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Bush in the Bubble
Newsweek
By Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe December 19, 2005
Dec. 19, 2005 issue - Jack Murtha still can't figure out why the father and
son treated him so differently. Every week or so before the '91 gulf war,
President George H.W. Bush would invite Congressman Murtha, along with other
Hill leaders, to the White House. "He would listen to all the bitching from
everybody, Republicans and Democrats, and then he would do what he thought was
right." A decorated Vietnam veteran, ex-Marine Murtha was a critical supporter
for the elder Bush on Capitol Hill. "I led the fight for the '91 war," he says.
"I led the fight, for Christ's sake."
Yet 13 years later, when Murtha tried to write George W. Bush with some
suggestions for fighting the Iraq war, the congressman's letter was ignored by
the White House (after waiting for seven months, Murtha received a polite
kiss-off from a deputy under secretary of Defense). Murtha, who has always
preferred to operate behind the scenes, finally went public, calling for an
orderly withdrawal from Iraq. In the furor that followed, a White House
spokesman compared the Vietnam War hero to "Michael Moore and the extreme
liberal wing of the Democratic Party." When that approach backfired, President
Bush called Murtha a "fine man ... who served our country with honor." The
White House has made no attempt to reach out to Murtha since then. "None. None.
Zero. Not one call," a baffled Murtha told NEWSWEEK. "I don't know who the hell
they're talking to. If they talked to people, they wouldn't get these
outbursts. If they'd talked to me, it wouldn't have happened."
A White House aide, who like virtually all White House officials (in this
story and in general) refused to be identified for fear of antagonizing the
president, says that Murtha was a lost cause anyway and dismisses the notion
that Bush is isolated or out of touch. Still, the complaints don't just come
from Democrats: Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, pointedly told reporters that Bush needs to "have much
more of a cadre of people in both houses, from both parties" visiting the White
House "very frequently." Lugar cited Bill Clinton as the model.
President Bush has always shown an admirable ability to ignore the
Washington pundits and make fun of the chattering classes. Yet his inattention
to Murtha, a coal-country Pennsylvanian and rock-solid patriot, suggests a
level of indifference, if not denial, that is dangerous for a president who
seeks to transform the world. All presidents face a tension between sticking to
their guns and dealing with changing reality. History suggests it can be a
mistake to listen too closely to the ever-present (and often self-aggrandizing)
critics. But likewise, the idea that any president can go it alone is, to say
the least, problematic.
Clearly, George W. Bush's role model is not his father, who every week would
ride down from the White House to the House of Representatives gymnasium, just
to hear what fellows like Murtha were saying. Nor is the model John F. Kennedy,
who during the Cuban missile crisis reached out to form an "ExCom" of present
and past national-security officials, from both parties, to find some way back
from the abyss short of war. Nor is it Franklin Roosevelt, who liked to create
competition between advisers to find the best solution. Or Abraham Lincoln who,
as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her new book, "Team of Rivals,"
appointed his political foes to his cabinet.
Bush likes to say that his hero is Ronald Reagan, a true-blue conservative
who knew his own mind. But Reagan also knew when to compromise, and when he got
into trouble early in his second term, he reached out for help, making a
moderate, former senator, Howard Baker, his chief of staff. The chance that
George W. Bush will give a top White House job to an establishment moderate
(say, Brent Scowcroft, his father's national-security adviser) is about the
same as that Texas will become a province of France.
Bush may be the most isolated president in modern history, at least since
the late-stage Richard Nixon. It's not that he is a socially awkward loner or a
paranoid. He can charm and joke like the frat president he was. Still, beneath
a hail-fellow manner, Bush has a defensive edge, a don't-tread-on-me
prickliness. It shows in Bush's humor. When Reagan told a joke, it almost never
was about someone in the room. Reagan's jokes may have been scatological or
politically incorrect, but they were inclusive, intended to make everyone join
in the laughter. Often, Bush's joking is personal—it is aimed at you. The
teasing can be flattering (the president gave me a nickname!), but it is
intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a
towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a
president?
Not many, and not unless they have known the president a long, long time.
(Even Karl Rove, or "Turd Blossom," as he is sometimes addressed by the
president, knows when to hold his tongue.) In the Bush White House,
disagreement is often equated with disloyalty.
Lately, there are some signs that the White House is trying to dispel the
image of the Bush Bubble (or Bunker). Last week, as part of a campaign to reach
out to critics, the president addressed the Council on Foreign Relations, a
bastion of East Coast establishment moderates. This week Bush will entertain a
delegation of Hill Democrats (routine in the administrations of his father and
Reagan, very unusual under this president). In his public comments, Bush for
the first time is acknowledging that the war in Iraq has not gone quite as well
as hoped for. And some kind of a cabinet shake-up is likely in the new
year.
Yet such concessions may be more show than substance. White House officials,
as well as one of his closest friends (also speaking anonymously so as not to
complicate relations with the president), say that Bush remains sure that he is
on the proper course in Iraq and that ultimately he will be vindicated by
history. The president may be right. The Iraqi elections next week could
produce a government that survives the insurgency and establishes the first
(albeit shaky and not quite Western style) democracy in an Arab
state—even if that looks like a long haul by today's light. With an
improving economy, Bush's popularity could well rebound. Washington pendulums
always swing; Bush's polls appear to have bottomed out and are rising, at least
slightly.
In any case, the record so far suggests that Bush is not likely to change in
any fundamental way in the three years that remain in his term. He has won two
presidential elections and one war (Afghanistan) and is, at least by his own
reckoning, winning two more (Iraq and the Global War on Terror, or GWOT). His
character was forged by hard-won struggles with drink and more shadowy demons,
and he has been redeemed by faith. Bush sometimes compares himself to other
presidents, usually in terms of how not to do the job. These comparisons are
instructive, though not always as flattering as Bush thinks:
Bush is not Bill Clinton. Bush recoiled from the sloppiness and waffling of
his predecessor. He has no use for the kind of endless, circular collegiate
bull sessions that characterized Clinton's administration. In 43's White House,
meetings start on time, everyone wears a suit and pizza boxes are nowhere to be
seen. But Clinton was able to see, in a way that Bush perhaps does not, that
the White House can be, as Clinton put it in his sometimes whiny way, "the
crown jewel of the federal prison system." Clinton insisted on having his own
private phone line and fax line so that he could reach out (often, to the
dismay of those on the receiving end, at 2 a.m.).
Bush is not Lyndon Johnson. Johnson liked to keep three TVs blaring in his
office, and he would call reporters at home to browbeat them. Bush has said he
does not read the newspapers (actually, he does). "I'm not LBJ," Bush told a
recent gathering of lawmakers. "I'm not going to sit around some map room and
micromanage the war." Bush was slightly confusing his wars and presidents. It
was Franklin Roosevelt who ran World War II from the Map Room; LBJ descended
into the Situation Room in the basement to pick bombing targets. It is true
that LBJ was nearly driven mad by his obsession with Vietnam and his
insecurities about the "Harvards," whom he blamed for sucking him into the war.
But forced to listen to his critics—the so-called Wise Men who gathered
at the White House in March 1968 to tell him that the war was
unwinnable—LBJ was able to reverse course and begin the drawdown of
troops from Vietnam.
Bush is not his father. It is not necessary to read Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
to see Bush's reaction to his father's presidency. The younger Bush was a
political aide in his father's White House. From a front-row seat, he watched
with horror as aides leaked and double-crossed to get rid of chief of staff
John Sununu (even as he joined in the plotting). "I'm sure he was informed by
the experiences he saw when his dad was president," Bush's current chief of
staff, Andy Card, told NEWSWEEK. "And that's one reason why he has confided in
me." (Card was a rare Bush 41 staffer who did not backstab.) Much is said about
Bush's premium on loyalty, but the key word is trust. Like Robert De Niro's ex
CIA officer in "Meet the Parents," Bush has a very small circle of trust. From
his days as a small oil businessman, Bush believes in handshakes. He was
infuriated, for instance, when former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder
promised that he would stick with Bush on Iraq—and then won re-election
in 2002 by campaigning against the run-up to the war.
Bush's real friends are his old Texas and school buddies from Andover, Yale
and Harvard Business School. He calls them all the time—but the talk is
usually comforting and jocular, of sports and old days. They rarely dispense
pointed political advice or brace him with bad news. Chief of staff Card is
widely described by insiders as a decent and honorable man, but also as a
family retainer who tells the president what he wants to hear. Exhausted by
predawn arrivals at the White House, Card is expected to step down soon (though
he denies the rumors that he wants to replace Treasury Secretary John Snow).
The lead candidates to replace Card are all loyalists, like OMB Director Josh
Bolten, or Bush's old confidant and former Commerce secretary Don Evans (who is
lukewarm about working full time in Washington).
Bush's war cabinet has included some very strong and independent-minded
figures. Because they were at the end of their careers, with no office left to
seek, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were seen as liberated to call things the
way they saw them. But the headstrong Cheney and Rumsfeld seemed to almost
relish scoffing at dissent.
Cheney in particular has acted as Bush's unofficial prime minister, playing
a heavy hand in the war on terror and handling (or often mishandling) Hill
relations. Though a former congressman himself, Cheney disdains Congress almost
on principle: he believes the balance between executive and legislative power
went out of whack after Watergate, and he has done his best to strengthen White
House prerogatives. Cheney's bungling of the dicey issue of torture is a case
in point.
When Sen. John McCain passed a Senate resolution by a vote of 90-9 to ban
the "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees, Cheney, a former
member of the House intelligence committee, went to Capitol Hill to carve out
an exception for CIA officers. With CIA Director Porter Goss in tow, Cheney
privately made the case to a group of GOP senators that "enhanced interrogation
methods" work to extract necessary information from terrorists. The senators
were unimpressed. Talking to NEWSWEEK afterward, McCain waxed confident that he
"could get 90 votes again tomorrow." Since then, Bush's national-security
adviser, Steve Hadley, has been gingerly negotiating with McCain for some
face-saving compromise. The president is in a box: he can ill afford to make
his first veto ever of a bill banning torture.
Bush was getting pushed to compromise by his secretary of State, Condoleezza
Rice, who privately argued that Bush did not want his legacy to be a policy of
torture. Some Washington observers believe that Rice, who was frequently rolled
by the hard-line hawks Cheney and Rumsfeld in the first term, is feeling
empowered by her new role at State to take a stronger—and more moderate
and internationalist—position in Bush's War Cabinet. But one former Bush
41 administration figure who knows her well (and declined to be identified for
fear of giving offense) says of Rice's apparent evolution, "Don't read too much
into it. Condi is not a neocon. But she's not Colin Powell, either."
On the overriding issue facing the president—the war in
Iraq—some reality has slowly crept in. Last spring Cheney was still
whistling past the graveyard, describing the Iraqi insurgency as in its "last
throes." Since then, Bush's ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has tried to
educate the president and his top advisers on some "ground truth"—that
the new Iraqi Army and police are a long way from being able to defend their
own country and nascent government. According to senior Pentagon officials who
did not want to be identified discussing private meetings, in October Bush
received an unusually unvarnished briefing on the military situation from the
new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace.
What Bush actually hears and takes in, however, is not clear. And whether
his advisers are quite as frank as they claim to be with the president is also
questionable. Take Social Security, for example. One House Republican, who
asked not to be identified for fear of offending the White House, recalls a
summertime meeting with congressmen in the Roosevelt Room at which Bush
enthusiastically talked up his Social Security reform plan. But the plan was
already dead—as everyone except the president had acknowledged. Bush
seemed to have no idea. "I got the sense that his staff was not telling him the
bad news," says the lawmaker. "This was not a case of him thinking positive. He
just didn't have any idea of the political realities there. It was like he
wasn't briefed at all." (Bush was not clueless, says an aide, but pushing his
historic mission.)
In subtle ways, Bush does not encourage truth-telling or at least a full
exploration of all that could go wrong. A former senior member of the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Baghdad occasionally observed Bush on videoconferences
with his top advisers. "The president would ask the generals, 'Do you have what
you need to complete the mission?' as opposed to saying, 'Tell me, General,
what do you need to win?' which would have opened up a whole new set of
conversations," says this official, who did not want to be identified
discussing high-level meetings. The official says that the way Bush phrased his
questions, as well as his obvious lack of interest in long, detailed
discussions, had a chilling effect. "It just prevented the discussion from
heading in a direction that would open up a possibility that we need more
troops," says the official.
Bush generally prefers short conversations—long on conclusion, short
on reasoning. He likes popular history and presidential biography (Theodore
Roosevelt, George Washington), but by all accounts, he is not intellectually
curious. Occasional outsiders brought into the Bush Bubble have observed that
faith, not evidence, is the basis for decision making. Psychobabblers have long
had a field day with the fact that Bush quit drinking cold turkey and turned
around his life by accepting God. His close friends agree that Bush likes
comfort and serenity; he does not like dissonance. He has long been mothered by
strong women, including his mother and wife. A foreign diplomat who declined to
be identified was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay
bad news on the president. "Don't upset him," she said.
Bush is never going to be a JFK who would hold glittery state dinners and
use them to tease out new ideas and fresh thinking from different sources (and,
it should be added in JFK's case, fresh gossip and romantic conquests). Bush
has held four state dinners in five years and made clear his preference for
going to bed at 10. Ken Duberstein, Reagan's last chief of staff and a whiz at
congressional relations, recalled that when Nancy Reagan traveled, the
president did not like to dine alone. So Duberstein would bring in seven or
eight congressmen for dinner, and Reagan would tell his jokes and stories.
Reagan even had House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill over for his birthday.
Finally, Duberstein recalled, an aide had to step in and say, "It's time for
you guys to go back to running the government." Bush prefers to flip on ESPN or
go to Camp David for the weekend with Card and Harriet Miers, his trusted White
House counsel (and failed Supreme Court nominee).
Bush, too, can be funny; his humor is Preppy Putdown, not gentle and corny,
if sometimes off-color, like Reagan's. "It's the difference between Eureka and
Yale," says an old Reagan hand. It's also a matter of condence. Reagan knew he
was the best entertainer in the room. To be sure, Bush can be self-deprecating.
Joking about his Council on Foreign Relations speech, Bush suggested to his
speechwriters that, as a gag, he should hold up a copy of Foreign Affairs, the
council's worthy, dry publication, and say, "I tried to read it once but the
print was too small and there weren't enough pictures." (Bush decided against
using the quip, considering the speech too much of a serious event.) But humor
is a tool and sometimes a weapon for Bush. "He uses humor to disarm people and
get a read on them," said a senior aide who wouldn't be identified talking
about his boss. "You can tell a lot about a person in how they react to a
joke."
During Bush's first term, his attitude toward Congress was "my way or the
highway," according to a GOP staffer who did not want to be identified
criticizing the president. "If you were lucky, you got to talk to him as you
were taking a picture with him at a party," says Rep. Ray LaHood, an Illinois
Republican. "It was nothing." Lately, however, Bush has been inviting
congressmen up to the family residence at the White House to drink sodas and
snack on peanuts or cookies. Bush talks, then encourages feedback, good and
bad. "He's very engaged," says Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York.
He has to be. Congressmen from his own party have been in open rebellion. At
their annual leadership retreat at a luxury resort overlooking the Chesapeake
Bay two weeks ago, senior congressmen tore into White House aides Card and
Counselor Dan Bartlett. The normally mild-mannered Speaker Dennis Hastert, who
usually likes to operate behind closed doors, announced to the group, which
included staffers as well as members, that the White House had "blown it" when
it came to handling congressional relations. There was still incredulity over
the Murtha outburst demanding a troop withdrawal from Iraq. "They should have
seen that coming like a freight train," said a top Republican. "In any White
House the cardinal rule is no surprises," said Duberstein. "I was somewhat
surprised, I admit," Card told NEWSWEEK. At the retreat, the Hill Republicans
told the White House to do a better job of selling economic progress. The next
day the White House put Bush into the Rose Garden to spin good news on the
economy.
Now the White House is trying to reach out to Democrats. On Tuesday, Bush is
scheduled to meet with a group of conservative Democrats who support the war
and to have lunch with Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, who is celebrating his
50th year in the House. But the Democrats are wary. "A lot of us feel like we
have a Charlie Brown and Lucy relationship with the White House," says one Hill
staffer. "They say they want to play ball with us, but then they kick us when
they get a chance." Until recently, the White House has not seen the need to
court Democrats, since the Republicans control both houses of Congress.
Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman has been pushing for a bipartisan "war
council" that could advise the president on strategy. The Washington rumor mill
has suggested Lieberman as a replacement for Rumsfeld. Friends of Rumsfeld's
say he has no intention of stepping down. If Bush were to replace him with a
Democrat, it would send a powerful signal that the days of the almighty
Cheney-Rumsfeld axis were over. But don't hold your breath. "There is this
enormous pressure to change, but he's going to resist that," says a longtime
adviser. "He wants solid people who don't overrespond in a crisis." That was
the approach Bush took after his devastating defeat in the New Hampshire
primary in 2000. "The conventional wisdom after New Hampshire was to drop the
team and start over," says a senior White House aide. "But he brought the team
in and said: 'Let's go down to South Carolina and kick some butt'."
The leader of bush's political team was Karl Rove. Although his legal
problems are not over in the Valerie Plame leak case, Rove has been upbeat and
around town again, reportedly full of ideas for the next three years. Rove has
succeeded in promoting Bush's political fortunes by polarizing—by aiming
at 51 percent and calling it a mandate. It is possible that with some luck
abroad and stroking of Congress at home Bush can take advantage of the GOP
majority in both houses to get some traction on tough issues ahead, like
restoring fiscal discipline. If the economy stays strong and Iraq doesn't fall
apart, the GOP can hang on to Congress in 2006 (and thus in 2007 avoid a
blizzard of subpoenas from Democratic-controlled committees wanting to
investigate questions like whether the administration lied about WMD in Iraq).
Yet it will be hard to please congressmen while cutting their pork barrel, and
as usual, no one seems very eager to cut middle-class entitlement programs. Big
changes that require vision and sacrifice—like an energy and conservation
program to reduce dependency on Middle East oil—do not appear to be on
the drawing board.
True mandates for hard choices come from reaching out and compromising.
Bush's father understood that. Breaking his own "read my lips" promise at the
1988 Republican convention, he raised taxes in 1991 as part of a fiscal-reform
package that was essential to the 1990s economic boom. The tax hike probably
cost the senior Bush a second term in 1992. But it was the right thing to do.
It's very unlikely the son would do the same.
With Holly Bailey, Daniel Klaidman, Eleanor Clift, Michael Hirsh and John
Barry
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