29

THE BROKEN PROCESS

GEORGE W. BUSH’S election as the nation’s forty-third president propelled Scowcroft back into national view.

George Walker Bush was determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes. He wasn’t going to raise taxes. He wasn’t going to back down before Congress or break a campaign promise. He wasn’t going to go to war and leave the job unfinished. He wasn’t going to be a one-term president. And he certainly wasn’t going to let others think of him as a wimp. “Bush 43 was highly resistant to being instructed by his father on how to deal with issues,” one former US ambassador said. “There was a rebellious streak there.” There was also family honor at stake: George H. W. Bush hadn’t finished the race, as he wrote one of his brothers after the 1992 election. Now his eldest son would take over.⁵⁵

When it came to foreign policy, the former Texas governor and managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team needed a tutor. He chose Condoleezza Rice. He initially became acquainted with Rice through her close friendship with his father and Brent Scowcroft, and they became better acquainted during her summer visits to the Bush family compound at Walker Point. Not only did he find her to be smart, articulate, and talented, they shared interests in staying fit and in sports—Rice had dated several football players—and both spoke using sports metaphors. They also shared a devout Christianity.

So when George W. Bush was readying his run for the presidency in 1999, he asked Rice to lead his foreign policy team. She formed a group of advisers to hammer out and then draft the campaign’s foreign policy positions. The group included Richard Armitage, Bob Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim, and Bob Zoellick. Although Rice wasn’t the most senior of the group—Rice named them the “Vulcans,” after the Roman god of fire, Vulcan, whose statue towered over her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama—she called herself the quarterback and was skilled at managing the group’s different personalities.

Five days after the US Supreme Court awarded George W. Bush Florida and thus the national election, the president-elect announced that Rice would be his national security advisor, assuming the job that had previously been held by her mentor. Little wonder, then, that she said she wanted to model her role as national security advisor on Scowcroft’s performance in office.

Like her former boss, she didn’t believe the national security advisor should take an active policy-making role or upstage the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the secretary of the treasury, the director of intelligence, or other foreign policy principals. She didn’t follow the policy-making approach of Kissinger or Brzezinski, nor the adventurism of McFarlane or Poindexter. Rather, she saw her new role as that of a dedicated adviser and assistant to the president.56

Although George W. Bush appointed several other former members of his father’s staff to positions in his presidency, including Blackwill, Hadley, Wolfowitz, and Zoellick, he declined to have either Baker or Scowcroft play a significant role. Neither would he ask Baker, Scowcroft, or his father for advice; that was why he had Rice, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld. “You’re not going to see any Jim Bakers around me when I’m in office,” he told reporters early in his campaign.⁵⁷

For all of President Bush’s stated intentions of proceeding without the help of his father’s two closest advisers, he wouldn’t have become president without Baker, who was indispensable at securing Florida for the Bush campaign. And only a few months later, Bush had to call on Scowcroft to help with settling the Hainan Island incident of April 1, when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a Navy EP-3, an NSA spy plane, forcing the US aircraft to land on Hainan Island, where its crew was held captive and the airplane disassembled. After the incident, President Bush spoke out against Chinese aggression and, in reference to the Taiwan Relations Act, said the United States would do “whatever it takes” to help Taiwan to defend itself in the event that it was attacked. Because Bush in his comments did not explain the conditions of the United States’ defense of Taiwan—the agreement didn’t hold if Taiwan initiated conflict—Chinese leaders were upset and viewed the president’s message as belligerent. In order to clarify the US position, mollify the Chinese, and “tamp this down,” Rice advised Bush to ask for Scowcroft’s help. Scowcroft quietly traveled to Beijing, met with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, and the foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, and explained that the United States remained committed to a one-China policy. He reassured them that the United States was under no obligation to act if Taiwan initiated hostilities. What had begun as a “very bad first year” for the Bush administration had improved, Scowcroft later told an audience at the US Institute for Peace—although he did not tell the audience that this was partly the result of his own intervention—since the administration was now viewing China “with more balance.”58

Soon afterward, Bush, on the recommendation of DCI George Tenet and Rice, asked Scowcroft to advise him on restructuring the intelligence community. Bush had issued National Security Presidential Directive 5 (NSPD 5) on May 9, 2001, authorizing a ninety-day review of intelligence. The twelve-member committee and its twenty-five-person staff were to conduct an external review of the intelligence community, to be chaired by Scowcroft; a separate internal review, to be chaired by Joan Dempsey, would complement the external review. Both reviews, which shared the same staff, were tasked to reevaluate the organization and functioning of the US intelligence community, so as to “ensure that U.S. intelligence capabilities are honed to serve us on a wide range of critical challenges that face us now and in the future.” According to a White House press statement, the reviews were to “challenge the status quo and explore new and innovative techniques, systems, practices and processes” of foreign intelligence.⁵⁹

Although Tenet could select the members of both panels (Rice joined Tenet in appointing the members of the external board), the DCI was also wary of the possibility that an independent review board might report findings that would unduly upset the status quo and thereby potentially weaken the Agency and damage the DCI’s authority. Neither was Dempsey enthusiastic about the internal review, according to a member of the external review board. But Scowcroft “took it very seriously.” Not only did he do “whatever he was asked with his usual thoroughness,” the Wall Street Journal’s Ron Suskind reports, he “dove into the task with a young man’s energy.”⁶⁰

George W. Bush had initially gotten to know Scowcroft through Brent’s close association with his father. The younger Bush had helped on his father’s campaigns, had assisted the White House in the early 1990s, and had had the chance to get better acquainted with Scowcroft during his visits to Kennebunkport. Scowcroft admitted that he didn’t know Bush’s eldest son very well, though his impression of him as a college student was that he was “kind of a smart aleck and had a pretty sharp temper and didn’t seem to me to be much like his father.” Scowcroft liked the younger Bush’s bipartisanship when he was governor of Texas, though, and he supported his campaign for the presidency. During the 2000 presidential campaign, the two men spent three hours together on a porch in President Mubarak’s guesthouse in Cairo (the younger Bush was en route to Israel), where the two of them had a friendly, constructive visit. While Scowcroft was aware of the possibility that Bush 43 might hire Rice for his new administration, the newly elected president did not discuss it with him.61

The president gave Scowcroft further responsibility in August 2001, again following Rice’s recommendation: Bush asked him to head the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (work related to, though separate from, his chairmanship of the intelligence external review board). PFIAB was established during the Eisenhower presidency as a nonpartisan board that could offer the president expert and impartial advice on the conduct of foreign intelligence. Yet the actual influence exerted by PFIAB depended both on whom the president appointed to the board and on how the president intended to use the sixteen-member board.

Scowcroft’s work on the two boards revealed that the intelligence agencies had poor morale after years of cutbacks and underfunded budgets. Offices were equipped with outdated technology—not all of the offices had computers as of early 2001, for instance—and the huge National Security Agency was suffering brownouts because of the power demands of its massive computers. Virtually every agency in the intelligence community as of 2000 was “on the verge of collapse,” according to one former senior intelligence official.⁶² There was some support among managers in the CIA and related agencies for reform, then.

Scowcroft was in a position to make things happen. With his outstanding reputation, political skills, bureaucratic savvy, and knowledge of how Washington worked, he had a good chance of significantly reforming the intelligence community. Members of the intelligence community responded favorably to Scowcroft’s appointment as the chairman of the NSPD 5 review board; they saw him as a knowledgeable, sympathetic supporter of the community. As national security advisor, he had sanctioned and overseen covert operations and the intelligence community more generally, so he understood what could be expected in the collection and analysis of intelligence. And while there are many demanding consumers of foreign intelligence in Washington, there are relatively few who are at once supportive, skeptical, pragmatic, and judicious.⁶³

The members of the panel convened every two weeks in a secure space on K Street. At the board’s first meeting on July 3, Scowcroft said that terrorism had to be the nation’s highest national security priority, but that the United States had not yet come to grips with the matter. The commissioners then discussed the Federal Aviation Administration and talked “more broadly [of matters] outside of the normal intelligence community,” including domestic intelligence, the board’s chief of staff reported. There was a general recognition that “the whole concept of central intelligence had broken down. And largely because of budgetary reasons,” because the Department of Defense “controls so much of the budget.”64

A preliminary draft of the report was ready by August, and Scowcroft presented it to Vice President Dick Cheney, who “mostly listened, and seemed to agree,” Suskind writes. “It was a cordial meeting.”⁶⁵ So Scowcroft and the other board members went back to work to revise and polish their report.

Notwithstanding his seniority and reputation, Scowcroft ran things with a light touch, according to members of the commission, and delegated as much as he could—especially to David Jeremiah, who effectively served as the vice chairman (officially, there was no deputy or vice chairman). Scowcroft “was very down to earth, very easy to work with,” said one of his staff members. Even when traveling across Washington in muggy summer weather, for example, he insisted on going by Metro rather than taking up a colleague’s offer to let him use a government car.⁶⁶

The panel’s work was interrupted when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Towers and attacked the Pentagon. Scowcroft was in the Andrews Air Force Base departure lounge on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, waiting to fly out to Offutt Air Force Base. Offutt AFB, just south of Omaha, Nebraska, was the headquarters of the Strategic Command (STRATCOM), and Scowcroft was the chairman of a study commissioned by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The purpose of the “end-to-end review,” something that the Pentagon did every four years, was to systematically survey the entire complex of US nuclear weapons policy, from conceptualization to the laboratory to production, deployment, maintenance, and disposition of old nuclear weapons.⁶⁷

In the days immediately before September 11, the Pentagon had been conducting a series of war games under the code names Vigilant Guardian, Northern Guardian, and Global Guardian. The aim of the war games was to test US defense capabilities against different kinds of hypothetical strategic attacks. Because of the exercises and because of Scowcroft’s role as the chair of the quadrennial nuclear weapons study, he was going out to STRATCOM headquarters to monitor this “practice Armageddon.” Scowcroft and those accompanying him were to fly out on one of STRATCOM’s four E-4Bs so they could witness the operations of the United States’ military defenses against airborne strategic attacks. (The E-4Bs are adapted Boeing 747-200s that house the National Emergency Airborne Command Post. Each aircraft is essentially a mobile Pentagon, and provides its personnel the capability to coordinate the actions of civilian authorities, issue military orders, and direct forces—command, control, and communications, or “C3.” During the Cold War, the E-4Bs were called “doomsday planes,” since their purpose was to allow the US government to keep functioning in the event of a nuclear exchange.)68

It was while Scowcroft was waiting at Andrews AFB to board the E-4B that he learned an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. He assumed it was an accident, so he and the other passengers climbed aboard the aircraft and were already airborne when the second plane hit the South Tower. Scowcroft then realized that the two crashes were acts of terrorism, and his first thoughts were of the sheer enormity of the attacks and the immense tragedy.⁶⁹ (It was probably Scowcroft’s large white E-4B, with its distinct hump behind the upper deck, that was the mystery airplane the television networks reported flying over Washington, DC, that morning, that people photographed, and that the counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke and others have written about.)⁷⁰

Scowcroft’s aircraft continued to Offutt, where he proceeded to STRATCOM headquarters, a fortified bunker sixty feet underground. There he spent the next several hours witnessing the Air Force’s desperate scramble to identify and track the hundreds of aircraft over American skies. He headed back to Washington, DC, later that day, taking off from Offutt at about the same time President Bush was landing in Omaha (after having been airborne since leaving Florida earlier that day). While being driven back into Washington from Andrews AFB, Scowcroft saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon.⁷¹

Scowcroft considered the attacks to be the culmination of a logical progression dating back to the first attempt on the World Trade Center towers in 1993, followed by the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and the suicide attack on the USS Cole in October 2000. So he didn’t think the attacks of September 11 changed the world; what had changed, he thought, was how the United States now related to the world.⁷²

The nine-month-old Bush administration now had to manage that change. George W. Bush and his advisers needed to decide what the awful events signified and how the United States would respond.

The decision to go to war against Iraq in the aftermath of the successful campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan manifested a fact common to politics everywhere: that it’s much easier to achieve political agreement on the “what” of policy than on the “why.” Agreement on the “what” is relatively straightforward: reaching a consensus on a particular policy. But agreement on the “why” demands a consensus on matters much less amenable to agreement: on the logic of cause-and-effect relationship, on the likely consequences that follow from actions, and on assumptions on ideology and ultimate beliefs.

It’s not exactly clear what precise mix of motives led George W. Bush to make the decision he did. There was Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, as many in the Bush administration believed and most of the American public assumed. There were Iraq’s supposed ties to Al Qaeda and its support of terrorism, as Dick Cheney, Doug Feith, and others claimed. There was the idea that a liberated Iraq could become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, serving as a precursor to and harbinger of other such transformations in the region, as Paul Wolfowitz and others thought.73 Iraq also had the second-largest oil reserves in the Middle East (and the world) as Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, and others pointed out.⁷⁴ Furthermore, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was in Israel’s interest, influential neoconservatives believed, given Saddam Hussein’s enmity toward Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric.⁷⁵ And there was President Bush’s wish to complete what his father had started—to rid the Middle East of Saddam and his Ba’ath government. As George W. Bush told Senate minority leader Tom Daschle in early 2003, “The sonofabitch tried to kill my father.”⁷⁶

Domestic politics played a role as well. While the 2004 election was predominantly Karl Rove’s concern, it was of no minor interest to the president and others in the White House. George W. Bush could achieve what his father had not been able to. Scowcroft, too, speculated that reelection may have been the foremost reason for the Bush administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq: “I’m not sure how much the President is driven by the [neoconservatives] and how much he is driven by wanting to be re-elected—maybe more than most Presidents do—because his father was defeated,” he said. “And I think it’s not impossible that, freed from that demand, he might behave somewhat differently.”⁷⁷

Neither is it clear if administration officials genuinely believed the various views they espoused. Some officials were probably sincere in their arguments, while others were very possibly being sophistic in theirs.

Removing Saddam from power had been discussed even before George W. Bush’s administration took office. The Project for a New American Century had previously advocated Saddam’s removal, and in September 1998 President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law. “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq,” the act read, “and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” With Bush 43 in office, those hoping for Saddam’s removal had their chance. The question was when. Revealingly, the administration’s first NSC meeting, in January 2001, was on ridding Iraq of its president. And barely two weeks after the inauguration, on February 7, Rice chaired a Principals Committee meeting to discuss Iraq. At the meeting it was decided to establish an Iraq Operations Group within the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which was to plan for covert operations that might be part of a larger solution for regime change in Iraq.78

Within a few hours of the September 11 attacks, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and other neoconservatives began calling for the removal of the Iraqi government, and a few days later the Bush White House began to develop plans for a possible war against Iraq.

With the focus of Washington suddenly on terrorism, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq, attention turned away from the reform of the intelligence community—especially since any comprehensive reform would have been contentious. Tenet “brought [the NSPD 5 review] to a halt. He said we’re done.” But Scowcroft and others on the board thought “it was a waste not to continue” their work. Scowcroft talked to Rice, and she prevailed on Tenet to allow the study to continue (although Dempsey’s internal board was not revived). Rice and Tenet then redirected the external review “to think about how intelligence supports homeland security.”⁷⁹

The board members finished revisions on their twenty-page report, and Scowcroft himself carefully attended to the exact phrasing of the text. The report didn’t differ much from their previous draft, interestingly, because the board had previously discussed the possibility of a horrific incident resulting from a threat that was “hard to monitor, hard to assess,” in Jeremiah’s words.⁸⁰ The report did criticize the organization and processing of intelligence—and, of course, failures in the handling of intelligence had enabled 9/11 to occur. In particular, the report condemned the imbalance within the intelligence community: the fact that the military controlled the overwhelming majority of the intelligence budget—about 85 percent—and the CIA only 10 percent (the remaining 5 percent being divided among the State, Treasury, and Energy Departments as well as several other departments and agencies).

The report recommended that the three large independent agencies controlled by the Department of Defense—the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), National Security Agency (NSA), and National Imagery and Mapping Office (NIMO)—come under the administration of a new director of intelligence with statutory responsibility over the whole intelligence community. Scowcroft also recommended the establishment of a “massive intelligence research library,” where all data would be assembled and available to those with the proper levels of security clearance, since under the existing system the information that constitutes the raw material of intelligence was dispersed among more than a dozen different agencies. Before September 11, for example, US officials had to rely on at least nine different terrorist watch lists, so when the CIA lost track of two of the terrorists, the terrorists had already made it through US customs by the time the CIA released their names to other agencies. The FBI likewise had information on the terrorists in the months leading up to September 11, but hadn’t shared its data with other federal agencies.81

With a draft of their report in hand, Scowcroft and Jeremiah made the rounds. They first briefed Cheney, and this time the vice president told them they were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. So Scowcroft asked Cheney whether he and his fellow board members should bother to proceed. The vice president disingenuously told him to “go ahead” and brief Bush’s other top advisers, knowing full well, just as Scowcroft surely did, that the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was as dead set against any lessening of the Pentagon’s control as he was.⁸²

Scowcroft presented the board’s findings to Secretary of State Colin Powell, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Powell wished them luck, although he told them he didn’t think the proposal would go far. Rumsfeld, of course, was opposed; in fact, the Department of Defense had opposed a proposed reorganization of the intelligence community back in the mid-1990s. And when Scowcroft and Jeremiah spoke to Ashcroft, they “got our heads handed to [them] in a basket,” because they’d talked to the FBI—a unit within the Department of Justice, of course—before meeting with the attorney general.⁸³

There was nonetheless a general consensus among Bush administration officials on the need to centralize intelligence for the purposes of command and control. Opinions diverged over where that centralizing should occur, whether in the Pentagon (which is what Rumsfeld wanted) or in a new office, that of an independent director of national intelligence, which would oversee the CIA, the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies, and the other agencies involved in intelligence (which is what Scowcroft wanted). As it was, however, the managerial responsibility over the intelligence community—the control over personnel, budgets, and organizational structure, in other words—was at odds with the responsibility for the intelligence itself, including how intelligence was collected, who or which offices were in possession of which information, how intelligence was to be analyzed, and where and how it was to be aggregated and dispersed.

However, Tenet and others in the intelligence community were not willing to agree to any significant changes in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. And neither President Bush nor any of his advisers, including his national security advisor, were willing to lead a reform effort. What “fell by the wayside was community responsibility,” the chief of staff for the external review board, Kevin Scheid, said. “You didn’t have that cross-community intelligence integration necessary that would have helped us, given us a fighting chance before 9/11.”84 So when Scowcroft and Jeremiah presented the board’s recommendations at an NSC meeting, Rumsfeld and Cheney both strongly opposed Scowcroft’s proposed reorganization of the intelligence community, and their judgments carried the day. Neither man gave the report a fair chance in Scowcroft’s view. He recalled telling Rumsfeld, “Don, you know if our positions were reversed you would be making this same suggestion to me.”⁸⁵

Scowcroft felt “he was being set up for failure or irrelevance,” Unger reports.⁸⁶ Cheney’s treatment of Scowcroft and the NSPD 5 report alienated Scowcroft from his White House partner in the Ford administration, his close colleague from the first Bush White House, and his erstwhile friend. The two were never again close. It was this event, in the view of two of Scowcroft’s closest friends, Bill Gulley and Arnold Kanter, and not the later decision to go to war against Iraq, that caused the break between Scowcroft and Cheney.⁸⁷

Equally disappointing to Scowcroft was Rice’s passivity with respect to intelligence reform. The members of the panel had expected to be working closely with her, anticipating that as national security advisor she would be deeply involved with their efforts. Instead, she did not “show any particular interest” in what was going on, according to Jeremiah, and opted to stay on the sidelines.

The establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was the “one big idea” that carried over from the intelligence review board to the independent 9/11 Commission. The Homeland Security Act of November 2002 created the DNI position, a role above the CIA director and the heads of the other intelligence chiefs (including the new under secretary of defense for intelligence). The new DNI would henceforth report directly to the president, not unlike the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who was elevated within the military as a result of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act). But the new arrangement only added another layer of bureaucracy rather than imposing more effective control, since the DNI didn’t exert centralized control of either the personnel or the budget of the intelligence community. Not only was the CIA still relatively autonomous, but four-fifths of the intelligence community budget, including the funding for the NRO, NSA, and NIMO remained in the hands of the Department of Defense.88

The Homeland Security Act did set up a national center for counterterrorism staffed with personnel from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies, just as the report by Scowcroft’s intelligence review board had recommended and just as Scowcroft had discussed as chair of PFIAB. Philip Zelikow, Scowcroft’s former NSC staff member, his colleague on PFIAB, and the chair of the 9/11 Commission, also encouraged the move. And though there are still issues with respect to the sharing of information among the different intelligence agencies and residual feelings that there is not enough “honest collaboration” among the agencies, the situation of the 2010s is “night and day” compared to that of the 1990s and early 2000s.⁸⁹

Nonetheless, the intelligence community avoided serious reform. “After 9/11, Agency employees expected the axe of accountability to fall at any moment,” one intelligence official, frustrated at the lack of change in CIA, reported. “The bureaucracy, a living, breathing creature, was in fear for its life. Employees at [Langley] expected the Agency’s top managers to be fired. Talk at HQs was that the ‘seventh floor,’ where the CIA’s top mandarins dwelt, would be swept clean.” But nothing happened. “The days turned to weeks and still nothing happened.” On the contrary, “Tenet stated that there had in fact been no intelligence failure.”⁹⁰ And while eventually the DCI would be forced to resign, neither he nor the administration sought to reorganize or reorient the intelligence system.⁹¹

Once the commission drafted and presented its report, Scowcroft and his colleagues had fulfilled their mandate; the intelligence review was solely advisory, for internal government use only, and it was George W. Bush’s prerogative not to accept the commission’s recommendations. Neither Scowcroft nor any of the other commissioners and staff leaked the report. If some felt it had been “swept under the rug” or “deep-sixed” by Rumsfeld, that was the administration’s business; the report was for the president and his advisers to use as they thought best, as Scowcroft saw it. And they used very little.⁹²

With the terrorist attacks of September 11, the struggling Bush presidency had a clear purpose and an obvious mission. Cheney’s grim views of the world now resonated throughout the US government and American society, and the vice president quickly became the most powerful person in the administration besides the president himself. In the characterization of journalists Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe, Cheney was “Bush’s unofficial prime minister”—at least for a while.93

With Bush’s description in the 2002 State of the Union address of an “axis of evil,” most government officials, most journalists, and many in Washington and around the country figured it was only a matter of time before the United States went to war against Iraq. George W. Bush and his top aides didn’t want any advice from Bush 41, Baker, or Scowcroft. The president had no wish to have his administration’s actions tied to the counsel of his father’s hypercautious “wise men.”⁹⁴ Even more astonishing is that the decision to go into Iraq never went through any formal decision-making process. Neither the president nor Rice convened an NSC meeting or other high-level meeting to explicitly address the question of whether the United States should invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, and, if so, what the United States’ objectives would be and how the administration should best pursue those ends.⁹⁵

Scowcroft was reluctant for the United States to intervene in Iraq. With the administration heading to war seemingly without much forethought, he decided to take his case to the public. On August 4, 2002, he appeared on Face the Nation, where he explained to Bob Schieffer and millions of CBS viewers why he objected to the administration’s planned invasion. Scowcroft conceded that Saddam might well be a despot and untrustworthy, but he noted that it wasn’t because of terrorism that the Iraqi leader was a problem. He predicted that if the United States went in, it would turn the Middle East into a “cauldron.” Given the United States’ priorities and the costs and benefits of any invasion, he warned that an attack on Iraq would be “premature” and “counterproductive” in the absence of genuine progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and without the establishment of a UN inspection regime that could review Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons systems. Saddam Hussein was “not a man who will risk everything on the roll of a dice,” consistent with the fact that “during the Gulf War, he didn’t do everything he could have done,” Scowcroft noted, such as planting chemical weapons in New York or releasing nerve gas. Later that Sunday, the CBS Evening News showed clips of the interview, and a story in Monday’s London Times repeated Scowcroft’s arguments.⁹⁶

Curiously, no one in the Bush White House responded to Scowcroft’s comments (although on the evening of Monday, August 5, Powell had a long—and what he regarded as a very successful—conversation with the president at the Residence, Bob Woodward reports in Plan of Attack). Neither Rice nor any other White House official released any statements or tried to contact Scowcroft once the media picked up the story. Perhaps they thought the story would simply disappear. Scowcroft explained their inaction by pointing out that they already knew of his position, so there was no reason for them to contact him or respond to his criticisms.97 (Hadley recalls that in early 2002 when he stopped by the Scowcroft Group’s offices for lunch, Scowcroft joked that the deputy national security advisor was meeting with “the infidels.”⁹⁸)

But the story didn’t go away. A week later, on August 11, Juan Williams discussed Scowcroft’s arguments on Fox News Sunday. That same Sunday, Senator Barbara Boxer spoke of Scowcroft’s objections on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, and Senator Richard Lugar and CBS’s Bob Schieffer both commented on his views on Face the Nation.⁹⁹ There were related news stories on PBS, MSNBC, and NPR. In the meantime, Arnold Kanter and Virginia Mulberger suggested to Scowcroft that he write up his Face the Nation remarks as an op-ed.

“I was watching [Scowcroft on] Face the Nation,” Kanter recalled, and Brent gave “this strategic answer. And I sort of said, ‘Well, shit, that’s pretty good.’ So the next morning I come in the office and I say, ‘Brent, that was really good. You ought to write it in an op-ed.’” He agreed, using the TV transcript as the basis for the editorial. After he had finished writing, he sent the op-ed to the Wall Street Journal. (Kanter credited himself as being “somewhere between a nudge and an editor.” He emphasized his name didn’t belong on it, but said that Scowcroft “every so often” jokingly reminded Kanter that it was his idea to write the op-ed.)¹⁰⁰

The op-ed wasn’t the elder Bush’s idea, then, contrary to what many assumed, and neither did the former president give his approval. Although Scowcroft talked to the former president almost every day, according to their mutual friend Robert Strauss, Scowcroft wasn’t writing on behalf of his friend or for anyone else.¹⁰¹ In fact, it would have been out of character for the former president to ask Scowcroft to write a dissenting op-ed, just as Bush was too respectful of the presidency and too diffident to presume to tell his son how to do his job—especially not in public.¹⁰²

All the same, Bush and Scowcroft shared deep misgivings about the foreign policy direction being taken by his son, and the two of them, together with Barbara Bush and a handful of others, had been discreetly but unsuccessfully searching for ways to halt the momentum building for war on Iraq.¹⁰³ And each certainly knew the other’s mind. “Do I know what the father thinks about most things? Yeah, I think so,” Scowcroft told a reporter. “If I don’t, I’ve been sleeping for 30 years, because we’ve been together a long, long time. We talk about a lot of things, and we talk about a lot of them very quietly. We have a wonderful relationship, and I have to be very careful about the appearance of speaking for him out of turn.”104

When Scowcroft learned the Wall Street Journal would be running the op-ed, he faxed a copy to Kennebunkport, since he didn’t want to put the elder Bush in the awkward position of learning about the editorial from reading the newspaper or finding out about it secondhand. Out of courtesy, Scowcroft also faxed a copy to Rice’s personal secretary at the NSC; again, he heard nothing back.¹⁰⁵

Reading the morning newspapers on August 15 out on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush was outraged to see Scowcroft’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He immediately called Rice, who was in Washington. “What is he doing?” he demanded. “Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age,” he told her.¹⁰⁶

Rice then called her one-time mentor, former boss, and dear friend and began yelling at him, telling him that both she and the president felt blindsided. She berated him for betraying the president, betraying the trust of his friends and former associates in the administration, and betraying the Republican Party. She wanted to know why Brent hadn’t called her beforehand to let her know his position. Scowcroft mildly commented that the arguments in the op-ed were the same as those he’d made on national television two weeks earlier. “It’s different when you put it in print,” Rice responded. In Scowcroft’s description, “I got taken to the woodshed.”¹⁰⁷

Rice hadn’t been blindsided, though. Scowcroft’s fax had gone through to her private office number, and she was aware of her mentor’s other media statements. In fact, she’d spoken to him on the morning of Sunday, August 4, before he went on Face the Nation.¹⁰⁸

Yet she could hardly admit these facts, given how embarrassing the op-ed was for her. Everyone believed she had considerable influence over Scowcroft, but it was now apparent she hadn’t been able to prevent him from writing in the widely read Wall Street Journal—the editorial page of which amounts to the daily bulletin board for the Republican Party—notwithstanding their close relationship.¹⁰⁹

The op-ed carried a further unpleasant implication: Rice hadn’t protected her principal, the president of the United States, from public humiliation. By saying that she hadn’t seen the op-ed, Rice was able to distance herself from both the op-ed and her mentor. She had good reason for distancing herself from Scowcroft, moreover, since she suspected that some might think he was arguing on her behalf (as she writes in her memoirs).110 So she was at pains to let the president, her White House colleagues, her fellow Republicans, the press, and the public think she had been unaware of the op-ed, and that in any case it didn’t express her views.

The op-ed also constituted a clear indictment of how Rice was running the NSC process. In his memoirs, George W. Bush writes that Scowcroft’s op-ed made sense, but that he was “angry Brent had chosen to publish his advice in the newspaper instead of sharing it with me.”¹¹¹ Yet if the president didn’t know about Scowcroft’s op-ed and his argument against an Iraqi war—and Eagleburger maintained that “it was obvious the president knew” of Brent’s disapproval of his plans for war—then Bush had been poorly served by Rice, the NSC staff, and his other advisers, since it would then appear they hadn’t informed him of what he described in his memoirs, Decision Points, as Scowcroft’s “fair recommendation” on Iraq. Or if Bush did know, as Eagleburger believed, then Scowcroft’s position should have been widely known and been debated within the administration, in which case the former national security advisor probably would not have felt that he had to go public. But his views hadn’t been credibly and forcefully presented.¹¹²

The fact is that George W. Bush hadn’t participated in a full and open discussion about the pros and cons of going to war against Iraq. Rice hadn’t informed Bush of the full set of policy alternatives for countering terrorism and dealing with Iraq and hadn’t insisted that the president consider the potential consequences of his actions. Perhaps “because she lacked Scowcroft’s convictions” or perhaps because she agreed with Bush and rejected Scowcroft’s analysis and assessment of the situation, the national security advisor “failed to frame Scowcroft’s policies as an option for Bush to consider,” Craig Unger writes.¹¹³

Powell was the one person in the administration whom the op-ed helped, at least in the near term. The secretary of state telephoned Scowcroft afterward, telling him, “You gave me some running room.” The “initial reaction” of almost everyone else in the Bush administration, though, “was he’s helping the bad guys,” Powell said. Elliott Abrams conceded that few among them—himself included—appreciated the fact that Scowcroft “has a loyalty to the country that is greater than his loyalty to the Republican Party.”¹¹⁴

In any case, the die had already been cast. The day before Scowcroft’s op-ed appeared, in fact, Rice chaired an NSC meeting for the purpose of drafting a strategy for war against Iraq and placed one of her NSC aides in charge of an interagency group, the Executive Steering Group, that was tasked to oversee and coordinate the many steps that had to be taken to support US military operations in the Gulf.115 Left unquestioned was its premise: that the United States should invade Iraq.

GEORGE W. REJECTED the possibility that his father wanted “to send him a message on Iraq.” It “was ridiculous” to think that he was trying to communicate through Scowcroft, Bush writes. “Of all people, Dad understood the stakes,” and “if he thought I was handling Iraq wrong, he damn sure would have told me himself.”¹¹⁶

While the younger Bush was right to assert that his father wasn’t sending him a message—with the implication that Scowcroft had written the op-ed independently—he was also being disingenuous: he knew his father would not “have told [him] himself.” It wasn’t Bush 41’s style to impose his views on another US president, even his own son. The two of them weren’t close, in fact, and when they got together they avoided discussing the presidency or the substance of foreign policy. Scowcroft himself describes the father-son issue as “huge.” Former senator David Boren, who was a friend of Scowcroft and Bush 41, reports that there was a total breach of communication between father and son, and that the elder Bush wouldn’t have shared his views on Iraq with his son.¹¹⁷ George W. Bush also well knew that Scowcroft and his father agreed on virtually all foreign policy issues, including Iraq, and that Scowcroft’s editorial would have dovetailed with his father’s own thinking.

Indicatively, a few days after the op-ed appeared, the elder Bush and Robert Hormats, then a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, had breakfast in Veracruz, Mexico. Hormats reported that George H. W. Bush had only the nicest things to say about Brent and was effusive in his praise. He “wouldn’t have done this,” Hormats said, “unless he felt comfortable with Brent.”¹¹⁸

Rice, the NSC staff, and others in the administration officials simply miscalculated. They thought they could safely ignore Scowcroft, no doubt assuming that Scowcroft’s dissent would stop with his remarks on television.

A few weeks after the publication of the op-ed, Rice and Scowcroft had dinner with some other friends at the restaurant 1789 in Georgetown, and the national security advisor told Scowcroft she wanted to bring democracy to Iraq. “Condi, it’s just not going to happen,” he remembered responding. “‘You can’t build democracy that way.’ She said, ‘Oh yes you can.’” The conversation got heated, and Rice then declared, “The world’s a mess and someone’s got to clean it up.” Scowcroft strongly disagreed with her position, but he was too fond of her and too much of a gentleman to argue further over dinner. But, as he later told friends, he was bewildered by her “evangelical tone.”119

The Republicans were “intensely angry at him,” Lee Hamilton remarked. They hated Scowcroft for the op-ed, and “some very strong language was used against Brent.” The war against Iraq stood at the center of Bush’s foreign policy—reforming the world “through our foreign policy and military action,” in Hamilton’s words—and now Scowcroft, a former national security advisor to two presidents and a Bush family friend, was rejecting Bush’s plans. For Bush and his advisers, it was “You’re either for us or against us.” And because Scowcroft, a lifelong Republican, had the temerity to challenge them, he was seen as disloyal, a heretic.¹²⁰

Scowcroft was associated “with everything we didn’t like about the George H. W. Bush administration,” Abrams said, “which was to say we viewed it as weak foreign policy.” For Abrams, who was then on the NSC staff, the epitome of Bush 41 and his advisers’ undue regard for the Soviets and preference for the status quo was the Chicken Kiev speech advocating the restraint of nationalist sentiments. He and other neoconservatives believed that it was Reagan, because of his increases in US defense spending, his pursuit of SDI, and his other bold initiatives, who had won the Cold War—not Bush 41, Baker, and Scowcroft. They had wanted to hear George H. W. Bush bluntly declaring to the Soviets and to the world: “We win, you lose.”¹²¹ They believed that the defeat of the Soviet Union marked the triumph of the United States and of American values, and they wanted to see Americans dancing on top of the Berlin Wall. And Scowcroft’s excessive caution was now again in evidence.

Early the next month the administration pulled out all the stops. The White House reported that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” Rice declared on national television (using speechwriter David Frum’s words). And in a speech to the United Nations on September 12, President Bush made the administration’s case to a global audience, affirming the United States’ commitment to action against Iraq.¹²²

Many members of the press and much of the public rallied behind the Bush White House. Wall Street Journal readers wrote letters condemning “Scowcroft’s appeasement.” The New Republic’s Fred Barnes said it was “absolutely shocking” that Scowcroft would write a piece “attacking the foreign policy not only of President Bush’s son, George W. Bush, but attacking the foreign policy favored by his very own protégée, Condoleezza Rice, now the national security advisor in the Bush White House—the same job Scowcroft had in the [first Bush administration].”123 William Kristol, writing in the Weekly Standard, called Scowcroft and Colin Powell “appeasers” who “hate[d] the idea of a morally grounded foreign policy” that “aggressively and unapologetically [sought] to advance American principles around the world,” and he characterized Scowcroft’s arguments as “laughably weak.” John Podhoretz of the New York Post described Scowcroft and Bush 41’s other advisers as being “among the most mediocre ever to staff an administration” and charged that they had “displayed shockingly poor foresight” by leaving Saddam in power. He also described the senior Bush as “the most unimaginative president of the second half of the 20th century.”¹²⁴

The New York Times’ managing editor, Bill Keller, also weighed in. Keller cast aspersions on Scowcroft’s motivations in a signed editorial, warning readers they should know the background of those criticizing the plans for war against Iraq. The former national security advisor “makes his living advising business clients,” he pointed out, “some of who would be gravely inconvenienced by a war in the Middle East.” Keller’s criticisms applied to other skeptics of the war, moreover, such as Lawrence Eagleburger.¹²⁵ Still others commented that while they didn’t know what Scowcroft’s motives were, they knew he was wrong. “Scowcroft and his leave-Saddam-alone acolytes,” William Safire wrote in his syndicated column, were resorting to “strategic, self-justifying, political, or pacifist grounds” in order to oppose “finishing the fight” against Saddam.¹²⁶

Kissinger, too, disagreed with his friend and former deputy. “Brent [didn’t] explain against what specific aspect of the war against terrorism [an attack against Iraq] distracts from,” Kissinger said on CNBC’s Capital Report. He thought the United States was right to act aggressively in the Middle East, “the area in which terrorism grew up.” The Bush administration should show “that to challenge the United States is simply too dangerous.” And “an operation against Iraq, especially if it is imbedded in the proper political framework, would,” in Kissinger’s view, “help the war against terrorism.”¹²⁷

The New York Times’ editorial board argued otherwise:

Brent Scowcroft is a cautious, deliberate man accustomed to sharing his foreign policy views with Republican presidents in private, as he did as national security advisor to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. That Mr. Scowcroft would publicly question the current president on a matter as sensitive as Iraq is an extraordinary challenge to the Bush administration as it weighs whether to go to war to oust Saddam Hussein from power. Mr. Scowcroft’s concerns about attacking Iraq, aired yesterday in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, were the equivalent of a cannon shot across the White House lawn. The piece should erase any doubt about the need for a national debate on Iraq.128

Morton Kondracke of Roll Call also thought the op-ed served a valuable purpose. The Bush administration needed to go beyond claiming that Saddam Hussein was “a bad guy,” Kondracke reasoned, and “go down the line and start answering Scowcroft’s, Senator Carl Levin’s, and others’ objections.”¹²⁹

Scowcroft himself felt frustrated by all the attention and ultimately misused. His views were well known to Rice, Hadley, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others in the administration—including the president, in all likelihood—as well as to Washington-area national security experts, and they had been for some time. In addition, the tone of the Wall Street Journal’s headline for the op-ed, “Don’t Attack Saddam”—a title chosen by the editors, not by Scowcroft—was off-base. Scowcroft had never written that the United States shouldn’t attack Iraq; he merely insisted that Bush and his advisers be certain that the attack was warranted and that they think through the consequences. The former national security advisor didn’t want an attack on Iraq to divert the United States from the more important objective of the war on terror. The op-ed made an appeal for serious deliberation and caution, moreover; by no means was it a command to the Bush administration. It would have been wholly out of character for Scowcroft to use the imperative to address an American president.

The effect of Scowcroft’s guest editorial was to estrange him from his former friends and associates, however. He essentially became persona non grata for George W. Bush and others in his administration. Even Robert Gates, the president of Texas A&M University at the time, writes that he was “dismayed when my closest friend and mentor, Brent Scowcroft,” publicly disputed “the administration over his opposition to going to war in Iraq.”¹³⁰ Also, because Scowcroft was chairman of PFIAB, his dissent “changed what PFIAB was able to do,” one intelligence official observed, and it altered “the relationship between the White House and the intelligence community.” In fact, Scowcroft’s op-ed may have been the reason PFIAB was moved from “its offices next to the White House and stuck in a less desirable office building a few blocks away.” (Scowcroft, perhaps charitably, attributed the relocation to renovations, not retribution).131

Although he never regretted writing the op-ed, Scowcroft scarcely imagined the hostility it would provoke. It caused him considerable personal discomfort and anguish, a longtime friend and associate noted. A reserved and private person by nature, Scowcroft hardly enjoyed being vilified by his former friends and colleagues, by commentators in the press, and by his fellow Republicans.¹³²

WITH BUSH’S REELECTION in 2004, Scowcroft asked each member of PFIAB to submit his resignation. The president accepted Scowcroft’s and that of most of the other PFIAB members. With that, George W. Bush “unceremoniously . . . dumped Brent Scowcroft,” without having any private conversation with him or making any public acknowledgment of his government service.¹³³

Scowcroft, in turn, was greatly disappointed with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Bush’s other senior advisers. He was especially unsettled by Rice’s behavior, according to the journalist Elizabeth Bumiller, confiding to a senior European diplomat, “I don’t understand how my lady, my baby, my disciple, has changed so much.”¹³⁴

General Brent Scowcroft had made Condoleezza Rice. He had introduced her to others in government, industry, and the small world of foreign policy experts. In 1987 he had invited her to become a member of the Aspen Strategy Group. He introduced her to George H. W. Bush and his son, George W., and he appointed her to head the Soviet desk on his NSC staff. Not only did they become colleagues, they became close friends. And like most close friends, they shared common attributes. Rice, like Scowcroft, was well-spoken, fast on her feet, highly competent, a very quick study, public-spirited, and seemingly tireless. She was also poised under pressure, adept at working with people with strong personalities, and savvy at finding common ground among people with contending points of view. She was an outstanding teacher, too, one capable of making complex ideas accessible to those with less knowledge and experience.¹³⁵

“We were just attracted to each other pretty early on,” Rice said. “I adored him. I adore him now.” The feeling was reciprocated.¹³⁶ Not only had Rice visited the senior President Bush and Scowcroft several times in Kennebunkport during the Bush 41 presidency, but in the mid-1990s she helped Bush and Scowcroft write A World Transformed, assisting on major portions of the manuscript addressing US-Soviet relations. The “most personally satisfying” part of working in the Bush 41 White House, she told one of her biographers, “was working with Brent Scowcroft.”137

Notwithstanding Rice’s stated intentions, her international realism, her past experience on the NSC staff, and their close friendship, their policy views didn’t entirely coincide. Rice advocated the aggressive pursuit of a missile defense system, for instance, whereas Scowcroft remained a skeptic. She was much less willing to risk an open disagreement between the United States and Israel, and she didn’t think an Israeli-Palestinian settlement was the United States’ highest priority in its relations with Israel, much less in US policy toward the Middle East. Indicative of Rice’s more pro-Israeli (and less pro-Saudi) foreign policy was the membership of the Vulcans. The group not only included conservatives who’d worked under Bush 41, such as Richard Armitage, Bob Blackwill, Robert Zoellick, and Stephen Hadley, it also included several neoconservatives: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Dov Zakheim (a former deputy under secretary of defense, a member of the Project for a New American Century, and the comptroller for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004).¹³⁸

When Rice was working on the NSC staff with Scowcroft, their differences had little occasion to emerge, since neither SDI nor the Middle East was in Rice’s portfolio. Rarely did her influence on national security policy extend beyond US-Soviet and East-West relations. So what Scowcroft may have perceived as her agreement on the goals and conduct of US foreign policy may have simply reflected Rice’s limited role, her relatively junior status, and her ambition.

The attacks of September 11 made the differences between the two Bush presidencies increasingly apparent, however, differences that went well beyond content. They brought into relief more fundamental contrasts on how to run the NSC process. For one, Bush and Rice misjudged their top personnel choices. Whereas Bush 41 and Scowcroft paid extensive attention to how their top foreign policy appointees would interact—as well as they could anticipate such interaction from their past acquaintance—Bush 43 and Rice picked their top foreign policy advisers on the basis of talent and experience. The cost of not attending more to interpersonal chemistry was that policy making during Bush 43’s first term was marked by a distinct absence of camaraderie and trust among several of the foreign policy principals.¹³⁹

Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice simply didn’t get along well together, as historians, journalists, and insider accounts have revealed. Cheney prevailed on Bush to select Rumsfeld as defense secretary. Once in office, Cheney and Rumsfeld proceeded to work in tandem to neutralize Powell’s influence and undermine the State Department’s voice in setting US foreign policy.

Powell’s celebrity, outspokenness, charisma, and media savvy had begun to irritate Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the vice president “considered Powell an overreaching publicity hound, a man who spent too much time talking to Bob Woodward to be trusted,” writes Victor Gold, a former aide to Barry Goldwater and longtime Republican. Powell, for his part, regarded “Cheney as a man who, not having experienced war, was given to grandiose military projects that played well in war games, but played hell in actual war.”140

While this wasn’t the first time that the secretary of state and secretary of defense were at odds with each other, as the histories of the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations show, it was the first time an extremely powerful vice president was part of the mix. Blackwill observed that “Powell and Rumsfeld, who sat next to each other” at White House meetings, might as well have been “on separate planets.” At one NSC meeting in late August 2002, for instance, Blackwill was flabbergasted to see that neither Powell nor Rumsfeld was making any pretense of listening to the other; he realized there was “no engagement, no real discussion of military strategy or Iraq.” Yet neither President Bush nor Rice forced the issue or insisted on a genuine dialogue. Absent such intervention, Rumsfeld and Cheney were able to marginalize the secretary of state.¹⁴¹ In the words of one diplomat, Powell was “the Secretary of State who wasn’t,” and Kissinger joked that foreign policy makers looked upon the Department of State “as a small country that occasionally does business with the United States.”¹⁴²

Rumsfeld had similarly strained relations with the nation’s military leaders and especially with the incumbent chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton. In fact, former defense secretary William Perry found Rumsfeld’s relationship with the Joint Chiefs—his direct subordinates under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act—to be as broken as any he’d ever seen.¹⁴³ A few years later, many of those military leaders would be clamoring for Rumsfeld’s resignation.

Neither did Rumsfeld or Cheney give Rice much respect. She was a generation younger; she had little bureaucratic experience (having previously spent only three years in Washington, one year as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs, in 1986–1987, and two years as a member of Scowcroft’s NSC staff); and she wasn’t a conceptual thinker. They saw her as a lightweight, someone who deferred to them and didn’t engage with them as equals—at least not during Bush’s first term in office. “What Condi is really good at,” the writer Nora Ephron observed, “is making nice.” Like other women of her generation, Rice was brought up to smooth over differences and not to force issues. She kept her thoughts to herself, knowing that she could always get in a word with President Bush later, if need be, given how close she was to the president.144

When Rice gave “tasks and guidance to combatant commanders and the joint staff,” for instance, Rumsfeld let her have it. “You and the NSC staff need to understand that you are not in the chain of command. Since you cannot seem to accept that fact, my only choices are to go to the President and ask him to tell you to stop or to tell anyone in DoD not to respond to you or the NSC staff,” he told her. “I have decided to take the latter course. [If] it fails, I’ll have to go to the President. One way or the other, it will stop, while I am Secretary of Defense.” Taken aback, Rice didn’t know what to say.¹⁴⁵

When Rice convened meetings, moreover, Rumsfeld and Cheney sometimes neglected to do the necessary background reading, walked out of the meetings while they were still going on, or skipped them altogether—all without repercussions. One anonymous “very senior official” from the first Bush administration said he’d “never seen more high-level insubordination in the US government in almost thirty years” than with Rumsfeld and the Bush 43 presidency.¹⁴⁶

As serious as Rumsfeld’s insubordination may have been, more serious was the vice president’s calculated circumvention of Rice and the NSC process.

Vice presidents normally don’t have staffs large enough to allow them to participate in more than the one or two issue areas in which they choose to specialize, so as a practical matter they attend high-level policy meetings on only their chosen specialties and don’t participate in others. Cheney broke this mold. He added fourteen staff members in national security alone to the Office of the Vice President and created a total staff of fifty to sixty people—about as large as the NSC staff of several postwar presidencies. As a result, the vice president had enough assistants to staff out issues and “work the paper”—that is, do the research, draft the memoranda for his and the president’s consideration, and mark up and respond to the documents being received by the White House from others around the government.¹⁴⁷

Cheney also set up his own sources of intelligence from within the government—including within the NSC staff—and from Iraq. Not only was he close to Donald Rumsfeld (although the exact quality of their relationship remains a mystery), he was on very good terms with the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, the under secretary of defense, Douglas Feith, and the under secretary of state for arms control, John Bolton. He’d also been Hadley’s boss during first Bush administration, and the deputy national security advisor routinely forwarded NSC communications to the Office of the Vice President. With the research and information that Cheney now had available thanks to these information stovepipes and his expanded staff, the vice president was able to engage in almost all high-level policy discussions. And because of his connections with Rumsfeld and others in the Department of Defense, he was able to circumvent Powell and the State Department and even Rice and her NSC staff.148

Making Cheney’s operation even more effective was the fact that the vice president operated in secret. He worked with assistants that others in the White House didn’t know about—and whose names he didn’t share. He did business behind always-locked doors. He received clandestine visitors whose names were scrubbed from the White House’s visitor logs.¹⁴⁹ And he promoted his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to presidential assistant—just as Scowcroft had done with Gates under Bush 41—which gave Libby the same seniority and official rank as Rice and the chief of staff, Andy Card.¹⁵⁰

Cheney thereby managed to subvert the policy-making process and transform how the office of the vice president had previously functioned. At first, he wanted to run the NSC meetings when Bush was out of town or couldn’t attend, but when the president sided with the national security advisor, Cheney made an end run. He set up a shadow NSC in the Office of the Vice President in effect, thereby undermining the NSC process as it was supposed to function.¹⁵¹ And like Rice, he had an office located in the White House’s West Wing, close to the Oval Office, and a relatively small staff.

It was Cheney who Scowcroft in 2005 called “the real anomaly in the Administration”—not the president, Rice, or Hadley, each of whom also acted contrary to his expectations. Scowcroft had “consider[ed] Cheney a good friend—I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore,” he told Jeffrey Goldberg for a profile in the New Yorker. Cheney responded to Scowcroft’s statement by saying the chief reason his views had changed over time—as “happens to most of us”—was his continued fear “of a 9/11 with nukes or biological agents.” He worried about “a handful of terrorists in the midst of our cities with far deadlier technology than they used on 9/11. And that fundamental fact led me to a set of conclusions about the kind of strategy we needed to pursue, how aggressively we needed to pursue it, if we were going to successfully defend the nation against follow-on attacks.” “Brent,” he went on, “is entitled to his view and his opinion.” He then added: “Of course he wasn’t in the White House bunker on 9/11. . . . I think his views might be very different if he’d gone through and had to deal with that set of issues we found ourselves having to deal with the morning after 9/11.”152

But Scowcroft had not been talking about Cheney’s fearful reaction to 9/11, his belief in US military supremacy, or his advocacy of executive privilege. What Scowcroft was objecting to, and the proximate cause for his remark, was Cheney’s uncritical acceptance of the views of the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, who the vice president consulted after September 11, 2001. “I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick,” Lewis had said. “They respect power.”¹⁵³

Scowcroft found it remarkable that Cheney would accept this simplistic, racist, and ultimately uninstructive analysis. Whereas Cheney had been previously willing to negotiate with Baker, Scowcroft, Powell, and President Bush over the issues and haggle with congressional Democrats, the vice president now seemed to have lost his reasonableness and respect for others. Scowcroft had seen this quality earlier, in Cheney’s reaction to his report on intelligence reform, and he then witnessed it with Cheney’s claim that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium from Niger, despite the dodgy intelligence, and his direct link between Saddam and Al Qaeda operatives, despite the lack of evidence for any significant connection. This was the anomaly for Scowcroft: that Cheney seemed to have lost his sober judgment and intellectual honesty—someone who Representative Martin Frost, a Democrat from Texas, called a “man of integrity.”¹⁵⁴

Some wondered, too—Scowcroft included—whether Cheney’s several heart operations had altered his personality, since cardiac surgery may cause behavioral change.¹⁵⁵ Whatever the cause, many in Washington thought Cheney had changed, Lawrence Eagleburger among them. In 2009, Eagleburger said of his former White House colleague, “I wouldn’t trust him with my dog across the street.”¹⁵⁶

PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATIONS ARE renowned for their fractious politics; the Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan presidencies are cases in point. Yet what distinguished the Bush 43 administration was that when confronted by crisis, the president and Rice were unable to forge a coherent NSC process. The clash of personalities in the administration of George W. Bush led to catastrophic results.157

There were no NSC meetings to examine the underlying premise that the United States should go to war against Iraq. Neither were there meetings of the NSC, the Principals Committee, or any other organizational body to address what would be two critical, disastrous decisions made by L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the presidential envoy to Iraq: to expunge all thirty thousand Ba’ath Party members from the Iraqi government and to disband the half-million-member Iraqi army and its intelligence services.¹⁵⁸

Yet Bremer’s ill-advised actions—which had the effect of removing almost all public officials from Iraq’s government while under US occupation, including government officials with critical expertise, Ba’ath-affiliated schoolteachers, and policemen on the street, as well as alienating potential allies of the United States within Iraq—were never run through an interagency process. Neither the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, nor the State Department had been consulted, even though the decisions ran contrary to the lessons of post–World War II Germany and Japan and contradicted the commonsense notion that foreign occupiers need the help of middle- and lower-tier government authorities to maintain political order and to ensure the continuity of government. Without a substitute system ready to put in place after the invasion, and with the CIA and State Department often excluded from the decision process, the Defense Department took over handling of the US occupation of Iraq.¹⁵⁹

In his memoirs, George W. Bush distances himself from these decisions by using the passive voice: “The Iraqi police force had collapsed when the regime fell,” he writes. “The Iraqi army had melted away.” Bremer may have acted on his own authority, which is what Scowcroft suspected; others credited Rumsfeld (Bremer himself said the policies came from Doug Feith, the under secretary of defense).¹⁶⁰ But the responsibility for vetting the soundness of national security policy decisions and for coordinating administration policy lies with the national security advisor—and Rice failed to exercise that responsibility.

The result was that secretary of state Colin Powell, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, DCI George Tenet, and others in the government—especially in the State Department and CIA—were essentially made irrelevant. And as Ivo Daalder and I. M. Destler point out, Rice, Hadley, and the NSC joined in to help make them feel as though “they were not on the team.”¹⁶¹

The “National Security Council was dysfunctional,” one of the members of the 9/11 Commission remarked—a view shared by all of the commissioners, according to this official.162 Rice and the NSC “had failed in the principal job of resolving differences among the cabinet members,” Armitage bluntly told Rice in July 2003. Elliott Abrams thought the foreign policy process had gone “off the rails.”¹⁶³ Army Gen. Wesley Clark bluntly described the NSC process “out of whack.”¹⁶⁴

It would be “deeply unfair” to blame Rice, Robert Blackwill says. In Blackwill’s view, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone to be able to simultaneously manage Powell, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Even Kissinger and Scowcroft would have found the “clash of egos and worldviews similarly difficult” to handle, he said. Robert Gates similarly remarked that “when you have two players who aren’t willing to participate, no one could have made it work.” Or, in the words of one of Scowcroft’s former NSC staff members, Rice “didn’t have a prayer.”¹⁶⁵

Blackwill and Gates were being generous. Kissinger and Scowcroft would have handled things very differently. Not only did Kissinger always have a highly privileged relationship with presidents Nixon and Ford, the secretary of state made sure the relationships stayed that way. When Kissinger thought things weren’t going as they should, he would threaten to resign—a threat he made repeatedly. There’s no doubt that Kissinger would have resigned had he felt he was being outmaneuvered, ignored, or otherwise cut out of the policy-making process. And he came close to doing so on several occasions. (When Kissinger said he was going to quit during Ford’s reelection campaign, Tom Korologos, a political adviser to the president, quickly said, “Henry, for Christ’s sake, if you’re going to quit, do it now, we need the votes.”)¹⁶⁶ It is impossible to imagine Kissinger letting a secretary of state, secretary of defense, or vice president marginalize his input on policy decisions.

Scowcroft likewise enjoyed very close relationships with presidents Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41, and exercised tight control over the NSC process. With his knowledge of the bureaucracy, his attention to personnel decisions, his expertise and command of the facts, and his strength of will, Scowcroft wouldn’t have permitted the NSC process to deteriorate as it did under Bush 43. And while Scowcroft never threatened to resign, it is similarly impossible to imagine him letting a secretary of defense, vice president, or other senior official push him to the margins of the decision-making process. As Senator Sam Nunn pointed out, one of Brent’s “rare” and “amazing” talents was his ability to handle “big egos.”¹⁶⁷

However effective Rice had been as head of the NSC’s Soviet desk from 1989 to 1991—and she had been highly effective—she did not manage the NSC process as it needed to be managed. Yet she could have threatened to resign if that was what it would have taken to bring discipline to the NSC process, just as Kissinger had during the Nixon and Ford administrations and as Shultz did during the Reagan presidency. Instead, she preferred to be a confidante, close personal adviser, and friend to George W. Bush.168

Of course, how the government runs and how the national security advisor is used is the president’s prerogative. “In the end it’s the president’s responsibility,” Scowcroft observes.¹⁶⁹ Yet “at the outset of his administration,” a new president “must put together a team of staff members even when he has only the dimmest notion of what his own job really is.”¹⁷⁰ The president has little way to “know whether he is putting together a closely knit team or a bunch of people who will spend most of their time fighting each other rather than constructing and managing his policy.”¹⁷¹ The success of a president’s foreign policy necessarily depends on the quality of those who coordinate decisions—the national security advisor and the White House chief of staff, in particular—and the quality of their interactions. He has to trust that his appointees don’t prioritize their own ambitions or their particular policy, partisan, or ideological objectives when working with their fellow principals. This is especially true for the national security advisor, on whom the president has to rely to get the advice he needs in order to make the best possible choices.

Scowcroft described his own “approach to almost every question is to view it with informed skepticism,” because “if it doesn’t work, what happens?” It was “important that the national security advisor tell the president what you think he or she needs to know, not what he wants to hear. And that,” he admitted, “can be tough.”¹⁷² If “all the advisers agree on a certain course of action,” then things are relatively simple, he observed. But when “they disagree, it becomes more complicated, and the issue is how you deal with the disagreements.” The “best way” to handle disagreements, he thought, was to convene a meeting of the president’s senior advisers. He would “have each one of them explain their rationale, and then [he would] help the president decide among them.”¹⁷³ Some presidents, like Nixon, preferred to do this on paper. Nixon would “study the different options and come back and decide.” Others, such as Ford and George Bush, “liked to hear the discussion in person and hear the arguments back and forth as an aid to making decisions.”¹⁷⁴

Rice didn’t see her role as that of a skeptic or as the enforcer of a rigorous NSC process, however. Neither she nor any of Bush 43’s advisers insisted that the president see the information he needed to see. She left it up to others to propose ideas and suggest initiatives, Scowcroft told Marcus Mabry, one of her biographers. For all of her talents as a synthesizer and debater, he didn’t view Rice as an innovator or particularly intellectual. Indeed, one of Rice’s friends and a colleague at Stanford called her “the least reflective person” he knew.175 Instead, she saw her role as helping the president fulfill his own preferences, reassuring him about his decisions, and protecting him. As she warned one foreign diplomat after she became secretary of state, “Don’t upset him.”¹⁷⁶

Rice’s preference for staying close to Bush—and she had more access to him in the presidential residence, at Camp David, and out on the ranch in Crawford than any other White House official—may explain why she was willing to tolerate a dysfunctional NSC process. Missing, though, was a cold-eyed, objective perspective on the United States’ long-term interests, however much she may have agreed with the administration’s causes and courses of action. What bothered Scowcroft more than Rice being upset with him, said a friend, “was the fact that here she is, the national security advisor, and she’s not interested in what a former national security advisor had to say”—someone whom she had professed to respect and admire.¹⁷⁷

Rice’s stepmother mentioned another factor that may have led Rice to defer to Cheney and Rumsfeld and to accept their hijacking of both the substance of national security and the NSC process after September 11. “I just can’t see [Condi] taking failure . . . just the thought of losing, I don’t think that would go too well with her,” Clara Rice said in reference to Rice’s decision not to run in 1998 for Pete Wilson’s open California senate seat. Or, as Victor Gold suggests, she may have been a “careerist with eyes fixed on the next rung up the political ladder.” Scowcroft said as much: that he thought he had been “helpful and useful to her.”¹⁷⁸

Yet this ambition, however blind, meshed with another, pricklier reality. As a young, very bright, and attractive African American woman in the older, white, and male world of national security policy experts (and the Republican Party), Rice no doubt made her patrons feel good about themselves. Consistent with this role, she participated in George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign by giving speeches and otherwise serving as a symbol for African American women and of the Republican Party’s inclusiveness.¹⁷⁹

George W. Bush, to be sure, shoulders much of the responsibility for his hands-off decision making, which intersected in unfortunate ways with his overconfidence, his incuriosity, his lack of skepticism, and his zeal. Neither did he “encourage truth-telling or at least a full exploration of all that could go wrong,” Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe wrote in Newsweek. Scowcroft was more plain-spoken: he said Bush 43 was the worst foreign policy president he had known.¹⁸⁰

Scowcroft also acknowledged the complicity of the president’s advisers, however, and was “very disappointed with Condi Rice and Dick Cheney.” Although neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld trusted Rice or wanted to let her run the NSC process, it came “down to Condi Rice,” as the national security advisor, to insist on having a structured decision-making process, a former intelligence official explained. This official called Rice “perhaps the worst national security advisor we’ve ever had.” It is “utterly amazing” how “one person . . . can make all the difference in the world.”181

Rice later conceded she had been in over her head. “No one told me Iraq would be so difficult,” Rice told Scowcroft at a dinner party. “Yes, they did,” he replied, “but you weren’t listening.”¹⁸²