by Peter Baker
Yet inside the administration, everyone was growing frustrated with Iraq. While Washington was aggravated by Bremer’s plan for an extended occupation, the viceroy in Baghdad was increasingly worried that American forces were not focused on what needed to be done to put down the growing insurgency. “There was a big debate raging,” recalled Frederick Jones, the press secretary at the National Security Council. “No one was happy with the direction. There was a lot of tension.”
One day, Bremer called Scooter Libby and left a message, only to have Cheney return the call instead. Bremer took the opportunity to lodge his concerns.
“Mr. Vice President, in my view we do not have a military strategy for victory in Iraq,” he said. “It seems to me that our policy is driven more by our troop rotation schedule than by a strategy to win.”
“I’ve been asking the same question—what’s our strategy to win?” Cheney responded. “My impression is that the Pentagon’s mind-set is that the war’s over and they’re now in the ‘mopping up’ phase. They fail to see that we’re in a major battle against terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere.”
Rumsfeld and Powell were advancing separate plans intended to speed up Bremer’s timetable for transferring sovereignty. Bremer tried to hold that off by sending a letter to Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice on November 10, agreeing to pursue an interim constitution, which could accelerate a handover. Rice called him a few hours later and asked him to come to Washington to brief Bush. Bremer raced to catch a military flight and arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at eight o’clock the next morning.
When Bush and Cheney gathered the team to talk with Bremer that day, November 11, they heard a stark warning from the CIA about the growing insurgency. Rumsfeld interrupted.
“Why do you call it an insurgency?” he demanded.
A CIA official outlined the Pentagon’s own definition of insurgency, but few wanted to call it that. Acknowledging it was an insurgency would admit the occupation was not going well.
Nor was there much excitement about Bremer’s revised transfer plan. Cheney suggested just letting the Iraqi Governing Council choose a transitional government. Bremer thought that was too big a risk, so overnight he reworked his plan with Meghan O’Sullivan and agreed to turn over sovereignty by June 30 of the following year to an interim government chosen through caucuses rather than waiting for elections. When he presented it at the White House the next day, it met with far more approval. “Bremer is doing a fabulous job,” Bush told the visiting NATO secretary-general that day. Not everyone on his team agreed. But Bremer had bought himself more time and flew back to Iraq to announce his plan on November 15.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, had grown increasingly alienated from Bremer and the White House. He thought Washington had bungled planning for a post-Hussein Iraq and misjudged what was happening on the ground. The decision to transfer sovereignty in his mind was driven by the American political calendar. “The administration knew something had to be done immediately so that the November 2004 presidential election would not be impacted,” he concluded. “It was all about winning the presidential election and maintaining power.”
If that seemed a cynical interpretation, it was nonetheless hard to separate the political war at home from the military one overseas. As fall headed toward winter, Scooter Libby remained intent on exposing Joseph Wilson as not credible and pressed Kevin Kellems, a newly hired spokesman for the vice president, to attack the ambassador with reporters despite an explicit edict from Bush not to engage in the matter. Kellems was uncomfortable with Libby’s requests and went to David Addington for advice. Addington recommended he ignore Libby. “Don’t do it,” Addington said. “Listen to the president.”
CRITICS WERE JUST as cynical about the other big effort Bush was making in those autumn days, this one on the domestic front. Bush had promised during his 2000 campaign to revamp Medicare to cover prescription drugs for older Americans, but as he pressed Congress that fall, many even inside the White House saw it as a calculated move inspired by Karl Rove to win over senior voters in 2004, especially in the retirement havens of Florida, where no one wanted to go through another close call. “This was, I think, a Rove-driven agenda,” concluded Senator Judd Gregg, the Republican who helped Bush prepare for the 2000 debates. “They wanted to do something as a statement to senior citizens.”
There was certainly a policy argument for the initiative. Since Medicare was enacted in 1965, health care had grown increasingly dependent on prescription medication, and costs for seniors had skyrocketed. The plan Bush was pushing would be the most ambitious expansion of the entitlement program since its inception. But he faced complicated politics in passing it. Democrats generally opposed it, calling it a sop to the pharmaceutical industry and decrying changes Bush and his allies had included in the legislation to make the program more market oriented. Republicans like Gregg and Trent Lott dismissed it as more big government, especially since its $400 billion cost over ten years was not paid for. But Bush did have the critical support of AARP, the retiree group.
Bush was on Air Force One flying back from a visit to London as the House debated deep into the night of November 21. Bush talked with some members from Air Force One.
“I didn’t come to Washington to increase the size of government,” one balking conservative told him.
“You know what? I didn’t either,” Bush replied. “I came to make sure the government works. If we’re going to have a Medicare program, it ought to be modern, not broken.”
By the time Bush landed and returned to the White House, he was still short of a majority. Speaker Dennis Hastert opened voting at three o’clock in the morning and under House rules, members had fifteen minutes to vote. But when time was up, Bush was down by fifteen votes. Hastert held the vote open as party leaders leaned on Republican dissenters to switch. Hastert told David Hobbs, the chief White House lobbyist, that Bush had to talk with more Republicans, but Hobbs could not reach Bush, who had gone to bed. “He was just going crazy because he couldn’t get through,” Hastert recalled.
Finally, Hobbs woke Bush at 4:45 a.m. and implored him to speak with wavering congressmen. Hobbs wandered around handing his cell phone to Republicans to talk with Bush, putting about twenty on the line, one at a time, so many that he burned out his battery. Then a group of conservatives led by Representative Trent Franks of Arizona said they wanted to speak with the president, so they convened in a room off the House floor and gathered around a phone.
“Congressman, I understand you have a plan for getting the bill passed,” Bush told Franks as the others strained to listen.
Franks made clear he and his colleagues actually did not like the bill because they felt it expanded the government role in health care.
“I misunderstood,” Bush said. “I thought you had a plan.”
“I just needed to tell you that,” Franks said, referring to the way conservatives viewed the bill. “The only way they could change their minds on a proposal like that is if they believed they were getting something more important for the country.”
“Like what?” Bush asked.
Trying not to sound pushy, Franks switched to the third person. “If we could get the president of the United States to give his word of honor tonight that he would only appoint Supreme Court justices that he knew would overturn Roe v. Wade, would uphold personhood of the unborn in the Constitution and be strict constructionists, we could get this done right now,” he said.
This went beyond the usual log-rolling for a bill. It was one thing to promise a bridge or a highway project to get a key vote. Bush was being asked to commit to whom he would appoint to the highest court of the land.
“Congressman, I can’t do that,” Bush said. “If I did that, they’d spoonfeed that to me at the confirmation hearings.”
Franks said he did not mean that Bush would have to make it public.
Bush tried to steer the conversation back to the merits of the Medicare bill but
Franks persisted. The two went back and forth for several minutes, and Franks made clear they did not mean Bush should directly quiz candidates about Roe v. Wade since that would cross a line presidents typically did not cross.
“Okay, give me your criteria one more time,” Bush said.
Franks went over it again. Then, even more daring, he added, “Mr. President, that would not include Alberto Gonzales.”
Conservatives knew Bush would dearly love to make his White House counsel the nation’s first Hispanic justice, but they did not trust Gonzales. There was stunned silence in the room at Franks’s brazenness. But Bush let it pass without commenting. What he said next would become a point of dispute.
As at least one of the conservatives in the room remembered it, Bush agreed to the deal. “Congressman,” he told Franks in this recollection, “I tell you what, I think I’m going to make that commitment. You know I’m a man of my word.”
“I know you’re a man of your word,” Franks said. “Do I have your word?”
“Yes, congressman, you have my word.”
Others did not remember it being that explicit. Hobbs, the White House lobbyist, recalled the president being elliptical. “I don’t have a litmus test,” Bush said in this version. “You know what’s in my heart. You know what kind of judicial philosophy I have.” Hobbs and Jeff Flake, another congressman in the room, said they did not remember any commitment beyond that. Dennis Hastert too said later that Bush “was very careful not to make hard promises.”
Either way, Franks believed he had a commitment from the president to appoint anti-abortion justices; Bush of course was inclined to do so anyway, but the conservatives would try to hold him to it. Franks later sent him a list of ten candidates who fit his criteria. Among them were a couple of appeals court judges named John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Franks and a few others then switched their no votes, and the bill passed, 220 to 215, at 5:53 a.m. as the sun peeked over the horizon. The two-hour-and-fifty-one-minute vote was twice as long as the longest roll call in history.
The measure headed to the Senate and again stirred drama. Bush allies needed sixty votes to advance the legislation to a final vote on November 24, but they found themselves one short. The only hope for the president, as it turned out, was Trent Lott, who had lost his post as majority leader after Bush took him to task for his controversial comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. “I didn’t think they were telling the truth about what it was going to cost,” Lott recalled. Plus, given the costly growth of the nation’s entitlement programs, he thought it was like “putting more chairs on the deck of a sinking ship.”
As Lott made his way up the aisle to the clerk’s desk to register his vote, he heard Bill Frist, the man who took his post, plead, “Help us out, Trent.” Against his better judgment, he did, providing the crucial vote to advance the bill. Bush called minutes later to thank him, but Lott told him it was one of the worst votes of his career. A day later, on November 25, he voted against final passage, but that required only 50 votes, and it passed 54 to 44.
BUSH HEADED TO Crawford for Thanksgiving with another destination in mind. Since mid-October, he had been talking with Andy Card about making a secret trip to Iraq to see firsthand the country that had come to dominate his presidency. The notion seemed almost farcical given the security questions; other presidents had slipped out of the country to visit war zones in secret, but that was before the era of Stinger missiles and twenty-four-hour television.
From the ranch, Bush and Condoleezza Rice convened a videoconference with Cheney and Card on the morning of November 26 to see if everyone still agreed he should go. “We said we thought it was what we should do,” Rice recalled. Laura agreed, but their daughters were less sure. Bush told them only thirty minutes before leaving. “I’m scared, Dad,” Barbara said. “Be safe. Come home.”
Late that afternoon, Bush, wearing jeans, boots, and a work coat, climbed into an unmarked red van with tinted windows along with Rice. Both of them had baseball caps pulled low. “We looked like a normal couple,” he said afterward. “We were a casual yuppie couple.” To avoid suspicion, the van was driven by a plainclothes Secret Service agent who pulled out of the ranch past guards who did not realize who was in the back of the vehicle. They pulled out onto Interstate 35 toward TSTC Waco Airport, and for once the highway was not shut down for the presidential motorcade. Bush seemed taken aback by the slow pace.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A traffic jam,” Rice responded, tweaking him.
They boarded Air Force One with only a handful of aides plus seven journalists who had just been clued in and told to remove batteries from their mobile phones to preserve secrecy. The plane took off at 7:27 p.m. local time and headed to Washington, where the president and his small entourage transferred inside a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base to the second modified Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One, this one fueled and ready for the trip around the world. Stopping at the top of the ramp, Bush turned to reporters and put his hand with thumb and pinkie apart to his ear as if using a phone and mouthed the words “No calls, got it?” He drew a finger across his neck and repeated, “No calls.” Then he slipped into the plane. A few additional aides and reporters joined them, and the president was back in the air at 11:06 p.m. local time.
Bush fell asleep within fifteen minutes of takeoff. As they approached the coast of Great Britain, the distinctive blue-and-white aircraft was spotted by the pilot of a commercial jet who radioed to ground control.
“London, is that Air Force One?” he asked.
“No, that’s a Gulfstream V,” replied the air traffic controller, reading the cover data that had been fed into the flight system.
The pilot apparently recognized something was up because he just laughed and said, “Okay, London.”
Colonel Mark Tillman, the chief Air Force One pilot, alerted Joe Hagin, the deputy chief of staff who had put the trip together. Bush asked whether they should abort. They decided not to but kept watch to make sure the president’s absence from Crawford did not show up in any news reports.
As the plane approached Baghdad, Rice, Card, Hagin, and Dan Bartlett grew increasingly tense, and they worried Bush might be too. “Do you think we should go pray with the president?” Rice asked. They went to the president’s cabin, everyone held hands, and each of the five then offered a short prayer.
Bush headed to the cockpit to watch the approach to Baghdad. He noticed the minarets in the distance as the sun began to set. “The city seemed so serene from above,” he later observed. And yet he understood the dangers and kept his eye on a red light he had been told would flash if a missile were fired at the plane. Just five days before, a cargo plane taking off from the Baghdad airport had been hit by a SAM-7 ground-to-air missile and forced to make an emergency landing. As Air Force One approached, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, waiting on the tarmac, heard explosions in the distance and worried about a mortar attack.
In the main cabins of Air Force One, the shades were pulled shut and the lights turned off, with only the eerie hue from the digital clocks providing any illumination. Body armor was passed out for the president and passengers, and the pilot took an evasive path to make a sharp, quick landing. Air Force One touched down at 5:32 p.m. local time on Thursday, November 27, in a dusty mist that helped obscure the plane. Bush emerged from the plane in jeans and a blue shirt. At the bottom of the stairs were Sanchez, Jerry Bremer, and a handful of others.
“Welcome to Free Iraq, Mr. President,” Bremer declared.
Bush reached out to hug him. Brigadier General Martin Dempsey handed Bush a First Armored Division windbreaker, which he promptly put on.
Bush was then taken to the Bob Hope Dining Facility, which Bremer described as “a sort of overgrown Quonset hut.” Bremer had been told about the secret trip while in Washington. Sanchez had learned just three days before the president’s arrival. But none of the six hundred troops had a clue.
&n
bsp; While the president waited unseen in the wings, Bremer and Sanchez went to the microphone as if they were the main speakers.
“Now, General Sanchez,” Bremer started, “it says here I’m supposed to read the president’s Thanksgiving proclamation, but I thought the deal was it was the most senior person who reads it. Is that you?”
Sanchez played along. “Sir, I don’t know. Maybe we ought to get somebody from the back.”
“Let’s see if we’ve got anybody more senior here who can read the president’s Thanksgiving speech,” Bremer replied. “Is there anybody back there who’s more senior than us?”
That was Bush’s cue, and he entered to raucous cheers from shocked soldiers. “The building actually shook,” one soldier later recorded. The burst of enthusiasm was overwhelming, and as tears ran down Bush’s face, aides worried he would be too choked up to speak. “I was swept up by the emotion,” Bush recalled.
He tried a weak joke to shake it off. “I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere,” he told the soldiers.
He was on the ground just two hours, posing for pictures, and meeting briefly with members of the Iraqi Governing Council. Critics back home later mocked him for holding up a tray of turkey as if serving soldiers when it turned out to be decorative. But for many on the ground, the notion that their commander in chief would fly around the world into danger to spend the holiday with them resonated powerfully. And it would stay with Bush for years after he got back on Air Force One and took off.
Just as important, the secret held until he was out of missile range. Back at the ranch, Laura Bush even grew concerned that she had not seen any television coverage, forgetting that there would be a delay until his departure. She called the Secret Service command post to make sure everything was all right.
“Where’s the president?” she asked.
“We show him in the ranch house, ma’am,” an agent answered.
She realized they still did not know he was gone. “Oh, I’ll go look again,” she replied, trying to cover her tracks.