At the start of the first term, Bush needed to reach out. Now he can appoint whom he pleases. The media will have even less opportunity to find leakers.
New Bush Cabinet Seen as Move for More Harmony and Control
By DAVID E. SANGER and STEVEN R. WEISMAN - NYT
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - President Bush has instructed his new national security team to end the running battles between the State and Defense departments and the Central Intelligence Agency, and to extend his personal control over agencies he has suspected of impeding his foreign policy aims, according to current and former administration officials.
One senior official said Mr. Bush decided months ago to make no effort to retain Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who had long indicated he planned to leave.
A close associate of Mr. Powell said he would have stayed if asked, at least for a while. "He was never asked," the associate said.
So when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told Mr. Bush at Camp David on the weekend just after his re-election that she was willing to stay for a second term, he quickly offered her the secretary of state job, a post that she told friends last year she thought did not suit her sometimes impatient temperament.
"Her interests ran to Defense," said a national security official who just left the administration. "But the president didn't want to change horses in the middle of a war."
The essence of Mr. Bush's moves has been to fill key cabinet agencies with people he has relied on in the Oval Office, people who know his mind.
"This is a different cabinet - it's a true kitchen cabinet," said one official who no longer works in the White House but deals with it often.
But one of the mysteries is whether the reorganization foreshadows a change of approach, particularly in American diplomacy.
Some saw the departure of Mr. Powell as the moment for conservatives under the influence of Vice President Dick Cheney to assume an even larger role and seize key sub-cabinet posts.
But Ms. Rice is considered less ideological than many in the administration and more attuned to the president's own thinking.
The question is whether she will arrive at the State Department with an agenda known chiefly to her and the president. According to officials who have heard accounts of the case Mr. Bush made to Ms. Rice, he argued that their strong personal ties would convince allies and hostile nations like Iran and North Korea that she was speaking directly for the president and could make deals in his name.
"This is what Powell could never do," said a former official who is close to Ms. Rice and sat in on many of the White House situation room meetings where policy conflicts arose.
"The world may have liked dealing with Colin - we all did - but it was never clear that he was speaking for the president. He knew it and they knew it."
Ms. Rice's brief acceptance speech gave few hints of what course she planned to set if confirmed, as expected. But several officials said that in recent days she has spoken of leaping at the opportunity created by the death of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and of deciding whether North Korea and Iran could be induced to end their suspected nuclear weapons programs.
The State Department and the White House were already bubbling with talk that senior officials of the National Security Council who work on those issues may be moving to the State Department.
If a large-scale migration takes place, it could mark a transition between the institutions not seen since Henry Kissinger controlled both of them, three decades ago, and would put the State Department under much closer scrutiny by White House loyalists.
Several officials said they believed that was Mr. Bush's intent.
The process of moving confidantes into key cabinet posts began with the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, to be attorney general.
It accelerated on Tuesday with the nomination of Ms. Rice and the elevation of her deputy Stephen J. Hadley to replace her as national security adviser, whose role is to adjudicate conflicts between agencies.
Margaret Spellings, the president's top aide on social and education policy, is expected to be named secretary of education, perhaps as soon as Wednesday.
But that leaves in place Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, a strong-willed hawk who often clashed with Ms. Rice. Most notably, she took over control of the occupation of Iraq, creating an Iraq Stabilization Group.
Her aides had made no secret of her opinion that Mr. Rumsfeld had failed to devote enough planning, attention or resources to making a success of the occupation.
Their relationship worsened after the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib, the American run prison west of Baghdad, became publicly known. Ms. Rice, her associates say, had warned Mr. Rumsfeld to pay attention to detention issues, but the defense secretary often sent subordinates to meetings on the subject.
So there is no end of speculation about whether Mr. Rumsfeld will have the kind of relationship with Ms. Rice that he had with Mr. Powell: one of constant bickering.
Mr. Rumsfeld tried to tamp that speculation down on Tuesday, telling reporters traveling with him in Quito, Ecuador, "I have known Condi for a good number of years," and adding that "long before this administration, we were friends."
"She is an enormous talent," he said. "She is experienced, very bright, and as we all know, has a terrific relationship with the president, which is a very valuable thing."
But he acknowledged that tensions would inevitably occur, and, he said, "It is the task, the responsibility, the duty of people who are participating in that national security process to make sure that the issues are raised and discussed," a process that he said "has worked very well in this administration."
Ms. Rice's associates said they expected that there would be fewer and less heated arguments in the future, partly because Mr. Rumsfeld would be more wary of Ms. Rice and her relationship with the president.
The task of defusing tensions between the departments will now fall to Mr. Hadley, a skilled lawyer who seeks the middle ground but in the past has been deferential to Mr. Cheney, one of his mentors, and to Mr. Rumsfeld.
His loyalties, though, are clearly to Ms. Rice, who installed him as her deputy and entrusted him with a series of the toughest problems facing the administration: North Korea, managing the relationship with Pakistan, and coordinating the plan for Iraq after Saddam Hussein, to name several.
"Steve's a very loyal guy," one of the senior members of the National Security Council said, "and he's going to have a tough job because he will be pulled in many directions."
Some fear that an administration that seemed in a constant state of dissent may, under the new structure, not have enough.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
