Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  A squadron of Democrats was vying to challenge Bush, sensing vulnerability born of a war launched on what increasingly looked like false intelligence, including Representative Richard Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader who had supported Bush on Iraq; Senator Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential nominee who had engaged in such a civil debate with Cheney; Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Vietnam War hero who became one of the nation’s most prominent antiwar activists; Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a telegenic trial attorney running on an antipoverty platform; General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander who won the Kosovo War; and Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, a physician who pioneered civil unions for gay couples.

  Gephardt, Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards had all voted to authorize war in 2002, complicating their efforts to criticize Bush, while Dean, who had no vote, was making inroads with a vocal antiwar message. Rove conducted an informal survey of the president’s political advisers. Four predicted Dean would win the Democratic nomination. Five picked Gephardt, including Bush. No one chose Kerry.

  Every weekend, Rove convened “Breakfast Club” meetings at his house, serving scrambled eggs with cheese and cream as well as venison, wild boar, and nilgai sausage while he and other strategists built the architecture of a reelection campaign. The advisers were not the only ones getting geared up. Bush’s daughter Jenna dreamed that her father had lost, so she and her sister, Barbara, who had defiantly sat out past campaigns, volunteered to work on this one. If he was going to lose, they reasoned, they wanted to have done what they could. Bush was delighted.

  Rove’s talent for political forecasting proved no better in Democratic primaries than it had in the 2000 general election. Dean knocked Gephardt out of the race during a brutal campaign in Iowa—with Bush’s help. “Dean ran an ad with me in the Rose Garden on that October day with Bush,” Gephardt remembered, “and the day the ad appeared, my polls took off. There was nothing to be done.” Gephardt, who won Iowa when he ran in 1988, finished fourth on January 19, behind Kerry, Edwards, and Dean. But Dean hurt himself fatally in the process thanks to a whooping scream at the end of his concession speech that got replayed endlessly on cable television.

  Rove had been betting colleagues hamburgers that Dean would win the nomination and even now thought he could recover. Bush disagreed.

  As he traveled to Ohio and Arizona, Bush offered his verdict. “He’s done, it’s over,” Bush said in his armored car between events.

  “Well, your father lost Iowa and went on to win,” ventured Matt Schlapp, his political director.

  “Yeah, my dad did lose Iowa,” Bush said, “but this guy is done.”

  Dan Bartlett said the concession speech may have played well in the room but was too hot for television. “It’s a good reminder,” he said.

  Bush spent the night of the New Hampshire primary, January 27, with friends and family at the White House. Kerry won with 38 percent, outpacing Dean, who had 26 percent. As the evening progressed, Bush and his guests debated lightly who would be a tougher general election opponent, Kerry or Edwards. Bush thought Edwards was too unseasoned and would be easier to beat, while Kerry would be a formidable opponent. Laura Bush disagreed. She thought Edwards would be the tougher challenger; nobody particularly liked Kerry, she reasoned, while Edwards was young, attractive, southern, and in his own way charming.

  WHILE DEAN WAS making Iraq an issue, Bush was coming to terms with the failure to find the weapons. David Kay, the arms inspector hired by the CIA to find the banned arms, decided to step down amid tension with George Tenet, and on January 28, Kay appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to give an assessment.

  “Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong,” Kay told lawmakers, “and I certainly include myself here.”

  He noted that even countries that opposed the war, like France and Germany, believed there were weapons. “It turns out that we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.”

  Kay rejected the common assertion that intelligence analysts were pressured by political leaders, calling that “a wrong explanation.” And he noted that his group had found “hundreds of cases” of prohibited activities involving weapons research by Iraqis, and “not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.” But those activities fell short of actually creating or storing weapons, and Kay called it important for Washington to “understand why reality turned out to be different than expectations and estimates.”

  Bush and Cheney invited Kay to lunch the next day to grill him about his conclusions. Condoleezza Rice and Andy Card joined them. Bush did most of the questioning while Cheney remained silent.

  Kay explained that the intelligence was wrong because the Iraqis acted like they had weapons.

  “Why would Saddam do something like this?” Bush asked.

  Because, encouraged by the French and Russians, he never thought the United States would actually invade, Kay said. Hussein, he added, was more afraid of the Shiites and Kurds he had kept in line with his mythological weapons, not to mention a coup from within his own power structure, and he feared losing stature in the Arab world.

  But Kay had criticism for Bush as well. One reason the intelligence community fell down on the job, he told the president, was that he had brought George Tenet across the line between analyst and policy maker. “You’re paying a price for having the director of the CIA essentially as a cabinet official and being too close,” Kay said. “Every president I know anything about would like to have his own policy and his own facts. The intelligence community should be the holder of the facts. It’s very difficult for George if he’s sitting at the table.”

  “Do you think I should meet less with him?” Bush asked.

  “Mr. President, this is not something I want to say,” Kay said.

  The next Monday, February 2, the situation grew worse with an interview that Colin Powell gave the Washington Post acknowledging that he might not have supported the invasion had he known there were no weapons. Almost exactly a year to the day after the landmark presentation to the Security Council that had deeply scarred his credibility, Powell admitted they had gone to war on false premises. While he told the newspaper that he still thought the war “was the right thing to do,” he hedged when asked whether he would have favored it if he knew then what he knew now. “I don’t know,” he said, “because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world.” The “absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus,” he added, and “changes the answer you get.”

  Bush and Cheney were furious. Powell tried to backtrack.

  “It was something we all agreed to, and would probably agree to again under any other set of circumstances,” he told reporters.

  George Tenet pushed back three days later with a speech at his alma mater, Georgetown University, where he acknowledged the agency’s failures but defended the prewar intelligence. He noted that he had hired another weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, to replace Kay and that “despite some public statements, we are nowhere near 85 percent finished” looking.

  Tenet concluded that the agency was “generally on target” about Hus- sein’s missile program but “may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making” on nuclear weapons. While they had found no chemical or biological weapons, Hussein wanted to make them and had the ability to produce them on short notice. Tenet admitted being influenced by an Iraqi source with “direct access to Saddam” who told the CIA that the Iraqis knew how to fool inspectors. “Could I have ignored or dismissed such reports at the time?” Tenet asked. “Absolutely not.”

  There was blame enough to go around: A president who arrived in office ready to complete what his father left unfinished. A vice president so convinced of the dangers from Baghdad that he pressed for intelligence to back up his conclusions. A CIA that often overlook
ed dissenting voices to produce what it thought the nation’s leadership wanted. A Democratic opposition cowed by the political winds and too willing to believe the same ultimately flawed evidence. Allied intelligence agencies like the British, Germans, and Italians that passed along thinly supported assertions, fraudulent documents, and wholesale fabrications without fully sharing their sources. An Iraqi dictator who never came clean on the assumption that America would never follow through on its threat. And a news media that got caught up in the post–September 11 moment, trusted official sources too much, and gave prominence to indications of weapons while downplaying doubts.

  IF CHENEY HOPED the gay rights issue had blown over in the weeks after the State of the Union, he was soon disappointed. On February 4, the highest court in Massachusetts ruled that same-sex marriage was a right under the state constitution, a decision that turbo-charged the already heated national debate. A week later, the mayor of San Francisco ordered city officials to grant marriage licenses to gay couples contrary to California law.

  In the White House, Karl Rove thought the president should go beyond his State of the Union address and explicitly endorse a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. While Bush had always taken a traditional view of marriage, he had never supported rewriting the Constitution to mandate it and indeed had declined to embrace such a proposed amendment when Bill Frist brought it up seven months earlier. But the Massachusetts and San Francisco actions had propelled the issue to new levels, and with the election approaching, it was an issue of great resonance among conservatives. Over the previous year, Tim Goeglein, the White House liaison to evangelical conservative leaders, “heard more about marriage than any other issue.”

  Bush agreed to consider it. Cheney asked his domestic policy adviser, Neil Patel, to research the issue. Patel assembled a binder with all of the president’s past statements on the issue and other material, then gave it to the vice president. Cheney did not volunteer what he would do with it, and it was awkward to ask. Peter Wehner, the speechwriter who had been put in charge of a sort of internal White House think tank called the Office of Strategic Initiatives (sometimes called the Office of Strategery after a mangled Bush term), drafted a briefing laying out both sides of the argument in a dispassionate way, looking at the constitutional ramifications, the institution of marriage, and the state of the law. Bush was turned off by courts seemingly making up rights not explicitly found in law.

  As the debate played out, Cheney remained quiet, as he often did. Everyone understood his view. But he chose not to engage, either in larger sessions or even in his one-on-one lunches with Bush. He could have weighed in and possibly tilted the debate but chose discretion. He had never been out front on gay rights, speaking only when asked. And in his calculations about which issues to expend political capital on, same-sex marriage did not make the list. That may have reflected his judgment about where Bush would end up, or it may have reflected a personal discomfort with the topic. In any case, he stayed on the sidelines.

  Another person who stayed quiet was Ken Mehlman, the president’s campaign manager who was secretly gay but had not yet come to grips with it, much less admitted it to Bush or his colleagues. Some suspected, but others were thrown off by the memory of Mehlman dating a young female campaign worker in 2000. Likewise, Israel Hernandez, Bush’s longtime aide going back to the Texas Rangers days, was also secretly gay.

  The issue, with all its awkward dynamics, played out against a presidential campaign coming into focus. Bush invited Cheney and top aides to the Yellow Room in the residence at 11:00 a.m. one weekday in February to listen to Rove and other strategists outline their plan for reelection. Rove showed a month-by-month plan of themes, travel, and media for the two principals and their spouses. The strategy was to present Bush as a man of strength and values, a steady leader in a volatile moment. “There is a strong sense that Bush provides security and makes people feel safe,” aides wrote about Cleveland focus groups conducted in February. “Subtle images of 9/11 get the message across very effectively.” Mark McKinnon, after a technical meltdown with his laptop, played five proposed television ads, including one with images of September 11. If Americans remembered how afraid they were after the attacks, they would side with Bush; if they focused on how astray the Iraq War seemed to be going, he could lose.

  Rove, McKinnon, Mehlman, Matthew Dowd, and other political advisers had been preparing for reelection since days after the vote in 2000. Dowd’s conclusion during the recount that independent voters were a vanishing force had already driven the White House approach, and now advisers devised a strategy effectively the opposite of the one they advanced four years earlier. Instead of simply devoting resources to a small group of swing voters, they would focus just as intently on identifying and turning out core Republican voters. “That decision influenced everything that we did,” Dowd said. “It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff.”

  To research how previous presidents had handled reelection campaigns, Dowd spent the summer of 2002 traveling to presidential libraries, including Ronald Reagan’s in California, Gerald Ford’s in Michigan, and George H. W. Bush’s in Texas. He put together a long memo about the opportunities and traps confronting an incumbent president and presented it to colleagues before the midterm elections. But the strategy Rove, Dowd, and the rest of the team put together was forward-looking, innovative techniques no president had tried before. Adopting the methods of commercial marketing, Rove and his colleagues sliced the electorate using “microtargeting” to tailor messages based on things like what magazines voters subscribed to, what cars they owned, and even what kind of liquor they drank.

  For her part, Laura urged her husband not to make same-sex marriage an issue in the campaign. “We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay,” she remembered. But when Bush and Cheney next had lunch, the president told the vice president he would endorse the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. “He brought up the fact that he knew that I might have a different view because he knew about Mary,” Cheney recalled. “He was very gracious about it. I mean, I guess that would be the way I would describe it. I knew going in that this was a place where we differed.” Bush was passing along his decision, not soliciting Cheney’s advice. He told the vice president to tell Mary that he would understand if she wanted to issue a statement opposing it. The vice president accepted the decision without protest. But he was not happy. “Cheney was pissed off,” said a friend, “and I think he blamed Karl for that.”

  On February 24, Bush made it public. “The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith,” Bush said. At the same time, he said he wanted to make sure states could still pass alternative arrangements, such as civil unions, and he discouraged hateful rhetoric. “We should also conduct this difficult debate in a matter worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger.” Bush, who had privately deplored gay bashing and welcomed his transgendered college classmate to the White House, read the statement in a flat tone that suggested his heart was not in it. He was a traditionalist, he did not think courts should be deciding such questions, and he was told it was good politics, but he also knew he was playing to the sorts of antipathies he had resisted in the past.

  The vice president called Mary to tell her the president had offered to let her issue her own statement disagreeing with the decision. But the last thing she wanted to do was call more attention to herself. Having wrestled with this issue a month earlier, she had come to terms with remaining on the campaign and keeping her thoughts to herself.

  The politics of the decision were clear. A poll taken a week before the announcement showed that 64 percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage compared with 32 p
ercent who said it should be legal. Among the conservative voters Rove was targeting, the margin was even more lopsided. Eleven states were poised to put the question on the November ballot, drawing out more Bush-Cheney voters. The Bush team would eventually put anti-gay-marriage ads on radio stations oriented to Hispanic and African Americans below the radar screen of the national media; some aides were never sure if Bush even knew about that.

  At a private meeting after his announcement, Bush told Republican congressional leaders that he felt his hand had been forced by the courts. But he was also in a feisty mood, focused on the looming campaign. He had “gotten pretty well pummeled” during the Democratic primaries, he told the lawmakers, but was planning to go on offense. “The vice president and I are ready to fight,” he said.

  IN THE MIDST of a busy February, Bush absorbed a personal blow. His loyal dog Spot had suffered a series of strokes and had to be put to sleep on February 21. The fifteen-year-old English springer was born to Millie, his parents’ dog, and had the distinction of being the only canine to live in the White House under two presidents. As with many couples whose children go off to school, Spot along with the Scottish terrier Barney occupied an important part of the president’s family life. Where Barney was rambunctious and often had to be corralled, Spot was friendly and obedient, regularly making her way onto Marine One on the South Lawn for trips to Crawford without having to be nudged.

  For Bush, the dog’s death among all the other tragedy that he had overseen since coming into office, and particularly in the eleven months since invading Iraq, somehow struck home. Before she was to be euthanized, as Laura recalled it, Bush took the ailing dog to the South Lawn, set her down, and then lay on the grass next to her, “encircling her in the chill dusk with the warmth of his body and gently stroking her head for a final farewell.”