Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

Once when a classmate believed to be gay walked by, someone made a mean remark. As Lanny Davis, later a prominent Democratic lawyer, recalled it, Bush told the wisecracker to knock it off. “Why don’t you try walking in his shoes and seeing how it feels?”

But however reasoned or flawed its findings may have been, the Supreme Court did not elect Bush and Cheney; it stopped a recount process that would not have changed the outcome. Two extensive recounts conducted later by media organizations showed that Bush and Cheney would still have won even if the hand recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court or the more limited recount in four Democratic counties sought by Gore had gone forward.

Richard Clarke in the Situation Room kept calling back asking for Major Mike Fenzel. The person answering the phone just grunted and passed the phone. “Who is the asshole answering the phone for you, Mike?” Clarke asked. “That would be the vice president, Dick,” Fenzel said.

the experience of September 11 changed the dynamics. Even if Iraq did not have a relationship with al-Qaeda, as Cheney suspected, Hussein now looked more dangerous in a world where the United States could no longer afford to let threats fester. If Hussein once seemed manageable in the box Washington had constructed for him, it no longer seemed reasonable to Bush or Cheney to leave in power an openly hostile enemy of the United States who might have chemical, biological, or even possibly nuclear weapons that he could use himself or potentially pass along to terrorists. In years to come, that calculation would look different, but at that moment it seemed logical. Bush gave Rumsfeld his marching orders.

Bush listened as Powell ran through the points from his notepad: the consequences of an invasion, the cost to international unity, the possibility of oil price spikes, the potential destabilization of Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region. It would suck all the oxygen out of Bush’s term. And most important, it would mean Bush would effectively be responsible for a shattered country, for twenty-five million people and all their hopes and aspirations. “If you break it, you are going to own it,” Powell told Bush. “It isn’t getting to Baghdad. It is what happens after you get to Baghdad. And it ain’t going to be easy.”

But other Democrats were upset. Senator Tom Daschle recognized that the timeline would mean Congress would be debating war right before the election. Remembering Karl Rove’s comments on taking the war to voters, Daschle suspected political motivations.

Powell maintained that a resolution was needed to show the world that the United States was willing to do everything possible before turning to force. Then if war did come, Powell said, they would be in a stronger position to build a broad coalition.

Cheney grew grim and laid out the worst-case scenario. “Dick, how would you feel if you voted no on this and the Iraqis brought in a bomb and blew up half the people of San Francisco?” Armey was suitably scared but still dubious. “You’re going to get mired down there,” he predicted. No, Cheney said. “It’ll be like the American troops going through Paris.” In the end, Armey felt he had no choice but to go along. It was a fateful decision. Had the Republican majority leader opposed the authorization of force, it would have freed other nervous Republicans and given cover to Democrats to oppose it as well. Cheney had accomplished his mission. But it would ultimately destroy his relationship with Armey, who came to feel betrayed. “I deserved better than to have been bullshitted by Dick Cheney,” he said years later. “I can’t definitively say that Cheney purposely lied to me, but if you demonstrated it to me, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Powell had developed a theory about Cheney and what made things so different this time around. While some believed the vice president had changed, Powell did not think so. In Cheney’s past jobs, under Gerald Ford or George H. W. Bush, he was contained. He was too young and inexperienced to impose his will on the Ford White House, and in the first Bush White House he was serving a president who was very sure of himself on foreign policy and national security. As defense secretary, Cheney had often expressed ideas similar to those he would advance as vice president. But back then, he was surrounded by other adults in the room with experience and gravitas—Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Powell himself, and of course the president. In this White House, Powell believed, Cheney was not effectively contained by anyone. He had a much freer hand with a president whose background gave him little real preparation to be commander in chief. Powell thought Cheney saw himself as Tom Hagen, the mentor-tutor of the Godfather movies, the consigliere advising a young mob leader.

ANOTHER MAJOR INITIATIVE was shaping up around the same time. Since taking office, Bush had developed an interest in fighting AIDS in Africa. He had agreed to contribute to an international fund battling the disease and later started a program aimed at providing drugs to HIV-infected pregnant women to reduce the chances of transmitting the virus to their babies. But it had only whetted his appetite to do more. “When we did it, it revealed how unbelievably pathetic the U.S. effort was,” Michael Gerson said.

The development of low-cost drugs meant for the first time the world could get a grip on the disease and stop it from being a death sentence for millions of people. “They need the money now,” Fauci said. “They don’t need a vaccine ten years from now.”

Bush thought so too. So while he mostly wrestled with the coming war, he quietly set in motion one of the most expansive lifesaving programs ever attempted. Somewhere deep inside, the notion of helping the hopeless appealed to a former drinker’s sense of redemption, the belief that nobody was beyond saving.

Liberation, however, proved to be messier than anyone had hoped. Cheney and Makiya were right when they said that Americans would be welcomed as liberators by Iraqis. They were, at first. Long-suffering Iraqis were jubilant at Hussein’s fall. The stories of torture that spilled out in those days after the statue fell made up a Stalinesque tapestry of cruelty. Where Cheney and Makiya got it wrong was presuming the welcome would last or that the joy over Hussein’s overthrow necessarily translated into enduring amity for the overthrowers. Iraqis had endured a dozen years of international sanctions that Hussein had blamed for widespread malnutrition, disease, and every economic malady. They had been told that a rash of cancers was the result of depleted uranium in American bombs left over from the Gulf War or used to enforce the no-fly zone. Shiites and Kurds were still resentful that after freeing Kuwait, the Americans did nothing to help as Hussein brutally crushed their uprising in 1991. And there was deep-seated suspicion that the Americans had come back not to help them but to take their oil. It did not help that American troops sat by and did little to keep order amid the chaotic scenes following the collapse of the Hussein regime as looters ransacked government buildings. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld glibly said. But forces were being set loose that would take years to control.

Kay explained that the intelligence was wrong because the Iraqis acted like they had weapons. “Why would Saddam do something like this?” Bush asked. Because, encouraged by the French and Russians, he never thought the United States would actually invade, Kay said. Hussein, he added, was more afraid of the Shiites and Kurds he had kept in line with his mythological weapons, not to mention a coup from within his own power structure, and he feared losing stature in the Arab world.

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.

“There is a strong sense that Bush provides security and makes people feel safe,” aides wrote about Cleveland focus groups conducted in February. “Subtle images of 9/11 get the message across very effectively.” Mark McKinnon, after a technical meltdown with his laptop, played five proposed television ads, including one with images of September 11. If Americans remembered how afraid they were after the attacks, they would side with Bush; if they focused on how astray the Iraq War seemed to be going, he could lose.

Bush, who had privately deplored gay bashing and welcomed his transgendered college classmate to the White House, read the statement in a flat tone that suggested his heart was not in it. He was a traditionalist, he did not think courts should be deciding such questions, and he was told it was good politics, but he also knew he was playing to the sorts of antipathies he had resisted in the past.

Comey said the program’s importance did not change the legal issues. “The analysis is flawed, in fact facially flawed,” he said. “No lawyer reading that could reasonably rely on it.” “Well, I’m a lawyer and I did,” Addington interrupted. “No good lawyer,” Comey said.

Bush did not understand just how far the conflict over the program had gone until later that morning when Card told him Comey and as many as a dozen officials planned to quit because the president had reauthorized it. “I was stunned,” Bush said later, asserting that he did not even realize that Ashcroft had transferred his powers to Comey. When Comey showed up for a routine meeting that morning, Bush asked him to stick around afterward. “I just don’t understand why you are raising this at the last minute,” Bush said. Comey was shocked and realized Bush had been kept in the dark. “Mr. President,” he said, “your staff has known about this for weeks.” Only then did Bush learn that Mueller also planned to resign. Flashing through his mind were visions of Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” when the attorney general and the deputy attorney general both resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. “I was about to witness the largest mass resignation in modern presidential history, and we were in the middle of a war,” Bush concluded. One Justice Department official predicted, with only a bit of hyperbole, that if the top law enforcement officials all walked out, the president would have to resign within seventy-two hours or risk impeachment.

The Fallujah episode underscored the uncertain way Bush was managing the war from Washington. One minute he wanted to be tough; the next he was convinced the whole enterprise would unravel. His instinct was to defer to the people on the ground, but when the people on the ground disagreed among themselves, he was reluctant to mediate or insert himself. In his head were images of Lyndon Johnson picking out bombing targets during the Vietnam War, an object lesson, he felt, in what presidents should not do. “You fight the war, and I’ll provide you with political cover,” he told the generals more than once. But in this instance, his equivocation had a cost. Conway concluded, “We certainly increased the level of animosity that existed.” Along with stirring the Sadr hornet’s nest without capturing him, the Fallujah debacle led Sanchez to call those days in March and April “a strategic disaster for America’s mission in Iraq.” Taken together, he said, “our actions had undeniably ignited a civil war in Iraq.”

ON THE MORNING of April 29, Bush and Cheney welcomed ten members of a bipartisan commission investigating September 11 into the White House. It was a bright, sunny day, with light beaming through the windows of the Oval Office as the president and the vice president greeted their visitor-inquisitors. Bush was friendly and warm, Cheney quiet and stoic. The White House, and especially Cheney, had long viewed the inquiry with suspicion, sure that it would turn into an exercise in finger-pointing that could only be damaging in an election year. Richard Clarke had used his appearance before the commission to accuse Bush and his team of not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough and to dramatically apologize to relatives of the victims of September 11. The White House resisted turning over sensitive intelligence documents or letting aides to the president testify. But eventually the resistance began to look like stonewalling, and the White House agreed to send Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly and to let the commission interview Bush and Cheney—as long as they appeared together and no transcript or recording was made. The insistence that the two do the interview jointly set tongues wagging about a president who needed to lean on his vice president, feeding into a public perception that it was Cheney who was really in charge, not just in ordering that hijacked planes be shot down on September 11, but in every phase of the war on terror that followed. “My immediate sus...

At 10:00 a.m. on May 5, Bush met with Rumsfeld, who handed him a handwritten letter. “Read this,” the secretary said. Mr. President, I want you to know that you have my resignation as Secretary of Defense anytime you feel it would be helpful to you. Don Rumsfeld Rumsfeld told the president that there had to be accountability and the furor would just grow until there was a sense that the government had taken it seriously. Bush agreed. “Don, someone’s head has to roll on this one,” he said. Well, Rumsfeld responded, you have my resignation. The meeting broke up without a decision. Rumsfeld’s letter was not precisely a letter of resignation; it was an offer to resign if the president wanted him to. Generously, it could be read as an honorable act taking responsibility; more cynically, it could be seen as forcing Bush either to support him or cut him loose. Bush saw it as the latter. “Pretty smooth move by the crusty old guy,” Bush told Dan Bartlett. “He called my hand.”

LIFE ON THE ROAD took on a familiar rhythm and drew Bush closer to his aides. After a rally in Taylor, Michigan, on August 30, Bush heard that his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin, had lost his mother. Hagin had not told the president or even dropped off the campaign swing. Bush went to Hagin’s hotel room and found him on the phone with his brother. Hagin’s back was turned, so Bush just sat down on the bed and waited. Only after five minutes or so had passed did Hagin hang up and realize who was there. Bush spent an hour consoling Hagin, an eternity in the life of a president.

Cheney might not have grasped that removing a rival would elevate an even more powerful one. To replace Powell, Bush settled on Rice. Unlike Powell, Rice, as everyone knew, had the president’s ear, and she would have the opportunity to transform State into a vehicle for Bush’s policies instead of an outpost of resistance. In joining the cabinet, she would finally be freed from the facilitator role she played as national security adviser, making her more of a peer of the vice president than simply a staff person. If he had any qualms, Cheney knew better than to express them. Bush was announcing his decision, not asking him about it. “He had thought about it, and this is the way he wanted to go,” Cheney recalled.

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.

After another weekend mulling options, Bush announced Powell’s resignation on Monday, November 15, in a written statement along with those of the secretaries of energy, education, and agriculture and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Powell was treated as just one more replaceable cabinet member. Bush made no public appearance to discuss Powell’s departure, instead dispensing his secretary of state with three paragraphs that praised him as “one of the great public servants of our time.” The next day, Bush did appear before cameras in the Roosevelt Room to announce Rice’s nomination and the elevation of her deputy, Stephen Hadley, to replace her as national security adviser. Powell was not present. Neither was Cheney.

Bush had kept his decision to put Kerik in the cabinet secret, instructing Alberto Gonzales to vet him personally. It did not take much to uncover a trove of disturbing details about Kerik—various ethical scrapes, a civil lawsuit, a bankruptcy, a get-rich-quick board appointment to a stun-gun firm seeking business with homeland security agencies, not to mention criticism of his management while in Iraq. Most damning of all, the best man at his wedding worked for a New Jersey construction company with alleged Mafia ties that was seeking a big New York City contract and had provided Kerik with gifts, including $165,000 in apartment renovations. Gonzales, facing his own confirmation process for attorney general, grilled Kerik for hours. But in the end, Bush liked Kerik and brushed aside concerns.

But then as she was leaving his office, she felt a pang of discomfort at stiff-arming the president of the United States, so she said she would consult her National Guard adjutant general. “I’ll talk to him again and I’ll let you know before twenty-four hours are out,” she said. From her point of view, she was just being courteous, not wanting to completely slam the door in the president’s face. From Bush’s vantage point, though, she sounded more forward leaning than she later remembered it, on the edge of agreeing but dawdling before making a decision at a moment when someone needed to be decisive. If anyone was playing politics, Bush’s aides thought it was the governor and her team.

“As all of us saw on television,” Bush said, “there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.” But with so much else on his plate, that sort of broader action never took place. Bush and his wife would eventually make dozens of trips to the region, and he ultimately steered $126 billion in federal funds for response and recovery, a historic commitment by some measures equivalent to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II. But Katrina would remain etched on his record as a failure of leadership, and at times he was bitter. “Can you believe they’re blaming me for this?” he once told Kofi Annan in a private conversation.

For the president and the vice president, the week was already one of the worst of their time in office. The flameout of Miers’s candidacy was a shattering blow to Bush and a reminder that Cheney’s advice had been disregarded. Now the prospect of a trial of the vice president’s chief of staff was devastating. It would go to the heart of the most dangerous political question confronting the administration, namely its veracity in selling the country on war. The Libby case had fueled the suspicion that the White House had deliberately deceived the country; “Bush Lied, People Died” was the favorite bumper sticker of the Left.

With Miers shot down and Libby under indictment, Bush retreated to Camp David to talk about what came next. The first task was to find another Supreme Court justice, and at this point Bush wanted no more fuss. To everyone’s amazement, Miers resumed her role as counsel, throwing herself into the search for someone to take her place as if nothing had happened. “Her stock went out of the roof internally the week after that, just the way she conducted herself,” Bartlett remembered.

THE WHITE HOUSE was pushing through another important appointment at the same time, one not as visible but arguably more important to the rest of their time in office. After eighteen years as the nation’s sometimes inscrutable chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was stepping down. During his long tenure, Greenspan had tamed inflation, coolly managed crises, and presided over a period of significant economic growth with low unemployment. But there were warning signs of trouble ahead. Riding a wave of easy credit in the form of subprime mortgages, Americans were buying homes as never before, many stretching beyond their means. House prices had jumped nearly 25 percent in two years, creating a bubble that was pushing the economy along. Wall Street was taking those risky mortgages, repackaging them, and selling them as investments. Greenspan had reassured policy makers that this was not actually a bubble, only “froth” in certain local markets that could cool off. Other economists, though, worried that house prices had risen so fast on the backs of unsustainable mortgages that the bubble could collapse and bring on an economic downturn. To replace Greenspan, Bush again turned to Cheney. Much as he did with the Supreme Court nominees, Cheney winnowed the list, then interviewed finalists in his West Wing office for ninety minutes each. In the end, he settled on Ben Bernanke—a Princeton University economist, former member of the Fed Board of Governors, and current chai...

Wearing a tuxedo and his trademark sideways grin, Cheney could hardly have had a friendlier audience as he took the stage at the Mayflower Hotel near the White House. “Two thousand and eight!” someone in the audience called out. “Not on your life,” Cheney, the noncandidate, quickly retorted. He wasted no time going after the critics. “I’m sorry we couldn’t be joined by Senators Harry Reid, John Kerry, and Jay Rockefeller,” Cheney said. “They were unable to attend due to a prior lack of commitment.” To make sure they got the point, he paused amid laughter. “I’ll let you think about that one for a minute.”

But Rove had a hard time seeing Bartlett as a peer, not the kid he had hired right out of college, and the younger man resented what he saw as the patronizing attitude. Eventually, Bartlett stopped returning Rove’s calls, infuriating the older man, and the two were barely speaking outside of meetings. A no-better-friend, no-worse-enemy kind of figure, Rove could be funny, charming, and fiercely loyal to his colleagues, but some privately thought the college dropout had an inferiority complex that sometimes manifested itself in condescension. When someone was on his bad side, he did not hide it. His feud with Bartlett spilled over to Wallace, whom he seemed to resent for siding with Bartlett. At one point, he berated her brutally, a “big screaming match,” as one colleague termed it, that echoed around the West Wing. “Karl kicks the shit out of me because he is too scared to kick the shit out of Dan or he’s afraid he would push back,” Wallace complained to Andy Card over lunch in the White House mess one day. Card dunked his grilled cheese sandwich in his tomato soup. “I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “He doesn’t listen to me.”

But accepting the results did not mean working with Hamas, which had never recognized Israel’s right to exist. While Abbas would remain president, the Hamas victory dashed hopes for a peace settlement and prompted the United States and Europe to cut off much of their aid to the Palestinian government. More significantly, perhaps, it struck a debilitating blow to Bush’s freedom agenda. Enthusiasm inside the administration for elections faded fast, and the so-called realists who had always been wary of the president’s high-flying rhetoric now had something to point to as they argued about the law of unintended consequences; popular will sounds great unless it advances enemies of one of America’s closest allies.

But the damage went beyond a wounded friend and some political heat. His handling of the shooting was a moment that some inside the White House would call a turning point, an episode that soured the relationship between president and vice president and diminished Cheney’s clout within the West Wing. “That had a big effect on the Bush staff and his inner circle,” recalled Peter Wehner. Cheney increasingly came to be viewed after the shooting incident less as a sober and intimidating force and more as a political liability. He was even the butt of jokes that would never have been uttered aloud in the corridors of the White House in the first term. “People started rolling their eyes, you know?” said one aide.

Card had at times been a punching bag for Rumsfeld, who called to berate him. “You don’t know how to be chief of staff,” Rumsfeld would tell him, as Card recalled to colleagues. “You’re failing the president in your job.”

Bush realized how much he had come to lean on Card. At a later farewell party at Blair House, Bush choked up and could not even get through his remarks.

For nearly five years, Bush and Cheney had waged war largely as they saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls without warrants, Cheney arranged for Bush to authorize it. If the military wanted to hold terrorism suspects without trial, Bush and Cheney agreed to let it. The two had operated on the principle that it was better to act than ask permission, convinced that protecting the country required the most expansive interpretation of presidential powers. If they were later forced to retreat from controversial decisions, they reasoned, it was worth the price to prevent what in those early hours and days seemed like a certain “second wave” of attacks. Better to “push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop,” as David Addington had memorably put it. For years, that had worked. Now the Supreme Court in the latest and broadest of a series of decisions on the war on terror was interposing itself as a larger force.

Bush and Blair vented their mutual aggravation with Putin during a call two weeks later. “I left St. Petersburg more worried about Russia than ever,” Blair told Bush on July 28. “You should be,” Bush agreed. “We talked at dinner. He’s okay with centralization, which he thinks leads to stabilization. I told him, ‘What happens when the next guy comes and abuses it?’ He said, ‘I’ll stop him.’ He thinks he’ll be around forever. He asked me why I didn’t change the Constitution so I could run again.”

While the vice president maintained a deferential respect for Bush, the people around him engaged in long discussions about when exactly the president changed. Some thought it was as far back as 2003 when it became clear Iraq did not have banned weapons and Bush grew disenchanted with the path Cheney had led him down. Others pointed to the fight over reauthorizing the surveillance program when Bush felt blindsided, or the “last throes” comment when the vice president looked out of touch, or even the shooting accident. And then there were some close to the vice president who pointed to Lebanon, seeing it as a metaphor for Bush’s drift from his own record—the president who defied world opinion to take down the dictator of Baghdad was now more intent on currying favor with foreign leaders than doing what was right and standing by Israel against terrorists.

Meeting with the wounded and the relatives of the dead might have eroded another leader’s commitment and convinced him to reverse course. But Bush took the opposite message—in large part because Hildi Halley was the exception. “The number of people that would really say we have to get out, it was a very, very, very small number of people,” said Hagin. “By far and away, the most prominent emotion was, they would sort of set their jaw and say, ‘Don’t let my son have died in vain.’ ” One mother of a slain soldier told Bush, “He did his job. Now you do yours.” For Bush, withdrawing troops before Iraq was secure would mean admitting their sons and daughters had indeed died in vain, and that was something he just could not let happen.

Just after lunchtime on September 6, Bush strode into the East Room to publicly acknowledge the CIA prisons for the first time and announce that he was sending the fourteen remaining “high-value detainees” to Guantánamo, where they would be made available to the International Committee of the Red Cross and given the same food, clothing, and medical care as other prisoners. For thirty-seven minutes, Bush defended what he had done, arguing that for a select few captives on the battlefield, the normal rules could not apply. “These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for new attacks,” Bush said. “The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.” The detainees in the black-site prisons had been subjected to what he antiseptically referred to as “an alternative set of procedures” that were “tough” but “safe and lawful and necessary.” These tactics had “given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks here in the United States and around the world.” He named some detainees who had been held, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and described how they provided information leading to the other captures and headed off attacks on a marine camp in Djibouti, an American consulate in Pakistan, and civilian targets in London. What Bush did not describe was exactly what the “alternative set of procedures” ...

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

In the end, Rumsfeld was a contradiction; demanding yet not decisive, he ran roughshod over subordinates yet deferred to them on a failed strategy for too long.

Alluding to his testy encounter with Cheney over disclosure of his shooting incident to a local Texas paper, Bartlett turned to the vice president and joked that he was going to leak his resignation to his neighborhood newsletter. “He didn’t laugh,” Bartlett recalled.

Cheney was the only one to make the case for the United States to bomb the facility itself. To him, it came down to American credibility. After North Korea tested its nuclear bomb in October 2006, Bush had drawn a red line, warning of dire consequences if Pyongyang were caught proliferating nuclear technology. Well, Cheney argued, they had just been caught. Bush’s warning had to mean something; otherwise what was the point? If America did not follow through, he said, then the mullahs in Tehran certainly did not have to worry about defying the world on Iran’s nuclear program.

What Petraeus did not know at first was that Israel had already told Bush that it planned to bomb Syria to destroy its fledgling nuclear reactor. Having Petraeus in full military uniform chatting with Assad in the days or weeks before then could send mixed signals. On September 6, Israeli warplanes swooped into Syrian airspace and destroyed the nuclear plant under cover of night. Israel kept quiet about the operation, calculating that Syria would rather absorb the blow in silence than suffer the humiliation of publicly admitting that the Jewish state had successfully raided its territory. The Americans had assumed there would be an uproar in the Arab community. But it turned out the Israelis knew their neighborhood better. Syria kept quiet.

Bush recognized that it was a promising cycle for Democrats and expected Hillary Clinton to succeed him. At times, he chortled at the notion. “Wait ’til her fat ass is sitting at this desk,” he told aides at one point. But he respected her strength and leadership skills and hoped that, in a way, her presidency could vindicate his. Clinton, the wife of his predecessor, had staked out a hawkish position since joining the Senate in 2001, even voting for the Iraq War. While harshly critical of Bush’s handling of it, she had refused to repudiate that vote despite pummeling from the Left. During an off-the-record chat with television anchors one day, Bush recalled how Dwight Eisenhower criticized Harry Truman’s record while running for president in 1952, only to adopt the early Cold War containment strategy he inherited, in effect institutionalizing a bipartisan approach that would endure for decades. The way Bush saw it, Clinton could be the Ike to his Truman. Although she had bashed him on the trail, he felt confident she would continue the broad direction he had set.

As Bush enjoyed the rare moment of accord, Cheney watched with concern. The goal was laudable, he thought, but unrealistic. He was not sure whether it was worth the investment of time and energy to pursue the same dream that had eluded presidents for decades. More significantly, the vice president was aghast that Syria had been invited to the conference. While President Bashar al-Assad had only sent a deputy foreign minister, the very presence of an outlaw state undercut everything they had been working toward. Less than three months after Israeli jets demolished a secret nuclear facility in Syria, the Damascus government was being welcomed to an international gathering with no consequence for its actions.