[IP] TIME Confessions of a White House Insider
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Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 14:13:29 -0800
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Saturday, Jan. 10, 2004
Confessions of a White House Insider
A book about Treasury's Paul O'Neill paints a presidency where ideology and
politics rule the day
By JOHN F. DICKERSON
If anyone would listen to him, Paul O'Neill thought, Dick Cheney would. The
two had served together during the Ford Administration, and now as the
Treasury Secretary fought a losing battle against another round of tax
cuts, he figured that his longtime colleague would give him a hearing.
O'Neill had been preaching that a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax
cuts would exacerbate it. But others in the White House saw a chance to
capitalize on the historic Republican congressional gains in the 2002
elections. Surely, Cheney would not be so smug. He would hear O'Neill out.
In an economic meeting in the Vice President's office, O'Neill started
pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget deficits
threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. "Reagan proved deficits don't
matter," he said. O'Neill was too dumbfounded to respond. Cheney continued:
"We won the midterms. This is our due."
A month later, Paul O'Neill was fired, ending the rocky two-year tenure of
Bush's first Treasury Secretary, who became known for his candid statements
and the controversies that followed them. Rarely had a person who spoke so
freely been embedded so high in an Administration that valued frank public
remarks so little.
Now O'Neill is speaking with the same bracing style in a book written by
Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind. The Price of Loyalty: George
W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill traces the
former Alcoa CEO's rise and fall through the Administration: from his
return to Washington to work for his third President, whom he believed
would govern from the sensible center, through O'Neill's disillusionment,
to his firing, executed in a surreal conversation with Cheney, a man he
once considered a fellow traveler. Suskind had access not only to O'Neill
but also to the saddlebags he took with him when he left town, which
included a minute-by-minute accounting of his 23 months in office and
19,000 pages of documents on CD-ROM.
So, what does O'Neill reveal? According to the book, ideology and electoral
politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his tenure that it
was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas. The incurious
President was so opaque on some important issues that top Cabinet officials
were left guessing his mind even after face-to-face meetings. Cheney is
portrayed as an unstoppable force, unbowed by inconvenient facts as he
drives Administration policy toward his goals.
O'Neill's tone in the book is not angry or sour, though it prompted a tart
response from the Administration. "We didn't listen to him when he was
there," said a top aide. "Why should we now?"
But the book is blunt, and in person O'Neill can be even more so.
Discussing the case for the Iraq war in an interview with TIME, O'Neill,
who sat on the National Security Council, says the focus was on Saddam from
the early days of the Administration. He offers the most skeptical view of
the case for war ever put forward by a top Administration official. "In the
23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as
evidence of weapons of mass destruction," he told TIME. "There were
allegations and assertions by people.
But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference
between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions
that one could draw from a set of assumptions. To me there is a difference
between real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the
intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence." A top
Administration official says of the wmd intelligence: "That information was
on a need- to-know basis. He wouldn't have been in a position to see it."
From his first meeting with the President, O'Neill found Bush unengaged
and inscrutable, an inside account far different from the shiny White House
brochure version of an unfailing leader questioning aides with rapid-fire
intensity. The two met one-on-one almost every week, but O'Neill says he
had trouble divining his boss's goals and ideas. Bush was a blank slate
rarely asking questions or issuing orders, unlike Nixon and Ford, for whom
O'Neill also worked. "I wondered from the first, if the President didn't
know the questions to ask," O'Neill says in the book, "or if he did know
and just not want to know the answers? Or did his strategy somehow involve
never showing what he thought? But you can ask questions, gather
information and not necessarily show your hand. It was strange." In larger
meetings, Bush was similarly walled off. Describing top-level meetings,
O'Neill tells Suskind that during the course of his two years the President
was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
In his interview with TIME, O'Neill winces a little at that quote. He's
worried it's too stark and now allows that it may just be Bush's style to
keep his advisers always guessing. In Suskind's book, O'Neill's assessment
of Bush's executive style is a harsh one: it is portrayed as a failure of
leadership. Aides were left to play "blind man's bluff," trying to divine
Bush's views on issues like tax policy, global warming and North Korea.
Sometimes, O'Neill says, they had to float an idea in the press just to
scare a reaction out of him. This led to public humiliation when the
President contradicted his top officials, as he did Secretary of State
Colin Powell on North Korea and Environmental Protection Agency
administrator Christine Todd Whitman on global warming. O'Neill came to
believe that this gang of three beleaguered souls?only Powell remains?who
shared a more nonideological approach were used for window dressing. We
"may have been there, in large part, as cover," he tells Suskind.
If the President was hard to read, the White House decision-making process
was even more mysterious. Each time O'Neill tried to gather data, sift
facts and insert them into the system for debate, he would find discussion
sheared off before it could get going. He tried to build fiscal restraint
into Bush's tax plan but was thwarted by those who believed, as he says,
that "tax cuts were good at any cost." He was losing debates before they
had begun. The President asked for a global-warming plan one minute and
then while it was being formulated, announced that he was reversing a
campaign pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions and pulling out
unceremoniously from the Kyoto global- warming treaty, short-circuiting his
aides' work. The President was "clearly signing on to strong ideological
positions that had not been fully thought through," says O'Neill. As for
the appetite for new ideas in the White House, he told Suskind, "that store
is closed."
To grope his way out of the wilderness, O'Neill turned to his old friends
from the Ford Administration, Alan Greenspan and Dick Cheney. According to
the book, Greenspan agreed with many of his proposals but could not do much
from his Delphian perch. When O'Neill sought guidance from the Vice
President about how to install a system that would foster vigorous and
transparent debate, he got grumbles and silence but little sympathy. Soon
O'Neill concluded that his powerful old colleague was rowing in a different
direction."I realized why Dick just nodded along when I said all of this,
over and over, and nothing ever changed," he says in the book. "This is the
way Dick likes it."
Where ideology did not win, electoral politics did. Overruling many of his
advisers, the President decided to impose tariffs on imported steel to
please voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.
When the corporate scandals rocked Wall Street, O'Neill and Greenspan
devised a plan to make CEOs accountable. Bush went with a more modest plan
because "the corporate crowd," as O'Neill calls it in the book, complained
loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency. "The biggest difference
between then and now," O'Neill tells Suskind about his two previous tours
in Washington, "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis,
and Karl (Rove), Dick (Cheney), Karen (Hughes) and the gang seemed to be
mostly about politics. It's a huge distinction."
A White House that seems to pick an outcome it wants and then marshal the
facts to meet it seems very much like one that might decide to remove
Saddam Hussein and then tickle the facts to meet its objective. That's the
inescapable conclusion one draws from O'Neill's description of how Saddam
was viewed from Day One. Though O'Neill is careful to compliment the cia
for always citing the caveats in its findings, he describes a White House
poised to overinterpret intelligence. "From the start, we were building the
case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change
Iraq into a new country," he tells Suskind. "And, if we did that, it would
solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of
it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"
Cheney helped bring O'Neill into the Administration, acting as a shoehorn
for O'Neill, who didn't know the President but trusted the wise counselor
beside him. So it was perhaps fitting that Cheney would take O'Neill out.
Weeks after Bush had assured O'Neill that rumored staff changes in the
economic team did not mean his job was in peril, Cheney called. "Paul, the
President has decided to make some changes in the economic team. And you're
part of the change," he told O'Neill. The bloodless way he was cut loose by
his old chum shocked O'Neill, Suskind writes, but what came after was even
more shocking. Cheney asked him to announce that it was O'Neill's decision
to leave Washington to return to private life. O'Neill refused, saying "I'm
too old to begin telling lies now."
Suskind's book?informed by interviews with officials other than O'Neill?is
only a partial view of the Bush White House. Bush's role on key topics like
education, stem-cell research and aids funding is not explored. Bush's role
as a military leader after 9/11 is discussed mostly through O'Neill's
effort to stop terrorist funding. Bush comes across as mildly effective and
pleased with O'Neill's work. The book does not try to cover how Bush
engaged with his war cabinet during the Afghan conflict or how his
leadership skills were deployed in the making of war. On the eve of the
Iraq war, however, O'Neill does tell Suskind that he marvels at the
President's conviction in light of what he considers paltry evidence: "With
his level of experience, I would not be able to support his level of
conviction."
There is no effort to offer an opposing analysis of O'Neill's portrayal of
his tenure. The book lists his gaffes?he ridiculed Wall Street traders,
accused Democrats of being socialists and disparaged business lobbyists who
were seeking a tax credit that the President supported?but it portrays
these moments as examples of brave truth telling in a town that doesn't
like it. White House aides have a different view: It wasn't just that
O'Neill was impolitic, they say; his statements had real
consequences?roiling currency markets and Wall Street. What O'Neill would
call rigor, Bush officials say, was an excessive fussiness that led to
policy gridlock and sniping within the economic team.
O'Neill says he hopes that straight talk about the broken decision-making
process in the White House will highlight the larger political and
ideological warfare that has gripped Washington and kept good ideas from
becoming law. Perhaps naively or arrogantly, or both, he even believes it
may help change the climate. Ask him what he hopes the book will
accomplish, and he will talk about Social Security reform in earnest tones:
tough choices won't be made in Washington so long as it shuns honest
dialogue, bipartisanship and intellectual thoroughness. O'Neill may not
have been cut out for this town, but give him this: he does exhibit the
sobriety and devotion to ideas that are supposed to be in vogue in the
postironic, post- 9/11 age.
Loyalty is perhaps the most prized quality in the White House. In the book,
O'Neill suggests a very dark understanding of what happens to those who
don't show it. "These people are nasty and they have a long memory," he
tells Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out even in the face
of inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate loyalty to something he
prizes: the truth. "Loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that's
the opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and
telling someone what you really think and feel?your best estimation of the
truth instead of what they want to hear." That goal is worth the price of
retribution, O'Neill says. Plus, as he told Suskind, "I'm an old guy, and
I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me."
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