each other out of the workplace. Cheney did not spend social weekends at Camp David, and they did not dine together with their wives. They did not typically exchange birthday gifts. Bush did not go hunting with Cheney, and the vice president visited the president’s ranch in Texas only for official meetings, although the two men would occasionally slip out to fish for bass in a pond on the property. On election night in 2000 and again in 2004, they watched the returns separately, coming together only late in the evening when they thought they were about to head to a public party to claim victory. “They weren’t personally close,” reflected Ari Fleischer, the president’s first White House press secretary. “They didn’t go bowling together or to Camp David. Cheney didn’t go jogging with George Bush. He was everything that Bush designed when he chose Dick Cheney to be counselor.”
Cheney thought of their relationship as a business one. “It was professional, more than personal,” Cheney said after leaving office. “We weren’t buddies in that sense.” Bush had a hard time defining their relationship. “You know, I would, I would say friends,” he finally concluded. “But on the other hand, we run in separate circles. Dick goes home to his family, and I go home to mine. I wouldn’t call him a very social person. I’m certainly not a very social person either. So we don’t spend a lot of time socially together. But, uh, friends.”
Partners might be a more apt description, although even that is freighted. Some Bush advisers objected because in their view partnership implied an equal footing, and the vice president was, in the end, the vice president. Cheney never forgot that and made a point of showing nothing but deference to Bush. While Bush called him “Dick,” Cheney always called Bush “Mr. President.” Even out of his presence, Cheney referred to him as “the Man,” as in “Let’s take this to the Man.” Bush, more irreverently, sometimes referred to Cheney as “Vice.” Karl Rove came to call Cheney “Management,” as in “Better check with Management.”
Cheney was just five years Bush’s senior but carried himself with the gravitas of a much older man, and Bush treated him with more respect than anyone else in the inner circle. Yet in any meeting, it was clear who was in charge: Bush led the discussion, asked the questions, and called on people to speak, while Cheney largely remained quiet. “If you spent any time around President Bush, you quickly realize he’s not a guy who can be led around in that way, not at all,” observed Matthew Dowd, his campaign strategist. “And Cheney’s not the type who operates that way, not at all.” Still, that silence seemed to connote a power all its own; everyone else in the room understood that when they left, Cheney stayed behind, offering advice one-on-one when nobody could rebut him. What Cheney actually thought, at times, remained mysterious. “He was a black box to a lot of us,” said Peter Wehner, the White House director of strategic initiatives.
They were, of course, starkly different men, Bush an outgoing former college cheerleader from a privileged family background who delighted in bestowing nicknames, conquered his own demons with a ferocious midlife discipline, and preferred the big picture; Cheney a onetime electrical lineman who worked his way up to some of the most important jobs in Washington by mastering the intricacies of governance, ultimately becoming the grim eminence of a wartime White House.
But they shared more in their backgrounds than many recognized. Both were raised in the West and identified with its frontier spirit. Both made their way east to the halls of Yale University, only to become disenchanted by what they found to be an elitist culture. Both partied robustly as young men and had run-ins with the law, only to get their acts together after the women in their lives finally put their feet down. Both admired Winston Churchill to the point of displaying busts of the legendary prime minister, seeking to emulate his relentless strength in the face of overwhelming odds.
They both had a sense of humor too, though of markedly different brands. Where Bush was jocular and sometimes goofy, making faces on his campaign plane or enjoying an aid
e’s whoopee cushion prank, Cheney was dry and understated, slipping in an ironic comment and then lifting the corner of his mouth into his trademark crooked grin. As it happened, they shared the same target for their humor: Cheney. Bush enjoyed poking fun at his vice president’s bad aim and penchant for secrecy. “Dick here sent over a gift I could tell he’d picked out personally,” Bush said when his daughter Jenna got engaged to be married. “A paper shredder.” Cheney embraced his own dark reputation. Once his friend David Hume Kennerly greeted him teasingly by saying, “Hi, Dick. Have you blown away any small countries this morning?” Without missing a beat, Cheney replied, “You know, that’s the one thing about this job I really love.” At one point, he puckishly tried on a Darth Vader mask his aides had bought and posed for a picture. When Cheney later tried to put the picture in his memoir, Lynne Cheney talked him out of it.
Popular mythology had Cheney using the dark side of the force to manipulate a weak-minded president into doing his bidding. The image took on such power that books were written about “the co-presidency” and “the hijacking of the American presidency.” Late-night comedians regularly turned to the same theme. Conan O’Brien joked that Cheney had told an interviewer, “I’ll really miss being president.” Jimmy Kimmel joked that Cheney “doesn’t regret any of the decisions he made, and if he had to do it all over again, he would order President Bush to do exactly the same thing.”
Cheney did not seem to mind, but it got under Bush’s skin. When he published his own memoir after leaving office, Bush disclosed that Cheney had volunteered to drop off the 2004 election ticket. “Accepting Dick’s offer,” Bush mused, “would be one way to demonstrate that I was in charge.” Yet while Bush stewed, Cheney came to see the reputation as an advantage. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he once asked sardonically. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”
The cartoonish caricature, however, overstated the reality and missed the fundamental path of the relationship. Cheney was unquestionably the most influential vice president in American history. He assembled a power base through a mastery of how Washington worked and a relationship of trust with Bush, who viewed him as his consigliere guiding him through a hostile and bewildering capital. Cheney subordinated himself to Bush in a way no other vice president in modern times had done, forgoing any independent aspiration to run for president himself in order to focus entirely on making Bush’s presidency successful. In return, Bush gave him access to every meeting and decision, a marked contrast to his predecessors. Harry Truman as vice president met alone with Franklin D. Roosevelt just twice after Inauguration Day. When asked in 2002 how many times he had met privately with Bush, Cheney reached into his suit pocket and pulled out his schedule. “Let me see,” he said. “Three, four, five, six, seven—seven times.” Then he paused for effect. “Today.”