by Peter Baker
While the vice president’s office defended itself, the situation in Iraq developed in troubling ways. Presuming the war was essentially over, short of mop-up operations, Tommy Franks had decided against bringing in the First Cavalry Division as planned and announced his retirement. When Richard Myers asked him to reconsider, Franks lashed out at him. “Not going home?” he said. “Butt-fuck me.” His command unit left behind in Iraq then withdrew from the country, and he was replaced by a recently promoted division commander named Ricardo Sanchez. Now the army’s most junior lieutenant general, Sanchez found himself in charge with a headquarters designed to run a division, not a country, with just 37 percent of the staff such a post should have had. His ascension went largely overlooked in Washington. Donald Rumsfeld had interviewed Sanchez for his promotion to three stars but later said he had nothing to do with putting him in charge in Iraq, an astonishing disengagement in the most important theater for the American military. (Myers doubted Rumsfeld’s account. “I just find that really hard to believe,” he said.)
The transition belied the increasing violence on the ground. More than two dozen American soldiers had been killed in combat since Bush declared major operations over under the “Mission Accomplished” banner, and the Pentagon had concluded that it was fighting five distinct groups, even though it refused to call that a guerrilla war or an insurgency. Bush was defiant. Talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room on July 2, he all but dared the insurgents to escalate their attacks.
“There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there,” Bush said. “My answer is: Bring ’em on. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”
The Texas swagger made headlines, but like his “dead or alive” comment in 2001 it drew concern from the first lady and others who deemed it cocky and even insensitive.
“Mr. President, can you imagine how that would sound to a mother who just lost her son in Iraq?” Ari Fleischer asked in a private moment.
Bush said he had not thought of that. “I was just trying to express my confidence in our military.”
That offhand bravado became a rallying cry among insurgents in Iraq, who threw it back in Bush’s face as the war escalated. And it helped reinforce for Bush what every president ultimately realizes, that words have multiple audiences; what makes sense for one set of ears has a drastically different impact on another. As his presidency wore on, Bush became more aware that he was simultaneously addressing not just the American public but troops in harm’s way, the country’s allies, the Iraqi people, and the enemy itself. He would eventually consider the “bring ’em on” comment one of his biggest gaffes, although its larger importance lay not in the words themselves but in the flawed analysis they revealed. What he faced in Iraq was not a relatively minor challenge that would be put down expeditiously.
NOR WAS THE Niger question. On July 6, Joseph Wilson unmasked himself, writing an op-ed in the New York Times, giving an interview to Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby in the Washington Post, and appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, all to allege that weapons intelligence “was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Cheney read the Times op-ed while flying back to Washington on Air Force Two from Wyoming. He clipped it, underlining eleven different parts and scrawling his own reactions above the headline. “Have they done this sort of thing before?” he wrote. “Send an Amb to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”
The White House was pounded over the sixteen words and decided to retreat. At a briefing on July 7, the day after Wilson’s public debut, David Sanger of the Times pressed Fleischer on Bush’s statement in the State of the Union.
“So it was wrong?” Sanger asked.
“That’s what we’ve acknowledged,” Fleischer said.
But that did not end the matter. Cheney was upset and talked it over repeatedly with Libby. The vice president was “very keen to get the truth out,” Libby later said. In the days that followed, Libby told Fleischer about Wilson’s wife, and the two of them as well as Karl Rove discussed it with reporters. Critics later portrayed that as a systematic campaign to deliberately blow the cover of a covert CIA operative, which would be a crime. All involved denied it, and no one would ever be charged with it. What seems more plausible is that Libby and the others were trying to undercut Wilson’s credibility by suggesting he went to Africa at the behest of his wife, not the vice president. Libby was so consumed by the matter that he called Tim Russert, the NBC News bureau chief, to complain about the commentary of the liberal MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews. What exactly was said during that call would later be in dispute.
Bush was leaving for a weeklong trip to Africa and not eager for the controversy to follow him. The day before he departed, he met with Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and George Tenet. Rice argued they should “just take the issue off the table” by repudiating the sixteen words and taking responsibility. Cheney opposed that, arguing that the information had been in the National Intelligence Estimate and cited legitimately. Even at that time, it had been reported that an Iraqi delegation had a few years earlier approached Niger about “expanding commercial relations”; Cheney and his allies argued that had to mean uranium, since that was the country’s main resource. Besides, Cheney argued, the sixteen words were literally correct because they said the British government had reported this, which it had. But Bush eventually agreed with Rice, who then talked with Tenet about releasing a statement.
The situation worsened as Bush took off on Air Force One. With the president and Rice across the world, Cheney in Washington, and Tenet at a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, the administration’s response over the next few days proved disjointed at best. Before Tenet could finish his statement, Rice felt pressured to put the fire out, so she marched back to the press cabin on Air Force One as it made its way to Entebbe, Uganda, on July 11.
“If the CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question,” Rice told reporters.
Bush echoed her later that day when asked about it by a reporter at a beachside hotel in Uganda. The speech, he emphasized, “was cleared by the intelligence services.”
What Bush and Rice considered factual statements were seen by Tenet as shifting blame, and he wondered if he might be fired or have to resign. In Sun Valley, he grew angrier as he wrote his own statement, going back and forth with the White House. Seventeen drafts later, he took his lumps: “First, CIA approved the President’s State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency. And third, the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.” But then he offered “a little history,” noting that the CIA had disagreed with the British about the validity of the Niger report and had not included it among the key judgments in the National Intelligence Estimate, although it was mentioned in the body of the text. He did not mention that the CIA had gotten the White House to take the same allegation out of Bush’s October speech in Cincinnati.
The swirling events opened a permanent rift between Tenet and the White House. Cheney and his allies believed Rice’s admission only made matters worse, not better. “You put a bull’s-eye on the White House,” Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who had dealt with CIA officials over the speech, told Stephen Hadley that night. Joseph felt the admission fed into the perception that the White House had lied. Rice, Rove, and Dan Bartlett eventually came to the same conclusion, although it was not clear that there was much of a choice.
THE NEXT DAY, July 12, Cheney flew to Norfolk, Virginia, to help commission the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier. On the return flight, Libby entered his cabin on Air Force Two to tell him a couple of reporters had called about the Wilson story. Cheney dictated to Libby what he should tell them
. Libby later that day talked with four reporters, and Valerie Wilson came up with two or three of them.
On July 14, the conservative columnist Robert Novak published a column identifying Valerie Wilson as a CIA operative. Novak had learned not from the Cheney camp but from one of Cheney’s fiercest adversaries, Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy secretary of state, who mentioned it during an interview on other subjects. Armitage, an inveterate gossip, had also mentioned it to Bob Woodward during an interview for a book. Novak got it confirmed to his satisfaction from Karl Rove and then a CIA spokesman. Three days later, Matthew Cooper of Time, one of the reporters Libby talked with after the Norfolk trip, posted a story on the magazine’s Web site mentioning the ambassador’s wife; Cooper, like Novak, had also spoken with Rove. Judith Miller of the New York Times, who talked with Libby about Valerie Wilson, never published anything about her.
Libby and Rove at first thought the revelation might help them by making it clear that Joseph Wilson did not go to Africa on Cheney’s behalf. But they quickly realized what an enormous miscalculation that was. Although Valerie Wilson was working as an analyst at CIA headquarters, she had previously been overseas undercover, and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act made it a crime to intentionally disclose the identity of a covert agent. Rather than questioning the origin of Wilson’s trip, reporters focused on whether the White House had blown the cover of a CIA officer to punish a critic.
Matters got worse over the weekend when Michael Gerson found in his files the memo the CIA had sent him and Hadley warning them to take the Niger uranium story out of the president’s Cincinnati speech the previous fall. Gerson brought the memo to Hadley, who was deeply embarrassed. The warning was on page 3 of a three-and-a-half-page memo, and Hadley had forgotten about it, but it was clear the White House had been previously alerted about the veracity problems with the Niger intelligence. It was his responsibility to vet the State of the Union, and he should have remembered the previous episode. Hadley, almost universally considered a soft-spoken, workaholic man of decency and honor, crafted a statement announcing his resignation.
The next morning, July 22, Bush found Hadley coming to see him alone before a meeting.
“Mr. President, I think I need to resign,” Hadley said.
“Ugh, Hadley,” Bush said, dismissing him.
Hadley raised his voice, something he almost never did. “Mr. President,” he said, “you need to hear me out on this.”
“All right, Hadley, I will hear you out.”
Hadley explained that the president should expect the highest standards and those who work for him were invested with the national trust. It was no disgrace to accept responsibility for a mistake, he said. “In fact, that is exactly how the system should work, and that is what needs to happen here.” Hadley mentioned his resignation statement.
“Let me see your statement,” Bush said. He read it through. “It is a great statement,” he said, “and you can use everything but the last paragraph,” meaning the resignation.
“Mr. President, I think this is a mistake,” Hadley protested.
“I know you do.”
At that point, Cheney and other top advisers arrived for an 8:00 a.m. meeting. Bush decided to needle Hadley a bit. “Hadley wants to resign,” he announced to the room.
“What’s the matter, Steve?” Cheney asked. “Don’t you like it around here?”
Hadley, embarrassed to have this play out in front of the group, made a shorthand version of his case but knew it was for naught. “Give your statement,” Bush instructed, “but you are not resigning.”
As it happened, Tenet that same morning brought a copy of the memo and a follow-up, intent on making the point that the CIA had warned the White House about the uranium claim in the past. After showing them to Hadley, Tenet went to Andy Card’s office. As Tenet recalled, Card shook his head. “I haven’t been told the truth,” he said.
Hadley that afternoon invited reporters to the Roosevelt Room, where he explained what had happened and took responsibility. He and Bartlett stayed for an hour and twenty-three minutes, letting reporters exhaust every question to prove they were not hiding anything—except, that is, Hadley’s attempt to step down. Asked if he had offered to resign, Hadley said, “My conversation with the president I’m not going to talk about.”
A week later, the CIA notified the Justice Department that the leak of Valerie Wilson’s identity may have constituted a crime.
16
“Welcome to Free Iraq”
Stephen Hadley was not the only one contemplating stepping down that summer. Unbeknownst to almost anyone outside the Oval Office, Vice President Cheney offered three times to drop off the reelection ticket in 2004.
“Mr. President,” Cheney said during one of their weekly lunches, “I want you to know that you should feel free to run for reelection with someone else. No hard feelings.”
President Bush looked at him with worry. Was he okay? Was there anything wrong with his heart?
No, Cheney said. He just recognized that it might be easier for Bush to win with someone else.
Cheney understood he had become a magnet for attacks, portrayed by critics as the dark force behind the throne. His poll numbers were still relatively strong in those days, far above where they would eventually sink; some 54 percent of the public approved of him, according to Gallup, and 51 percent thought Bush should keep him on the ticket. But the benefit he brought in 2000 as counsel to an inexperienced president no longer applied. Cheney remembered helping to push Nelson Rockefeller off the ticket in 1976 so that Gerald Ford could beat Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, and he thought George H. W. Bush should have replaced Dan Quayle in 1992.
“The reason I did it—I believed that it was one of the few things 41 could have done in ’92 to change the scenario enough to have a shot,” Cheney said years later. “I had been through the thing with Ford and Rockefeller and concluded that we had to get Rockefeller out if we were going to win the nomination.” And so, he said, “I always saw the vice president as expendable in a sense. I do today.”
Bush, who had urged his father to replace Quayle with Cheney in 1992, brushed off his vice president. But Cheney came back at him during one of their weekly lunches. “The first couple of times I brought it up, I had the impression that he didn’t take me seriously,” Cheney recalled. “So I brought it up a third time, and he said okay and went away and thought about it.” Cheney said it was not an offer made lightly. “I mean, all the president had to say was, ‘Dick, I am ready to make a change,’ and I was out of there. I would have made it easy.”
Bush did think about it and even came up with a potential replacement, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader from Tennessee. He liked Frist’s demeanor, his medical background, the generational change he might represent. Frist had been a key ally on elements of the compassionate conservative agenda, including PEPFAR, and the two were working together on legislation expanding Medicare to cover prescription medicine. But Bush never contacted Frist. He quietly confided in only a few aides, individually and not in a meeting, including Andy Card, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett, and it remained a closely held secret. Bush did not mention it to reelection strategists like Ken Mehlman and Matthew Dowd or even to Condoleezza Rice. Cheney kept it secret from most of his staff and even longtime friends like Donald Rumsfeld and Alan Simpson. “I knew nothing about it,” Simpson said.
The fact that Bush was tempted, even briefly, suggests that the relationship was beginning to change. As he described it in his memoir, Bush noted that Cheney “helped with important parts of our base” but “had become a lightning rod for criticism from the media and the left. He was seen as dark and heartless—the Darth Vader of the administration.” More telling, though, was Bush’s mention of the perception that Cheney really ran the White House. “Accepting Dick’s offer would be one way to demonstrate that I was in charge,” Bush said. All the talk of Cheney as secret puppet master had begun to rankl
e him, and he wanted to prove he was the boss.
Even though they were unaware of Cheney’s offer, the issue was the subject of repeated conversations among the president’s campaign advisers. Some like Dowd wanted to replace Cheney—his candidate was Rice—both because of the drag he had become and because they needed to think about the future of the party and who would run for president in 2008. “Many of us came to the conclusion there was a Cheney problem,” Dowd said later. Rove, though, would not entertain it, and Bartlett put off the dissidents. “This is being considered,” he said. “Stay tuned.”
But privately, Bartlett warned Bush against the switch. Even though Bartlett was among the Bush aides who had been most frustrated at times with Cheney, he believed replacing him on the ticket would backfire. “People would say, ‘What does it say about Bush?’ ” he reflected. “The Dems would pile on and would not give any credit. I don’t think it would have successfully distanced himself from any of the controversial decisions. For every problem you think you’re solving, you’re creating two more.” While replacing running mates between terms was common early in the country’s history, no incumbent president had done it and gone on to win since Franklin Roosevelt. It would call into question the fundamental judgment of the president, suggesting the very first decision he made as a potential national leader had been wrong.
Bush went back to Cheney and turned him down; Cheney thought it was “a few days later,” while Bush remembered it being “a few weeks later.” Either way, Bush concluded, “I hadn’t picked him to be a political asset; I had chosen him to help me do the job. That was exactly what he had done.”