Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

But bombarding the commander in chief and his number two with endless reports of possible mayhem and tragedy naturally influenced the approach they took to defending the country.

“There was a pervasive feeling that 9/11 itself was not the end of the story,” remembered John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director.

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“The threat going forward wasn’t just another 9/11-style attack,” he observed later. “It was, and remains, the possibility that the next one could be far deadlier and more devastating than anything we have ever seen.”

“I never got the sense that Cheney was dragging Bush to the right on these issues,” said Berenson. “To me, they always appeared very unified in a two-man scull rowing hard in the same direction.”

Senator John Warner of Virginia, the silver-haired patrician Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee who looked as if he came straight from central casting, pulled Stephen Hadley aside. “You sure better find these stocks of WMD,” he said, “or there is going to be hell to pay.”

There was blame enough to go around: A president who arrived in office ready to complete what his father left unfinished. A vice president so convinced of the dangers from Baghdad that he pressed for intelligence to back up his conclusions. A CIA that often overlooked dissenting voices to produce what it thought the nation’s leadership wanted. A Democratic opposition cowed by the political winds and too willing to believe the same ultimately flawed evidence. Allied intelligence agencies like the British, Germans, and Italians that passed along thinly supported assertions,

fraudulent documents, and wholesale fabrications without fully sharing their sources. An Iraqi dictator who never came clean on the assumption that America would never follow through on its threat. And a news media that got caught up in the post–September 11 moment, trusted official sources too much, and gave prominence to indications of weapons while downplaying doubts.

In picking Rice, Gonzales, and Spellings, Bush was effectively stocking the cabinet with three of his closest advisers, taking firmer hold over the reins of government for the second term.

As for any moral quandaries, the only one Cheney saw was the responsibility to prevent future attacks; everything else took a backseat.

The unnecessary controversies combined with the devastating misjudgments in Iraq ended up detracting from what otherwise might have been a solid record for the forty-third president.

Perhaps most important, while any number of factors were at work, he and his vice president could reasonably claim to have protected the country following September 11.

did not fully understand what it was setting in motion. “The first grave mistake of Bush’s presidency was rushing toward military confrontation with Iraq,” observed Scott McClellan. “It took his presidency off course and greatly

damaged his standing with the public. His second grave mistake was his virtual blindness about the first mistake.”

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter, Iraq and the financial crash summed up the Bush presidency. Other than his response to September 11, Bush’s two greatest moments in office were arguably his responses to those two crises, ignoring political peril and discarding ideology to do what was necessary to turn things around. Sending more troops to a losing war and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out irresponsible banks had to be two of the boldest and most politically unpopular decisions by any president in modern times. And in both cases, they proved to be critical to the country.