What followed, according to several sources who were in the room last Thursday afternoon, was a jut-jawed, disjointed discourse with a tinge of diatribe and a crescendo of podium pounding. The president dismissed questions about his administration’s counterterrorism actions–or lack of them–before September 11 as mere Democratic partisanship. “I sniff some politics in the air,” he scoffed. Then he wandered off to the Middle East, recounting a blunt Oval Office conversation with Ariel Sharon. He said he’d asked the Israeli leader if he really hated Yasir Arafat. Sharon had answered yes, according to the president. “I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Well, are you going to kill him?’ " Sharon said no, to which the president said he’d replied, “That’s good.”
Bush was just getting warmed up. “Now you guys really got me going,” he said. He threatened to block the entire defense bill if it contained money for the controversial and costly Crusader artillery system. “I mean it. I’ll veto it,” he said tersely, glancing at Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, where Crusader would be built. Bush ended with an attack on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. “He’s starving his own people,” Bush said, and imprisoning intellectuals in “a Gulag the size of Houston.” The president called him a “pygmy” and compared him to “a spoiled child at a dinner table.” Stunned senators didn’t know quite what to make of the performance. “It was like in church, when the sermon goes on too long and you’re not sure what the point is,” one told NEWSWEEK. “Nobody dared look at anybody else.”
If Bush seemed unsure of his bearings, he had reason to be. After eight months of political calm, the war on terror abroad has turned into an uncivil war at home. Until last week, the capital was full of urgent but murky bureaucratic debates about the quality of counterterrorism information-sharing. Now, suddenly, Democrats, investigators and the news media were asking the hoary Nixonian questions: what did the president know and when did he know it? And they were asking new but equally dramatic ones: With years’ worth of scattered but numerous hints of Al Qaeda’s emerging suicide strategy, why didn’t Bush know more? And why weren’t people told after September 11 what the administration knew before that fateful day?
In this new Question Time, Bush has the benefit of a bond with the American people, who, for the most part, seem to hope that he will succeed. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, his approval rating is 73 percent, still a lofty number. Yet voters are highly critical of other parts of his administration (the CIA, FBI and his own security team). By a 55 to 38 percent margin, they think the administration should have issued a public hijacking warning before September 11. By a 68 to 24 percent margin, they want a congressional investigation of intelligence failures. And voters’ skepticism even extends to Bush on one crucial subject. Asked if he had done all he “should have” with the pre-9-11 warnings, voters said yes–but by only a 48 to 39 percent margin.
Democrats, trying to sound more sorrowful than angry (let alone delighted) demanded answers. Noting an instantly famous headline (BUSH KNEW) in the normally pro-Bush New York Post, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton took to the Senate floor to express her concern. So did party leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt. The rest of the party joined in, conveniently ignoring Clinton-administration failures and the extensive pre-9-11 knowledge of their own members of congressional intelligence committees. “It was the attack of the mattress rats,” a top White House aide said bitterly. “They were everywhere.”
Soon after Bush’s chesty Mansfield Room talk, Team Bush gathered itself, and fought back hard–“whacking the rats,” as the aide put it. They dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney to wave the patriotic flag at a political dinner in New York, where he warned critics not to make “incendiary comments” that are “totally unworthy of national leaders in time of war.” The Bushies even took the unprecedented step of wheeling out Laura Bush to defend her husband. Traveling in Budapest, Hungary, Mrs. Bush stayed up late to watch a Condi Rice briefing. The next morning the First Lady volunteered to reporters that it was “very sad that people would play upon the victims’ families’ emotions, or all Americans’ emotions.”
The counteroffensive temporarily silenced most Democrats. But the Bush administration nevertheless found itself in a nightmarish if familiar Washington predicament, forced to issue statements without knowing what leaks might immediately undercut them. Investigative committees were demanding (and getting) access to thousands of potentially explosive documents, and bureaucrats suddenly were less interested in protecting the president than in protecting their own rears and reputations.
Under the strain, the White House’s vaunted “message discipline” and internal unity were falling apart. Privately, some hard-liners criticized Press Secretary Ari Fleischer for confirming the basic substance of the Aug. 6 memo when it was first reported by CBS. “We should have piled up the sandbags and said, ‘None of your business, it’s highly classified’,” one insider grumbled. Others criticized Rice’s briefing. “She wasn’t ready for prime time,” huffed one staffer. Still others privately lamented the administration’s failure to tell the public more, if not before 9-11 then immediately after. Some wished that counselor Karen Hughes–who was traveling with Mrs. Bush and will soon be leaving the White House–was back at spin-control central.
More urgently needed than a message leader is a message, said Republican polltaker Frank Luntz. The topic: what people need to know, and what, for security reasons, they can’t be told. “The public is confused about the relationship between national security and the flow of information from the government,” he said. “One minute they’re being issued too many warnings, the next minute, not enough. People don’t want to know anything that might compromise the war effort, but they need to have a better sense of what the limits are and why.”
But a habit of disclosure isn’t in the Bush genetic makeup. The son of a CIA chief, Bush has always preferred to operate with secrecy and surprise. Cheney sees Congress and the media as annoyances–at best. This view was reinforced by the advent of war. More than ever they tend to think that the public has a right to know only what the top guns think is worth telling them. But now, having said less than he should have last fall, Bush is going to have to say more than he wanted to this summer–and, perhaps, for the rest of his presidency.
