The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  The bill creating the 9/11 commission was approved in Congress just days after the election, and it seemed a godsend to Cleland and to Democratic leaders in the Senate. Majority Leader Tom Daschle was eager to create a soft landing for his old friend Cleland, a new job that would give him real purpose. The commission was ideal. It meant that Cleland could stay in the public spotlight on the national security issues that were his passion in the Senate.

  Cleland was grateful to Daschle for the assignment, and friends could see a small glimmer of the old optimism as he prepared for his duties on the commission.

  But the optimism evaporated as quickly as it had appeared.

  By the spring of 2003, several of the other 9/11 commissioners had come to believe that the biggest threat to the investigation did not come from the intransigence of the Bush White House or the FBI or the CIA; it did not come from the refusal of the Pentagon and the FAA to hand over its full records from the morning of the attacks. The threat appeared to come from within the commission itself—from Cleland.

  They felt that Cleland was so combative and harshly partisan in the commission’s early private meetings—so angry at the mention of the names of Bush or Rove, so obsessed with what was happening in Iraq—that it threatened any hope of a unanimous final report.

  Former senator Slade Gorton, who was considered second only to Tom Kean among the Republicans in his willingness to cooperate with the Democrats and to incur the wrath of the White House in the process, felt that if Cleland had remained on the investigation, it would have failed. “Max Cleland is an extremely embittered individual, and all he wanted to do was ‘get’ the president,” Gorton said later.

  It had come to the point where commissioners began to hope that Cleland would not show up for the commission’s meetings. “He stirred things up every time he came,” Gorton said. Lee Hamilton had not realized, and was startled by, “the depth of Max’s bitterness about the Senate race—it hit him hard.”

  In the early closed-door meetings in 2003, Kean had struggled to convince the other commissioners that they needed to put aside their partisan differences for the good of the investigation. “We owe nothing to our political parties, and we owe everything to the people who died in New York and Washington,’’ Kean would say.

  Cleland’s presence threatened to make it impossible. He demanded again and again that the commission investigate the Bush administration’s reasoning for invading Iraq in March. He kept revisiting the question even after Kean and Hamilton made clear that they did not consider it part of the commission’s mandate.

  Kean had hoped that, with time, Cleland’s outbursts would stop, or that at least he would tone them down. But the situation grew worse when Cleland decided to go public with his attacks on the president, the White House staff, and eventually the commission itself.

  Cleland understood how alarmed others on the commission were becoming about the harshness of some of his rhetoric on the question of the Bush White House, but he felt he had no choice. He was just so mad. “I was about as hot as I could get,” Cleland acknowledged later.

  Quietly, Kean and the other commissioners began to look for a way to remove Cleland from the commission, fearing that if he remained on the panel, his outbursts would provide the White House with the political cover it needed to withhold any cooperation from the investigation.

  Kean knew that Cleland’s departure would have to be orchestrated with extraordinary delicacy. Cleland had become a hero to many of the 9/11 families early on with his eagerness—apparently not shared by the rest of the commission—to confront the White House.

  Cleland’s departure would mean the loss of the Bush administration’s toughest critic on the investigation. Kean could imagine the headlines if word of Cleland’s departure leaked prematurely or if it was depicted by the family groups as a move by the commission to placate the White House. Warily, Kean picked up the phone to call Tom Daschle and discuss the “concerns about Max.”

  CLELAND INSISTED it was his decision to leave the commission. He said he did not want to participate in anything that might be depicted in history as a whitewash of 9/11. “They didn’t get rid of me,” he said of the commission bitterly. “I got rid of them.”

  He was convinced, he said, that the Bush White House was orchestrating a “cover-up” of its intelligence blunders before 9/11 and that the commission was frightened of taking on a president who was then riding so high in opinion polls. “There was a desire not to uncover bad news, a desire to leave rocks unturned—both in the White House and, to a certain extent, on the leadership of the commission,” he said.

  Cleland said the final straw for him was Kean and Hamilton’s refusal to draw an end to negotiations with the White House over the commission’s access to classified documents, especially the presidential daily briefs. Cleland and other Democrats on the commission were convinced they should have been subpoenaed from the start.

  “When I saw Mr. Hamilton and Governor Kean go hat in hand to the White House, I said, bullfeathers, we shouldn’t be negotiating with anybody,” he said. “When we were denied full access by every member of the commission to all of the presidential daily briefs, I knew this was ultimately going to be a sham.”

  At the urging of Kean and others on the commission, Tom Daschle arranged a new, soft landing for Cleland, this time on the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that helps American businesses sell their products overseas. Two of the five seats on the bipartisan board were set aside for Democrats, and there was a vacancy in the summer of 2003. The appointments were much sought after, since they were full-time jobs that came with a salary of $136,000 a year, plus a full staff and spacious government offices on Lafayette Park, a block from the White House. Daschle submitted Cleland’s name to the White House—the president has final say on the nominations—in July. The White House announced the nomination four months later.

  It was an awkward decision for the White House. It pained administration officials to arrange a new, high-paying government job for someone who was such a venomous critic of the president and his top aides. At the same time, they were eager to see an end to Cleland’s attacks on Bush and his “stonewalling” of the 9/11 commission; he would lose the platform that the commission had offered him.

  At a news conference in Washington in December, Kean was asked about the reasons for Cleland’s departure. A reporter noted that the circumstances of his White House nomination to the Export-Import Bank were “rather suspicious” given Cleland’s public attacks on both the White House and the commission. Why would the White House agree to give the job to Cleland? Why was the commissioner who was most openly critical of President Bush leaving the 9/11 investigation?

  “Anybody who knows Max Cleland would never question his integrity,” Kean replied with what appeared to be anger, responding to an attack on Cleland’s integrity that the reporter really had not made. “He would never take an appointment as a payoff, which you imply, at all. I just resent that on his behalf. Senator Cleland is an American hero, as far as I’m concerned.”

  BECAUSE IT had taken several months to get Cleland nominated and confirmed to the Export-Import Bank, Daschle had much of the autumn to find a replacement. The commission’s final report was due in May 2004, only several months away, and he needed to find a loyal Democrat who did not face a steep learning curve on national security issues.

  He offered the job in December to one of his closest friends, Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska. Three years earlier, Kerrey had startled Senate colleagues with his announcement that he was retiring from Congress. He was leaving Capitol Hill for Manhattan, politics for academia. He had accepted the presidency of the New School, a university based in Greenwich Village that was best known for its respected, if eclectic, group of graduate schools, including the Parsons School of Design, the nation’s best-known fashion school, and the Actors Studio, the famed drama academy.

  Life in New York suited Kerrey. As often h
appens to politicians of a certain charisma and glamour, he seemed to outgrow Washington; the capital was too much of a gray, one-company town. By Washington standards, Kerrey had plenty of star power; he had famously dated the actress Debra Winger before marrying Sarah Paley, a screenwriter and former writer for Saturday Night Live. He had a heroic personal story before joining the Senate, which included combat duty in Vietnam as a navy SEAL; he lost half of his right leg to a land mine in Vietnam and was awarded the Medal of Honor.

  His war record would be tarnished with news reports in early 2001, shortly after he left the Senate, that he led a raid on a Vietnamese village in 1969 in which as many as twenty-one unarmed civilians were massacred, including women and children. Kerrey did not dispute the essential details of the reports, acknowledging he was still haunted by the killings. “I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don’t think it is,” he said. “I think killing for your country can be a lot worse.”

  Kerrey was tempted by Daschle’s offer to replace Cleland. In the Senate, Kerrey’s expertise was in just the sorts of national security issues that were before the 9/11 commission; he had been the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee in the 1990s, when the al-Qaeda threat first emerged. But he did not accept Daschle’s offer immediately; he asked for time to think it over. Kerrey had only recently married and had a two-year-old son—the boy, Henry, was born on September 10, 2001—and he told Daschle that he did not relish the prospect of being away from his new family in Washington for days or weeks at a time.

  Finally, Daschle won him over. Daschle’s aides knew that the commission offered Kerrey a chance to reintroduce himself to the public in a setting that would show Bob Kerrey at his best—smart, subversively funny, iconoclastic—and might dull the memory of the ugly stories about the 1969 massacre.

  After accepting the job, Kerrey called his wife to tell her that he would need to cancel the couple’s plans for a two-week Christmas vacation to Italy; he would spend it instead commuting to Washington to read up on the commission’s work. He met Philip Zelikow in the offices on K Street, was given a desk, and got to work, grabbing the first of dozens of files of classified summaries of the commission’s investigation to date.

  On that first day, Kerrey came across a document that would almost end his work on the commission before it began. It was a written statement prepared by Zelikow for the commission’s files about his ties to Condoleezza Rice and his work on the White House transition team in 2001 in reviewing Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism operation.

  Kerrey could not believe what he was reading—“just could not believe it.” He had not known any of this. Zelikow’s friendship with Condoleezza Rice was bad enough, but was it really possible that Zelikow had been an architect of Clarke’s demotion only months before 9/11? Kerrey thought Zelikow’s 2002 “preemptive war” strategy paper amounted to the “gene code” for Bush’s Iraq policy. Kerrey wondered how Kean and Hamilton could have agreed to put someone with such an obvious conflict of interest in charge of the investigation.

  He had a lunch scheduled the next day with Kean, and he confronted him about Zelikow.

  “Look, Tom, either he goes or I go,” Kerrey declared. “I don’t know what you were thinking about putting him on the investigation. But you can’t expect me to stay.”

  Kean tried to talk Kerrey out of any rash decisions. He explained that Zelikow’s conflicts of interest had been a concern to the commission from the start and that Kean and Hamilton had kept a close eye on Zelikow for any action that hinted of partisanship. So far, he said, there was no evidence of it.

  Kerrey was not convinced. He still held out the possibility that he would resign from the commission, but he agreed to continue the conversation with Kean. For Kean, it was hard to see which would be worse, the loss of Zelikow so late in the investigation or the angry resignation of a newly arrived commissioner because of Zelikow’s conflicts of interest.

  Kean agreed to meet up with Kerrey on an Amtrak train heading to Washington for the commission’s next meeting, and the men talked for much of the trip. Kerrey learned what a generation of New Jersey politicians already knew—that Tom Kean was a grand master in the art of persuasion. Whatever his suspicions about Zelikow, Kerrey agreed to stay.

  Kerrey’s appointment to the commission was not considered good news throughout the Democratic Party, certainly not among officials of the former Clinton administration. Daschle had picked Kerrey over the opposition of other Democrats who knew that Kerrey’s reputation in the Senate was that of a contrarian.

  During Clinton’s White House years, Kerrey had seemed to revel in attacking the administration. Certainly, Kerrey had never hidden his dislike of Bill Clinton. When both men were running for the 1992 presidential campaign, Kerrey had publicly described Clinton as an “unusually good liar,” an insult that had lived on in virtually every political biography written about Clinton.

  As he was about to prove on the 9/11 commission, Kerrey believed that Bill Clinton deserved just as much scrutiny as George Bush for the government’s failures before 9/11 to deal with Osama bin Laden. Bush had eight months to worry about bin Laden before he attacked on American soil; Clinton had eight years. Democrats other than Daschle worried that they had just replaced the commission’s fiercest critic of George Bush with a man who would prove equally critical of Bush’s Democratic predecessor.

  25

  HOME OF LORIE VAN AUKEN

  East Brunswick, N.J.

  OCTOBER 3, 2003

  The leaders of the Family Steering Committee could not put up with it—with him—anymore. By fall, the committee, which included the Jersey Girls and was the most aggressive of the 9/11 family groups, was convinced that Philip Zelikow had to go. It was not just his connections with Condoleezza Rice and his friendships with so many others in the Bush administration; the basic information about his conflicts of interest had been known for months. It was his arrogance in his meetings with the families. His haughtiness. His secretiveness.

  The families had a justifiable sense of entitlement about the 9/11 commission. It was their commission, this was their investigation. The families knew for a fact, and no one disputed it, that the commission would never have been created without them. It was their daylong vigils on Capitol Hill and in front of the White House in 2002, their buttonholing of lawmakers in the House and Senate parking lots, and those endless rounds of television and radio interviews that had shamed the White House and Congress into agreeing to an independent investigation of why their loved ones had been murdered.

  So why was Zelikow, of all people, running this investigation? With each new disclosure about his relationships in the Bush White House, why did Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton choose to stand by him? To many of the families, it was clear that Zelikow was overseeing an investigation that would be—or at least should be—targeting people who were among his best friends and patrons. Rice in particular.

  The Jersey Girls were fixated on Rice; they believed she was at the center of all that had gone wrong in the White House in the spring and summer of 2001 in its failure to respond to warnings that al-Qaeda was about to strike. Among themselves, the Jersey Girls had taken to referring to Condoleezza Rice as “Kinda-Lies-a-Lot” Rice.

  When challenged rudely by the families, Zelikow would be rude right back, which only fed the families’ anger. Kean and most of the other commissioners were smarter than that. Kean was known for agreeing to painfully long private meetings with the Jersey Girls and other 9/11 families and letting them vent their anger, sometimes for hours, about the perceived failings of the investigation. He said he thought it was their right to yell at him.

  “I’d be yelling at somebody, too, if I had gone through what they had gone through,” he said. “I always had a feeling that, rational or irrational, they deserved to be heard.”

  A reporter from the Newark Star-Ledger was sitting outside Kean’s office at Drew University, waiting for an app
ointment, when he overheard the Jersey Girls laying into Kean from behind the closed door. The reporter was so astounded by the attacks that he reported them on the front page of the paper the next day. The story bore the headline KEAN FEELS THE WRATH OF IRATE 9/11 FAMILIES. It reported that the meeting was “punctuated by shouts and table-pounding.”

  Zelikow was apparently able to put aside any sympathy he might have had for the families. He would shout back. He stormed out of a meeting with the families held at a downtown Starbucks in Washington—the families were not allowed into the commission’s offices because they did not have security clearances, which only added to their fury—after Kristen Breitweiser, one of the Jersey Girls, challenged him again about his conflicts of interest with Rice and others.

  “That’s right, Kristen,” he said sarcastically, his face growing bright red with anger as he stood up to march out the door of the coffee shop. “Everything is connected. The hip bone is connected to the thigh bone is connected to the knee bone is connected to the ankle bone. It is all connected.” He said later that many of the 9/11 family advocates had gone beyond grief to “a further level of anger, which in some cases had hardened into deep bitterness and mistrust.”

  By October, the committee felt it had cataloged enough evidence of Zelikow’s conflicts to go public and call for his ouster.

  In a letter to Kean and Hamilton on October 3, 2003, they said the commission had only two options—force Zelikow’s resignation or demand that he recuse himself from any part of the investigation involving the National Security Council; the second option would have effectively ended Zelikow’s involvement in the parts of the investigation that were most important to him.