Chapter 7
RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY
I WAS A BACKBENCHER,” said Condoleezza Rice, recalling her first meeting in the Situation Room. It was February 1989. George H. W. Bush had just become president, and the newly minted director of Soviet and East European affairs sat along the conference room’s wall, furiously scribbling notes as NSC principals discussed “how to deal with this fellow Gorbachev.” This was the first of many NSC gatherings that year to discuss the Soviet Union and its rapidly dissolving empire.
“Every meeting was about ‘There’s been a revolution in Czechoslovakia. Havel’s back in power.’ Or ‘Ceausescu has been executed [in Romania],’” Rice told me. As the months went by, Eastern Bloc countries threw off the Soviet yoke one by one. “It was just dizzying, the speed and thrill of it… We were being carried along by history.”
Dave Radi, a Navy commander who served under Bush 41 as a Sit Room senior duty officer, recalls this period as “euphoric.” A first-generation American whose father arrived at age eight on a boat from Slovakia, Radi “couldn’t have dreamed of working in a place like [the Sit Room], because I didn’t even know it existed.” But as a Navy intelligence officer, he learned about the pipeline from the Pentagon to the White House that sent military staff there for two-year tours. Every day in the room was a “pinch me” moment, Radi says—but the year the Eastern Bloc collapsed was even more special.
The mood in the room was “Can you believe this is happening?” he recalls. As one satellite state after another fell, “I remember going up… to tell General Scowcroft—and I don’t know if it was Bulgaria, Romania, it really doesn’t matter, whichever one was falling—and he said, ‘Can you get me a scorecard? I can’t keep track anymore.’”
In Poland, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity party swept the elections. In Hungary, the government opened its border with Austria to give East Germans passage to the West. In Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov resigned after an astonishing thirty-five years as head of state. In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution propelled playwright Vaclav Havel into power. And in Romania, the brutal Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu was executed by firing squad. All of this happened in a single year—the same year that the Soviets ended their decade-long occupation of Afghanistan and began building their first McDonald’s in Moscow.
The most memorable moment in this democratic tidal wave happened on November 9. Communist party leader Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced at a press conference that “immediately, without delay,” East Germans would be free to travel into West Germany. He had misunderstood new government regulations, which were intended simply to open an application process for emigration. But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, people rushed to the wall. Very quickly, crowds on both sides began hammering at it, knocking off chunks and punching holes into the concrete. Just two years after President Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” the Germans were doing it themselves.
Condi Rice was in the Situation Room during this remarkable time. “One thing that people don’t realize is that we received a really dark letter from Gorbachev, almost a warning… that it was happening too fast,” she recalls. Gorbachev sent the message to French president François Mitterrand, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and President Bush. In it, he warned that with “huge numbers of people moving in both directions, a chaotic situation could easily develop that might have unforeseen consequences… [including] not only the destabilization of the situation in Central Europe, but also in other parts of the world.”
In the Sit Room, Rice felt something was off about the message. “I remember thinking that somebody else had written that letter,” she told me. It sounded like a hostage video written by Soviet hard-liners. And yet, she observed, Gorbachev almost seemed to welcome the reunification.
This was a seismic moment in world affairs, and Rice felt the exhilaration of being in the Sit Room as it happened. “Going into that room when you’re on the right side of history,” she said, “is pretty thrilling.” It’s certainly more enjoyable, as Rice would later learn, than being there while on the wrong side of history.
“One of Bush 41’s triumphs was the way he handled the Berlin Wall, which was at some level the art of doing nothing,” said Bob Gates, who was then serving as deputy national security adviser. In his view, the president wisely sat back and allowed history to take its course, watching as the cycle of events played out. Facing pressure to say more and do more, Bush worked through the dilemmas in his diary. “The press gets all over me,” he wrote. “‘Why aren’t you more excited? Why aren’t you leading it?’” But he was more concerned about provoking a violent Kremlin backlash. “What if there is a big attack—crackdown,” he wrote. “It is a reason to be prudent and be cautious and to stop short of the euphoria some are exhibiting.” His patience paid off. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union fell, marking the end of Communist rule over Eastern Europe.
Yet, several thousand miles farther east, the Chinese Communist Party had—despite similar protests and uprisings—managed to hold on to power. They did so through violence and repression, starting with the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989. For President Bush, who had served as chief of the U.S. Liaison Office (essentially, the ambassador) to the People’s Republic of China, this one was more difficult to sit back and watch. It was personal.
TIANANMEN SQUARE IS a highly symbolic and meaningful place for the Chinese. It stands adjacent to the ornate imperial palace known as the Forbidden City, and it contains significant landmarks such as the National Museum of China and the Great Hall of the People. It’s also the final resting place of Communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, whose embalmed body lies in a glass case within a stately mausoleum.
Starting in mid-April 1989, students began gathering on this historic plaza, agitating for political and economic reforms. The protests grew larger over the next seven weeks, with students setting up tents, staging a hunger strike and constructing an enormous statue dubbed the “Goddess of Democracy.” As Communist and Socialist dictatorships fell across Eastern Europe, it seemed possible the same would happen in China. But at one a.m. on June 4, army tanks rolled in, and Red Army soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons, killing or injuring thousands of people. The square’s concrete bricks ran slick with blood, a scene of carnage that was soon broadcast around the world.
David Sedney was on duty in the Situation Room when the massacre started. “It was night there, but it was also otherwise a slow time for us,” he told me. Because of time zone differences, it was midday on June 3 in Washington when the troops stormed the square. President Bush was at his family’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, but Sedney knew he would want a play-by-play. The Sit Room staff immediately started sending whatever information it had. “We were passing things through Deputy National Security Adviser Gates,” Sedney recalled. “We wouldn’t call the president [directly].”
The Sit Room staff knew it would be a challenge to provide President Bush with adequate information, considering his experience and deep knowledge of the country. As secretary of state James Baker put it, “George Bush was so knowledgeable about China, and so hands-on in managing most aspects of our policy, that even some of our leading Sinologists began referring to him as the government’s desk officer for China.” This led to an unusual moment—one that would never happen today.
“President Bush is calling us when it started, when the tanks are rolling,” recalls Dave Radi. “He wanted to know what avenues they were going down.” In pre-Internet times, this was difficult information to find, and there was discussion of why the president would even need it. “Somebody said, ‘Hey, he was our quasi-ambassador. He rode his damn bike [all over Beijing].’” Unlike other U.S. presidents, this one knew the layout of the Chinese capital intimately, and he wanted to know exactly where the troops and tanks and students were moving in real time.
“Up on Farragut Square… there was a store that sold atlases, maps and everything,” Radi recalled. “The most brilliant move we made was to run up there and buy a detailed tourist map of downtown Beijing, because it enabled us to be quasi-intelligent in speaking to the president.”
The staffers also looked to television for details of the massacre: Nine years after launching, CNN had become the resource in the Sit Room for breaking news. Having instantaneous TV reporting was extremely helpful, but it also presented a dilemma. “We’re trying to do value-add to what’s on TV,” Sedney recalled. “People are watching CNN, so you don’t want to be reporting what people have already seen… So that’s where you try and report in reactions of others, and then bring in the intelligence that we might have that would elucidate things that people can’t tell from TV.”
“You have to be very aware of what’s on CNN,” Sedney adds, “because that’s the main source of information for all policymakers.”
It’s also how Secretary of State Baker learned about the massacre. Baker called his son Jamie to invite him out for a round of golf, and Jamie said, “I don’t think you’re going to be playing any golf today.”
“What do you mean?” Baker asked.
“Well, I’m sitting here watching tanks roll through Tiananmen Square on CNN,” Jamie replied.
Seriously? How was it possible that the secretary of state was learning about an event of such global magnitude from… his son? Moments later, a duty officer at the State Department called with the news, but Baker was so stunned by this sequence of events, he wrote about it in his memoir.
Paper maps, CNN broadcasts, hard copies of reports, and newfangled devices called pagers: These were linchpins of Sit Room technology in the late 1980s. This doesn’t seem like a terribly advanced setup, but that wasn’t due to lack of know-how on the part of the support staff. Gary Bresnahan was now serving in his third presidential administration, and his technological prowess—and the level of his importance in the White House—were on display a few weeks after the massacre.
While President Bush had demonstrated the “art of doing nothing” when the Berlin Wall came down, he acted more forthrightly in the days after Tiananmen Square. Aggrieved by what had happened in Beijing, and eager to communicate directly with Deng Xiaoping to salvage what had been a relatively good relationship, he wrote a long letter to Deng, which Brent Scowcroft personally delivered to the Chinese ambassador. The missive was filled with emotionally direct appeals: Bush wrote that he was reaching out “in the spirit of genuine friendship” with “great reverence for Chinese history, culture and tradition.”
“We must not let this important relationship suffer further,” Bush continued, adding that “We must not let the aftermath of the tragic recent events undermine a vital relationship patiently built up over the past seventeen years.” The president was clearly anxious about relations between the two countries. Yet he was also aware that he couldn’t appear to be placating the dictators. International reaction to the massacre was swift and sharply critical, and Congress endorsed steep sanctions on China. But Bush’s gamble of sending such a plaintive letter did pay off. Deng sent his own private reply within twenty-four hours, inviting Bush to send an envoy to meet with him in Beijing.
The meeting would take place under absolute secrecy, so the president needed to have full trust in whoever was making the trip. He chose Brent Scowcroft and Larry Eagleburger. Scowcroft would bring his secretary, Florence Gantt. Never before disclosed, the fourth person to make the trip was Gary Bresnahan.
On June 30, 1989, an unmarked Air Force C-141 took off from Andrews Air Force Base with a crew of six pilots, none of whom were initially told the mission’s ultimate destination. The four civilians would make the long flight inside an Airstream trailer–style “comfort pallet” installed in the belly of the C-141. To make absolutely sure the mission remained top secret, a military Stratotanker would refuel the plane in midair, to avoid the possibility of any ground crews recognizing Scowcroft or Eagleburger.
“That was a really unique one,” Bresnahan told me, in a comment that could easily apply to the man himself. His job on this mission was to set up and monitor top secret communications between the plane and the president—no small feat in 1989. “I had what they call a patch antenna… You can put a special antenna in there, so you can have UHF Satcom back to somewhere,” he explained. To thwart anyone trying to listen in, Bresnahan—who was trained as a cryptologist—created an encryption key.
“We have a generator that can make this stuff,” he said. “So I had to make a special key for this trip so nobody else had it—even the people in the White House comms that would normally listen.” The only two people who would be able to access this encrypted line were Scowcroft and President Bush. Because the president was in Kennebunkport, someone would have to deliver the encryption key to him.
“I gave it to the WHCA commander,” Bresnahan recalled. “He says, ‘What’s this for?’ I says, ‘Sir, I’m just the messenger’… Even though I was the one that created it, I had to play dumb,” he said with a laugh.
Bresnahan couldn’t shake a strange feeling that the carefully laid plan might still fail. If you’re using satellites to communicate, when you fly around the curvature of the earth, there comes a point when you have to do an “M-hop”—switching from one satellite to another. “You go over one satellite, you come back down to a ground entry point, go back up to another satellite and get back in,” Bresnahan explained. On this trip, that switch would happen through ground-based equipment in Hawaii. If the equipment wasn’t functioning properly for any reason, the crucial connection between Scowcroft and the president would be lost.
So, in the days before the flight, Bresnahan decided to send a colleague who specialized in radio communications to take a look. “I said to his commander, ‘Hey, I need Billy to go out on a maintenance trip to Hawaii.’ He says, ‘When you want him to leave?’ I says, ‘Tomorrow morning.’” And just like that, the commander dispatched the tech from Washington, D.C., to Hawaii. Which turned out to be a good thing, because as Bresnahan had suspected, the equipment there wasn’t up to par. “The amplifier in Hawaii was falling apart,” he recalls. “So it wouldn’t have worked. I was just lucky my intuition said I needed a guy to go to Hawaii to check this out.”
As Bresnahan told me this story, I couldn’t help but think how incredible the whole scenario was. Here was an Army enlistee, a guy from a blue-collar background who grew up about as far from the halls of power as you can get. He became a crucial part of top secret White House operations. He never told a soul—not family, friends, colleagues or even many of his superiors—about what he was doing. Yet he could just pick up a phone and inform a superior officer that he needed a guy to fly to Hawaii, and it happened—no questions asked.
“Well,” Bresnahan said, in his typically understated way, “this commander said, ‘There’s one thing about Gary—just trust him.’ You know? And I don’t know what it was. I was lucky. I don’t know what the trust was.”
It clearly wasn’t luck. The trust would endure through the next four presidencies.
ONE OF THE biggest leaps in Sit Room technology actually came about by chance.
Bresnahan had set up a secure video teleconferencing system (SVTS) facility in the back room of the complex, but no one wanted to use it. “It was used by lower-level coordinating committees once or twice,” Dave Radi recalls. But mostly “it was where we ate our lunch. Because during my two and a half years, nobody would take technology over being face-to-face.”
Richard Clarke, who during this Bush administration was serving as assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, elaborated on the problems. “No one would use it because they thought the White House was recording. And so we signed an MOU [memorandum of understanding] that that wasn’t happening.” Then people started worrying that whenever video conferencing did take place, others might actually be in the room, just out of the camera’s range. “We began a tradition that you would zoom the camera back at the beginning of the meeting,” Clarke said, “so you could see the room and know that there was no one lurking.”
People clearly didn’t trust the SVTS. Sit Room meetings had always taken place in person—why change it now? Just because a new technology existed, did that mean it was better than doing things the old way?
But then, in December 1989, the NSC got its first glimpse of how useful video technology could be. In the Philippines, army forces loyal to ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos launched a coup, attempting to overthrow democratically elected president Corazon Aquino. Should the United States intervene? Or wait and see how the fighting unfolded? With U.S. military bases on Philippine soil and a close relationship with Aquino, the Bush administration needed to respond quickly.
Unfortunately, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Bob Gates were at that moment flying to the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta for a summit with their Russian counterparts. “We decided there’s no point in going to the Sit Room because Brent’s not there. And Bob Gates isn’t there. So let’s just use this video thing,” Clarke recalls. “And we ran that crisis exclusively by video—and it worked.”
As the group discovered, there were substantial benefits to running Sit Room meetings by SVTS. Instead of everyone having to rush to the White House, they could simply connect via video from their own offices. And being in their own offices meant they had instant access to all the information from their departments.
“At the end of it, everybody said, ‘Well, shit—this is the way to do it, because we’re all in our command centers,’” recalls Clarke. “If we’d all been in the Situation Room, we would have been cut off from our sources of information.” Of course, a large part of the Sit Room staff’s job is to gather and sift through information from other departments. But the NSC members liked being able to bring the most critical data to the meeting themselves.
“It really changed the way government did its work,” under secretary of state for political affairs Bob Kimmitt told me. “It didn’t diminish the importance of the Situation Room… but it dispersed or diffused the conversation to internodal rather than one central ‘we’ve gotta be in that room to have this conversation!’” That said, Kimmitt still believed it was important at times to meet face-to-face. “I think the NSC system works best when modern communication, including video conferences, is supplemented by personal look-the-individual-in-the-eye meetings,” he told me.
The Philippines coup attempt marked the beginning of regular use of the SVTS room. Eight months later, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, video conferencing became a crucial tool in formulating the U.S. response.
“There were an untold number of meetings at the deputies level,” John Bolton, who was at that point an assistant secretary of state, told me. “And principals meetings and full NSC meetings that, I think for the first time at a real crisis level, involved a lot of the secure video communications.”
Bolton would join the meetings from his post in the State Department’s operations center. “It was really only Gates and a few other people who were in the Situation Room,” he recalls. The benefit, as he saw it, was the savings in travel time. “How many hours would have been consumed with people traveling to and from the White House?” he asked. “Even just a half mile away at the State Department, it makes a lot of difference than having to drive over, go through the security to get in—I mean, hours are being wasted fooling around with that.”
There was another, more subtle strategic benefit: keeping a lid on crisis events. As Dave Radi put it, “Instead of all the black limousines coming in when there’s a crisis, let’s start using technology, and let’s not have [everyone gathering] in the West Wing. Maybe we can mask things for a little bit, to buy us a little bit of time.”
Any extra time would certainly be useful whenever a geopolitical catastrophe erupted—as one did on August 2, 1990. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
“GATES WAS AWAY on vacation. And Eagleburger was somewhere on vacation in early August. Baker was hunting with [Georgian leader Eduard] Shevardnadze in Mongolia or something goofy like that,” recalls Richard Haass, who was then serving as special assistant to the president. “So we had an all-day interagency meeting over at State… and probably about four or five o’clock in the afternoon, we finally said, ‘These guys ain’t just rehearsing. They’re gonna go in.’”
For two weeks, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had been massing Iraqi troops near the border of Kuwait. Most observers didn’t believe he would actually invade, thinking instead that the show of force was meant to pressure Kuwait into settling a financial dispute between the two nations. Much like Vladimir Putin’s threat to invade Ukraine in 2022, it seemed like a bluff. But on August 1, “all the warning lights went off,” Haass says. “This was the day we realized that what Iraq was doing was not simply coercion, but they were going to invade.”
Haass was tasked with persuading the president to call Saddam directly—a last-ditch effort to prevent him from going in. So he and Brent Scowcroft walked over to the East Wing, where they found the president in the medical office getting a massage.i
“The president’s on the table getting pounded. I’m kind of sitting there, looking every which way,” Haass recalls with a laugh. “It was one of those slightly bizarre moments, a little bit more close-up than you really wanted.” Bush, Scowcroft and Haass discussed the question at hand: How do you reach Saddam Hussein?
“It wasn’t obvious,” Haass says. “You had the crazy Iraqi [information minister], Baghdad Bob… So we were debating how to do it.” By now it was evening in Washington, which meant it was the middle of the night in Baghdad. “Who the hell’s gonna wake up Saddam Hussein at two o’clock in the morning?” Haass says. “This is the way we got the expression ‘shoot the messenger’—it’s not just an expression!”
As the group continued to debate, Bob Kimmitt called from the State Department. It was too late: Saddam had already sent tanks into Kuwait.
“If I remember correctly, Brent and I went down to the Sit Room,” Haass told me. They convened an interagency meeting using SVTS. “That was the night we froze not just Iraqi, but Kuwaiti assets, because we didn’t want Iraq to get hold of Kuwaiti assets and drain the accounts.” This was the start of the Gulf War, a six-month conflict that included the allied military buildup dubbed Desert Shield, followed by the air strikes known as Desert Storm.
“We had what we called the ‘small group,’” Haass recalls. “This was a group of a subset of deputies, with no plus-ones. It was Bob Gates chairing as the deputy national security adviser, and Bob Kimmitt from State, Paul Wolfowitz from the Defense Department, Dave Jeremiah from the Joint Chiefs, Dick Kerr from Intelligence and me. And the six of us were kind of the steering group for the crisis.” This group met several times a day, using SVTS about half the time, according to Haass.
Then there were the “Gang of Eight” meetings—Bush’s war cabinet of Scowcroft, Gates, Baker, defense secretary Dick Cheney, chief of staff John Sununu, vice president Dan Quayle, JCS chair Colin Powell, and director of central intelligence William Webster. Most of those meetings, Haass says, were in the Sit Room—though President Bush rarely set foot in the room himself, choosing instead to meet with the Gang of Eight in the Oval after they’d discussed strategy among themselves. “I can’t remember a single meeting with President Bush 41 in the Sit Room conference room,” Bob Kimmitt told me.
Yet even though he didn’t attend meetings there, President Bush—like LBJ—called the Sit Room first thing every morning, to find out what had happened overnight.
“We did shift change at six a.m.,” says Dave Radi, “and typically he would call at 6:01.” The White House operator would ask for the duty officer’s name, then connect the president. “[I’d] hear the president say, ‘Dave!’ And at a certain point, he would say, ‘Oh, hey! My Navy guy!’… You know, you could just tell that he was still in the rack, trying to figure out what was going on.”
President Bush wasn’t the only one communicating with the Sit Room before the sun came up. Richard Haass actually began living in the complex a few days after Saddam invaded Kuwait.
“My office was over in the Old Executive Office Building,” he recalls. “And I kept getting called to the Oval so often that it just became inefficient. I was spending maybe eighteen hours a day in the office, and it just became easier to be there.” For about a month, Haass slept in the complex. Upon waking, he’d immediately ask for whatever new intel had come in overnight.
“They kept feeding me the cables,” he said. “The only thing I didn’t have time to check was my email. So about a month into the crisis, I realized I had something like ten thousand unopened, unread emails.” He deleted them all in a single stroke, without even bothering to read them.
Haass hardly slept for the first few days after the invasion, and his decision to camp out in the Sit Room led to a comical moment. On Sunday, August 5, President Bush was returning to the White House from Camp David. About a half hour before the helicopter was scheduled to land, Scowcroft asked Haass to meet the president, brief him on the latest developments and give him some talking points. Haass was up to the task, except for one problem: He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, looking more like a disheveled suburban dad than a high-level White House aide.
He ran around the Sit Room asking the guys on duty for clothes. “I borrowed a jacket, borrowed a shirt. I still kind of looked like a mess,” he recalls. Dave Radi helped Haass with his wardrobe, he told me with a laugh, “to make it so that he didn’t look like a total buffoon.”
Haass hurriedly threw together talking points. “I knew what I wanted to get him to do, but I was so tired, I couldn’t physically do it very fast,” he says. “Condi [Rice] was with me, and she got frustrated watching me. She said, ‘This is pathetic. I can’t stand it!’ So she yanked me out of my chair and said, ‘Just dictate.’” Haass talked out his thoughts while Rice typed them up. “It was the only time in my life I’ve had Condoleezza Rice as my secretary,” he says. She ripped the paper out of the typewriter and thrust it into his hands as he hustled out to the South Lawn to meet the president.
Bush descended the steps of the helicopter, and Haass handed him what Rice had typed. When he addressed the waiting reporters, Bush declared, “This will not stand.” Those four words became the most famous of his presidency.
The lines had been drawn. And now it remained to be seen how the Bush administration would function in a time of war.
“WE HAD A rhythm that we set up very soon after Saddam invaded in August of ’90,” Bob Kimmitt told me. Deputies committee meeting, using SVTS, at 10:30 a.m. Then Small Group meeting in the Sit Room at noon. Gang of Eight meeting in the Oval Office right after that. Then more deputies meetings, policy coordination committee meetings, and finally an all-hands gathering at the State Department at 8:00 p.m.
“From August, certainly through December or early January, that was our rhythm,” Kimmitt recalls. “Five days a week.”
Kimmitt was doing this at State. Others were doing the same at their own home departments—CIA, Defense, all the major agencies. A huge funnel of information flowed down, all morning long, into the Sit Room and then eventually to the president. Decisions got made. And then that information started flowing out, going back to the departments and agencies. It was like an hourglass, I ventured.
“It is an hourglass,” Kimmitt agreed. “And the center of the hourglass was the Oval Office. But just above it and below it was the Sit Room.”
In almost every account of the Bush 41 White House, and in multiple interviews I conducted for this book, I heard the same sentiments expressed over and over: Bush’s team worked together incredibly well. The Situation Room functioned at peak performance. The decision-making process was efficient and professional. It’s difficult to find anyone who has a bad recollection of working in the first Bush administration.
According to Richard Haass, it all flowed from the top. “This worked well,” he told me, “because Bush 41 assembled really good people who got along.” That included one man in particular who was pivotal to the smooth functioning of the administration. “Scowcroft played a critical role,” Haass recalls. “Scowcroft had the trust and respect of everybody, whether they agreed or not.”
As we’ve seen, Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft is one of those key people who keeps popping up in administration after administration. He trained as an Air Force fighter pilot but pivoted to a ground-based career path after crash-landing his jet in 1949. Slight of stature, modest by nature, and possessed of an ability to get along with anyone anywhere, Scowcroft quickly moved up the ranks in a variety of jobs, working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, teaching at the Air Force Academy and West Point, and serving overseas.
He got a White House job during the Nixon administration, when he was tapped as military assistant to the president. He served as deputy national security adviser under Presidents Nixon and Ford, then as national security adviser under Ford and George H. W. Bush. During the Reagan administration, he served on the Tower Commission that investigated the Iran-Contra affair—which is one reason he was so valuable to subsequent administrations. Bush 41 brought him in as a close friend and alter ego to right the ship. Scowcroft had helped uncover the excesses of Oliver North and the parallel Sit Room, so he was able to use that knowledge to streamline the Bush White House’s process.
“If you looked up in a dictionary ‘perfect national security adviser,’ it would have been Brent,” Condi Rice told me. “He was self-effacing. I think he could have walked down the streets in Washington, D.C., and nobody would have known who he was.” Scowcroft promised secretary of state James Baker that he wouldn’t appear on television or deliver a speech before clearing it with Baker. And unlike the domineering Henry Kissinger, who hoarded private time with President Nixon, Scowcroft, Rice observes, was “great at making sure that the secretaries were not just informed, but had a chance to talk to the president.” He was a classic honest broker. To build trust, he held a weekly breakfast with Baker and Dick Cheney—no aides allowed. “He was the gold standard,” Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley told me.
“My first time I went down there, I kept calling him ‘sir,’ because I was in the Army and he’s a retired general,” recalls former NSC staffer Jane Lute, who is one of the very few people to have shared with a spouse the experience of serving in the Situation Room (hers is former deputy national security adviser and NATO ambassador Doug Lute). “And [Scowcroft’s deputy Bob] Gates was like, ‘Will you knock that off?’”
Under the first Bush administration, Lute says, the NSC ran like a well-oiled machine. “It was not only that Brent and Bush 41 had known each other and had worked together,” she said, “but that both of them had very deep foreign policy and political instincts.”
John Bolton agrees. “That was really the legendary period of how the thing functioned and how it was used,” he told me, going on to compare the Bush team to the 1927 Yankees.
“I’m apolitical here. Let’s just make that clear,” Dave Radi said. “But they were the right men at the right time—men or women—for what was going on, not just with Iraq, but the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen and everything else.”
TWO INCIDENTS IN the Situation Room give a flavor of how the Bush administration functioned during wartime.
In the first, on October 11, 1990, the NSC core group was meeting to hear General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf’s plan for how to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Schwarzkopf wanted to send U.S. ground troops straight up from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, confronting the Iraqi army head-on, what national security professionals call “force on force.”
Bush and Scowcroft were, to put it mildly, unimpressed with this plan. In the book they co-authored, A World Transformed, Scowcroft wrote simply that he “was appalled with the presentation.” John Bolton gave me a more colorful description of the meeting, even though he wasn’t personally there; this was how Larry Eagleburger recounted it to him:
Everybody’s sort of sitting there listening, and you know, Schwarzkopf is this big bear of a guy in a small room with a loud voice, a lot of charts…
And then all of a sudden this little voice from little Brent Scowcroft pipes up and he says, “Well, Norm, why are you going force on force?” And he said Schwarzkopf kind of exploded. And then Bush 41 said, “Yeah. Why are you going force on force?” And that was the end of Schwarzkopf Plan A. They had to go back and do Plan B.
This story hearkens back to JFK’s advice to “watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men, their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.” Scowcroft stuck his neck out for his boss, and Bush then pushed back on Schwarzkopf. The two worked in tandem to send the general back to the drawing board.
The second incident took place two weeks later, on October 30, 1990. Once again, the NSC core group was meeting in the Sit Room, this time to decide whether sanctions or military force was the better option for getting Saddam out of Kuwait. With more than 200,000 U.S. troops in the region, we had enough force to go in. But according to Bob Gates, Schwarzkopf now opposed the plan. Basically, his bluff had been called—and when military leaders don’t want to do something, they try to make it sound impossible, or a bloodbath in the making, or both.
As Schwarzkopf’s second-in-command briefed the group, President Bush asked, “What would it take for you to take the offensive and liberate Kuwait?” Gates described to me what happened next:
This guy does the usual military thing—and it’s a three-star general. And he says, “Well, Mr. President, here’s what it would take. Six aircraft carrier strike groups. You would have to move the Seventh Corps out of Germany to Saudi Arabia. They’ve been there since 1945. They’re the two heaviest divisions in the U.S. Army. You’d have to paint ’em all tan [for desert camouflage]… And by the way”—and this is, like, a week before the midterms—“you’ll have to activate the National Guard and Reserves.”
And to the day I die, I will never forget. Bush stood up. He pointed at Dick Cheney and said, “You’ve got it. Let me know if you need more.” And walked out of the room.
A presidential moment. Bush called the military’s bluff, more than doubling the number of troops from 225,000 to half a million, without even hesitating.
President Bush was “very comfortable making decisions,” Haass told me. “He didn’t need thirteen meetings on an issue. And he was very comfortable with the use of force, maybe because he was a combat veteran.”
This was the tough, decisive side of George H. W. Bush. But what many Sit Room staffers remember best is his kinder, gentler side. Unlike some presidents, Bush 41 truly enjoyed interacting with the men and women who worked so hard for him. He didn’t approach them as cogs in a machine; he appreciated their knowledge and expertise and spoke with them as equals. Kevin O’Connell, who served in the Sit Room during the Gulf War, recalls that “General Scowcroft and his deputy, Bob Gates, believed that the person with the most knowledge about a situation should be the one talking to the president… For an intelligence officer, it was a pleasure to brief him because he understood everything.”
In fact, Bush was so respectful of the Sit Room, he actually asked permission to enter when he dropped by one Saturday early in his administration. The room is equipped with a camera and phone outside the door, and that morning, he picked up the receiver and said, “This is the president. May I come in?” The startled secretary, Gilda Kay, buzzed him in.
For staffers who had served during the Reagan administration, the Bush family’s informality was at first jarring. Dave Radi described the difference in demeanor between the two First Ladies. “I had seen Mrs. Reagan a couple of times. And you know, talk about someone who was impeccably dressed. And the unspoken word was, don’t try to talk, don’t make eye contact.” Then, a few weeks into Bush 41, he saw Barbara Bush. “She had come down the steps, dog in tow, with a couple of grandkids. And she was in sweats. And I’m embarrassed to say that my first reaction was, ‘Lady, that’s not proper dress.’”
But the Bushes treated the White House as their home. They walked the dogs, hung out with their family, and invited friends to movie nights in the screening room. And sometimes, they invited Sit Room staffers there, too.
“On a slow Saturday, Barbara would call over and say, ‘Hey, y’all want to watch a movie with us?’” recalls Dave Sedney. “And if we weren’t that busy, we’d send somebody over.” This made for some incredible memories for staffers. They’d get to watch the movie with President and Mrs. Bush, enjoy some popcorn, and chat with their hosts about what was going on in the world.
Dave Radi says that the president “seemed to get bored on the weekends, especially when he and Mrs. Bush stayed at the White House instead of going to Camp David.” Bush would call down to the Sit Room and ask for “funny cables,” he recalls. “Hey, I know I appointed some ambassadors that are funny as hell,” he’d say. “Bring me some stuff to read!” Radi would carry a stack of cables up to the little study off the Oval Office. Even before he got there, he could hear the president’s choice of music wafting down the corridor. “He’d be in that private study blasting the most godawful country and western,” Radi says with a laugh.
When Radi’s son was born, Bush surprised him with a gift. “We probably were the lowest level of life in the West Wing, but the president brought down a bottle of champagne for me, for my son,” he says, still sounding amazed at the memory. And at an NSC picnic the following year, Radi’s son apparently decided he was entitled to the president’s own beverage as well. “I’m holding my son. The president is drinking,” recalls Radi. “The next thing I know, he puts his hand in the president’s beer.” Radi was mortified, but Bush was unfazed. “He takes his little hand out and says, ‘Now, can’t a man have a beer?’” Seeing how embarrassed Radi and his wife were, he laughed. “You two calm down! I’m a grandparent.”
My favorite story, though, comes from Gary Bresnahan. He was in Kennebunkport, hooking up communications equipment in the attic of the president’s house with another technician. Bresnahan sent his colleague back to their hotel to get a piece of equipment they’d forgotten, and the guy seemed to be taking forever. After forty-five minutes or so, Bresnahan finally heard footsteps behind him. He wheeled around and barked, “Where the fuck you been?!” To his shock, he found himself nose to nose with the president of the United States.
“Well, I didn’t know I took so long,” Bush said, not missing a beat.
Bresnahan laughs. “I’m pissing my pants—I still piss my pants when I tell the story. I literally said the F-word to the boss, right in front of his face.”
THE BUSH 41 team was tight-knit, efficient and superb at handling foreign policy. Yet they learned the same lesson handed to Winston Churchill after World War II: Leaders don’t always get rewarded politically for winning a war.
I had a front-row seat to the events that defined—and ultimately defeated—the Bush presidency. In the summer of 1989, I was offered a dream job as executive floor assistant to House majority leader Richard Gephardt. In that role, I would be his shadow, his surrogate and his eyes and ears in the Capitol. There was a bonus, too. Gephardt was planning on running for president in 1992, and I would be in on the ground floor of his campaign.
Gephardt seemed well positioned during the budget fight of 1990. He and his fellow Democratic leaders, Speaker Tom Foley and Senate majority leader George Mitchell, refused to negotiate until President Bush broke his signature “Read my lips: no new taxes” promise from the 1988 campaign. To his credit, Bush agreed to a deal that raised taxes, for the sake of reaching a bipartisan agreement to reduce the budget deficit. But he paid a high price. During the fall of 1990, as he was building an Iraq war coalition abroad, his GOP coalition in Congress was cracking apart.
All that political trouble seemed to be swept away by the swift victory in the Gulf War. By the summer of 1991, Bush was again riding high, with approval ratings near 90 percent. A series of big-name Democrats, including my boss, Gephardt, backed away from challenging him. Which created an opening for Bill Clinton—and me.
I joined Clinton’s campaign that fall, getting in literally on the ground floor: Our headquarters was a storefront paint shop in downtown Little Rock. From the moment we met, I could tell he was a political genius; in thirty minutes, he mapped out how the primary campaign might unfold, in a manner that matched almost exactly what happened. Clinton hammered Bush on his economic record, declaring that America needed a president who “cares as much about the Middle West as the Middle East.” It was a famously rocky campaign, with Clinton having to fight through sex scandals and questions about the draft, but he ultimately cruised to victory on the promise of change after twelve years of Republican presidents.
Back at the White House, Brent Scowcroft gathered the NSC staff in Room 208 of the Old Executive Office Building—the same room where Oliver North had set up his Iran-Contra operation. In an essay she wrote for the book Transforming Our World, Jane Lute recalled the scene: He “took in the whole of the room and minced no words,” before announcing, “We’ve all been fired.” Scowcroft being Scowcroft, he looked for the silver lining. He told the group that the loss wasn’t due to any foreign policy issues, then remarked dryly, “I suppose we can take some satisfaction in that.”
Inauguration Day came two months later. I was thirty-one years old and hours away from becoming White House communications director, a role that would prove more demanding and exhausting than I could ever have imagined. We had no idea what we were in for, but that morning at Blair House, as we toiled over Clinton’s inaugural speech, I saw in Brent Scowcroft’s face how very emotional and draining life in the White House could be—and how difficult it was to leave.
He walked into Blair House to brief the incoming president and deliver the nuclear codes, his final official duty. Then Scowcroft—the stalwart and stoic adviser who had bolstered the morale of Sit Room staffers after the defeats of Bush and Ford and the resignation of Nixon—walked out of Blair House alone in a rumpled raincoat and fedora, tears in his eyes.
Footnotes
i In his book with Scowcroft, A World Transformed, Bush wrote that he was getting heat treatment for sore shoulders after hitting a bucket of golf balls. But Haass swears he was lying on a table getting a massage.