Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

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...