|
WASHIGTON—Karl
Rove told George W. Bush before the 2000 election that it
was a bad idea to name Dick Cheney as his running mate,
and Rove later raised objections to the nomination of
Harriet 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 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 Alito Jr. was then selected and confirmed for
the seat.
Roberts
rejected Draper’s report when asked about it last night.
“The
account is not true,” said Supreme Court spokesman 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, Texas, 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 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 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 Bolten, the outgoing chief, Andrew
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 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 Sunday 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 December 12, 2006, and at the conclusion, the President
agreed to another interview. In one of the interviews, he
looked ahead to his postpresidency, 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 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 UN.” |
