[NYTr] Book Tells of Dissent in Bush's Inner Circle

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Washington Post - Sep 3, 2007 via rick kissell
http://www.washingtonpost.com


Book Tells of Dissent in Bush's Inner Circle

White House Granted Author Unusual Access

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer

Karl Rove told George W. Bush before the 2000 election that it was a
bad idea to name Richard B. Cheney as his running mate, and Rove later 
raised objections to the nomination of Harriet E. 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 G. 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 A. Alito Jr. was 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 spokeswoman 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, Tex., 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 D. 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 H. 
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 B.
Bolten, the outgoing chief, Andrew H. 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 J. 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 yesterday 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 Dec. 12, 2006,
and at the conclusion, the president agreed to another interview. In
one of the interviews, he looked ahead to his post-presidency, 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 Bill 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 U.N."