The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  6

  OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF

  The White House

  DECEMBER 2002

  Only a dozen years earlier, Tom Kean’s friends and political strategists would have predicted that he would march into the White House someday as the man who lived there.

  Kean was one of the GOP’s golden boys in the late 1980s, a hugely popular Republican governor in a state that normally leaned to the Democrats. New Jersey’s economy boomed under Kean, and he made measurable progress in improving the schools and the environment. He brought African-Americans and union workers into the Republican Party, winning 60 percent of the black vote and the support of two-thirds of union households in his landslide victory for a second term in 1985. Kean appointed more blacks to state jobs than all of his predecessors combined. Another part of his legacy was harder to measure but might have been just as important: Under Kean, New Jersey had stopped being the butt of every late night comedian’s jokes.

  The elder George Bush had encouraged Kean to think beyond New Jersey, inviting him to make the keynote address at the 1988 Republican convention in New Orleans. Just before the convention, Kean published his memoirs, The Politics of Inclusion, and it was the work of a man who was clearly thinking about a run for national office; his political handlers made sure every convention delegate got a copy.

  But that seemed a lifetime ago, certainly a political lifetime ago, as Kean passed through the White House security gates in December 2002 and headed into the West Wing in his new role as chairman of the 9/11 commission.

  A new, much more conservative George Bush was president, and his Republican Party had little room for moderates like Kean.

  Kean had come to the White House now as a visitor, and a wary one at that. He had traveled to Washington at Andy Card’s invitation, there to meet with Card and Bush’s other top aides to discuss Kean’s plans for the commission.

  Kean had no idea what reception he would face. He was beginning to understand just how fiercely the White House had opposed the investigation that Kean was now being asked to lead. He was keenly aware of the fact that he was Bush’s second choice as chairman. “The substitute,” he called himself.

  Kean had certainly heard all about the “message discipline” of the White House of George W. Bush. The president had surrounded himself with a small circle of aides—Card, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, press secretary Ari Fleischer, communications director Karen Hughes—who demonstrated unquestioned loyalty to Bush and his family.

  This White House seemed unwilling to tolerate public dissent, so it was almost never heard, even if Kean thought it left Bush’s aides sounding robotic and unthinking in their public appearances. After he came to know them better, Kean would later refer to Bush’s White House aides as “the control freaks.”

  When Kean made that first visit in December 2002, Washington was in a war fever. Bush seemed intent on invading Iraq; it was being described as the next logical chapter in the war on terrorism that began on September 11. Given the administration’s repeated claims of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, maybe even between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, Kean wondered how a war in Iraq might affect his investigation.

  Rice and the others were being fanned out to the morning television shows almost every day by the end of 2002, mouthing literally the same words, the same script, to defend an attack on Iraq. How many times had he heard the line from Rice and others about how the “smoking gun” of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program might be “a mushroom cloud”?

  Kean hoped that things would be different with Card—more straightforward, certainly less scripted behind closed doors. He knew that Card’s connection was more to the elder Bush than to the incumbent president. Card was not part of the “Texas mafia” that had come to Washington with Bush from Austin—Card had spent his years out of power as a Washington lobbyist for General Motors and other carmakers—so Kean hoped that meant Card might be more forthcoming.

  But as he moved from office to office in the West Wing that day to introduce or sometimes reintroduce himself, Kean began to realize that the “message discipline” extended even to this sort of courtesy call from a fellow Republican.

  Clearly Card, Rice, and the others had been given talking points before they met with Kean—were they reading from the same three-by-five card? Just as they stuck to a script with the cantankerous White House press corps, Kean realized they were going to stick to a script with him in talking about the 9/11 commission. Bush’s aides were trying to deliver a political message to Kean, although he would not fully understand it until later.

  When he sat in one of their offices, it was only a few minutes before Kean began to hear the same phrases—almost word for word—from Card, Rice, and the others in describing their hopes for Kean’s leadership of the commission:

  “We want you to stand up. You’ve got to stand up.”

  “You’ve got to have courage.”

  “We don’t want a runaway commission.”

  They did not really explain what they meant by any of it—stand up to whom? courage about what?—and Kean found himself baffled by what he was hearing in the White House meetings. Was this some sort of code? Was he supposed to ask for the context? What did they mean by “runaway” commission?

  “I don’t want a runaway commission, either,” he told them, chuckling nervously when he heard them use the phrase over and over.

  As he left the West Wing that afternoon and passed back through the security gates, Kean decided to hope for the best. He wanted to assume that he was being told by the White House to “stand up” for the truth and to show “courage” in following the trail of evidence about 9/11, wherever it might lead.

  Kean would realize later how naive he had been. After months of tense negotiations with the White House as it tried to block the commission’s access to secret documents and interviews, he would think back to those first meetings at the White House in 2002. He realized that he was not being told by the White House to stand up for what was right.

  “I decided that as the process went on, that’s not what they meant at all,” Kean said in an interview much later, an uncharacteristic trace of anger and cynicism in his voice.

  When Bush’s aides told him to “stand up,” what they meant was that Kean and the commission needed to “stand up for the president,” not necessarily for the truth. The truth was secondary. “You’ve got to stand up for the president, and you’ve got to protect him in the process. That’s what they meant.” It appeared that a “runaway commission” was one that issued a final report concluding that Bush and his White House bore some responsibility for 9/11. “That was their nightmare,” Kean said later. “I think they never lost that fear.”

  During that first day of White House meetings, Card and the others also told Kean that they wanted to be “helpful” to him in assembling a staff, especially in the selection of an executive director to run the investigation. They had a couple of candidates for him to consider, including a retired general and a former State Department official.

  Kean took down the names and agreed to consider the White House candidates. He was not just being polite; the names were not those of obvious political hacks, at least none that he knew. Maybe these were talented people, he thought. Maybe there was nothing wrong with the White House recommending candidates for the job.

  Kean certainly agreed with Card and the others that the choice of executive director was important. It might be the most important decision Kean and Hamilton would make.

  It is a polite fiction in Washington that the reports of blue-ribbon federal commissions are written by the commissioners themselves. In truth, most of the reports are written by a professional staff led by a full-time staff director. On the 9/11 commission, that title was executive director. All ten members of the commission had separate jobs and were volunteering their time to the investigation. Four of them, including Kean, lived far from Washington. Although Kean expected to keep
a close watch on the commission, it would be mostly from a distance; he intended to continue to spend most of his time at home in New Jersey. It would be left to the executive director to manage the staff and set a direction for the investigation.

  Many members of the commission’s staff would later assume that the man selected as the commission’s executive director—Philip D. Zelikow, a forty-eight-year-old historian and political scientist at the University of Virginia—had been on that White House list of candidates. That was not true.

  Over time, Zelikow would be seen by many of the commission’s investigators, as well as by many of the 9/11 families, as a White House mole. They believed he had been put there to make sure that George Bush and especially Zelikow’s close friend Condoleezza Rice were protected from too much scrutiny, particularly over the seeming failure of the White House to act on dire terrorist threats in the months before September 11. But if that was Zelikow’s role on the commission, it was not because the White House had gotten him the job and asked in advance for his help. It appeared instead to be a role that the aloof academic had assigned himself.

  7

  CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.

  DECEMBER 2002

  At the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Philip Zelikow was sulking, or so many of his colleagues thought in late 2002. Two years earlier, they would have guessed that he was a short-timer at Virginia. Zelikow seemed bound for Washington and great things in George W. Bush’s White House. During the 2000 campaign, Zelikow made sure that others at Virginia knew of his close friendship with “Condi” Rice, who had emerged during the campaign as Bush’s closest adviser on foreign policy. She was the president’s tutor, really, since Bush had no experience in international affairs. Zelikow let people know he was on a first-name basis with many others who would take top jobs in the White House, including “Andy” Card.

  Zelikow and Rice had known each other since the 1980s, when they were colleagues on the National Security Council in the presidency of Bush’s father. Then, as always, the NSC was a heady place to work, a sort of rival State Department, Pentagon, and CIA all in one, in which even a junior White House staffer had the chance to shape national security policy. Zelikow left the NSC in 1991 to teach at Harvard, where he was a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, and then moved seven years later to Virginia to run the university’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. The center is best known in academic circles for its authorized White House oral histories—collections of taped interviews from former presidents and their top aides, conducted shortly after leaving office.

  After the White House, Rice returned to Stanford, where she had taught before the NSC. But she and Zelikow stayed in touch and published a book together in 1995 about Germany’s reunification. Rice readily acknowledged that Zelikow had written the bulk of the book, and he was pleased to share credit with such an obvious up-and-comer as Rice. Zelikow was an elegant writer. His talent was evident on almost every page.

  After the younger George Bush was declared president in the 2000 election, Rice was named national security adviser, and she in turn placed Zelikow on her transition team for the NSC. His work on the transition was not widely known outside the White House. That was no surprise. At a time when Washington was awaiting the arrival of a new president, few people paid attention to the names of middle-ranking members of the White House transition team, especially not in 2001, when the transition was brutally cut short because of the Florida recount debacle.

  Zelikow was a Texan, raised in Houston, which was a useful thing in Bush’s Washington, although it seemed hard for many people to believe that the tweedy historian hailed from the flatlands of central Texas. Zelikow could dress like an Oxford don; he seemed to have a closetful of tweed jackets. With his references to his “good years” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he seemed to suggest that he had spent his undergraduate years along the pathways of Harvard Yard.

  In fact, Zelikow had gotten his undergraduate degree at the University of Redlands, a small college not far from Los Angeles, where he had transferred in his senior year from the University of Houston. He had gone to both schools because of their nationally ranked debate teams. Zelikow was one of the country’s best college debaters. His debate partner from Redlands, Mark Fabiani, went on to become a central political strategist—and scandal manager—for Bill Clinton’s White House. The Zelikow-Fabiani team placed 16th at the national collegiate debate finals in 1976; among individual debaters, Zelikow came in 10th. The skills of a first-rate debater—the ability to argue any point of view on short notice and to crush an opponent’s argument, no matter how valid it might be—served both men well in their careers in Washington.

  Zelikow knew how to flatter people who might get him somewhere; that seemed to NSC colleagues to explain his close friendship with Rice. But he made many more adversaries with his outsize ego and fierce temper; his anger was a thing to behold, his face growing bright red, his well-chosen insults flying in every direction.

  For someone who specialized in diplomatic history, Zelikow could be remarkably undiplomatic, most disastrously in 1992, when he was teaching at Harvard and attended a United Nations disarmament conference in Hiroshima, Japan. He declared at the conference that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II had, in a sense, done Japan a service by shortening the war and saving perhaps a million other Japanese lives. Zelikow seemed oblivious to the fact that any attempt to justify the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would draw a fierce protest in Japan, and his statement led about fifty pacifists, including scarred survivors of the atomic bombs, to stage a sit-in protest. The protests—and Zelikow’s remarks—drew news coverage around the world.

  He attracted new, unwelcome headlines in 2000 with the disclosure of large numbers of errors in the transcripts of White House recordings that he had prepared for use in his otherwise well-reviewed book The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, written with Harvard historian Ernest May. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly, a former historian at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Sheldon Stern, identified mistakes and omissions throughout the transcripts prepared by Zelikow and May. There were dozens in just the first twenty pages of The Kennedy Tapes, he said. Many of the errors were significant, changing the meaning of what was said during the nuclear showdown. (Two small but telling examples: The book had Attorney General Robert Kennedy referring to plans for the “invasion” of Russian ships heading to Cuba, when in fact he actually spoke of a much less confrontational “examination”; the flawed transcription suggested just the sort of showdown the Kennedy White House was trying to prevent. Zelikow and May also had CIA director John McCone referring to the need to call on former president Dwight Eisenhower as a “facilitator” in the crisis, when in fact McCone said “soldier.”) Zelikow and May made major revisions in the book in later editions but said in a letter to the Atlantic that complaints from Stern had left them “bemused” and that “none of these amendments are very important.” Stern said that he found Zelikow’s dismissive response “shocking” and added, “When the words are wrong, as they are repeatedly, the historical record is wrong.”

  After Bush’s victory in 2000, Zelikow thought he was in line for the job of Rice’s deputy at the NSC, or so he led friends to believe, but the offer did not come. The job of deputy national security adviser went instead to Stephen Hadley, a Washington lawyer who was close to the new deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.

  Zelikow might have thought he was on the short list of any number of other important foreign policy jobs in the new Bush administration, but he was not offered those posts, either. Many people in the new Bush administration admired Zelikow’s intelligence—“brilliant” was one of the adjectives often used to describe him—but found him impossible to work with. Andy Card had dealt with Zelikow at the Miller Center and bristled at his treatment by the “bully” historian.

  So after he finished his duties on the tran
sition team, Zelikow headed back to Charlottesville and the Miller Center. He stayed in touch with people at the White House he considered friends, including Rice. White House officials said he lobbied Rove for a commitment to designate the Miller Center as the official repository of the new administration’s oral history.

  If Zelikow did not get the job he wanted in the Bush administration, he was still handed an extraordinary assignment by the White House in the months after the 9/11 attacks. At Rice’s urging, Zelikow was the principal—if initially secret—author of a national security strategy paper that would turn American military doctrine on its head and justify a “preemptive war” against an enemy that posed no immediate threat to the United States. It was being written with Iraq in mind; the administration needed a scholarly document it could point to in justifying the imminent invasion. When the existence of the new strategy paper became known late in 2002, it produced an uproar, which might explain why Zelikow made little effort at the time to publicize the fact that he had written it. That would become widely known only later. (For his part, Zelikow has insisted he had no idea that his paper, which was mostly written by the spring of 2002, might be used at the White House in justifying the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. “The subject of Iraq did not arise in the development of this document,” he said later.)