I went on to discuss the media:
The same is true with the press, in my view a critically important guarantor of our freedom. When it identifies a problem… the response of senior leaders should be to find out if the allegations are true… and if so, say so, and then act to remedy the problem. If untrue, then be able to document that fact. The press is not the enemy, and to treat it as such is self-defeating.
Many members of Congress and many in the media read these remarks. They were, I believe, the foundation of an unprecedented four-and-a-half-year “honeymoon” for me with both institutions.
The final relationships to fix were interagency, particularly with the State Department, the intelligence community, and the national security adviser. This was the easiest for me. I had first worked with Steve Hadley on the NSC staff in 1974, and Condi Rice and I had worked together on that staff during Bush 41’s presidency, as mentioned earlier. I knew that for much of my career, the secretaries of state and defense had barely been on speaking terms. The country had not been well served by that. I had known the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, when he was the two-star head of intelligence for the Joint Staff. Nearly nine years on the NSC staff had also ingrained in me the importance for a president of having the team pull together. It had worked well in Bush 41’s administration, and it needed to in Bush 43’s. I readily conceded that the secretary of state should be the principal spokesperson for the United States, and I also knew that if she and I got along, it would radiate throughout our departments and the rest of the government. Symbolism was important. When Condi and I would meet together with leaders in the Middle East, Russia, or Asia, it sent a powerful signal, not just to our own bureaucracy but to other nations, that trying to play us off against each other wasn’t likely to work.
There was another factor that made me comfortable assuming a less publicly assertive role. I wrote earlier about the unparalleled power and resources available to the secretary of defense. That ensures a certain realism in interagency relationships: the secretary never has to elbow his way to the table. The secretary can afford to be in the background. No one can ignore the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.
The fractious relationship among Defense, the director of national intelligence, and the director of the CIA needed to be repaired as well. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Jim Clapper; McConnell, the DNI; General Mike Hayden, the CIA director; and I now undertook to figure out how to remedy the deficiencies of the 2004 Intelligence Reform Act and bring the intelligence community closer together. It was an arduous process—more than it should have been—because of so much scar tissue and enmity in the various bureaucracies. This was one of those rare instances where a unique set of personal relationships stretching back decades allowed us significantly to mitigate otherwise intractable bureaucratic hostility. And it is still another reminder that when it comes to government, whether it works or not often depends on personal relationships.
If there was any doubt that things had changed among the agencies with my arrival, it was put to rest with a speech I made at Kansas State University in November 2007, where I called for significantly more resources for diplomacy and development—for the State Department and the Agency for International Development. No one could ever recall a secretary of defense calling for an increase in the State Department budget. With Rice, Hadley, and me working together, cooperation among the agencies and departments improved significantly. Indeed, as early as February 2007, Steve told me I was already making a huge contribution, that I had “opened up the process for the president” and had had a real impact on other departments and the interagency process. My unspoken reaction was that I had enough fights on my hands without looking for more.
THE BUSH TEAM
I joined the Bush administration at the end of its sixth year. Neither the president nor the vice president would ever again run for public office. That fact had a dramatic impact on the atmosphere and the nature of the White House. The sharp-elbowed political advisers and hard-core ideologues who are so powerful in a first term were pretty much gone. All eyes were now on legacy, history, and unfinished business, above all, on Iraq.
In all the books and articles I have read on the Bush administration, I have seen few that give adequate weight to the personal impact of 9/11 on the president and his senior advisers. I’m not about to put Bush or anyone else “on the couch” in terms of analyzing their feelings or reactions, but my views are based on many private conversations with key figures after joining the administration, and on direct observation.
Beyond the traumatic effect of the attack itself, I think there was a huge sense among senior members of the administration of having let the country down, of having allowed a devastating attack on America take place on their watch. They also had no idea after 9/11 whether further attacks were imminent, though they expected the worst. Because the senior leadership was worried there might be warning signs in the vast collection apparatus of American intelligence, nearly all of the filters that sifted intelligence reporting based on reliability or confidence levels were removed, with the result that in the days and weeks after 9/11, the White House was flooded with countless reports of imminent attacks, among them the planned use of nuclear weapons by terrorists in New York and Washington. All that fed the fear and urgency. That, in turn, was fed by the paucity of information on, or understanding of, al Qaeda and other extremist groups in terms of numbers, capabilities, leadership, or anything else. Quickly filling those information gaps and protecting the country from another attack became the sole preoccupation of the president and his senior team. Any obstacle—legal, bureaucratic, financial, or international—to accomplishing those objectives had to be overcome.
Those who years later would criticize some of those actions, including the detention center at Guantánamo and interrogation techniques, could have benefited from greater perspective on both the fear and the urgency to protect the country—the same kind of fear for national survival that had led Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus and Franklin D. Roosevelt to intern Japanese Americans. The key question for me was why, several years after 9/11 and after so many of those information gaps had been filled and the country’s defenses had dramatically improved, there was not a top-to-bottom review of policies and authorities with an eye to culling out those that were most at odds with our traditions, culture, and history, such as renditions and “enhanced interrogations.” I once asked Condi that question, and she acknowledged they probably should have done such a review, perhaps after the 2004 election, but it just never happened. Hadley later told me, though, that there had been a review after the election, some of the more controversial interrogation techniques had been dropped, and Congress had been briefed on the changes. Like most Americans, I was unaware.
Most of the members of the Bush team I joined have been demonized in one way or another in ways that I either disagree with or believe are too simplistic. As for President Bush, I found him at ease with himself and comfortable in the decisions he had made. He knew he was beyond changing contemporary views of his presidency, and that he had long since made his presidential bed and would have to sleep in it historically. He had no second thoughts about Iraq, including the decision to invade. He believed deeply in the importance of our “winning” in Iraq and often spoke publicly about the war. He saw Iraq as central to his legacy, but less so Afghanistan, and he resented any suggestion that the war in Iraq had deprived our effort in Afghanistan of adequate resources. Bush relied a lot on his own instincts. The days of funny little nicknames for people and quizzing people about their exercise routines and so on were mostly long over when I came on board. This was a mature leader who had walked a supremely difficult path for five years.