The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  Kean surprised himself a little with a quick answer. “Yes,” he said. “I would be honored to be considered.”

  He did not pledge to accept the job. He would want time to think about it and talk to Debbie, who craved privacy. But he told Rove he was certainly pleased to be considered for such an important assignment from the president. Kean did not have to remind Rove, he said, of the trauma that 9/11 had brought to his beloved New Jersey, where many of the victims in the World Trade Center had their homes and families.

  “Thank you, Governor,” Rove said. “We may be getting back to you.”

  Rove had forgotten what Kean’s almost comically patrician accent sounded like. Old money and croquet mallets. Princeton. FDR-lite. Certainly not Rove’s type of Republican. Rove had spent years trying to beat the last remnants of the country club Yalie out of George W. Bush, and he had mostly succeeded. (Kean’s accent was actually considered a selling point in a popular television ad campaign for New Jersey tourism in the 1980s that ended with then governor Kean flashing his gap-toothed smile and uttering the campaign’s slogan as only he could: “New Juuuuusey and you, puuuufect together.”)

  Kean hung up the phone after his conversation with Rove, wondering what he had gotten himself into. Following his election as governor in 1981, and before that as a New Jersey state assemblyman, Kean used the same phrase with friends to describe his daunting new responsibilities in government. He would say he felt as though a “ton of bricks had fallen on me.”

  But after Rove’s call, there was almost a physical sensation, his shoulders slumping—brick by brick—at the thought of returning to the political stage like this. For Kean, the September 11 terrorist attacks were not just some faraway horror that he had witnessed on a television screen with the rest of the country. He had lost many, many friends and colleagues on 9/11. Like every suburb in northern New Jersey, Bedminster was devastated by the attacks. These were well-off commuter towns. More than a year after the attacks, there were still faded yellow ribbons tacked on community bulletin boards in Essex and Union and Somerset counties to represent neighbors who had taken the train into Manhattan early on the morning of September 11 and headed to desks on high floors of the World Trade Center and were never seen again.

  The afternoon after Rove’s call, the phone rang again in Bedminster. This time the voice was familiar to Kean: It was Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff. Kean and Card had known and liked each other for years; they’d first met in the 1980s, when Card was Ronald Reagan’s White House liaison to state governments. Card explained to Kean that he was calling on behalf of the president and that Bush had selected Kean to lead the 9/11 commission as its chairman. The president would call shortly, assuming Kean was still interested. Yes, Kean said, thanking Card. He accepted the job.

  Kean was genuinely honored by this assignment, although as he talked to Card, he recognized a wariness in his voice that had not been there when he talked to Rove the day before. The more he had thought about it overnight, the more Kean realized that he was probably taking on an impossible job. “I wondered if this was a terrible mistake,” he said.

  To begin with, he knew he was hindered by ignorance—“zero knowledge”—of most of the issues before the 9/11 commission. “I was an outsider,” he said later. “I knew nothing about these subjects—national security, intelligence, and so forth.” He knew nothing about terrorism. Nothing about Islamic extremism. He had never seen a classified document before.

  More worrisome to Kean was the poisonous partisan atmosphere of Washington, a city he loathed. The ten-member commission was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans who had been chosen by the most partisan leaders of their parties. The panel was expected to deliver its final report at the worst possible time—in the middle of a presidential election campaign. How could Kean hope to bring together five Democrats and five Republicans to agree on anything, much less whether someone deserved blame for leaving the United States vulnerable to a terrorist attack?

  The finger-pointing was well under way by the time Kean joined the commission. The bipartisan congressional investigation of intelligence failures before 9/11 was nearly finished; its final report was expected to show that the Bush administration had brushed aside warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 of an imminent terrorist strike. Democrats saw an opening to blame Bush for September 11; Republicans responded by accusing Bill Clinton of having bungled opportunities throughout the 1990s to kill Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, probably because Clinton had been so distracted by sexual scandals. How could Kean hope to get past the politics to the truth about 9/11? “I thought the commission was destined to fail,” he said.

  President Bush called Kean on Monday, December 16, and thanked him for agreeing to lead the investigation. Kean considered himself a friend of Bush’s father, but he barely knew the incumbent president. The conversation lasted a few minutes. It was very quick, very polite, Kean remembered. Bush pledged his cooperation to the commission; there was no time for a detailed discussion of how wide-ranging that cooperation might be. Two days had passed since Kean’s conversation with Rove. It would occur to Kean later that it had been odd that the first call he received from the White House about the 9/11 commission had come from Rove. Why had membership on the panel been shopped around by Bush’s political guru? Kean understood later that it had been a sign of the political struggles to come.

  KEAN SAID that he accepted the job, finally, because of his obligation to so many dead friends. For months after 9/11, his calendar had been filled with funerals or, more often, memorial services. Because so few intact bodies and body parts were recovered from the rubble and ash at ground zero, funerals had often not been an option.

  The victims of the attacks included one of his best friends, Don Peterson, the former president of Continental Electric Company and Kean’s weekly doubles tennis partner for almost twenty-five years. Peterson and his wife, Jean, had been traveling from Newark to San Francisco aboard United Airlines Flight 93 to attend a family reunion at Yosemite National Park. Kean liked to assume that Don Peterson was one of the heroes of Flight 93, which crashed in a lonely field in western Pennsylvania after a struggle between the hijackers and passengers; the passengers’ uprising appeared to have prevented the Boeing 757 from reaching its intended target in Washington, probably the Capitol dome.

  Kean did not know if Peterson was a Republican or a Democrat. It was typical of Kean, famous in the state capital of Trenton for his ability to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats, that he did not know the political affiliation of one of his closest friends.

  “All I know is that Don supported me,” Kean said. “He wasn’t political at all.” In Kean’s early races for the statehouse, Peterson had gone door-to-door to round up votes.

  Kean had given eulogies at several memorial services for 9/11 victims. He had been a member of the board of directors of the Fiduciary Trust Company, an investment firm that had its headquarters in the World Trade Center; it lost eighty-seven people in the attacks. At a service for one of the Fiduciary executives, Kean urged survivors to find comfort in their memories of their loved ones, not to dwell on the terrible way they had died. He offered a quotation from a favorite writer, J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan: “God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.”

  His quick, positive response to Rove’s offer was out of character for the sixty-seven-year-old Kean. He had perplexed and infuriated the Republican Party throughout the 1990s with his refusal to consider running again for office or taking on other roles for the party. Kean had turned down several entreaties—six times, by his count—to run for the U.S. Senate.

  Kean had considered reviving his political career. Even a decade out of office, opinion polls showed that he remained one of the state’s most popular politicians, nearly as popular with Democrats as with Republicans. GOP strategists promised him a cakewalk if he sought a Senate seat. But finally, each time, Kean said no.

  He loved the lif
e he had created for himself after politics. He had bolstered the academic reputation and finances of Drew University, the small liberal arts school that he had led as president since 1990, doubling its applicant pool and almost tripling its endowment. He loved his home in Bedminster, a converted farmhouse on a winding dirt road surrounded by thick woodlands. He had moved to Bedminster after stepping down as governor.

  Kean was a passionate environmentalist—one more reason he had found himself unwelcome in the new Republican Party—and he cherished the thought that stretches of the rolling hills around Bedminster looked little different from colonial days, when his celebrated ancestors arrived to help settle New Jersey. Kean was from one of the oldest and most distinguished families in the United States; his ancestors included Peter Stuyvesant and William Livingston, New Jersey’s first governor; the Roosevelts were cousins. Kean’s father had served in the House for twenty years. His grandfather had been a United States senator.

  Above all else, Kean turned down the Senate races because he knew it would require him to live and work in Washington. The city represented all that Kean had come to hate in politics—the vicious partisanship, the endless chase for campaign money, the pleasure that the capital’s most powerful residents took in character assassination.

  In deciding against a run to replace retiring Democratic senator Bill Bradley in 1995, Kean startled Republican Party strategists by suggesting that they would waste their time asking him to consider another congressional race. There was a “meanness” and “lack of civility” in Washington that he wanted no part of. In a revealing interview that September with The Washington Post, Kean said he was offended by the “eyeshade mentality” of the modern Republican Party and the growing influence of “right-wing radicals” in the GOP eager to sacrifice the environment and public education in the name of budget cuts. “If the whole point is just reducing the budget, you’re just crunching numbers,” he said. “That’s not governing.” Kean figured that if he got elected to the Senate, he would be instantly marginalized. He was almost certainly right.

  He was that rarity in American politics: a man whose ambitions were curbed—ended, really—by his unwillingness to bend on principle. As governor, he supported a woman’s right to an abortion, gay rights, strong environmental protection laws, gun control, and well-funded public schools. And he was not going to abandon those convictions even as the GOP seemed to move against them—and him.

  His wife, Debbie, clearly hated politics, everything about it, and Kean was not going to lose her or his children in pursuit of a political career. While governor, Kean was repeatedly pressed to consider a White House bid, and he had thought about it. But later he realized it had probably always been out of the question. Among the couple’s friends, it was assumed that Debbie would never have agreed to it.

  “You have to give up everything, your family, any hobbies or interests, just focus on that and nothing else, and then you have to make all sorts of compromises if you want a national constituency,” Kean said. “I was just never that interested.”

  Kean was comforted by Card’s suggestion in the phone call that the job of chairman of the 9/11 commission would be only part-time. He would not need to live in Washington. He could continue in his duties as president of Drew and commute down to Washington one or two days a week for commission meetings. If he memorized the Amtrak schedule and timed his day properly, he could get home to Bedminster most nights. It was a relief to Kean to think that he could escape the “snake pit” of Washington by sunset.

  4

  OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF

  The White House

  DECEMBER 15, 2002

  Andy Card figured it was his job to worry about everything, and he began to worry about Tom Kean from the moment he put down the phone after offering Kean the job.

  Card would have worried in his sleep, too, but there was never much of that. Sleep was a luxury that Andy Card mostly denied himself. George Bush’s amiable, hyperdisciplined chief of staff was typically the first to arrive in the West Wing in the morning; he rose from bed in his home in the capital’s Virginia suburbs at 4:20 a.m. and often did not return home until after midnight. His waking hours had a single focus: keeping Bush on schedule, on focus, and happy. Card had huge authority, if only because he controlled Bush’s schedule and determined who got into the Oval Office and how long they stayed. But no one accused Andy Card of lusting for power. He seemed to find it a genuine thrill to be at the president’s side, to witness history. It was Card who walked into the elementary school classroom in Florida on the morning of September 11 and whispered into Bush’s ear that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and that “America is under attack.” The photos of Card leaning over to deliver the news to a startled Bush had become one of the iconic images of that day.

  Mostly, though, Card’s job was one of logistics. It was not nearly as glamorous as all the television shows and movies set in the West Wing wanted to suggest. He joked that the second part of his title—“of staff”—captured the job better than “chief.” Former senator Howard Baker, Reagan’s chief of staff, told Card the job was the “worst in Washington.” The White House chief of staff was responsible for everything. If someone needed firing, the job was often given to Card; it was Card who later broke the news to Secretary of State Colin Powell that his services would not be needed in Bush’s second term. If Bush decided suddenly that he wanted a cheeseburger for lunch, Card would handle that, too. If something went wrong, it was Card’s fault. If something went right, the president got credit.

  There was no time to relax and reflect. “There was always another crisis pounding away,” Card said. He had so much to remember during the course of the day that he depended on a memory technique to keep track of it all—imagining Bush’s day like a kitchen stove, with the most important tasks on the front burner, the rest simmering at the back.

  Card obviously admired Kean—who didn’t like Tom Kean? “I think he’s a pretty straight shooter, and he is smart, and he’s got good political instincts,” Card said. The two men had represented the same liberal-to-moderate wing of the Republican Party—Card had been a state legislator in Massachusetts and, like Kean, had supported abortion and gay rights. Card had learned to suppress those views in the service of the far more conservative George W. Bush.

  But no matter how much he liked Kean, Card understood that putting him in charge of the 9/11 commission was a risk. Henry Kissinger was the safer choice, certainly politically. Card knew that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had regularly, if quietly, sought Kissinger’s advice after 9/11, especially as the nation prepared to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Card knew that Kean had been close to Bush’s father; the elder Bush had courted Kean to join his cabinet. President George Herbert Walker Bush and Kean had much in common. Their bloodlines could not have been bluer, with prep school and Ivy League educations to match. Their fathers had served together in Congress. But Card had no reason to believe that Kean had any special loyalty to the new president. To Kean, President George W. Bush seemed so much more rough-and-tumble than his father.

  After Kissinger’s abrupt resignation as chairman of the 9/11 commission, there was a feeling that a Republican replacement with name recognition—and many fewer conflicts of interest—needed to be found in a hurry. Kissinger’s departure was being portrayed in the headlines as a White House blunder. Card wanted the subject changed fast. “In the White House, you don’t have the luxury of dwelling on yesterday, so we moved on,” Card recalled. That explained why Rove had made the first call to Kean only hours after Kissinger’s decision to quit.

  Kean had been on a short list of candidates for chairman from the beginning of the search, along with Kissinger and former secretary of state James A. Baker, the longtime consigliere to the Bush family. Rove told colleagues in the White House that he thought he had been the first person to propose Kean for the commission—“to my eternal regret,” he said, given Kean’s later
battles with the White House. Card thought he was responsible. “We went through a lot of names of potential Republican figures who would have passed some test of statesmanship, and I honestly believe I was the first one to bring up Kean’s name.”

  Part of Kean’s appeal to the White House was the belief that he would be more sensitive than other candidates to the needs of the executive branch. With his encyclopedic knowledge of American politics, Rove knew that New Jersey’s governor was arguably the most powerful in the country. It was the only statewide elected office in the Garden State. There was no lieutenant governor; New Jersey’s attorney general was appointed by the governor. So maybe, Card thought, Kean would be more understanding than others of the concept of executive privilege and the need for Bush and the White House to keep secrets. “Kean had been an executive,” Card said. “Naively on my part, I thought he would come at this from the perspective of a governor who would be concerned about excessive intrusion.”

  Until it was forced to bow to political realities, the White House had done its best to block the creation of a commission, arguing that the inquiry would distract the government from its mission of preventing new attacks by al-Qaeda. Card had believed that argument wholeheartedly; the commission, he thought, would be a terrible distraction at a time when spy agencies were warning almost daily of the possibility of new attacks.

  But Card knew the White House’s opposition to an independent investigation was more complicated than that. There was a real political fear of an independent commission. Rove began rewriting the strategy for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign literally the day after 9/11. He knew that Bush’s reelection effort centered on his performance on terrorism; almost nothing else would matter to voters. If the commission did anything to undermine Bush’s antiterrorism credentials—worst of all, if it claimed that Bush had somehow bungled intelligence in 2001 that might have prevented the attacks—his reelection might well be sunk.