Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Bush went down his list of candidates straight to Samuel Alito, the appeals court judge from New Jersey and Miers’s first choice to begin with. Alito, like Michael Luttig, had compiled a strongly conservative record during more than a decade on the bench but was not as prominent and not as easy a target for Democrats. Bush called to offer him the nomination.

  THE WHITE HOUSE was pushing through another important appointment at the same time, one not as visible but arguably more important to the rest of their time in office. After eighteen years as the nation’s sometimes inscrutable chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was stepping down. During his long tenure, Greenspan had tamed inflation, coolly managed crises, and presided over a period of significant economic growth with low unemployment. But there were warning signs of trouble ahead.

  Riding a wave of easy credit in the form of subprime mortgages, Americans were buying homes as never before, many stretching beyond their means. House prices had jumped nearly 25 percent in two years, creating a bubble that was pushing the economy along. Wall Street was taking those risky mortgages, repackaging them, and selling them as investments. Greenspan had reassured policy makers that this was not actually a bubble, only “froth” in certain local markets that could cool off. Other economists, though, worried that house prices had risen so fast on the backs of unsustainable mortgages that the bubble could collapse and bring on an economic downturn.

  To replace Greenspan, Bush again turned to Cheney. Much as he did with the Supreme Court nominees, Cheney winnowed the list, then interviewed finalists in his West Wing office for ninety minutes each. In the end, he settled on Ben Bernanke—a Princeton University economist, former member of the Fed Board of Governors, and current chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers—and sent him to the Oval Office to see Bush.

  Low-key and professorial, Bernanke was well regarded, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the Great Depression. He shared Greenspan’s comfort with the housing market, attributing the steep jump in prices to “strong economic fundamentals” like growth in jobs, incomes, and new households. He anticipated the possibility of “a moderate cooling in the housing market” that would not stop economic growth.

  Bush announced the selection on October 24, drawing bipartisan support and touching off the biggest stock market rally in six months. Bernanke would go on to be confirmed by the Senate on a voice vote without opposition.

  BUSH AND CHENEY increasingly found themselves on the defensive in the area where they had long been strongest, their handling of national security. John McCain, who was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison camp a generation earlier, was leading an uprising against the White House with legislation banning torture and restricting interrogation techniques used with terror suspects.

  Cheney was outraged, seeing it as a self-defeating move that would hamstring their efforts to protect the country. He traveled to Capitol Hill to try to stop it, meeting with McCain and his ally Senator Lindsey Graham. He presented intelligence gained through the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and argued it could not have been obtained any other way. McCain and Graham pushed back. “We are on the defensive all over the world; enemies use this against us,” Graham told him. “And there is a better way. You can get good information without abandoning your values.”

  Their meetings grew heated. At one point, Cheney gave McCain substitute language designed to preserve the interrogators’ flexibility, but the senator rejected it. Frustrated, Cheney lashed out and said McCain would have blood on his hands. “Basically, they told me that if our legislation passes, I am going to have planes flying into buildings,” McCain told aides afterward. Cheney said later that McCain was not willing even to listen to a briefing on what the interrogations had accomplished. “We had hardly started when he lost his temper and stormed out of the meeting,” Cheney said.

  McCain responded with a show of force. At the same time the Harriet Miers nomination was foundering, the Senate voted 90 to 9 to approve McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act, enough to override a veto. In the White House, some in the Cheney camp wanted to threaten a veto anyway. When John Bellinger, the State Department’s top lawyer, saw a draft veto message, he went to Condoleezza Rice and appealed to her to intervene.

  He reminded her that she often talked about America being on the right side of history. “I think history is going to judge us badly on our decisions on detention,” he said, “but we can change course and you want to be on the right side of history on these issues.”

  Rice agreed and weighed in at the White House. After a lot of wrangling, the veto threat was quashed. Bush sent Stephen Hadley to negotiate with McCain, benching Cheney. If the vice president was angry, he made no protest that his aides could see.

  But even as Bush and Cheney were trying to stave off restrictions on interrogations, one of the most sensitive elements of their war on terror was suddenly exposed when the Washington Post reported on November 2 that the CIA had been holding terror suspects in secret “black site” prisons in foreign countries. At the request of the government, the Post withheld the names of Eastern European countries hosting secret prisons. Even Bush had not been told which ones they were, according to Michael Hayden, the NSA director who later became CIA director. But human rights activists and other journalists eventually concluded that they were Romania, Lithuania, and possibly Poland.

  As Thanksgiving approached, Bush and Cheney decided to push back against critics. They were angry at what they saw as the hypocrisy of Democrats jumping all over them for a war many of them had supported too. While Bush headed to Asia for a summit, it fell to Cheney to launch the counteroffensive with a speech at a gala honoring Ronald Reagan sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom institute in Washington on the evening of November 16. In the hours before the dinner, speechwriters hastily tore up their draft and turned it into a turbocharged assault on the Democrats.

  Wearing a tuxedo and his trademark sideways grin, Cheney could hardly have had a friendlier audience as he took the stage at the Mayflower Hotel near the White House.

  “Two thousand and eight!” someone in the audience called out.

  “Not on your life,” Cheney, the noncandidate, quickly retorted.

  He wasted no time going after the critics. “I’m sorry we couldn’t be joined by Senators Harry Reid, John Kerry, and Jay Rockefeller,” Cheney said. “They were unable to attend due to a prior lack of commitment.”

  To make sure they got the point, he paused amid laughter. “I’ll let you think about that one for a minute.”

  But his point was clear. “The suggestion that’s been made by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city,” Cheney declared. “Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions.” Cheney was only getting warmed up as he assailed “a few opportunists” who were “losing their memory or their backbone” and hurling “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” while troops abroad were fighting and dying. “We’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite history,” Cheney declared. “We’re going to continue throwing their own words back at them.”

  Bush quickly amplified Cheney’s attack from the other side of the world. Asked about it a few hours later during a news conference with the South Korean president, Bush said he agreed. “It’s patriotic as heck to disagree with the president,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is when people are irresponsibly using their positions and playing politics. That’s exactly what is taking place in America.”

  The attacks provoked a furious response. “We need a commander in chief, not a campaigner in chief,” Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, c
omplained on the Senate floor. “We need leadership from the White House, not more whitewashing of the very serious issues confronting us in Iraq.”

  But the more potent retort came from Representative Jack Murtha, the hawkish marine veteran of Vietnam and the top Democrat on the subcommittee controlling military spending. Murtha had supported the Iraq War, but on November 17 he declared the war “a flawed policy wrapped in illusion” and called for the “immediate redeployment of U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces,” which he predicted could take six months. He teared up as he described meeting wounded troops and lashed out at Bush and Cheney. “I like guys who’ve never been there to criticize us who’ve been there,” he said. “I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there, and send people to war, and then don’t like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done.”

  Murtha’s outburst rippled through the president’s traveling party in Asia because he was known as one of the most pro-military members of his party. The president’s advisers worried that if Murtha could abandon the war, opposition could snowball. Beyond that, it was a personal blow to Cheney. He and Murtha had become good friends in Congress. Murtha had thrown him a dinner upon his appointment as secretary of defense in 1989 and was the Democrat whom Cheney relied on most. “The place where I did my deals that I could count on was Murtha,” he once said. Now the man he could count on was calling him a chickenhawk.

  In Asia, Bush’s advisers argued about how to respond. Some thought Bush should meet with Murtha, but those pushing for a tough slapdown won. The White House issued a statement accusing Murtha of “endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party” and advocating “surrender to the terrorists.” That only inflamed the debate. “That was the beginning of keeping our critics at arm’s length,” Nicolle Devenish, now going by her married name, Wallace, reflected later. “Obviously, it didn’t work.”

  Bush seemed to think better of it too. In between meetings with Chinese leaders in Beijing on November 20, he summoned reporters and raised Murtha without being asked. “Congressman Murtha is a fine man, a good man, who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States congressman,” Bush said. “He is a strong supporter of the United States military. And I know the decision to call for an immediate withdrawal of our troops by Congressman Murtha was done in a careful and thoughtful way. I disagree with his position.”

  Asked by a reporter about Murtha’s attack on Cheney, Bush said, “I don’t think the vice president’s service is relevant in this debate.”

  WITH AMERICAN MILITARY fatalities in Iraq topping two thousand, the White House worried it was losing the war at home. “We may be running out of time,” Stephen Hadley told aides. “I lived through Vietnam. A president cannot continue to fight a protracted war with less than a majority of support from the American people.”

  The president’s advisers decided to revive their plan for the president to wage a concerted public campaign explaining a strategy that Condoleezza Rice had termed “clear, hold and build.” This had been the plan for the fall until Hurricane Katrina came along and blew it out of the water. But once again, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett argued over what tone Bush should take—defiant or humble. Rove wanted an offensive against war opponents, while Bartlett argued that admitting mistakes would do more to restore credibility.

  The running debate underscored a broader rift. Ever since Karen Hughes left, Bartlett had become the main counterweight to Rove on the political staff. Lanky and lean with an easy smile, Bartlett had spent his entire adult life working for Bush, joining Rove’s consulting firm right out of the University of Texas at Austin just as the first gubernatorial campaign was getting under way. He made a point of showing up early every day and ended up answering the phone when the candidate called in, then bonded with him even more when assigned to research Bush’s history to counter negative political attacks. His prematurely graying hair and his confident, mature demeanor made him seem older than his thirty-four years.

  But Rove had a hard time seeing Bartlett as a peer, not the kid he had hired right out of college, and the younger man resented what he saw as the patronizing attitude. Eventually, Bartlett stopped returning Rove’s calls, infuriating the older man, and the two were barely speaking outside of meetings. A no-better-friend, no-worse-enemy kind of figure, Rove could be funny, charming, and fiercely loyal to his colleagues, but some privately thought the college dropout had an inferiority complex that sometimes manifested itself in condescension. When someone was on his bad side, he did not hide it. His feud with Bartlett spilled over to Wallace, whom he seemed to resent for siding with Bartlett. At one point, he berated her brutally, a “big screaming match,” as one colleague termed it, that echoed around the West Wing.

  “Karl kicks the shit out of me because he is too scared to kick the shit out of Dan or he’s afraid he would push back,” Wallace complained to Andy Card over lunch in the White House mess one day.

  Card dunked his grilled cheese sandwich in his tomato soup. “I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “He doesn’t listen to me.”

  Bush was constitutionally loath to admit mistakes, seeing it as a Washington parlor game. But he understood what Bartlett and Wallace were saying. The aides turned to the research of Peter Feaver, a Duke University scholar who had joined the National Security Council staff over the summer. Feaver was an expert on public opinion during wartime and had conducted studies concluding that the key to support even when a war was going badly was whether people believed it could ultimately succeed. Americans turned against Vietnam less because of rising casualties than the sense that leaders no longer believed the United States could win. Most damaging to public opinion, Feaver believed, were public signs of pessimism by a president, whether it was Ronald Reagan after marines were killed in Lebanon or Bill Clinton after the Black Hawk Down battle of Somalia. So while admitting setbacks was okay, it was critical for Bush to convey confidence that victory was achievable.

  Bush opened a series of five speeches on the war on November 30 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Feaver helped draft a thirty-five-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” mainly to prove that Bush had one. Feaver originally used the word “success,” but the speechwriters insisted on changing it to “victory.” “Plan for Victory” signs were hung around the stage, and in his forty-three-minute speech Bush used the word “victory” fifteen times. “We will never back down,” he declared. “We will never give in. And we will never accept less than complete victory.” Bush did resolve better than regret. He did not use the word “mistakes” but admitted that “we’ve faced some setbacks” and said “we learned from our earlier experiences.”

  Bush made more concessions as the series of speeches progressed. By the third outing, on December 12, in a hotel not far from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, he opened the floor to questions. The first person he called on was Didi Goldmark, a sixty-three-year-old former libel lawyer.

  “Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I’d like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed,” Goldmark said.

  It was a question that the White House and the Pentagon had consistently refused to address. But Bush gave a direct answer.

  “I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis,” he said. “We’ve lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.”

  Bush moved on to the next question without identifying how he arrived at the figure, but he was right on the money, at least according to a group of British researchers and antiwar activists called Iraq Body Count. As of the day he spoke, the group estimated civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892. Aides were struck that Bush knew the number without being briefed. It underscored, they thought, just how much he was living and breathing the war.

  His plan for turning Iraq around hinged on elections scheduled for three
days later, when Iraqis would go to the polls for a third time in 2005 to select a permanent government under the new constitution drafted in August and approved by a referendum in October. This time, the Sunnis, who had boycotted the election in January, were participating. The possibility of reconciliation seemed promising.

  IN THE MIDST of his public defense of the Iraq War, Bush spent part of December defending the war on terror on another front. The New York Times planned to publish a story disclosing the warrantless surveillance program for the first time.

  The Times had first learned of the secret program a year earlier, but the White House lobbied editors not to publish on the grounds that it would jeopardize national security. Michael Hayden, the NSA director, had invited Philip Taubman, the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, to visit the agency and hear firsthand from the people doing the eavesdropping—analysts who “were slack-jawed” to be describing one of the nation’s deepest secrets to a journalist. The editors were persuaded.

  But a year later, more questions were arising over the conduct of the war. James Risen, a reporter working the story along with Eric Lichtblau, was planning to disclose the NSA program in a book. The Times editors were revisiting whether it should go in the newspaper too, given what they had learned about the internal debate over the program’s legality and the larger pattern of administration policies on interrogation, detention, and rendition.

  Bush invited the Times leadership to the Oval Office to make a rare personal plea. Hadley and Hayden joined him, but Cheney stayed away, worried that the long-standing tension between him and the Times that led him to kick the newspaper off his plane during the 2004 campaign would be distracting. Taubman brought Bill Keller, the executive editor, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the chief executive and namesake son of the legendary publisher who resisted government pressure not to publish the Pentagon Papers. As the president welcomed them, he was polite, though not warm. He motioned to Sulzberger to sit in the chair normally occupied by the vice president or visiting foreign leaders.