Bush was respectful and trusting of the military but, at least in my time, not reluctant to disagree with his senior leaders and commanders, especially as it became clear in mid-2006 that their strategy in Iraq wasn’t working. He visited the Pentagon fairly regularly, willing to meet as often as needed with the chiefs to give them the opportunity to lay out their views and talk with him. He welcomed their candor, and while he would react to or rebut things they said, I never heard him do so in a rude or curt manner or in such a way as to discourage future candor. At the same time, he would get impatient with senior officers who were publicly outspoken on sensitive issues. Whether it was the DNI, Admiral Mike McConnell, in a New Yorker article calling some of our interrogation techniques torture, or Fox Fallon expounding on avoiding conflict with Iran, or Mike Mullen on several occasions going against the company line on both Iraq and Afghanistan, the president would turn to me and say, “What is it with these admirals?”
The president and I were not close personally, but I felt as though we had a strong professional relationship. He invited Becky and me to Camp David on several occasions, but we were unable to go either because of my foreign travel or Becky being in the Pacific Northwest. Declining the invitations became a source of embarrassment to me, especially when the invitations stopped coming. I was always concerned the president might think we were avoiding what would have been a real honor when, in fact, it was always just poor timing.
The one somewhat touchy area between us—never openly discussed—was my close relationship to the president’s father. When Bush 41 was in Washington in late January 2007 and wanted to come over to the Pentagon to see me and meet some of the military leaders, I got a call from Josh Bolten that Bush 43 thought such a visit might become a news story and he did not want that. Josh urged me to call off the visit. I said I would defer to 43’s wishes. So 41 and I had breakfast the next day at the White House instead. A few weeks later I was returning from a meeting at the White House when my secretary called to tell me that 41 was on his way to the Pentagon. I barely arrived in time to welcome him, and he went around shaking hands and talking with the folks in my immediate office. He was there only about fifteen to twenty minutes, but I think he wanted to make a point about his own independence.
My only real problem with the Bush White House involved its communications/public relations advisers. They were always trying to get me to go on the Sunday TV talk shows, write op-eds, and grant interviews. I considered their perspective—and that of Obama’s advisers too—to be highly tactical, usually having to do with some hot-button issue of the moment and usually highly partisan. I believe that when it comes to the media, often less is more, in the sense that if one appears infrequently, then people pay more attention when you do appear. Bush’s advisers occasionally would try to rope me into participating in White House attacks on critics of the president, and I would have none of that. When the president gave a speech to the Israeli Knesset in the summer of 2008 in which he came close to calling his critics appeasers, the White House press folks wanted me to endorse the speech. I directed my staff to tell them to go to hell. (The staff told them more politely.) In terms of picking fights, I intended to make those decisions for myself, not cede the role to some staffer at the White House.
President Bush was always supportive of my recommendations and decisions, including on those occasions when I told him I wanted to fire some of his senior-most appointees in the Defense Department. He gave me private time whenever I asked for it, and we were in lockstep on strategy with respect to Iraq, Iran, and other important issues where some in the administration, the press, and Congress sometimes thought I was freelancing. I kept him well informed about everything I was doing and what I intended to say publicly.
I enjoyed working for and with President Bush. He was a man of character, a man of convictions, and a man of action. As he himself has said, only time will tell how successful he was as president. But the fact that the United States was not successfully attacked by violent extremists for the last seven years of his presidency, and beyond, ought to count for something.
I met Dick Cheney in the mid-1980s when he was a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. I had been a junior National Security Council staffer during the Ford administration, when he was deputy White House chief of staff and then chief; I was far too much of an underling to have any contact with him. In my opinion, one cannot understand Cheney without having been in the White House during the Ford years. It was the nadir of the modern American presidency, the president reaping the whirlwind of both Vietnam and Watergate. The War Powers Act, the denial of promised weapons to South Vietnam, cutting off help to the anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban resistance in Angola—Congress took one action after another to whittle down the power of the presidency. Cheney saw it all from the Oval Office. I believe his broad assertion of the powers of the presidency after 9/11 was attributable, in no small part, to his experience during the Ford years and a determination to recapture from Congress powers lost fifteen years before and more.
Because Dick is a calm, fairly quiet-spoken man, I think a lot of people never fully appreciated how conservative he always was. In 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War, the question arose as to whether to seek both congressional and UN Security Council approval for going to war with Saddam Hussein. Cheney, then secretary of defense, argued that neither was necessary but went along with the president’s contrary decisions. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.
He and I had always had a cordial relationship. When I was acting director of central intelligence in early 1987, I met with Cheney to ask his advice on how to deal with the White House and Congress; he was the only member of Congress I consulted. We got along well during 41’s administration, sharing a concern—well placed, as it turned out—about the prospects for Gorbachev’s survival and agreeing on the need to reach out to other reformers, including Boris Yeltsin. Much later, perhaps around 2004 or 2005, Becky and I had joined the Cheneys and one other couple as guests of former U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom Anne Armstrong and her husband, Tobin, at their vast and historic ranch in south Texas for bird shooting. Neither Becky nor I am a bird hunter, but we went out with the party and watched the shooting from a safe distance. We socialized before, during, and after meals and had a great time. (We were later invited to participate in another such hunting weekend at the Armstrong ranch with the Cheneys a year or so later. I had a speech commitment in Los Angeles and so we had to decline. The Austin lawyer invited in our stead would be the victim of the hunting accident involving the vice president.)
By the time I joined the administration, Dick was increasingly concerned about unfinished business, with regard to Iran in particular, and eager to deal with it because the next president, in his view, might not be tough enough to do so. He was a strong supporter of the surge in Iraq and provided access to its most vocal advocates outside government, including retired general Jack Keane, especially when they thought others in the government (mainly me, Rice, Mullen, and Fallon) weren’t sufficiently committed. Cheney never wavered in his support for “enhanced interrogation techniques” or for the ongoing importance and value of the prison at Guantánamo. On these and other issues, he was increasingly isolated inside the senior ranks of the administration, a reality he conceded with some humor and grace. He got to the point where he would often open his remarks with “I know I’m going to lose this argument” or “I know I’m alone in this.”
Cheney’s manner in the inner circles of the government belied the “Darth Vader” image that his public speeches and positions helped create. I never heard him sound off in anger; rather, he would present his point of view lucidly and calmly. He asked thoughtful questions of experts and intelligence professionals, and I considered him a less aggressive questioner than the president. Based o
n what I heard from folks at the Defense Department, I think the vice president let some of his staff be the “bad guys” in interagency affairs rather than taking on that role himself. Again, my observations come from the last two years of an eight-year run. How much his approach changed after Condi became secretary of state and Hadley the national security adviser (Hadley had worked for Dick at Defense during 41’s administration), and then again after I replaced Rumsfeld (they had been extraordinarily close), I simply do not know. What was clear was that on the important issues, the vice president remained as committed as ever, and however calm his demeanor, he was not prepared to retreat on any of the controversial policies of the Bush administration. While we agreed on a number of important national security issues—above all, Iraq and Afghanistan—when I thought he was prepared to risk a new military engagement, I pushed back, just as I would in the Obama administration.
I knew Condi Rice and I would get along fine. (She, Hadley, and I are now consulting partners.) Under Bush 41, when I was deputy national security adviser, Condi had been the Soviet expert on the NSC. We both had doctorates in Russian and Soviet studies (she could still speak Russian, not me), and we agreed on just about everything relating to the collapsing Soviet Union from 1989 until 1991, when she returned to Stanford. Indeed, when 41 authorized me in the summer of 1989 to form a very secret, small group to begin contingency planning for the collapse of the Soviet Union, I asked Condi to lead the effort.
Condi is really good at just about anything she tries, a source of resentment for those like me who have no athletic, linguistic, or musical talent. But she and I quickly developed a strong working relationship that radiated throughout our respective bureaucracies, as I’ve said. We would get together for dinner every few months, always at her favorite restaurant in the Watergate building. On virtually all of the major issues during the Bush administration, she and I were pretty much on the same page. On North Korea, where I was far more pessimistic than she or her negotiators about any chance for denuclearization, I saw no harm in trying—unlike the vice president, who opposed any talks.
Rice was very tough-minded and very tough. She has a razor-sharp tongue, and she spares few who cross her. On one occasion, in a meeting with the vice president, Hadley, and me, Dick made some comment about the need to protect the Republican base in the Senate. Condi shot back, “What’s that—six senators?” Another time, when the senior leadership of the government was meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House to discuss closing Guantánamo (Condi and I were about the only advocates for closure at the table), Attorney General Mike Mukasey said we should let the whole thing just play out in the courts. Without missing a beat, Condi said, “Mike, every time you go to court, you lose.” She was also skeptical of guidelines for interrogation that still allowed humiliation through nakedness, as well as other techniques she found questionable.
Condi and I testified together on a number of occasions. The worst was a four-hearing marathon that we had to endure right after the president’s decision on the surge. A number of members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee were rude, nasty, and stupid—in the process, making the Armed Services Committees look almost statesmanlike. I was so angry at the boorishness and antagonistic tone of members of the Foreign Affairs Committee that about half an hour before the end of the hearing, I just shut down. I made clear I was finished trying to answer their questions. But not Condi. She leaned forward in the saddle and took them on (she clearly had more experience with this crowd) with intensity and logic. Of course, logic doesn’t count for much when the critics are baying at the moon.
Condi was very protective of State Department turf and prerogatives, and she bristled quickly at any hint that State wasn’t pulling its weight in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than once, I got an earful about some general or admiral who had complained publicly about the lack of civilian support in the war effort. My sense from our military leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan was that the civilian experts made a real difference; there were just too few of them. Early in my tenure, I received a memorandum from the State Department asking for military officers to fill what were supposed to be civilian positions in Iraq. Given what our folks were already being asked to do there, I wasn’t happy and said so publicly. Still, she and I never let those dust-ups impact our cooperation. It was my great good fortune to have two formidable women—Condi and Hillary Clinton—serve as secretary of state during my tenure as secretary of defense. On controversial issues in both the Bush and Obama administrations, I worked hard to make sure Condi and Hillary were on my side—and vice versa.
Steve Hadley and I first started working together on the NSC staff in 1974. He worked amazingly hard and, I thought, ran an interagency process that well served the president but that also was regarded as fair and even-handed by the rest of us. He was deeply loyal to Bush 43. As befits a good lawyer, he was meticulous in every respect. When I joined the government in late 2006, I thought Steve was exhausted, spent. But he kept on trucking, fueled by green tea. As secretary, I had a lot of respect for him, even if he did convene all those damn meetings.
The other key member of the national security team with whom I would work most closely was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As I’ve said, I worked with Pace for nine and a half months and with Mike Mullen for three years and nine months. They had very different backgrounds (beyond the former being a Marine, the latter a sailor) and very different personalities. Both are observant Roman Catholics, both are men of extraordinary integrity and honor, and both have good senses of humor. Their views on homosexuals serving in the armed forces were diametrically opposed—Pace adamantly against, Mullen becoming a historic advocate in favor. Both were superb advisers to me and to the presidents they served.
I was sold on Mullen to succeed Pace when Pete Chiarelli, my new senior military assistant, told me that he had paid a courtesy call on Mullen and had asked him what worried him the most about our forces, and he, the chief of naval operations, had replied, “The state of the Army.” I got to know Mullen better than Pace because of the length of our time together, and we shared more foxholes together. Despite the occasional bump in the road, I could not imagine a stronger, better chairman or a better partner.
At the outset of his tenure, Mike took on several issues where I actually agreed with him but, consistent with my practice of avoiding fights I didn’t need, thought he would spend political capital and ultimately lose. I think Mike felt the role of the chairman had been diminished over a period of years, and he was determined to strengthen it and make the chairman a much more publicly visible senior military leader. He soon took on a significant public calendar of speeches, television shows, and other appearances. Some of my staff and some at the White House became restive over this and recommended that I rein him in. While his public schedule occasionally made me uneasy, I trusted him, felt we had a strong partnership, and decided I would not make an issue of it. Mike strongly objected to Jack Keane’s advisory role in Iraq, specifically with Petraeus, and called Keane in to tell him he couldn’t go to Iraq anymore. Keane complained to the vice president, and the next thing I knew, Cheney was on the phone asking me why all the administration’s critics could travel to Iraq but not one of its foremost defenders. I ended up leaving the matter in Petraeus’s hands—if he could use him and found value in his visits, then Keane could go over. Mike objected to retired military officers taking an active role in politics and spoke out forcefully against it. He also wanted to eliminate the use of the term “Global War on Terror” by the military, early on in his tenure, perhaps to stake out his independence from the White House. Again, I didn’t really disagree, but I knew it would raise hackles throughout the administration and was another hassle we didn’t need. All that said, over nearly four years, there were only a few issues or decisions of consequence where we disagreed.
Mike had many strengths. He gave me great advice on military appointments and those personal relationships among senior offic
ers that count for so much. He was a powerful advocate of accountability, especially after a screw-up, and thus an important ally when it became necessary to fire or replace senior officers. One of his greatest strengths was his ability to bring the service chiefs together as a unified front when we had to deal with tough issues like the budget, thereby mostly avoiding internecine fighting among the services. He also made sure they had the chance to present their views directly to me and, whenever necessary, to the president. He had the gift of fostering unity, and I believe it well served the military, both presidents, the country, and me.
Perhaps for the first time ever, the chairman and the secretary of defense were next-door neighbors. Confident that I was going to be in Washington for only two years, for an exorbitant amount of money I rented a house on the Navy compound next door to where Mullen lived as chief of naval operations. He remained there as chairman, even though there is a very large house at Fort Myer, in Virginia, just across the Potomac from D.C., reserved by law only for the chairman. As a result, on weekends, Mike and I fairly often would wander over to each other’s porch to talk through some sensitive issue or crisis or our agenda. It must have been a strange sight for others working in the compound on a weekend to see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals sitting on the porch talking to the secretary of defense wearing jeans and a sport shirt and smoking a cigar.
One little problem was that, as chairman, Mike had several noncommissioned officers who worked at his house, cooking, cleaning, and so on. I, on the other hand, despite being secretary of defense and his boss, was a civilian and therefore not entitled to the household help that top generals and admirals receive. There was a lot of good-humored back-and-forth between us about the situation. I’d see Mike headed out on a weekend, and as I told my staff, “I was out there watering my damn flowers.” One night there was a terrible rain and windstorm, and a big limb came down in my yard. It lay there for several days, and I finally told one of my security officers, “After dark, drag the thing over to Mullen’s yard—it’ll be gone in an hour.” Sure enough, it was. At my farewell ceremony, Mike suggested that I had blown leaves over onto his yard. Not true, but only because I didn’t have a leaf blower.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 13