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Book Tells Of Dissent In Bush's
Inner Circle
Michael Abramowitz
Washington
Post
Monday Sept 3, 2007
Karl Rove told George W. Bush before the 2000 election that
it was a bad idea to name Richard B. Cheney as his running mate,
and Rove later raised objections to the nomination of Harriet
E. Miers to the Supreme Court, according to a new book on the
Bush presidency.
In "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush," journalist
Robert Draper writes that Rove told Bush he should not tap Cheney
for the Republican ticket: "Selecting Daddy's top foreign-policy
guru ran counter to message. It was worse than a safe pick --
it was needy." But Bush did not care -- he was comfortable
with Cheney and "saw no harm in giving his VP unprecedented
run of the place."
When Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, expressed concerns
about the Miers selection, he was "shouted down" and subsequently
muted his objections, Draper writes, while other advisers did not
realize the outcry the nomination would cause within the president's
conservative political base.
It was John G. Roberts Jr., now the chief justice of the United
States, who suggested Miers to Bush as a possible Supreme Court
justice, according to the book. Miers, the White House counsel
and a Bush loyalist from Texas, did not want the job, but Bush
and first lady Laura Bush prevailed on her to accept the nomination,
Draper writes.
After Miers withdrew in the face of the conservative furor, Judge
Samuel A. Alito Jr. was selected and confirmed for the seat.
(Article continues below)
Roberts rejected Draper's report when asked about it last night.
"The account is not true," said Supreme Court spokeswoman
Kathy Arberg, after consulting with Roberts. "The chief justice
did not suggest Harriet Miers to the president."
In recounting the Miers nomination and other controversies of
the Bush presidency, Draper offers an intimate portrait of a White
House racked by more internal dissent and infighting than is commonly
portrayed and of a president who would, alternately, intensely
review speeches line by line or act strangely disengaged from
big issues.
Draper, a national correspondent for GQ, first wrote about Bush
in 1998, when he was the Texas governor. He received unusual cooperation
from the White House in preparing "Dead Certain," which
will hit bookstores tomorrow. In addition to conducting six interviews
with the president, Draper said, he also interviewed Rove, Cheney,
Laura Bush, and many senior White House and administration officials.
Draper writes that Bush was "gassed" after an 80-minute
bike ride at his Crawford, Tex., ranch on the day before Hurricane
Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and was largely silent during a
subsequent video briefing from then-FEMA Director Michael D. Brown
and other top officials making preparations for the storm.
He also reports that the president took an informal poll of his
top advisers in April 2006 on whether to fire Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld.
During a private dinner at the White House to discuss how to
buoy Bush's presidency, seven advisers voted to dump Rumsfeld,
including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, incoming chief
of staff Joshua B. Bolten, the outgoing chief, Andrew H. Card
Jr., and Ed Gillespie, then an outside adviser and now White House
counselor. Bush raised his hand along with three others who wanted
Rumsfeld to stay, including Rove and national security adviser
Stephen J. Hadley. Rumsfeld was ousted after the November elections.
The book offers more than 400 footnotes, but Draper does not
make clear the sourcing for some of the more arresting assertions
-- such as the one about Roberts's role in the Miers nomination,
which has previously not come to light. Roberts's nomination was
highly praised by conservatives, and they criticized Miers as
lacking conservative credentials.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that he had
no comment on the book, including the claim about the Miers nomination.
Draper offers some intriguing details about Bush's personal habits,
such as his intense love of biking. He reports that White House
advance teams and the Secret Service "devoted inordinate
energy to satisfying Bush's need for biking trails," descending
on a town a couple of days before the president's arrival to find
secluded hotels and trails the boss would find challenging.
He also makes new disclosures about the behind-the-scenes infighting
at the White House that helped prompt the change from Card to
Bolten in the spring of 2006. By that point, he reports, some
close to the president had concluded that "the White House
management structure had collapsed," with senior aides Rove
and Dan Bartlett "constantly at war."
He quotes Gillespie as telling one Republican while running interference
for Alito's Supreme Court nomination: "I'm going crazy over
here. I feel like a shuttle diplomat, going from office to office.
No one will talk to each other."
It has been reported that Card first suggested he be replaced
to help rejuvenate the White House. But Draper writes that Bush
settled on Bolten, then director of the Office of Management and
Budget, as the new chief of staff before telling Card. When Card
congratulated Bolten on his new assignment, he writes, Bolten
"could tell that Card was somewhat surprised and hurt that
Bush had moved so swiftly to select a replacement."
Rove, meanwhile, was not happy, Draper writes, with Bolten's
decision to strip him of his oversight of policy at the White
House, directing his focus instead to politics and the coming
midterm elections. Bolten noticed that other staffers were "intimidated"
by Rove, and Rove was seen as doing too much, "freelancing,
insinuating himself into the message world . . . parachuting into
Capitol Hill whenever it suited him."
Draper offers little additional insight on or details of Cheney's
large influence in administration policy. But he writes that the
vice president did find himself ruminating over mistakes made,
chief among them installing L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional
Authority to run Iraq for a year after the invasion. Instead,
Draper suggests, Cheney believes that the White House should have
set up a provisional government right away, as Ahmed Chalabi's
Iraqi National Congress recommended from the beginning.
Several of Bush's top advisers believe that the president's view
of postwar Iraq was significantly affected by his meeting with
three Iraqi exiles in the Oval Office several months before the
2003 invasion, Draper reports.
He writes that all three exiles agreed without qualification
that "Iraq would greet American forces with enthusiasm. Ethnic
and religious tensions would dissolve with the collapse of Saddam's
regime. And democracy would spring forth with little effort --
particularly in light of Bush's commitment to rebuild the country."
In the CIA leak scandal, Rove assured Bush, Draper reports, that
he had known nothing about Valerie Plame, a CIA operative whose
covert status was revealed by administration officials to reporters
after Plame's husband criticized the administration's case for
war in Iraq. "When Bush learned otherwise," he said,
"he hit the roof."
Bush considered whether to cooperate with the book for several
months, Draper reports. The two men met for the first time on
Dec. 12, 2006, and at the conclusion, the president agreed to
another interview. In one of the interviews, he looked ahead to
his post-presidency, talking of his plans to build an institute
focused on freedom and to "replenish the ol' coffers"
by giving paid speeches.
He told Draper he could see himself shuttling between Dallas
and Crawford. Noting that he ran into former president Bill Clinton
at the United Nations last year, Bush added, "Six years from
now, you're not going to see me hanging out in the lobby of the
U.N."
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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