Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Rove oversaw an asset-deployment team that managed high-visibility trips and official grant announcements so as to promote the president’s agenda and his Republican allies. Rove’s team organized scores of political briefings at federal departments and agencies with election-themed slides. Half of the twenty-two grants released by the Department of Health and Human Services in late September, just weeks before the election, went to targeted states or districts, according to one media analysis; the news release announcing them focused at the top on four recipients, all of which had been highlighted in the political briefings. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao’s thirteen official trips in the final weeks before the election all took her to media markets on the political target list, the analysis found. The blending of government and politics triggered investigations by watchdog offices and disgruntled even some of Rove’s colleagues. David Kuo, the deputy director of faith-based and community initiatives in the White House, grew alienated when his office volunteered to do roundtables around the country but was then told by a Rove aide to specifically target twenty races during the 2002 midterm elections. In response to the pressure, the office kept a political map with every state shaded according to importance.

  Just days after the convention, the campaign faced a tenuous moment. On September 7, the American death toll in Iraq hit one thousand, the vast majority of them taking place after Bush declared major combat operations over in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner. It was a sobering milestone. But on the campaign trail, Cheney argued that the United States could not afford to give ground.

  “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice,” he told supporters in a fiery speech in Des Moines. “Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.”

  The line was a sharper articulation of the same argument Bush and Cheney had made for months, that Democrats would return the country to a pre-September 11 mind-set that looked at terrorism as a law enforcement matter rather than a war.

  But his stark equation—a vote for Kerry would mean a successful terrorist attack—took it a step further and resulted in gales of protest from the other side. “Dick Cheney’s scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs,” John Edwards fired back.

  As Cheney flew to his next stop in New Hampshire, cell phones aboard the plane began ringing from campaign headquarters with what-did-he-say questions. Scooter Libby argued that the line was being misread and began quarreling with the stenographer about where a comma should go. Reporters were blamed for blowing it out of proportion, further souring a relationship that had already led Cheney to ban the New York Times from Air Force Two and also to try to kick off the Associated Press until he was talked out of it. Anne Womack, his press secretary, was sent into Cheney’s cabin to get him to walk back the line. Cheney was irritated. As far as he was concerned, this was just game playing. “That is what I meant,” he snapped.

  WITH DEBATES APPROACHING, Bush was not as engaged in preparing as four years earlier. A commander in chief in the middle of a war has less time than a challenger. Moreover, Bush was distinctly unenthusiastic about debating and even less so about practicing. The fact that he would go up against Kerry only increased his irritability. Kerry exemplified everything Bush had long despised about the haughty Yale-Eastern-elite culture. “Bush thought Kerry was a pedantic and arrogant flip-flopper and didn’t like the Massachusetts senator,” as Rove later put it.

  Rove worried as he watched Bush glide through debate prep. The president “was rusty,” unlike Kerry, who had just emerged from a tough primary battle. Bush misjudged his opponent, telling aides that Kerry would not be overly aggressive because he would want to look presidential. Senator Judd Gregg, who played Al Gore in 2000, put his Democratic mask back on to play Kerry, but he flew to Crawford for prep sessions just three or four times, rather than every week as he had the last time. “You didn’t feel the heightened tension or newness or the originality that had to happen with the Gore debates,” he recalled. “The president was president. He knew what he wanted to say.” Dan Bartlett dubbed this presidentialitis—the notion that a president does not need to be prepped, a feeling of “I got this.”

  Bush arrived in Florida the day before the first debate with a commanding position in the race. The latest Gallup poll showed him with an eight-point lead. The debate could cement that. “If the president does reasonably well, this basically should button down the election,” Matthew Dowd concluded. Bush spent part of the day before the evening encounter on September 30 inspecting recent hurricane damage by helicopter and on foot with his brother Jeb. By afternoon, he had returned to his hotel and had a massage to get ready. Only later did advisers come to regret scheduling other activities for the day. Bush was weary.

  A couple hours before the debate, the president called Bartlett to his suite. “Now,” Bush said, “what do you want me to say about Kerry?”

  Bartlett was alarmed. Houston, we’ve got a problem, he thought as he left. He found other members of the campaign team.

  “What’s wrong?” someone asked.

  “I don’t think this is going to go well,” Bartlett said.

  Onstage at the University of Miami that night, Bush found an opponent who quickly got under his skin. Kerry went after the president aggressively, declaring that Bush had made “a colossal error of judgment” in invading Iraq and had “outsourced” the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Afghan warlords. Bush fired back, reminding voters that Kerry had also declared Saddam Hussein a “grave threat” and voted for war.

  The exchange flared over the validity of preemptive war. “You have to do it in a way that passes the test,” Kerry said, “that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.”

  Bush jumped on that. “I’m not exactly sure what you mean, ‘passes the global test,’ you take preemptive action if you pass a global test,” he said with undisguised scorn. “My attitude is you take preemptive action in order to protect the American people, that you act in order to make this country secure.”

  The rules required the camera to stay on the candidate who was speaking without reaction shots, but the networks had no intention of obeying a rule they did not negotiate, and the Bush team knew that. Still, his advisers seemed surprised to see a split screen showing the president scowling with disdain as Kerry spoke. After four years in office with a Congress of his own party and a staff that idolized him, Bush had grown unaccustomed to being challenged.

  Just as Gore’s sighs were off-putting in 2000, so now were Bush’s glowers and grimaces. Karen Hughes broke it to him afterward that pundits were offering a harsh judgment.

  “They’re going to report that you lost the debate,” she told him.

  “Why?”

  “You looked mad.”

  “I wasn’t mad. Tell them that.”

  “I can’t. Because you did look mad.”

  She was not the only one who told him. Rove told him “his dislike for Kerry was making him come across as unlikable.” Bartlett, Ken Mehlman, and Mark McKinnon echoed the assessment. Andy Card concluded that “he didn’t really want to be at the first debate.” Even Laura Bush weighed in. “I don’t know what happened,” she told him. “You’ve got to be yourself and you weren’t.” Even so, it took a review of the pictures to make Bush see. “I don’t think I was that irritated,” he told a friendly journalist after the election. “My facial expressions must have said that.” The polls certainly confirmed the judgment. The eight-point advantage in the Gallup survey disappeared overnight, and suddenly Bush was in a tie. “We came out of that debate and it is a whole new ball game,” Dowd concluded. “The performance was a disaster.”

  CHENEY STARTED DEBATE prep lo
ng before Bush did and was determined to help the ticket, but where he was a comforting face in 2000, four years later he had become a forbidding figure to the public. One day after a debate prep session at the vice presidential residence, most of his advisers had drifted off, and Cheney was left with Scooter Libby and Neil Patel. Libby raised the issue that consumed other White House aides but was rarely mentioned around the vice president.

  “Sir, have you ever looked at your polls?” Libby asked.

  “No, not really,” Cheney said, and it seemed possible he really meant it.

  “You might want to take a look,” Libby said. “They’re pretty bad.”

  “Really? What are they?”

  In some polls, his approval rating was below 50 percent.

  “You need to remember,” Cheney said, “that no one is voting for vice president and that it might help that mine be bad and the president’s be a tiny bit better.”

  “Don’t you think during an election that we should work on it a little bit?” Libby asked.

  “You’ve got to remember, no one is voting for the vice president,” Cheney repeated. “I really don’t care.”

  Cheney retreated to Jackson Hole for the final debate preparation. He looked up one day to find Dowd, who had flown to Wyoming to see him.

  “This is the situation,” Dowd told him. “You have to stop the bleeding.”

  Liz Cheney once again ran debate preparations, and she worried that John Edwards’s experience as a trial attorney would make him a formidable opponent. The vice president carved out four or five hours a day to practice. Rob Portman reprised his role as the opposition candidate, and Stuart Stevens was again the moderator. Stevens lightened the mood by asking “insane questions that no one would ever ask,” and Cheney gave “the most unbelievable dry answers,” recalled Neil Patel. Some in the room thought Cheney did not win the initial practice debates. “In the early ones, Portman did better, and as it went on, Cheney got better and better,” said Tevi Troy, another aide. The pressure was on. The night before the debate, Libby told Cheney that it would fall to him to make the case for the Iraq War. Lynne Cheney glared at him with irritation, evidently annoyed that the onus was placed on her husband.

  The day before the debate, Cheney went fly-fishing with Portman again, then joined his family for a quiet dinner. He flew on October 5 to Cleveland, where he met Edwards onstage at Case Western Reserve University. He looked down at a note card Liz had given him.

  Your children and grandchildren will never forget—and will tell their children and grandchildren—everything you have done for this great nation. We love you more than anything. Now go kick some butt.

  If his family was trying to boost him, Democrats were trying to unnerve him. Seated in the audience right in his eyesight was Senator Patrick Leahy, with whom he had skirmished on the Senate floor.

  But Cheney held his own, attacking Edwards for inconsistency on the war. Cheney had none of the respect for Edwards that he had had for Joseph Lieberman four years earlier. In Cheney’s mind, Edwards was slick and shallow, a presumptuous opportunist, and he did not disguise his contempt. “Senator, frankly, you have a record in the Senate that’s not very distinguished,” Cheney said at one point, citing missed meetings and votes. “Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.” Strictly speaking, that was not true. The two had both attended the same National Prayer Breakfast once. But Cheney had made his point: Edwards was not a serious figure.

  For Cheney, the most memorable moment of the debate came when the moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS, asked about his break with Bush over same-sex marriage.

  “People ought to be free to choose any arrangement they want,” Cheney said. “It’s really no one else’s business. That’s a separate question from the issue of whether or not government should sanction or approve or give some sort of authorization, if you will, to these relationships.” That, he said, should be left to the states. But he added that the president set policy for the administration and he supported the president.

  When Edwards responded, he mentioned Mary Cheney. “Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter,” he began. “I think they love her very much. And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her.”

  In the audience, Mary Cheney was steaming. He thinks they love me? “What gave him the right to use my sexual orientation to try to score political points?” she later asked. She caught Edwards glancing at her, and she mouthed a phrase that had become famous in her family and hoped he could read her lips: “Go fuck yourself.” Her mother and sister stuck their tongues out at him.

  Edwards went on to say that he and Kerry agreed that marriage is between a man and a woman but they supported partnership benefits for gay couples and criticized Bush for trying to “use the Constitution to divide this country.”

  When Ifill asked Cheney to respond, he said, “Well, Gwen, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.”

  “That’s it?” Ifill asked.

  “That’s it.”

  With that, Cheney had fulfilled Dowd’s assignment. The slide in the polls was arrested.

  THE DAY AFTER the debate, October 6, Charles Duelfer, who had taken over from David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, produced his final report on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Just as Kay had, Duelfer concluded Saddam Hussein had no such weapons and was making no concerted effort to develop them. Hussein’s illicit weapons capability “was essentially destroyed in 1991” and had not been reestablished. Indeed, Duelfer and his twelve-hundred-member team determined that Iraq, under pressure from the United Nations, had destroyed its last factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of biological weapons in 1996. And they found no evidence of any attempt to buy uranium from Niger or anywhere else after 1991.

  Hussein did harbor a desire to eventually re-create a weapons program after convincing the United Nations to lift sanctions, believing such arms had saved his regime during the war with Iran, deterred the United States from pressing on to Baghdad during the Gulf War, and intimidated Shiite opponents. And he had corrupted the UN oil-for-food program, essentially buying off key French and Russian officials. While Hussein wanted to pursue a nuclear capability, Duelfer reported the Iraqi dictator was focused mainly on ballistic missiles and tactical chemical weapons, and his interest was driven not by conflict with the United States but by fear of Iran, his principal enemy in the region. But this was all notional; there was “no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions,” Duelfer wrote in the nine-hundred-page report.

  Bush and Cheney, naturally, focused on the parts reporting Hussein’s ambitions for destructive weapons, but the main message was that the war had been justified on false intelligence. “U.S. Report Finds Iraqis Eliminated Illicit Arms in 90’s,” read the front-page headline in the New York Times. “U.S. ‘Almost All Wrong’ on Weapons,” said the Washington Post.

  Coming less than a month before the election, the report was politically damaging and exacerbated tensions between the White House and the CIA. Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, and other advisers to Bush and Cheney were convinced the CIA was leaking information to the opposition and the media in a deliberate attempt to influence the election. The friction grew so sharp that John McLaughlin, who had stepped in as acting director after Tenet’s resignation, personally investigated. “I did some real homework in the agency, and there was no organized campaign there to undermine his election,” he said years later. “I am absolutely convinced of that.” He told Bush that by phone. “We at CIA are not trying to bring you down,” McLaughlin told the president.

  Bush met Kerry
for their second debate, on October 8, at Washington University in St. Louis. This time it was a town-hall-style format with Missourians posing the questions, and Bush had worked harder to prepare. Right before going onstage, he asked to be left alone for fifteen minutes to collect himself, a rarity for a president who enjoyed company. It clearly helped. Joining Kerry before the cameras, Bush focused on containing any visible sense of annoyance. Still, as he roamed the stage, he mixed folksy charm with arguments that at times seemed too loud for the medium. Kerry responded by appearing as low-key as possible, although almost to the point of lacking passion.

  A focus group convened by the Bush-Cheney campaign in Orlando found that “John Kerry exceeded voters’ expectations in the two debates” and was seen as “more likeable, knowledgeable and charismatic than expected.” A memo summarizing the focus group said “voters were disappointed by the President in the first debate” but “give him better marks for the second debate and many thought he came across more human than Kerry.” For the third debate, Bush’s team concluded that “we want to remind voters Kerry’s not worth the risk. They know Bush. They don’t like the war in Iraq, but they at least know Bush is a decent guy and he stands up for what he believes.”

  BUSH ARRIVED AT Arizona State University for the final encounter on October 13 accompanied by John McCain. Their events together were awkward. Despite their reconciliation, McCain was reported to have flirted with becoming Kerry’s running mate. And the chemistry was still off. McCain kept trying to pump Bush up, sometimes to extremes. In the green room before the Arizona debate, McCain egged Bush on, telling him, “You’re going to be great” and “This is how you’ve got to hit him back.” Bush, looking for calm before the televised clash, found McCain’s hyper boxing-coach performance off-putting. “Man, is he spun up,” Bush marveled to aides afterward.