43*

by Jeff Greenfield

  It was quite an evening. Liberated by his victory, by his determination to speak his mind—and liberated as well, perhaps, by several glasses of a fine Pomerol—Gore spoke expansively about pushing the government to think and act outside the box.

  Why couldn’t autos run on new forms of energy, perhaps even gathering power through solar panels on car roofs? Why couldn’t federal money encourage cities to turn garbage into fuel? And why couldn’t federal policy, in the form of business loans and subsidized mortgages, be aimed at drawing Americans back to city centers instead of fueling wasteful, ugly suburban sprawl?

  And there was more: A stiff carbon tax would prod Americans out of their cars and onto mass transit or bicycles, or onto their feet.

  “Maybe,” Gore added, “that’d be one way to whip the country into shape. And if we pushed a few million people to drop some of the lard, we’d save a fortune in health care while we were at it. If you don’t believe we’ve got an obesity epidemic, just spend a day shaking hands at a supermarket with me.”

  Two weeks later, the staffer with the digital recorder learned that she had been denied the White House job she had coveted for years, victimized by one of the ferocious turf wars that break out in every transition. (“Like James Carville always says,” a friend commiserated, “in an election, you screw your enemies; in a transition, you screw your friends.”). An hour later, she was e-mailing that recording of Gore’s comments to a friend at the Washington Post.

  GORE CHIDES LAZY AMERICANS, the next day’s Post headline read. SAYS WE’RE EATING, DRIVING OURSELVES TO DEATH. The New York Post was less restrained: GORE: GET THE LARD OUT!

  As Gore and his inner circle dealt with the storm of outrage and the jabs from the late-night comics—“Gore plans to offer vouchers to any American who wants to go to Times Square and get whipped into shape,” Jay Leno said in his monologue—the last thing he needed was another headache from his soon-to-be predecessor. And that’s exactly what he got.

  On his last day in office, Clinton issued presidential pardons to a number of suspect figures, including longtime fugitive Marc Rich, the ex-husband of a major donor to the Clinton Library. Gore made no public comment, but he was privately furious—a fact his aides were at pains to reveal to the media. An equally furious Clinton told Hillary, “He’s going to pay for that temper tantrum.”

  And he extracted that payment on President Gore’s very first day in office.

  Inauguration Day

  January 20, 2001, was a miserable day, with temperatures barely above freezing and a steady rain that left the grounds of the Mall that faced the Capitol’s West Front sodden and muddy. Moreover, the chill in the air was matched by the distinct lack of festiveness surrounding the event. For the first time, the Secret Service had designated a presidential inauguration a National Special Security Event. That meant everyone heading to the Mall had to pass through metal detectors; all handbags, backpacks, and shopping bags were subjected to searches, causing hourlong waits and chilled, wet spectators. (“You’d think there was an enemy heading right for the Capitol!” one frustrated spectator groused.) The chill was just as obvious on the inaugural platform, where President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton exchanged the briefest of greetings with Al and Tipper Gore as they took their places.

  The inauguration went off well enough. Gore’s team congratulated itself for avoiding a potential controversy after the Reverend Jesse Jackson began not so subtly lobbying to deliver one of the inaugural prayers. Instead, they chose a far less controversial figure, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, from one of Chicago’s most politically potent African American churches. Reverend Wright brought laughter when he reminded God that “we march to different drummers,” and then—mid-prayer—mimicked the steps of marching bands from white and black colleges.

  And the inaugural speech itself, written largely by the president himself, reached for poetry more than prose, as he paid tribute to “the babies, who will someday travel to distant stars, to those who will teach those children in crowded rooms, to those who work the fields and feed our bodies, to those who preach the sacred words that feed our souls … We are in the first moments of a new day, so let the day begin.”

  With the ceremony ended, the Gores escorted Bill and Hillary Clinton down the steps of the Capitol’s East Front, where the Marine One helicopter waited to take the Clintons to Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, for the flight up to their new home in New York.

  “The weather seems to be taking a toll on Tipper,” CNN’s Judy Woodruff noted. “She’s clearly feeling the chill.”

  After the briefest of embraces, the Clintons climbed into Marine One; as it lifted off, Tipper turned away from the waiting cameras and muttered to her husband, “I feel like a huge shadow has just disappeared.”

  Not quite.

  As the Gores moved into the Capitol for the traditional lunch with the Congress, the former president and his wife arrived at Andrews, where the 747—no longer Air Force One, since Clinton was no longer president—was waiting. Tradition held that the ex-president and his spouse would depart quietly, without ceremony, leaving the stage to the new leader. But ceremony was exactly what was waiting for Clinton: a band, an honor guard, and a bank of microphones and cameras. By the time the choreographed troop review was done, it was time for the new president to address the congressional luncheon, and Gore’s team had prepared a surprise: an announcement that each month he would go to Capitol Hill to meet with leaders of both parties, as a signal that the chief executive understood the coequal role of the national legislature.

  But as Gore rose to speak, former president Clinton was at his microphone, acknowledging the cheers of the boisterous crowd.

  “You see that sign there that says, PLEASE DON’T GO? I left the White House, but I’m still here! We’re not going anywhere!” he said, and launched into a lengthy celebration of his tenure: “Twenty-two million new jobs! … More college opportunity than ever in history. … Five trillion dollars in surpluses. … ”

  The crowd loved it. The TV cameras loved it. The producers in every network control room in America loved it—and stayed with it, splitting the screen to show images of the old and new presidents.

  The new White House communications chief, Chis Lehane, did not love it. He was on the hotline phone to ABC’s Roger Goodman, who was directing the pool coverage.

  “Roger! The President of the Fucking United States is making a major fucking policy announcement! That’s where your fucking coverage should be!”

  “Not my call, Chris,” Goodman said. “We just send out the feeds; the networks take what they want. And they want … Bubba.”

  “Let it go,” President Gore said later when Lehane slipped into the glass-enclosed reviewing stand during the Inaugural Parade and briefed him on Clinton’s upstaging. “I’m sure it won’t be the last time we’re going to be frustrated.”

  It wasn’t long before that turned out to be an unhappily prescient observation.

  * * *

  While President Gore and ex-president Clinton were competing for the attention of millions, a small group of men, casually dressed in slacks and sweaters, were gathered at a townhouse nine miles northwest of the capital, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The host and his guests were exiles of a sort; but for a few thousand votes in Florida, they would have been preparing to guide the foreign policy of the United States under President George W. Bush. Now, with President Gore assuming power, they snacked on cold cuts as they engaged in a blunt assessment of how best to use the considerable political resources at their disposal to pursue their shared highest priority. And with them, elegantly dressed in a beige sport coat with blue pinstripes, was the one man who had done more than any other to shape that priority.

  For the top foreign- and defense-policy stars of the Republican Party, the Cold War and the power balances among nation-states had been the defining reality of their professional lives. They had been a part o
f the Reagan administration when that fifty-year struggle with the Soviet Union had come to an end. They were part of the first Bush administration when the president had rallied an international coalition to drive Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait; many of those at midlevel posts had bitterly regretted the decision not to send the Third Army straight into Baghdad, ridding the world of a psychopathic butcher once and for all. And for the eight years of the Clinton administration, they had worked in political exile to argue for “regime change” and had rallied the Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, forcing President Clinton to sign the bill, making it the official policy of the United States government to depose Saddam.

  And now that they were facing four more years away from the center of military and diplomatic power, they were determined to make the removal of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein a reality.

  Their host that evening was Richard Perle, a twenty-five-year veteran of Washington and a relentless advocate for what had come to be known as neoconservatism, the core belief of which was the forceful use of American power and influence to challenge the legitimacy of America’s foreign adversaries. With Perle were such luminaries as Doug Feith, John P. Hannah, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Paul Wolfowitz—the last two having been key figures in the Defense Department of George H.W. Bush.

  After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Wolfowitz had dismissed the idea that a self-financed terror group could have pulled off such an audacious attack on its own; a nation-state had to have been behind such a strike, he reasoned, and that nation-state almost certainly was Iraq.

  One of the neocons’ allies, an academic named Laurie Mylroie, not only argued that Saddam had been behind the World Trade Center strike; she also saw Iraq’s hand in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, for which Timothy McVeigh had been tried, convicted, and executed. The consensus among the intelligence community was that Mylroie’s notions were fanciful if not deranged, but the arguments were given credence in political journals, op-ed pages, and the halls of Congress, on both sides of the aisle. And the force behind that momentum, sitting now in Chevy Chase with Perle and his colleagues, was a man whose intellectual gifts and instinct for how to use and influence power were nothing short of astonishing.

  Ahmed Chalabi had been born into wealth and power fifty-six years before in Iraq. His father was the wealthiest and most influential citizen in the country. But in 1958, a bloody coup drove the Chalabi family into exile in London—and fueled in Ahmed a passion to avenge his family’s humiliation by returning to Iraq and ending the long suffering of the Shiite majority at the hands of the Sunni minority.

  In his quest, which now spanned some four decades, one of Chalabi’s key assets was his sheer brilliance. His was a polymath, fluent in several languages, who could lecture on subjects ranging from Marxism to literature. But beyond cognitive intelligence was an instinctive, almost feral ability to persuade. With the judicious use of money and favors, with protestations of loyalty and support that were, to put it charitably, “contingent,” Chalabi had, over a quarter-century, convinced powerful Americans that the removal of Saddam was an urgent national interest.

  He had also made contacts inside the CIA, which provided him with funds to organize the Iraqi National Congress in 1991—a group whose leadership he swiftly assumed. He had connected with men like those who held high rank in the Reagan and Bush administrations, who were gathered here on Gore’s inauguration day in Richard Perle’s townhouse. Perhaps most significant, he had allied himself with key members of Congress—Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Jesse Helms, and Democrats like House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee chair John Murtha, who controlled the purse strings of America’s military and defense machines, as well as Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman and Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey.

  Now, on the first day of Al Gore’s presidency, Chalabi and his influential supporters were determined to keep the pressure on, using the tools of persuasion that Wolfowitz and Perle had employed from their first days in the halls of power: flood decision makers, journalists, and think-tank players with memos and intelligence reports from dissident Iraqis; spotlight the undeniably murderous cruelties of the Iraqi regime; and use the investigative power of the Republican majority to hold hearings and its power of the purse to bend the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA to a more assertive stance.

  “Our mission,” one guest said, “is to make the case that Saddam is not only a tyrant but that he poses a direct threat to United States security because he is very likely compiling a stockpile of weapons—chemical, biological, nuclear—either to use or to put in the hands of his terrorist allies; and that his continued existence in power is a sign of weakness that encourages our adversaries to believe that we’re a paper tiger.”

  It was a disciplined, politically potent message, but one that would face stiff resistance. The State Department and the CIA—notoriously risk-averse in the eyes of the neoconservatives—would caution against the reliability of the intelligence. The Department of Defense would warn of the commitment needed to overthrow Saddam—not a handful of dissident Iraqis, but the kind of force that had driven Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991: half a million troops on the ground. That, even Chalabi acknowledged, would require a highly dramatic attack on American interests—or lives—that would create a demand for action.

  And on this damp, wet January day, no one could imagine what such an event might be.

  No one but a handful of men, dispatched from the other side of the world.

  The State of the Union

  “Mis-tah Speak-ah … the President of the United States!”

  President Gore strode into the House chamber as the senators, representatives, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, chiefs of staff, and a gallery of notables stood and cheered. It was February 27, 2001, and the new president would be making his first appearance at a joint session of Congress since presiding over the counting of Electoral College votes that had made him president seven weeks earlier. He had come here with a message, and a presentation, designed to put him squarely within the broad middle of American politics.

  The president’s box was dotted with “Skutniks,” guests the president could point to as living representatives of the points he was making. (They were so named because in 1982 President Reagan had invited Lenny Skutnik, who had rescued one of the passengers of an airplane that had crashed in the Potomac River, to sit in the gallery during the State of the Union address.) Some had served the same purpose during Gore’s 2000 acceptance speech at the Democratic convention: Jacqueline Johnson, from St. Louis, burdened by the cost of prescription drugs, and Mildred Nystel, who left welfare for a job, aided by the Earned Income Tax Credit. Others were new faces: Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco executive who had blown the whistle on the industry’s efforts to hide the impact of cigarette smoking, and one more person, whose identity was not disclosed until the speech itself and who would shortly come to symbolize the Gore administration’s most singular, least celebrated achievement.

  Most of Gore’s speech was a study in caution. The president proposed a half-trillion-dollar tax cut, directed at the business community and all but the wealthiest; another half-trillion from the impending surplus went to shoring up the Social Security and Medicare trust funds; four hundred billion more went to paying down the national debt. (This last triggered a dustup among Gore’s economic team, with chief economic advisor Paul Krugman warning, “If we wipe out the debt completely, we have no lines of credit; you guys need to go back and see what Alexander Hamilton had to say about that.”)

  The president proposed a health-care policy that was distinctly small-bore, lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to sixty-two—God knows he could afford that, with trillions of dollars in surpluses incoming in the next decade—and if Ted Kennedy was caught by the cameras grumbling to Senator Chuck Schumer about “another damn Eisenhower Republican posing a
s a Democrat,” well, that was just fine with Gore’s political team.

  And, just as he had promised members of the Congressional Rural Caucus, there was a $10 billion down payment to make broadband a national reality.

  “My dad was the chief Senate sponsor of the Interstate Highway System,” Gore reminded the Congress, “and I intend to be the champion of the Interstate Information Superhighway. Maybe I didn’t invent the Internet, but I darn well intend to improve it.”

  It was toward the end of his speech when Gore turned to a subject that had not been mentioned in the daylong briefings given to prominent journalists by White House staffers.

  “Our eyes have been focused here at home,” he said soberly. “An understandable focus with the Cold War gone and the specter of nuclear war a fading memory. But we must never forget that there are forces around the globe that wish us ill and are prepared to kill as many as they can, with no regard for innocent life.

  “Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail against it. America will remain a target, because we are uniquely present in the world, because we have taken a tougher stand against terrorism, and because we are the most open society on earth. But that very openness demands vigilance—the kind of vigilance demonstrated by a brave, determined customs inspector, Diana Dean, who stopped a man named Ahmed Ressam as he was on his way, in an auto loaded with explosives, to attack the Los Angeles airport on Millennium Eve. Diana,” Gore said, gesturing to the gallery, “we owe you and your colleagues a profound debt of gratitude.” And when the applause died down, he added, “I want to say to anyone, anywhere in the world, with malevolent intentions toward our country or any of our friends and allies: We will protect ourselves by finding you before you can turn your evil intentions into evil deeds. This is not a threat—it is a promise.”