by Peter Baker
Bush had one other final piece of business. At 11:00 a.m., he met in the Oval Office with Fred Fielding and William Burck, who reported to him on their meeting with Scooter Libby over the weekend. They had not changed their minds, they told Bush during a half-hour conversation. Moreover, they pointed out that Libby was not asking for forgiveness because he maintained his innocence. Bush took it all in. He signed clemency orders commuting the sentences of two Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting a Mexican drug dealer, a case that had become a cause célèbre for conservative critics of illegal immigration who thought they were persecuted for doing their jobs. But when Bush put his pen down, that was it. No more clemency meant no pardon for Libby. He would stick to his decision despite Cheney’s passionate opposition.
BUSH’S ASTRINGENT ENCOUNTER with Cheney was still fresh when the day came to hand over the Oval Office. On the morning of Inauguration Day, Bush showed up at the Oval Office as usual. His staff had left the office exactly the same as it had been, with all the photographs and paraphernalia still in place. But quietly, the president had given away his cigars, resolving to quit when he moved back to Texas. Bush slipped a handwritten note to the incoming forty-fourth president into a manila envelope marked “The White House” and attached a yellow Post-it note to the outside. He jotted down “44” on it and left it on the Resolute desk for Obama.
Bush was to host the Obamas before escorting them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony that would end his presidency after eight turbulent years. But as he waited for the appointed hour, he went wandering around the West Wing with Joshua Bolten. The place was a construction zone as crews rushed to put up more interior walls to make more cubbyholes for the new tenants. “The place was going condo,” Bolten recalled. Bush walked past the workmen, who paid no attention to him. He was mellow and reflective.
Eventually, it came time to leave.
“Okay, I’m going over to the residence,” he announced to his remaining staff. “Where’s my coat?”
He put on his overcoat and cowboy hat in the reception area next to the Oval Office, stepped out the door, walked down the Colonnade in the morning chill toward the East Wing, and never turned back. There was no moment of hesitation to look around the Oval Office one last time.
Just before 10:00 a.m., he and Laura stepped outside the mansion onto the North Portico and greeted Barack and Michelle Obama warmly. They led them inside for the traditional Inauguration Day coffee, a comforting ritual of unity after a campaign season of division. That morning, there were two of everything—two presidents, two vice presidents, two first ladies, two Secret Service details. “It’s like Noah’s ark,” observed Eric Draper, the outgoing Bush photographer.
Cheney showed up in a wheelchair, explaining that he had thrown his back out packing boxes at the vice presidential mansion over the weekend. “Cheney looked like hell,” recalled Joel Kaplan, who saw him later in the day. It produced an odd, awkward scene, as if all of Cheney’s efforts of the last eight years, all of the fights and the controversy, had finally taken their toll on a nearly sixty-eight-year-old body that had already endured four heart attacks.
“Joe, this is how you’re liable to look when your term is up,” Cheney joked to his successor, Joseph Biden.
Bush and Cheney separated as they left the White House, each joining his counterpart for the short motorcade to the Capitol. Bush blew a kiss to the White House as he left, then climbed into the armored car with Obama. As the two men settled into the cushioned seats and the tanklike vehicle began its slow, circuitous path past the barricades and out of the White House grounds, Bush took the opportunity to give his successor one last piece of advice.
Whatever you do, Bush said, make sure you set a pardon policy from the start and then stick to it.
In the midst of war and recession, what was on Bush’s mind in the final hour of his presidency was his vice president.
When they arrived at the Capitol, Bush took his place on the platform on the West Front. Obama supporters in the crowd chanted, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, hey, good-bye.” As Cheney was wheeled to his place, he too heard boos. Democrats buzzed about how the wheelchair-bound vice president had finally made the last transition into Mr. Potter, the cruel tycoon from It’s a Wonderful Life.
Bush paid no attention. He found Obama’s daughters and leaned over to say something to the younger one, Sasha, smiling as he got up close to her face. When he sat down in the big leather chair reserved for him, he and Obama leaned across the aisle separating them and exchanged words that made them both laugh.
Obama began his inaugural address with a note of gratitude for his predecessor. “I thank President Bush for his service to our nation as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition,” he said.
But much of the rest of the speech added up to a repudiation of Bush. Obama criticized “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place.” He rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” He assured the rest of the world “that we are ready to lead once more.” All in all, it was perhaps the starkest inaugural rejection of a departing president since Franklin Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in 1933.
Bush took it in stride. “That was a hell of a speech,” he told Rahm Emanuel, the new president’s chief of staff.
Then he headed back through the Rotunda of the Capitol to the marine helicopter waiting on the East Front.
“Come on, Laura,” he told his wife, “we’re going home.”
He gave Obama a hug.
“We will brief you from time to time,” Obama told him.
“There is no need for that,” Bush said. “I have served my time, and I don’t want you to feel like you need to waste a lot of time on me.”
Bush was done with Washington. With a last salute, he boarded the helicopter. It was just him, his family, his aide Blake Gottesman, Eric Draper, and some Secret Service agents. Lifting into the air, Bush took Laura’s hand and stared out the window at the Capitol and the throngs of people who had come to celebrate his successor’s installation—and in effect his own departure. In his other hand, he clutched remarks he planned to give to former aides gathered at Andrews Air Force Base. But something changed in his demeanor on the short flight. Finally, after eight years of living every burden, shouldering every calamity, after all the triumphs and all the misjudgments, he was free. “He looked relieved, thrilled,” Draper recalled. “You could see it on his face. His job was over.”
At Andrews, Cheney was to introduce Bush during a private ceremony in the hangar. “Frankly, all of us were worried about what he was going to say because we all knew, the people close to the president, how bad and rough the last few days had been,” said Joel Kaplan. But Cheney delivered a gracious speech extolling their eight-year partnership. Bush was relieved. After all the tension over the pardon, he had feared their friendship had been broken irretrievably. He took solace from the vice president’s words. But it did not close the underlying rift. “George Bush’s two terms were almost two different presidencies,” David Addington observed. “The second term was rough on both of them, rough on their relationship.”
After the two said their farewells, Cheney headed out. Obama had authorized the military to fly the vice president back to Wyoming on the jet he had used as Air Force Two. Once he landed in Casper, his friend Mick McMurry sent his private plane to fly Cheney the rest of the way to Jackson. “Nice plane, Mick,” Cheney told him with his wry smile. “I used to have a nice plane.”
That evening, Cheney joined friends and family at a welcome-home party. “He was in excruciating pain,” his friend Bill Thomson noticed. Cheney refused to take painkillers to avoid a fuzzy head. “He was showing his wear and tear,” McMurry said later. “But he seemed to enjoy the evening.” Indeed, the taciturn former vice president relaxed. “For Dick, he was pretty talkative th
at night,” McMurry said. “He was out of a job. I guess he could say what he wanted to.” While he did not talk much about Bush, McMurry was convinced that “he probably has a firmer relationship with George senior” than with the president he had served the past eight years.
The younger Bush made his way back to Texas aboard one of the special Boeing 747 planes normally designated Air Force One but now just called Special Air Mission 28000. His parents were on board, as were many of the aides who had accompanied him on the journey, most from Texas, like Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Dan Bartlett, Margaret Spellings, Alberto Gonzales, Mark McKinnon, Joel Kaplan, and Israel Hernandez. They gathered in the conference room to watch a farewell video, including testimonials and tributes from the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. There was a lot of hugging, a lot of laughing, a lot of relief. “It was a nonstop party the whole way,” Draper said. Bush posed for a picture with his mother, resting his chin on her shoulder. “He was very huggy,” recalled one aide. “He was hugging everybody. A little weepy, but mostly just hugging people.” The tone of Obama’s speech produced some grousing among the loyalists, who resented that he had slapped Bush on the way out. But the now-former president did not join in, uttering “not a word” disparaging his successor, as Hughes recalled.
Seventeen hundred miles to the west, Bush landed back in Midland, where he had started his own inaugural journey eight years earlier. He was grayer and worn, now sixty-two years old, and in a sentimental mood. As he got off the plane, he kissed Gonzales on the forehead and said, “Just stay strong.” The weather and the crowd were far more forgiving than in Washington. Warmed up by the Gatlin Brothers and Lee Greenwood, more than twenty thousand supporters waving red, white, and blue “W” signs greeted Bush in Centennial Plaza as the sun sank in the west. “There was a moment you got the impression that nobody liked him at all,” recalled Hernandez, his longtime aide. “But then he got to Midland and there was a huge crowd. That was very emotional for him.”
Bush made a few remarks to the crowd. “Tonight,” he told them, “I have the privilege of saying six words that I have been waiting to say for a while—it is good to be home.” He offered just a bit of defense of his embattled presidency. “Popularity is as fleeting as the Texas wind,” he said. “Character and conscience are as sturdy as our oaks. History will be the judge of my decisions, but when I walked out of the Oval Office this morning, I left with the same values that I took to Washington eight years ago. When I get home tonight and look in the mirror, I am not going to regret what I see—except maybe some gray hair.”
EPILOGUE
“There is no middle ground”
One day a couple of years after he left office, Dick Cheney sat down in a small library in the front of his new house in McLean, Virginia, sipped a cup of his favorite Starbucks coffee, and reflected on his time in power.
He was skinnier, his face hollowed out a bit. He was still recovering his strength from a heart attack he suffered after leaving office but had not yet undergone the heart transplant that would come later. He wore a blue Oxford shirt and khaki pants as well as a dark vest that covered the device attached to his chest that kept his weak heart running. He was feeling good, he said. Not running marathons, but going fishing. He spent four months a year in Wyoming, three in the summer, one in winter.
As he talked, Jordan, his black Labrador, lay sleeping nearby, while a yellow Labrador wandered in and out as if checking out the conversation. The off-white house behind a gate in McLean had been built during his last year in office, just down the street from Hickory Hill, the famed estate of Robert F. Kennedy. The Cheneys’ retirement home had four bedrooms, six full baths, three half baths, and four fireplaces, large enough for the daughters and their partners and half a dozen grandkids to visit.
On the shelf in the library were the classics expected in a Washington house—Robert Caro, Michael Beschloss, and the like—plus plenty of military histories, including Rick Atkinson’s account of the Gulf War, a Cheney favorite. Sitting unread at that point were memoirs by George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. But there were also some surprises, including books by critics like Ron Suskind and a volume called Dick: The Man Who Is President. On display was a brick from the house of Mullah Muhammed Omar, the Taliban leader, and another from the house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. There was, of course, a bust of Winston Churchill. On the wall hung a sword from his great-grandfather, who fought in the Civil War on the Union side.
“It was designed for the two of us. It is a great house,” he said. “We can live on one floor. We were thinking about our old age, when we wouldn’t be able to get around as easy, so we got a second floor, but we put an elevator in. Made it easy to get to that. We have an apartment over the garage that has been the book office for a lot of what we did this time around, but eventually we’ll have someone live in it to look after us. So it has been a lot of fun living here. The only new house we have ever owned, the only one we ever built, and I would never do it again. Everybody always says that, but there are thousands of decisions—doorknobs, by God! It takes a lot of effort to put something like that together. Fortunately, I was an observer and check writer.”
Now in retirement, Cheney had taken stock. He took pride in championing what he thought was necessary to protect the country and had no regrets about what others considered the excesses of Iraq, Guantánamo, and waterboarding. “We didn’t capture al-Qaeda and say, ‘Okay, bring on the water,’ ” he said. “That is never the way it worked. But as I say, some of our critics would lead us to believe that as soon as we captured these guys, that we started pulling out fingernails and toenails.”
Did any part of him feel queasy about what was done in the name of security, even if it was perfectly justified? “No,” he said with the calm certitude that marked his tenure in public life. “I firmly believe that it was the right thing to do. It worked. We haven’t been hit for seven and a half years, longer than that now.”
That was the calculation: means and ends. If the threat was dire enough, then getting rough with a handful of suspects seemed a small price to pay, especially Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the acknowledged mastermind of September 11. Whatever it takes.
“I wasn’t concerned just about guarding against another set of airplane hijackings,” Cheney went on. “That wasn’t the threat. The threat was the ultimate—a possibility of nineteen hijackers armed with a nuke or a biological agent. When you put that out there as the threat that you are trying to guard against, then the question of waterboarding one guy to find out what he knows isn’t cause for concern. Thank God we had him and had the ability to get him to talk to us.”
As he reflected on eight eventful years, Cheney said he believed he had a “consequential vice presidency,” thanks to Bush. “That is the way he wanted it. He is the one who made that possible, not me.” He recognized that his influence had faded by the end. He betrayed no anger about that, only acceptance. “Over time, I think I was probably more valuable to the president in the early part than the later part,” he said. “Part of that was a learning process for him. By the time we got down toward the later part of the second term, he was much more—well, he had the experience of having been president for all those years, and he relied less, I think, on staff than had been true earlier.”
Their parting at Andrews Air Force Base that winter day in 2009 also represented a departure in mission. Bush retreated to Texas, where he quietly went about building a presidential library and developing a public policy institute, while Cheney emerged from his undisclosed location to become a fiery critic of the new president. While Bush resolutely vowed not to pass judgment on his successor, declaring that President Obama “deserves my silence,” Cheney had plenty of judgment to pass and thought the country deserved his voice.
What set him off as much as anything was a decision by the new administration to reopen an investigation into CIA interrogations of terror suspects. In Cheney’s mind, there could be no more serious betrayal. As he saw it,
CIA officers operating under guidelines provided by the Justice Department to break captives and gain information to stop future terrorist attacks were now being treated as criminals. At one point, Cheney gave a speech on the subject on the same day Obama did, offering an unusual split-screen virtual debate between a sitting president and a former vice president. Obama argued for a middle ground between values and security. “The American people are not absolutist,” he said in his speech at the National Archives, “and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems.” Across town, Cheney argued that absolutism in the defense of liberty was no vice. “In the fight against terrorism,” he declared, “there is no middle ground, and half measures keep you half exposed.”
Cheney’s outspokenness was striking after so many years of staying largely behind the scenes, but it was only a new phase in the same campaign of defending the policies he had helped institute in the first term. “Dick feels an obligation to say what really happened, at least from their perspective,” said his friend Bill Thomson. Stephen Hadley thought Cheney was strongly influenced by his experience during Iran-contra, when he believed mid-level officials were sacrificed politically, and saw a parallel with the CIA officers. “Cheney thought that was shameful,” Hadley said. “He went out and had an opportunity to throw his body in the way of that freight train.” Liz Cheney said her father might have followed Bush’s approach and remained quiet had it not been for the investigation. “Threatening to prosecute CIA officials was indefensible,” she said. “It was just so far beyond what you could stay silent and watch.”