Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

Both admired Winston Churchill to the point of displaying busts of the legendary prime minister, seeking to emulate his relentless strength in the face of overwhelming odds.

Cheney was unquestionably the most influential vice president in American history.

Jerry Ford’s guy in Wyoming,” Cheney asked his former boss not to endorse him.

“Write this down. Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.”

Kristof’s reference set in motion a chain of events that would call into question the administration’s credibility on the central justification of the war, sow division and mistrust within the White House, and permanently damage the friendship between Bush and Cheney.

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.

What escaped the Bush-Cheney team was that their calculations of how many troops would be needed in Iraq had initially depended on two assumptions that ultimately were not borne out. They had assumed a substantial portion of the Iraqi army would remain intact and that other Arab countries would contribute troops as they did in the Gulf War. After both of those proved false, no one ever thought to compensate for the missing forces. “We never connected it up,” Hadley said. “I don’t know why. It seems, in retrospect, very clear.”

Amid the dysfunction, Bush felt burned most of all by the accusation that he did not care about the largely African American residents of New Orleans. Whatever Bush’s faults, few who knew him included racial insensitivity among them. He told Laura that “it was the worst moment of my presidency.”

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.

“we had clutched defeat from the jaws of victory.”

It was seen as liberating at the White House.” In the end, Rumsfeld was a contradiction; demanding yet not decisive, he ran roughshod over subordinates yet deferred to them on a failed

“That meeting is where the elephants finally threw up on the table,” Crouch said later. “In other words, they finally expressed their views in front of the president. Everybody knew this was the moment—speak now or forever hold your peace.”

The disparity between Obama’s campaign trail rhetoric on national security and his actions upon taking office shocked some of his supporters but should have come as little surprise to anyone who watched the evolution of the previous administration. Obama essentially ran against Bush’s first term but inherited his second. By the time Bush left office, he had already shaved off the harsher, more controversial edges of his war on terror, either under pressure from Congress, the courts, and public opinion or out of a conscious effort to put his policies on a firmer foundation with more bipartisan approval. He had emptied the secret CIA prisons, cleared out many of the prisoners at Guantánamo, approved no waterboarding after 2003, and secured the approval of lawmakers for military commissions, expansive surveillance, and other elements of his program.

“Bush made crises through neglect and then resolved crises through courage.”

Bush, in other words, was at his best when he was cleaning up his worst.