Yesterday, the NYT had an interesting look at a new book, “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush,” by journalist Robert Draper, a former writer for Texas Monthly who spent hours with the president and other White House officials, getting them to open up on a variety of subjects. The most notable revelation in the Times piece was that Bush didn’t intend to disband the Iraqi military after the fall of Saddam, but it happened anyway. Asked why and how he felt about this, Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember…. Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff.”
Today, the WaPo’s Michael Abramowitz follows up with more insights from Draper’s book, most notably the bitter behind-the-scenes conflicts that divided the White House. As Abramowitz said, the book “offers an intimate portrait of a White House racked by more internal dissent and infighting than is commonly portrayed.”
[Draper] 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.”
This isn’t entirely surprising. In Bush’s first term, the conventional wisdom was that the Bush gang was so disciplined, so ideologically in sync, and so loyal to their boss, we’d never hear about the kind of back-biting conflicts that caused occasional strife in the Clinton administration. But even before Draper’s book, this was always more about p.r. than reality — we’ve heard for years about a variety of internal conflicts, including those between Hughes and Rove, and Rumsfeld and Rice.
But Draper’s book apparently highlights just how deep these divisions were.
There was also this gem:
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.”
Really? Frankly, I’ve heard this before, from a couple of different writers, and each time, it strikes me as implausible. Indeed, it sounds like butt-covering of the highest order. Bush’s roof-hitting didn’t include firing Rove as he’d publicly vowed to do, didn’t involve stripping Rove of his security clearance as White House regs mandated, and didn’t appear to adversely affect their relationship at all.
Indeed, by appearances, Bush didn’t care that Rove helped leak the identity of a covert CIA agent during a war at all.
Among some of the other more notable revelations:
* Rove didn’t want to see Bush invite Cheney onto the 2000 ticket: “Selecting Daddy’s top foreign-policy guru ran counter to message. It was worse than a safe pick — it was needy.”
* When weighing firing Rumsfeld in April 2006, Bush polled his top advisors at a private White House dinner. Seven voted to dump Rumsfeld, including Rice, Bolten, Card, and Gillespie. Three voted to keep Rumsfeld, including Bush. (It’s not clear why the president bothered to conduct the poll in the first place.)
* Draper’s book says that John Roberts Jr., now the chief justice, was the one who recommended Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court. Roberts’ office told the Post, “The account is not true.” (I can’t think of a reason why Roberts would recommend Miers, so I find the denial fairly compelling.)
* Rove reportedly expressed concerns about Miers’ nomination, but he was “shouted down.”
* The day before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Bush was quiet during a video briefing from FEMA, in part because he was tired after an 80-minute bike ride.
* Secret Service agents have taken on the task of going to areas where Bush intends to visit, so they can find bike trails the president might find challenging. As Draper puts it, officials have “devoted inordinate energy to satisfying Bush’s need for biking trails.”
* Bolten stripped Rove of his policy role at the White House, because he’d 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.”
Sounds like there are some interesting insights in all of this, some more believable than others.