43*

by Jeff Greenfield

  Now, with his worst fears realized, Helms launched his own hearings, at which he confronted Gore’s national security advisor, Leon Fuerth.

  After a few moments of cursory questioning, Senator Helms gestured for an aide to hand Fuerth a paper, then asked him with exaggerated courtesy, “What is it you’ve just been handed, sir?”

  “It’s the ‘PDB,’ Presidential Daily Brief, for August 17, 2001,” Fuerth replied.

  “And what would that be?”

  “Just what it says,” Fuerth replied with a touch of acrimony. “It’s a summation of the intelligence gathered overnight by various intelligence agencies and delivered to the president every morning.”

  “And what is the title of that August 17 PDB?” Helms asked.

  “‘Al Qaeda Determined to Avenge Bin Laden’s Death by Striking U.S.,’ ” Fuerth replied.

  There was an audible gasp in the committee room.

  Fuerth argued, accurately, that the briefing did not say when or where or how Al Qaeda planned to execute such a strike. It made no mention of hijacking and weaponizing commercial airliners. Indeed, it contained no specific threat warning at all. But viewed backwards through the prism of what had in fact happened, the PDB took on the character of a clear, specific warning. And the fact that New York and Washington had been hit was, in retrospect, “proof” that the Gore administration had been massively derelict, as had the Clinton administration before it. (More than one commentator wondered pointedly whether Clinton had been “distracted” by his efforts to survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal rather than focusing fully on the terrorist threat.)

  All of which made the pressure to do something, to hit someone, even more intense. From congressional Democrats returning to Washington from visits from their home states came notes of concern: My constituents want action, Mr. President—they’re asking when we’re going to act like the world’s only superpower.

  As President Gore was searching for ways to push back against the clamor for a confrontation with Iraq, he remembered that it was time for his weekly lunch with Vice President Lieberman. With an unconscious shake of the head, the president pulled out the “Eyes Only” memo the vice president had sent him. Just then, an old adage popped into his head: I can protect myself from my enemies … but God save me from my friends.

  Two hours later, he knew exactly why.

  * * *

  Vice President Lieberman’s “campaign” had begun even as the smoke from the Capitol and the Pentagon was staining the skies above Washington. It was 8 a.m. on the morning of September 12. Gathered in the White House Situation Room—the same venue where President Gore had ordered the Predator strike on Osama bin Laden—were the president, the vice president, Secretary of State Holbrooke, Defense Secretary Nunn, and CIA Director Tenet. Richard Clarke had just concluded a terse, grim briefing. The events of the previous day had been without doubt an Al Qaeda operation, and the question was how the United States would respond. The steps ranged from a military operation in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban to a worldwide pursuit of Al Qaeda’s financial resources to a relentless pressure campaign on Pakistan to stop cosseting the Al Qaeda and Taliban presence inside its borders. As he concluded, Vice President Lieberman interjected.

  “Dick, I just want to put this on the table: How hard are we looking at Iraq’s role here? Is it really plausible that a ragtag terrorist group like Al Qaeda could have pulled this off? Moving all those people into the country, the visas, the training? We know the kinds of weapons Saddam may have stockpiled. We know he tried to kill President Bush. I just want to make sure we’re taking a hard look at whether Saddam is involved in any way. If he is,” Lieberman concluded, “I think that would justify a decisive, decisive response.”

  “With respect, Mr. Vice President,” Clarke said, “we—I mean, CIA, NSA, DOD, my shop—we’ve looked several times for state sponsorship. You know the kind of pressure we’ve been getting on this from the Hill, but we’ve not found any real linkage to Iraq. Iran, a little. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan Yemen, some. But Iraq … ”

  “I know, I know,” Lieberman said. “But this may be our chance to remove a clear and present danger—not to mention a genocidal mass murderer—once and for all. So I hope you’ll look very carefully at this.”

  With that, the focus shifted back to Afghanistan and to the staggering list of vulnerable targets within America’s borders—nuclear power plants, petrochemical factories, bridges and tunnels from New York to San Francisco. It was only later that the people in the Situation Room realized that they had witnessed the opening salvo of a political civil war.

  * * *

  Joe Lieberman came of age in the 1950s, but it was the early 1960s that shaped his worldview: a time when liberal Democrats were as passionate about a “muscular” foreign policy as they were about civil rights, civil liberties, and the organized labor movement. When he entered the Senate in 1988, he quickly distinguished himself from most of his fellow Democrats by embracing a foreign policy outlook shaped not by the anti-interventionist lessons of Vietnam but by the post–World War II outlook of Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the senator from Washington State who was staunchly liberal on domestic policy but a devoted hawk on foreign and defense matters. Lieberman was a relentless critic of his party’s anti-interventionist wing, which after Vietnam had become the dominant foreign policy voice of the party.

  The Connecticut senator publicly longed for “the Democratic Party that I grew up in—a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders, a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters around the world against the forces of totalitarianism, or we would fall divided.”

  And on no issue was Lieberman more assertive, more hawkish, than on Iraq. He had deplored the Bush administration’s failure to “finish the job” in 1991 by going to Baghdad and removing Saddam from power. He had also been a fervent supporter of Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress ever since Richard Perle had brought Chalabi to his attention on a plane ride to a national security conference in Munich. Lieberman quickly became enamored of the charismatic Iraqi, and championed Chalabi’s repeated claims that he and his allies could overthrow Saddam if the United States would only let them establish a “free Iraq” zone in the North, where Saddam’s power no longer reached. Such views had put Lieberman in opposition to the Clinton administration’s “containment” policy, but that did not deter Gore from picking him as his running mate in 2000. Gore’s principal challenge as the Democratic nominee was the same as for any sitting vice president: to demonstrate independence from the man he was trying to succeed. And no Democrat had been more critical of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair than Lieberman.

  But once the new administration took office, Lieberman’s focus on Iraq—some called it an obsession—returned to the surface. He and his national security advisor, Ken Pollack, would regularly push the State Department to disburse funds to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, even when State Department officials argued that the underground newspapers and radio stations Chalabi was “funding” had no apparent existence inside Iraq. His speeches—always cleared with the White House—brought the crowds at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and other advocates of a strong defense posture to their feet as he pledged that “President Gore and I embrace the wisdom of Dean Acheson, perhaps our greatest secretary of state, who said, ‘No people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.’ Those who would be our adversaries—from Tehran to Baghdad and beyond—ignore these words at their peril.”

  But that was before the attacks of September 11. Now, as Lieberman waited for his weekly lunch with the president, his long-held convictions had turned into something else: a profound, deepening dissatisfaction with the course on which the administration—the Gore-Liebe
rman administration—was embarked. And that discontent had crystallized in the form of a memo that he and Pollack drafted, which he had hand-delivered to President Gore’s personal secretary two days earlier.

  Dear Mr. President:

  I’m taking the extraordinary step of putting my thoughts on Iraq on paper—for your eyes only—because I genuinely believe it is the single most urgent issue you, or any President has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to the brink of nuclear war almost 40 years ago.

  Put bluntly, I believe our national survival is at stake in the war against terrorism. And I am convinced this war against terrorism will not be over until Saddam Hussein is removed from power in Iraq.

  Saddam is the sworn enemy of the United States and is still seeking revenge for the humiliating Gulf War defeat.

  His regime has the means—chemical and biological weapons—that he hasn’t hesitated to use, killing at least 25,000 Iranians and Kurds in at least 10 different attacks. And by all accounts, Saddam has been actively working to develop nuclear weapons since the end of the Gulf War. All that needs to present itself to him, I fear, is the opportunity.

  It is, I believe, imperative at this point that the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and our intelligence services have begun to draw up plans and options for changing the regime in Baghdad.

  I fervently hope that you will give this critical cause the leadership and the advocacy it deserves. Our national security demands nothing less.

  * * *

  President Gore pushed away the plate of kosher chicken salad, took a quick glance at one of the three BlackBerrys clipped to his belt, and nodded his head.

  “Joe,” he said, “I read your memo. I appreciate the candor; so let me reply with some of my own. I’m not happy with your insistence on Iraq—and I’m even less happy with what I’ve been reading in the press.”

  “Mr. President,” Lieberman said, “let me assure you—”

  “I’m not reassured, Joe,” Gore said. “Not when I read Bob Novak reporting on … let me get this right,” he said as he thumbed his BlackBerry. “Yes, here it is: ‘open discontent inside the administration over its refusal to deal with Iraq,’ or when I see a Wall Street Journal op-ed asking ‘if Vice President Lieberman can turn around White House policy.’ Where the hell am I supposed to think these stories are coming from, Joe? You’re not going to tell me you don’t stay in regular contact with your neocon friends, are you?”

  “Mr. President,” Lieberman said, “I make no secret of the fact that on the question of how we should deal with our enemies, I share a lot of views with them. But this is a much bigger question for me. It’s not just the threat from Iraq; it’s what I think it could mean if the world saw a tyrant like Saddam fall: what a free Iraq would mean in the region, for a real peace in the Middle East—”

  “I know the arguments, Joe—the virtuous circle: We take out Saddam, then the Sunnis and Shiites put aside, I don’t know, thirteen hundred years of hatred, the mullahs fall in Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas come to their senses and make peace with Israel, and the Saudis decide to become Social Democrats. But if by some wild stretch of the imagination it doesn’t work that way, you could have the same thing that happened in the Balkans—a thousand years of bottled-up ethnic hatred exploding, leaving us with a choice: occupy the country for years, or pull out and watch mass slaughter.

  “Joe, I promise you: The minute someone shows me any credible evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, or is in fact aiding Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group, or is in fact stockpiling WMDs, we will hit them with everything we have. But you know the history as well as I do: You start counting the lives lost to bad information or wrongheaded assumptions and you’re into the millions. And every person I trust tells me that Chalabi and his neocon friends are blowing smoke. I understand some of them are your friends, too, Joe. But this is the decision I’ve made.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

  “I guess in that case,” Lieberman said, “I’ve got a decision to make, too.”

  April 10, 2002

  The lawn outside the Naval Observatory was packed with cameras, lights, two hundred folding chairs occupied by a press corps in full Martian-invasion hysteria. A half-dozen men and women, microphones in hand, were speaking urgently to the cameras in front of them.

  “My God,” a CNN desk assistant said to her colleague, “I can’t believe we’re actually covering ‘breaking news’ that’s actually … breaking news.”

  “Not since President Ford dumped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to save his nomination from Ronald Reagan’s challenge … ”

  “Not since FDR replaced John Nance Garner with Henry Wallace in 1940, then dumped Wallace for Harry Truman in ’44 … ”

  “We’ve seen two secretaries of state—William Jennings Bryan and Cy Vance—resign because of policy disagreements, but for a sitting vice president … ”

  And Joe Lieberman, accompanied by his wife, Hadassah, and his daughter Rebecca, walked out of the official vice president’s residence and mounted the stage.

  “Two years ago,” he began, “I proudly accepted Al Gore’s invitation to join his campaign as his running mate. I believed then and believe now that on a broad variety of issues, President Gore is on a course to keep America prosperous and to expand opportunity for those still left behind.

  “But it has also become clear to me that on what I believe to be the central issue of our time—the protection of our national security and our battle against worldwide terrorism—the president and I have a fundamental, irreparable disagreement.

  “I think it’s time to acknowledge that our strategy of trying to manage this menace has simply not succeeded. Indeed, it seems to me that trying to manage the Iraqi threat under Saddam is like trying to cool a volcano with a thermostat. It doesn’t work. We must therefore declare a new objective. Our clear, unequivocal goal should be liberating the Iraqi people and the world from Saddam’s tyranny, as we should have done in 1991.

  “I have made this argument repeatedly within the counsel of the administration. It has been rejected. And this leaves me with a hard choice: to remain silent in the face of my deep conviction that we are on a dangerous course that threatens incalculable harm to our nation or to step down and make my case openly before the American people.

  “And I asked myself: What would I have done had I been in Neville Chamberlain’s British government in 1938 as he pursued a policy of appeasing Hitler? What would I have done had I been in Lyndon Johnson’s government as he escalated the Vietnam War? Once I answered those questions, my course was clear. Accordingly, I shall resign the vice presidency effective at noon tomorrow. President Gore, I believe, agrees that this is the wisest course of action.”

  The questions that followed were inevitable.

  Does this mean you will challenge President Gore for the Democratic nomination in 2004? Will you change parties?

  “The dangers we face as a nation are too profound,” Lieberman responded, “and the challenges we face too real, for us to look at this through the lens of partisan politics. In fact, I have spoken to my good friend John McCain; and he and I have agreed to begin a nationwide campaign to alert America to the clear and present danger posed by Saddam Hussein.”

  Might you and John McCain run together in 2004 on the Republican ticket?

  “What makes you think we’d have to do it as Republicans or Democrats?” He chuckled as he said it, but the graphics were already streaming across the live TV feeds: LIEBERMAN HINTS HE AND MCCAIN MAY MAKE INDEPENDENT WHITE HOUSE RUN IN ’04.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry the news isn’t better, Mr. President,” said Stan Greenberg as he dropped the sheaf of papers on the table between them. “I know it’s not going to make for pleasant bedtime reading.”

  “Not to worry, Stan,” Gore said. They were sharing a late drink in Gore’s East Wing study while
they went over Greenberg’s latest numbers. Five days after Lieberman’s sudden resignation, the president’s approval rating had dropped into the mid-thirties. Fifty-five percent of Americans said they would choose a different president if the election were held today. (“Yeah,” Gore said, “but if the election were held today, 80 percent of them would be very surprised.”) The midterm elections, three months away, were shaping up as a full-fledged disaster for the Democratic Party, and DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR BUSH bumper stickers were already appearing. Karl Rove had come out of retirement to tell a Midwest Republican gathering, “We can go to the country on this issue of defending national security, and we can cite Al Gore’s own vice president as Exhibit A.”

  President Gore bid his longtime pollster goodnight, and thought for a long moment.

  Then he picked up the phone and asked the White House operator to place a call.

  “Good evening, Hillary,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing your dinner. I have a proposition for you. Would it be possible for you to come by the White House tomorrow?”

  “I appreciate the invitation, Mr. President,” Senator Clinton said. ‘But in fairness, you should know that I’ve just given an interview to Tim Russert; I’m pretty sure it’ll be on the Today show tomorrow.”

  “And … ?”

  “And I told him that in view of—how did I put it?—the ‘radically changed’ circumstances, I intended to keep all my options open. And I mean all my options.”

  And in the long silence that followed, Hillary Clinton looked over at her husband and exchanged a nod and a smile.