Woodward book portrays a White House in turmoil
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By Peter Baker
The Washington Post
09/30/06
WASHINGTON — New revelations that White House aides tried twice in the past two years to persuade President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fueled a caustic election-season debate Friday over the president's wartime leadership.
The latest book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, "State of Denial," paints a portrait of an administration riven by personal and policy disagreements exacerbated by a deteriorating situation in Iraq.
In Woodward's account, Bush became increasingly isolated as his team rejected advice to shift gears in Iraq before it was too late.
On Friday, the White House dismissed the book while Democrats seized on it to bolster their campaign attacks less than six weeks before midterm elections.
The book reports that then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card twice suggested Bush fire Rumsfeld and replace him with former Secretary of State James Baker, first after the November 2004 election and again around Thanksgiving 2005. Card had the support of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and senior White House adviser Michael Gerson, according to the book.
First lady Laura Bush also reportedly told Card she agreed Rumsfeld had become a liability for her husband, although she noted the president did not agree. But Vice President Dick Cheney and senior Bush adviser Karl Rove argued against dumping Rumsfeld, and Bush agreed, according to Woodward.
The book claims Rumsfeld alienated key figures throughout the government and military. It says Rice complained Rumsfeld would not return her telephone calls, forcing Bush to intervene; that when Card conveyed Bush's order to send National Guard troops to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, Rumsfeld wouldn't do it until hearing from the president himself; and that Gen. John Abizaid, the senior U.S. commander in the Middle East, concluded "Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore."
The book also reports on ultimately futile attempts by civilian officials to persuade the Bush team to send more troops to Iraq.
Robert Blackwill, then a top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, wrote Rice in 2003 asking for as many as 40,000 more ground troops to help secure a postwar Iraq, according to the book. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer, then the top U.S. official in Iraq, repeated their request in a video teleconference with Rice and her deputy, Hadley.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday the administration didn't ignore Blackwill's memo. That's "not true," he said. Rumsfeld said it should be considered and the "generals and military commanders suggested a different course of action," Snow said.
The book outlines secret government findings about escalating attacks on U.S. troops and dire forecasts about the war worsening over the next year rather than improving.
In addition, the book says Cheney was so eager to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that his office would contact David Kay, then the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, with satellite surveillance reports and other intelligence tips on where such weapons caches might be located.
None was found, and Kay told Congress in January 2004 that U.S. intelligence on former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain chemical and biological weapons had been "dead wrong."
The White House has been bracing for weeks for the book, which was scheduled for release next week, although a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, the publisher, said it would be released today because of the prepublication disclosures.
The White House cooperated extensively with Woodward's first two books on the Bush presidency, "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack," granting him extraordinary access, including four interviews with the president. The books were criticized by some as overly favorable to Bush.
But the White House seems to have anticipated the third book would take a more critical view, and Bush declined to speak with him for it.
After The New York Times managed to buy an early copy of "State of Denial" and reported on it on Friday's front page, Bush aides frantically called Woodward, a Post assistant managing editor, and asked for copies, which he supplied.
A squadron of White House aides then spent hours tearing through the book and doing quick research to try to undercut its more damaging elements. They settled on a strategy of disputing certain conclusions while broadly dismissing the book as old news.
"In a lot of ways, the book is sort of like cotton candy; it kind of melts on contact," Snow said at a briefing. "We've read this book before. Rather than a state of denial, it's a state of the obvious."
Senate Democrats called their own news conference about the book before they could even read much of it. The title alone quickly became a Democratic mantra. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said four times at a separate briefing that Bush was "in denial," and Democrats released a series of statements and "fact sheets" trumpeting the line.
Rumsfeld, traveling overseas, declined to discuss the book. Card, Hadley, Gerson and the first lady's office declined to comment to The Washington Post or did not return telephone calls. But Snow, speaking on behalf of Laura Bush, said the first lady's office called Woodward's account "flatly not true." And Snow, quoting Rice's reaction to the report of her disputes with Rumsfeld, said, "This is ridiculous, and I told that to Woodward."
Card confirmed to ABC News on Friday that he suggested replacing Rumsfeld with Baker after the 2004 election as part of broader changes to the Cabinet, but he denied to news services that he led "a campaign" to oust the defense secretary.
"To say that it was a campaign or an orchestrated effort would be wrong," he told Reuters. "But were there times that we talked about potential changes in the Cabinet? Yes. Did they center around Rumsfeld? Not necessarily." He denied that Laura Bush encouraged an effort to remove Rumsfeld. "Mrs. Bush and I never discussed it," he told The Associated Press.
Snow confirmed one detail in the book: Henry Kissinger has been advising Bush about Iraq.
In an interview scheduled to air Sunday on "60 Minutes," Woodward says Kissinger, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, has been telling Bush and Cheney that in Iraq, "victory is the only meaningful exit strategy. This is so fascinating. Kissinger's fighting the Vietnam War again, because in his view, the problem in Vietnam is we lost our will. That we didn't stick to it."
The book also reported that then-CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, grew so concerned about a possible al-
Qaida attack in summer 2001 that they abruptly decided to drive straight to the White House to get high-level attention.
Tenet called Rice, then the national-security adviser, from his car to ask to see her in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression.
But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they believed, did not feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for a policy review.
The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former President Clinton this week complained that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than did Bush.
Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as Clinton had been in eight years.
The July 10 meeting among Rice, Tenet and Black wasn't mentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks and Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."
Jamie Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with staff members, who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting.
White House and State Department officials confirmed Friday that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with the portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response. Tenet and Black did not respond to messages Friday.
-Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler contributed to this report. Material from The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times also is included. |
