Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  With Bush’s permission, Cheney flew to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to give a speech on May 4 lacerating Putin’s Russia for “unfairly and improperly” restricting the rights of its people and using oil and gas as “tools of intimidation or blackmail” against neighboring countries. “Russia has a choice to make,” Cheney said. “And there is no question that a return to democratic reform in Russia will generate further success for its people and greater respect among fellow nations.” The speech infuriated Putin. But the message was undermined when Cheney flew next to Kazakhstan, an oil-rich former Soviet republic with no more freedom than Russia, and stood with its autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, offering nothing but praise. The Kremlin saw that as the height of cynicism and chose to believe Cheney was just freelancing. But in fact the speech had been vetted at the White House, and Bush was comfortable with Cheney playing the bad cop to his good cop. “The vice president put a stake in the ground with his speech, which helped us,” Bush told Blair.

  In his more friendly vein, Bush tried to get Putin to put other tangible issues on the table for the summit to keep it from being dominated by the question of Russian democracy. In a phone call on June 5, Bush suggested four subjects—bird flu, Darfur, Iran, and nuclear terrorism. Putin thanked Bush for pushing ahead with Russian membership in the World Trade Organization and said only “a few more moves” and then it “will be finished.”

  Then, in an odd exchange, Putin mentioned Sergei Lavrov, his chain-smoking, hard-line foreign minister. “Lavrov just returned from London and had problems with his cheeks and lips being swollen,” Putin told Bush. “We might need to take a closer look at what Condi did to him.”

  Bush, awkwardly, played along with what seemed to be a lurid form of sexual innuendo. “Condi is not blind,” he joked.

  “And she is a very attractive lady,” Putin replied.

  “She is a wonderful lady,” Bush said, then tried to move the conversation along. “Listen, I’d like to get this WTO stuff done in the next couple weeks before we get to St. Petersburg.”

  The next day, June 9, Bush traveled to Camp David with the visiting Danish prime minister and talked about Putin. “We’ve had some tough meetings,” Bush told his guest. “He’s not well informed. It’s like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong. I met him in Slovakia. He said, ‘You’ve been saying bad things about me on democracy.’ I said, ‘Yes. I don’t like what our press corps says about me but I don’t close them down. You go out and close the media when you don’t like what they say.’ ”

  He said Putin had even tried to get to him by offering an oil industry job to Don Evans, the former commerce secretary and one of his closest friends. “Putin asked me, ‘Would it help you if I moved Evans to an important position?’ What a question! ‘Will it help you?’ ” Bush was exasperated. “What I wanted to say is, ‘What would help me is if you make moves on democracy.’ It’s strange the way he thinks.” A few days before leaving for St. Petersburg, Bush confided in the visiting prime minister of Slovenia. “I think Putin is not a democrat anymore,” Bush lamented. “He’s a tsar. I think we’ve lost him.”

  Bush’s efforts to divert attention from the democracy dispute by forging a last-minute deal to admit Russia into the World Trade Organization failed. His trade representative, Susan Schwab, negotiated three late nights in a row with the Russians in a frantic effort to reach an accord that Bush and Putin could announce—at one point going twenty-four hours straight and eating pizza for breakfast. They got so close that the Russians publicly declared a deal would be signed by the presidents. But at 2:30 a.m. on July 15, a day after Bush arrived in town, they finally hit a wall.

  Disappointed, Bush put a brave face on the visit. After having dinner together, he and Putin appeared in a polite news conference with an undercurrent of tension. Bush’s only public mention of Russian democracy was gentle compared with his private frustrations expressed to Blair and others in the months leading up to the summit.

  “I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq, where there’s a free press and free religion,” Bush told reporters. “And I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same thing.”

  Putin, coiled and ready, seized on the remark. “We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly,” he said, provoking laughter from the Russian side.

  Bush seemed caught off guard. “Just wait,” he replied softly, maintaining a strained smile.

  AS IT TURNED out, Bush need not have worried about the summit being dominated by questions of Russian democracy. In the days leading up to the meeting, Israel had invaded Lebanon in response to Hezbollah raids and barrages of rockets, a crisis that had forced its way to the top of the agenda in St. Petersburg.

  While Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, had been trying to mediate, Bush was fending off pressure from allies to intervene, instead siding with Israel in its outrage over the attacks on its territory. Bush and Annan had what the UN secretary-general called a “charged and pointed debate” in front of the other leaders. “It was clear that Bush saw this as a simple matter of good versus evil,” Annan recalled. “A simple battle between good and evil it was not.”

  Either way, the diplomatic maneuverings underscored just how closely Bush was working with Rice these days. He told her to work out language for a joint statement with the other governments at the summit. In doing so, though, he inadvertently alienated Stephen Hadley, who despite his closeness with Rice felt cut out. Suddenly Bush’s tandem with Rice was risking a rupture in his White House team.

  “I can’t be his national security adviser if he doesn’t trust me to do these things for him,” Hadley told Rice. “I have to resign.”

  Rice talked him out of it and then told Bush he could not undercut Hadley like that. Bush meant no insult to Hadley; he was just so comfortable with Rice.

  During a private lunch on the summit’s final day, Bush shared his frustration over Lebanon with Tony Blair.

  “Blair, what are you doing?” he asked. “You leaving?”

  “No, no, no, not yet,” Blair said.

  As Bush ate and Blair stood over him, the two chatted for a couple of minutes about global trade talks and a sweater Blair had given Bush for his birthday.

  “I know you picked it out yourself,” Bush said sarcastically.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Blair replied with a laugh.

  Then Bush turned the discussion to Annan, telling Blair he was going to send Rice to the region.

  Blair offered to make a public statement to prepare the ground. “Obviously, if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can just go out and talk,” he said, recognizing the different expectations when America got involved.

  “What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” an irritated Bush said with his mouth full as he buttered a piece of bread.

  “Who? Syria?” Blair asked.

  “Right,” Bush said. “What about Kofi? That seems odd. I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically cease-fire and [only then] everything else happens.” Instead, he said, Annan should pressure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to rein in Hezbollah. “I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” Bush told Blair.

  Bush left St. Petersburg frustrated on multiple fronts. Putin waited until he had cleared Russian airspace to tell a news conference that he would not support Bush in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear program. “Speaking of sanctions against Iran is premature,” Putin said. “We haven’t reached that point yet.”

  Bush and Blair vented their mutual aggravation with Putin during a call two weeks later. “I left St. Petersburg more worried about Russia than ever,” Blair told Bush on July 28.

  “You should be,” Bush agreed. “We talked at dinner. He’s okay with centralization, which he thi
nks leads to stabilization. I told him, ‘What happens when the next guy comes and abuses it?’ He said, ‘I’ll stop him.’ He thinks he’ll be around forever. He asked me why I didn’t change the Constitution so I could run again.”

  WHETHER BUSH WOULD even want to run again was another matter. At home as well as abroad, the challenges were stacking up. After more than five years of working with a Congress mostly under Republican control, Bush was confronted for the first time with a bill he could not live with. Congress sent him legislation lifting his restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Among those leading the charge was Bill Frist, the senator Bush had privately considered as a replacement for Cheney on the 2004 ticket. Bush decided to veto the measure.

  Rather than be defensive, he staged a ceremony on July 19 with “snowflake babies,” or children born from discarded embryos adopted by other parents. The pictures on television showed a president surrounded by children, not a rigid conservative preventing lifesaving research. Bush had tempered the fallout from the veto. But the showdown foreshadowed more friction to come between the White House and its Republican allies with elections just months away.

  Indeed, as summer progressed and Iraq and other issues soured the public, Republican candidates were going out of their way to avoid Bush and Cheney, and the White House staff was working overtime to find races where the president could help. The last thing they wanted was the perception that Bush was so toxic he was not welcome at the side of Republican candidates. But the ones who did agree to a visit were generally from safe districts. “We were trying to keep his schedule active,” recalled Sara Taylor, the White House political director. “We didn’t want the president sidelined. Being sidelined would not be a good thing for him. We had people who didn’t want him to land at the airport.”

  The schism between the president and his party was brought home starkly on the same day as the stem-cell veto ceremony when Senator John Thune, one of Karl Rove’s pet projects in 2004, distanced himself from Bush. “If I were running in the state this year, you obviously don’t embrace the president and his agenda,” Thune told reporters at the National Press Club. Rove erupted when he saw the comments. “He thought Thune was ungrateful and whiny,” as one White House colleague put it, and told his staff to make sure the Bush donors who had helped Thune in the past knew about his betrayal. His staff balked, deeming it an excessive response, especially since Thune quickly apologized. But Rove persisted. “He would just not let it go,” the colleague said. Finally, Joshua Bolten, who had received an apology directly from Thune, stepped in and forced Rove to drop the matter.

  Republican lawmakers were not the only ones anxious about Iraq. After the failed reboot at Camp David, Stephen Hadley and the Iraq team tried to find a new way to force a strategy change. Meghan O’Sullivan and Brett McGurk sent Hadley a memo on the same day as Thune’s comments pleading for a full-fledged review of the war. The two young advisers reinforced the message directly to Bush the next day in their nightly report. “The deteriorating security situation is outpacing the Iraqi government’s ability to respond,” Bush read. Turning over the country to Iraqi forces was unrealistic since they were actually part of the problem, engaging in sectarian attacks themselves. “Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining.”

  Hadley privately agreed and was trying to nudge the process along subtly while still serving as an arbiter among different factions. If he pushed too hard, too fast, it could generate opposition to change. At Bush’s request, Hadley took the questions raised by O’Sullivan and McGurk and presented them to General George Casey during a videoconference on July 22. What was the strategy for Baghdad? Were more troops needed? What was the American mission? Had they let the Iraqis become too dependent on them, or was it the other way around? Casey found the questions demeaning and resented the civilian second-guessing. More forces would not fix the problem. The real solution was political, not military.

  A few days later, on July 26, Nouri al-Maliki made his first visit to Washington as Iraq’s prime minister. Bush welcomed him to the White House and listened as Maliki let his various ministers present somewhat tedious reports on their areas of responsibility.

  Bush tried to lighten the mood. When introduced to the electricity minister, he asked, “Do people call you Sparky?” No one on the Iraqi side seemed to get the joke.

  The president’s more important message was one of fortitude. “If you take one thing away from this visit, it’s that I’m behind you 100 percent,” he said. “Don’t worry about the politics here. Do the right thing. I’ll be with you. Count on it.”

  CERTAIN ABOUT HIS resolve but uncertain what to do, Bush took off on Au- gust 3 for a break at the Crawford ranch, his first summer retreat there since Hurricane Katrina. As soon as he landed, he began pounding the pedals on the bicycle trails he had come to love. Just as exercise helped him purge the toxins of alcohol in his youth, now it helped him flush out the tensions of Washington.

  He had just turned sixty that summer, a milestone that had clearly been on his mind. Bush made a point of fighting the advance of age with discipline. He exercised ferociously six days a week with a mountain bike, treadmill, and free-weight resistance training. When in Washington, he went for bike rides as long as two and a half hours at the Secret Service training facility outside the city. With a resting pulse rate of forty-seven beats per minute, a cholesterol count of 178, and a body fat percentage of 15.79, he remained in “superior” shape, according to his doctors.

  The devotion to exercise and schedules seemed to stem from the same discipline Bush had summoned to quit drinking at age forty. “He’s the first one to admit that he has an addictive personality, and he has to channel this addictiveness to constructive things,” Dan Bartlett once observed. “He likes systems; he likes structure. It’s interesting—for a personality that’s so free-form, he does like structure.” He kept a giant wooden jigsaw puzzle set up in the family quarters that he worked on regularly, making order out of the chaos of hundreds of pieces. “It’s something you can solve,” said Pamela Hudson Nelson, a longtime friend of Laura’s. “They have a lot of coping methods.” Bush also preferred to look ahead rather than backward. “When you’re working for the president,” Bartlett said, “you’ve always got to give him something to look forward to.”

  He especially looked forward to the long bike rides. He often invited others to join him but asked them not to ride in front of him so he could have the illusion of solitude, a rare sensation of freedom in the eternally scripted, perpetually surrounded life of a president. “Riding helps clear my head, helps me deal with the stresses of the job,” Bush, soaked in sweat, said after an eighty-minute ride at the ranch that summer. Mark McKinnon, his consultant and frequent biking partner, said the intensity was directly tied to the burdens of the job. “The more pressure there was at the White House,” he said, “the harder he rode.”

  Biking with the president often seemed to be an exercise in survival as much as serenity, particularly in the sweltering August heat of Texas, where he enrolled those who managed to keep up with him in his Hundred Degree Club. Tony Snow got roped into a ride after making the mistake of telling Bush once that he would enjoy riding with him sometime. “I was just, you know, trying to make nice,” he said later. “I was trying to kiss up to the boss.”

  But now Snow had accompanied Bush to the ranch for the first time.

  “Snow, you ready to ride?” Bush asked.

  Snow tried to beg off but got nowhere.

  The ride was memorable. “You go off-road,” he recalled, “and there’s a drop of about fifteen or twenty feet. It rises up again and then goes around the curve. The president goes down and goes, ‘Woo hoo!’ Person behind him goes down and goes, ‘Woo hoo!’ I’m in the back and I go, ‘Waaaah!’ ”

  Right into a tree.

  “Snow,” Bush called out. “You okay back there?”

  “Yes, sir. Just hit a tree.”

 
“Okay, well, come on then.”

  If anyone had learned the importance of getting up after hitting a tree, it was Bush.

  THAT SUMMER IN Crawford, Bush found himself managing a widening divide between his vice president and his secretary of state. The Israeli war in Lebanon had drawn international condemnation, and Europe was pressing for an immediate cease-fire. Bush resisted. He could hardly fault another country for going after terrorists. But he eventually found himself more isolated as the fighting dragged on, especially after Israeli bombs destroyed an apartment complex in the Lebanese village of Qana, killing dozens of civilians, including children.

  Condoleezza Rice flew to Texas to confer. She had been working the diplomatic channels and believed it was time to weigh in to halt the violence. Cheney felt otherwise. Israel had every right to protect itself, and stopping the operation before it fully rooted out Hezbollah would leave Lebanon a safe harbor for terrorists. Cheney saw the conflict in the context of America’s own struggle. He even thought the Israelis should “crater the runways” at the airport in Damascus on the theory that Iran was using Syria as a conduit for aid to Hezbollah. Even Israel thought that was going too far and urged the Americans to send the opposite message to Syria, that it would be left alone, for fear of a wider war.

  On August 5, Bush and Rice strolled over to the double-wide trailer with the communications equipment for a secure videoconference with Cheney and the rest of the national security team. Rice brought everyone up to date on her efforts to win a cease-fire.