Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Bush decided to elevate Alberto Gonzales to attorney general and chose Margaret Spellings, his domestic policy adviser who had followed him from Texas, to replace the departing education secretary, Roderick Paige. In picking Rice, Gonzales, and Spellings, Bush was effectively stocking the cabinet with three of his closest advisers, taking firmer hold over the reins of government for the second term.

  ALTHOUGH BUSH HAD already asked Rice to become secretary of state, he had not yet asked Powell to vacate the post. The assumption was that he would, but the president never called to ask if the most prominent member of his cabinet was really ready to step down. Instead, he had Card call Powell on Wednesday, November 10, to ask for his letter of resignation by Friday.

  Powell was not surprised, and yet he was a little taken aback by the suddenness. “I thought we were going to talk about it,” he told Card, “because frankly I don’t know when you want me out but there are some very important conferences coming up. So do you want it right away, or should I stay a couple of months?”

  Card explained the plan was to package Powell’s resignation with other cabinet changes. “We want the letters right away so they can be announced,” Card said.

  Powell said fine. Was Rumsfeld going too?

  Card said he did not know.

  “If I go, Don should go,” Powell said.

  After they hung up, something got lost in translation because Card took the conversation to mean Powell was hedging on leaving. Bush thought this was coming “out of nowhere” and suspected it was born out of Powell’s resentment that he was going but Rumsfeld evidently was not. Powell would later deny any desire to stay beyond a couple of months, which he would end up doing anyway while waiting for Rice to be confirmed by the Senate. But the conflicting signals left a sour taste.

  Powell told no one other than his wife and Richard Armitage about Card’s call and personally typed his resignation letter at home, using it to reclaim ownership of the decision. “As we have discussed in recent months,” he began, “I believe that now that the election is over the time has come for me to step down as Secretary of State and return to private life.” The letter was delivered Friday, November 12.

  Bush was still torn about what to do about his secretary of defense and cast around for advice. Hours after Powell’s letter arrived, the president was talking with his visiting cousin, John Ellis. Bush regaled Ellis with stories from the reelection and then escorted him out to his car on the White House grounds. Just as Ellis was about to head out, Bush stopped him.

  “What do you think about Rumsfeld?” he asked.

  Ellis didn’t hesitate. “I think you should fire him,” he said. “I don’t know the facts, but I know the building,” meaning the Pentagon, “will be very happy if you fire him.”

  “Well,” Bush said, “it’s something to think about.”

  Others were volunteering advice. Michael Gerson ventured that it might be worth making some “personnel changes.”

  Bush understood the code. “You mean Rumsfeld?” he asked.

  He did. Gerson acknowledged he could not speak to the strategic issues, but as a matter of public perception Rumsfeld was too identified with the previous approach. “It’s going to be hard to get credit for any improvements in Iraq as long as we have the current leadership,” he argued.

  Recognizing Bush’s strong sense of fidelity to those around him, Gerson said there was no betrayal in remaking the team between terms. “It’s not disloyalty when someone’s been there four years and there’s a natural change,” said Gerson, who advocated Lieberman as a replacement.

  After another weekend mulling options, Bush announced Powell’s resignation on Monday, November 15, in a written statement along with those of the secretaries of energy, education, and agriculture and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Powell was treated as just one more replaceable cabinet member. Bush made no public appearance to discuss Powell’s departure, instead dispensing his secretary of state with three paragraphs that praised him as “one of the great public servants of our time.” The next day, Bush did appear before cameras in the Roosevelt Room to announce Rice’s nomination and the elevation of her deputy, Stephen Hadley, to replace her as national security adviser. Powell was not present. Neither was Cheney.

  “WE ARE NOT winning.”

  Bush and Cheney were meeting with the national security team when they heard Richard Armitage’s dour account. Armitage was leaving along with Powell, and he could afford to be blunt in his assessment of the downward spiral in Iraq.

  Bush was taken aback. “Are we losing?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Armitage said, hardly the answer Bush wanted to hear.

  In the days after the election, American forces returned to Fallujah, where they had waged a brief assault on Sunni insurgents in April until being called off. Ever since, the city had become a haven for al-Qaeda, brimming with stockpiles of weapons and laced with an elaborate set of booby traps and improvised bombs awaiting any attackers. Perhaps three thousand Iraqi and foreign insurgents were now estimated to be in the desert city.

  About fifteen thousand American and British troops, joined by a contingent of Iraqi forces, launched Operation Phantom Fury on November 8, forcing their way into the hornet’s nest while up to 90 percent of the city’s 300,000 civilians fled. As in April, the political reaction was explosive. The leading Sunni political party withdrew from the government, and Sunni leaders called for a boycott of national elections scheduled for January. Three relatives of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi were kidnapped in Baghdad and threatened with execution unless the operation was halted. In Fallujah, resistance was fierce, and the house-to-house battle would stretch on for weeks, with 2,175 insurgents reported killed, becoming the bloodiest of the Iraq War.

  Amid the violence, Iraq was preparing to put together its first elected government. With Allawi’s interim government ready to expire, elections were scheduled for January 30, 2005, to seat a parliament that would govern while a permanent constitution was written. Then elections would be held again in December to pick a full-fledged government that would move Iraq into a new era.

  But as fall turned to winter and the vote approached, a debate broke out in Washington and Baghdad about whether to postpone it. With American troops clearing out Sunni militants in Fallujah, leaders of the Sunni minority that had dominated Iraq for decades under Saddam Hussein were calling for a boycott of the elections, fearing they would be marginalized by the newly emergent Shiite majority. Some Bush advisers worried about fueling an insurgency already hijacked by al-Qaeda.

  Bush instinctively resisted changing a plan once it was set, and he thought giving in to pressure would be a mistake. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the foremost Shiite cleric, had rejected any talk of delay, and Allawi, also Shiite, had not asked Bush for one. Postponing the vote might be seen as selling out the Shiite majority. So on December 2, Bush sent a message. Asked about the elections during a photo opportunity in the Oval Office, he said, “The elections should not be postponed. It’s time for the Iraqi citizens to go to the polls. And that’s why we are very firm on the January 30th date.”

  The same logic finally brought him to a resolution on Rumsfeld. Just as he did not want to change the elections under pressure, he decided not to change his defense secretary under pressure. Uncertainty at the Pentagon, he reasoned, could not help. Besides, he was reluctant to push out someone he considered completely loyal. If the strategy in Iraq was not working, Bush thought, it was his own responsibility, not Rumsfeld’s. And Bush respected the secretary’s blunt forcefulness and savvy understanding of how Washington worked. It wasn’t at all clear that someone else could do a better job of riding herd over a uniformed military that often viewed political leadership as a transient obstacle. Bush aides spread news of his decision the next day, December 3.

  The same day, he disclosed his nomination of Bernard Kerik to take over the Department of Homeland Security from Tom Ridge, who was stepping down. Bush wanted
a hard charger who could tame the bureaucratic monster still trying to absorb twenty-two agencies. When Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, called to recommend Kerik, his friend and former police commissioner, Bush jumped at the idea. He had met Kerik in the rubble of the World Trade Center and was instantly impressed. Kerik was the sort of tough, colorful character who appealed to Bush. A high school dropout and son of a prostitute apparently killed by her pimp, Kerik became an undercover narcotics detective wearing a ponytail and diamond earrings before joining Giuliani’s 1993 campaign as a driver. He grew close to Giuliani, who made him corrections commissioner and then police commissioner. Bush later sent him to Iraq to train security forces.

  Bush had kept his decision to put Kerik in the cabinet secret, instructing Alberto Gonzales to vet him personally. It did not take much to uncover a trove of disturbing details about Kerik—various ethical scrapes, a civil lawsuit, a bankruptcy, a get-rich-quick board appointment to a stun-gun firm seeking business with homeland security agencies, not to mention criticism of his management while in Iraq. Most damning of all, the best man at his wedding worked for a New Jersey construction company with alleged Mafia ties that was seeking a big New York City contract and had provided Kerik with gifts, including $165,000 in apartment renovations. Gonzales, facing his own confirmation process for attorney general, grilled Kerik for hours. But in the end, Bush liked Kerik and brushed aside concerns.

  It was a revealing miscalculation. In the week after the announcement, a torrent of media stories highlighted Kerik’s checkered past, until finally people at Giuliani’s firm scouring Kerik’s finances discovered he had not paid Social Security taxes for a nanny who apparently was an illegal immigrant. Kerik later said the White House knew about everything that became public except the nanny. So the nanny became the excuse given for pushing Kerik to withdraw on December 10.

  The political damage did not last long, but it should have been an alarm bell inside the White House. With reelection behind them, the danger was the sort of hubris that leads a president to believe that a fundamentally flawed nominee could still be pushed through Senate confirmation. Bush privately blamed Giuliani, angry that an ally would foist on him such a manifestly problematic candidate. But the Kerik case was not a situation where the vetting had failed to turn up negative information; to the contrary, it demonstrated that a president at the peak of his power and influence thought he could dismiss such issues and that the rest of Washington would go along.

  Bush was not having an easy time finding someone else to become homeland security secretary. Richard Armitage said no. So did Joseph Lieberman, who also turned down the UN ambassadorship. Eventually, Bush and his team settled on Michael Chertoff, who had been the assistant attorney general at the beginning of the administration and was then appointed to a federal appeals court.

  AS HE FINISHED the first term, Bush decided to reward three figures who had played important roles. At a lavish East Room ceremony on December 14, he awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom to George Tenet, Jerry Bremer, and Tommy Franks. “These three men symbolize the nobility of public service, the good character of our country and the good influence of America on the world,” Bush declared before draping the medals around their necks. The decision shocked Washington. The three awardees, critics were quick to point out, had been at the heart of the biggest mistakes of the Iraq War—the false intelligence, the heavy-handed occupation, and a postwar plan more intent on pulling troops out than properly securing the country.

  In one sense, it demonstrated a president loyal to his people, determined to recognize their patriotism, dedication, and endless hours in service of their country, and unwilling to blame them for errors. In another sense, it was the act of a president fresh off reelection feeling empowered and a little bit defiant. Let the critics wag. He had political capital. And perhaps there was just a bit of calculation as well, keeping three critical players in the fold. Just a week earlier, Tenet had signed a book contract reportedly worth more than $4 million. Given his bitterness, Bush and Cheney had every reason to worry Tenet might come after them in print. Instead, a couple of months after the medal ceremony, Tenet put the book project on hold for a while.

  Just three days later, Bush had another task left over from the first term. On December 17, he signed legislation restructuring the nation’s spy agencies, a response to two intelligence breakdowns of epic proportions. The legislation passed Congress only after the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, went to Cheney asking for him to intervene. He agreed. “You won’t hear anything about what I’m doing,” he told them, “but that’s when I’m most effective.” The final bill centralized the sixteen intelligence agencies under a single director of national intelligence, but with billions of dollars and bureaucratic control at stake the measure emerged only after the new position was undercut even before it was filled. Rumsfeld, whose Pentagon controlled most intelligence resources, was unwilling to surrender them. How could a cabinet secretary run his department, he asked, if he did not control the spending of the agencies within it? “The result would be a train wreck,” he had written in a memo to Bush during the legislative debate, “or you and your successors will have to spend a great deal of time acting as a referee, with some risk to U.S. intelligence capabilities.” Cheney backed him and Bush went along, leaving the new intelligence director without the power to control spending.

  The trick now was to find someone to take on the new position without the tools it would really require. Armitage said no thanks. Porter Goss, who had taken over as CIA director from Tenet, was having problems managing the agency, making a promotion implausible. Bush aides approached Robert Gates, a former CIA director under the president’s father who was now president of Texas A&M University, but he declined. The search would stretch into the New Year.

  The year’s end brought one final act of cleanup from the first term. On December 30, the Justice Department adopted a new memo defining the legal contours of the terrorist interrogation program to replace the one first written largely by John Yoo and later abandoned by Jack Goldsmith. The new memo was more restrictive but still granted interrogators a lot of leeway and in one footnote effectively declared that what had been done under the old memo was still legal. This was seen as a quiet victory for Cheney and David Addington. Indeed, Yoo later declared that “the differences in the opinions were for appearances’ sake. In the real world of interrogation policy nothing had changed.”

  AS THE NEW YEAR opened, Bush focused on redefining his presidency. One day Dan Bartlett and Nicolle Devenish found him in the Oval Office standing with his hands in his pockets, staring out the window, and musing about bringing home the troops from Iraq as soon as possible. He knew the public was weary of war. He seemed to be, too.

  Bush wanted to use the “freedom speech” he had told Michael Gerson to write for the second inauguration to reorient his administration. His inclination was reinforced when he sat down to leaf through galleys of a book given to him by his friend Tom Bernstein, a former partner in the Texas Rangers. The Case for Democracy was a manifesto by Natan Sharansky, the Soviet refusenik, Israeli politician, and neoconservative favorite. Bush found it so riveting he invited Sharansky to visit. In the Oval Office, the president told Sharansky that he had been struck by a metaphor in the book comparing a tyrannical state to a soldier pointing a gun at a prisoner until his arms finally tire, he lowers the gun, and the captive escapes. Sharansky was surprised by how much Bush had internalized the message. “Not only did he read it, he felt it,” Sharansky later recalled. “It says what I believe,” Bush later told a group of rabbis.

  Bush was encouraged in the weeks that followed when hundreds of thousands of people in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine took to the streets of the capital, Kiev, to protest a stolen election and force the end of a calcified regime. The demonstrators, clad in orange scarves, shirts, and hats, were reprising the popular uprising that occurred after a stolen election in Georgia, an
other former Soviet republic, just a year earlier, an uprising that succeeded in ousting the government in what came to be called the Rose Revolution. The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine had a big impact on the White House. It did not go unnoticed either that the revolutionaries in both cases were pro-Westerners standing up to intimidation from Moscow, which thought Washington was behind the uprisings.

  The speech-writing process was interrupted when Gerson, at age forty, suffered a mild heart attack in mid-December and had to be rushed to the hospital. Richard Tubb, the White House physician, had the hospital register Gerson under an assumed name, “John Alexandria,” to forestall public attention. After doctors inserted two stents into Gerson’s chest, Bush called to check in.

  “I’m not calling about the second inaugural,” he said lightly. “I’m calling to see how the guy who’s working on the second inaugural’s doing.”

  Gerson recovered soon and worked closely with his fellow speechwriter John McConnell to come up with the architecture for the speech. They solicited ideas from conservative thinkers. A three-page memo from John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale University scholar, particularly impressed them. “If there is ever to be a moment within the Bush presidency to think big, this is it,” Gaddis wrote, matching Bush’s own instincts. “The President has a convincing electoral mandate behind him. He’s no longer running for anything. He has as much political capital now as he will ever have—and it can only diminish as the second term proceeds.” Gaddis argued that the three clearest presidential statements of America’s international aspirations in the twentieth century were Woodrow Wilson’s address to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy”; Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” address proclaiming the universality of freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear; and Ronald Reagan’s London speech declaring that Communism would wind up on the “ash heap of history.”