Card Is Quiet Enforcer In Bush's White House
Chief of Staff's Tight Rein on Information
Insulates Bush, but Could Be Too Isolating
By JEANNE CUMMINGS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- A week ago, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card gathered the president's top advisers in his West Wing office to assess the latest damaging twist in the controversy over President Bush's prewar assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa to restart its nuclear program.
That Monday morning, while still at the president's Texas ranch, Mr. Card had learned speechwriter Michael Gerson had unearthed a Central Intelligence Agency memo warning the uranium intelligence was unreliable -- a memo issued almost four months before Mr. Bush's State of the Union speech. The discovery followed two weeks of contradictions and revisions by White House officials about their handling of prewar intelligence. Mr. Card now wanted the answer to one question: "Is there anything more?"
By Tuesday morning, the CIA had dug up another October memo warning against using the accusation. In a rare moment of openness, Mr. Card ordered both disclosed quickly, leading to a media briefing that night in which senior National Security Council aides shared blame with the CIA for the first time. Mr. Card hoped the admissions would put the crisis behind the president, but that is far from clear as Democrats clamor for an independent investigation and even Senate Republicans demand copies of the memos.
While the tactics were unusual for a White House bent on secrecy, the goal was familiar: to protect Mr. Bush personally from political harm. For Mr. Card, that is his first and foremost job.
Vice President Dick Cheney and political strategist Karl Rove gather far more attention, but the Iraq damage-control exercise illustrates the important role played by the little-noticed Mr. Card. He has tightly centralized power inside the White House's West Wing and constructed a nearly leakproof system to shield the president from scandal and distraction -- keeping secrets from the media, Congress and even cabinet members until Mr. Bush decides to reveal them, if ever.
"We serve the president," Mr. Card says. "We have structured a White House with discipline, centered around policy and decision flow."
There are downsides to this model of extreme White House discipline. Lawmakers grumble that Mr. Bush is shielded too much from them -- and their political wrangling. Such insulation can put the president dangerously out of sync with important political allies and the public.
Even some White House officials believe that is what scuttled the president's first attempt to come up with a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare recipients. With almost no discussion with Congress, the White House developed a proposal early this year that would have provided a better drug benefit to seniors who switched to a private health-insurance program. When the idea leaked out, Republican lawmakers rejected it out of hand, fearing a powerful backlash from seniors who didn't want to be forced out of a traditional Medicare program.
The system can also frustrate agency heads and cabinet secretaries, who find themselves kept out of the loop, and contribute to a climate of fear or insecurity. When the president was mulling his position on the University of Michigan's affirmative-action program this year, attorneys in the White House counsel's office deliberately avoided asking about the state of the West Wing debate to secure some deniability in case news leaked.
Still, the system has usually served Mr. Bush well. Nearly two years ago, it was Mr. Card who made the adroit political decision not to tell Mr. Bush that his old friend Kenneth Lay, then chairman of Enron Corp., was calling around the administration looking for federal help to salvage his failing energy-trading company. That decision stopped the scandal from seeping inside the Oval Office.
On the surface, Mr. Card, a former transportation secretary in the first Bush administration, doesn't appear to have nearly as much power as some of his predecessors, including John Sununu, chief of staff for the first President Bush. Mr. Card was Mr. Sununu's chief deputy, until the current president fired Mr. Sununu on his father's behalf because he was attracting too much attention with his autocratic style.
That experience appears to have prompted this President Bush to install an important check on Mr. Card's power: insisting that a handful of senior aides have open access to the Oval Office, without getting Mr. Card's permission.
Still, Mr. Card exerts plenty of quiet influence. He is the chief architect of the new Department of Homeland Security, a massive government restructuring planned entirely in secret. He also plays an important liaison role on Capitol Hill, drawing on relationships developed during his brief stint as a Massachusetts state legislator.
A case in point is fellow New Englander Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, whom Mr. Card has known from 25 years. Despite a strong push, he couldn't talk the Republican senator into supporting the president's original tax-cut plan. But Ms. Snowe says she expects to confer regularly with Mr. Card as Congress hammers out a final agreement on a Medicare-overhaul plan. Ms. Snowe calls Mr. Card a "break the glass kind of guy" because of his cool-headed nature in emergencies.
As the system's enforcer, Mr. Card monitors every action in the West Wing, sticking close by the president. He often spends entire days in the Oval Office. When Mr. Bush landed dramatically on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a military jet in May, Mr. Card was flying in the lone decoy jet. As a condition of taking the job, he insisted the president keep him informed of all briefings, whether or not Mr. Card is included.
Perhaps the most telling sign of his power was Mr. Card's decision to break with his own system of secrecy in an attempt to defuse the Iraq-uranium controversy. According to Dan Bartlett, the president's communication director, it was Mr. Card who ordered the review of all records, notes and memos regarding the State of the Union speech and the drafting of an October speech by the president in which he made the case for war. Whatever was found was to be disclosed quickly and by the White House itself.
In the West Wing session last week, Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Card told his staff, "It may sound silly," but the old expression "the truth shall set you free, is true. The truth is on your side."
But as lawmakers probe more deeply, the administration policy of not allowing senior presidential advisers -- including those at the NSC -- to appear before congressional committees may test Mr. Card's newfound penchant for disclosure.
Write to Jeanne Cummings at jeanne.cummings@wsj.com
Updated July 28, 2003 12:18 a.m. |
