A new book has come out that paints a different portrait of the Bush White House — one peppered with dissent that often came from surprising quarters, managed by a President who sent out conflicting signals:
Karl Rove told George W. Bush before the 2000 election that it was a bad idea to name Richard B. Cheney as his running mate, and Rove later raised objections to the nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court, according to a new book on the Bush presidency.
In “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush,” journalist Robert Draper writes that Rove told Bush he should not tap Cheney for the Republican ticket: “Selecting Daddy’s top foreign-policy guru ran counter to message. It was worse than a safe pick — it was needy.” But Bush did not care — he was comfortable with Cheney and “saw no harm in giving his VP unprecedented run of the place.”
If you recall at the time, when Cheney was selected as Veep it raised a lot of eyebrows since GWB had put someone in charge of doing an extensive search to find the best candidate for Vice President and the person in charge of that search was…Dick Cheney.
According to the book, Rove wasn’t also happy with Harriet Miers selection but one of her prime backers was someone who was a big legal name:
When Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser, expressed concerns about the Miers selection, he was “shouted down” and subsequently muted his objections, Draper writes, while other advisers did not realize the outcry the nomination would cause within the president’s conservative political base.
It was John G. Roberts Jr., now the chief justice of the United States, who suggested Miers to Bush as a possible Supreme Court justice, according to the book. Miers, the White House counsel and a Bush loyalist from Texas, did not want the job, but Bush and first lady Laura Bush prevailed on her to accept the nomination, Draper writes.
After Miers withdrew in the face of the conservative furor, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. was selected and confirmed for the seat.
Roberts rejected Draper’s report when asked about it last night.
“The account is not true,” said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg, after consulting with Roberts. “The chief justice did not suggest Harriet Miers to the president.”
There are two way of looking at the denial. On face value (a Supreme Court Justice would not lie) so the issue is closed. With skepticism (Roberts is perhaps concerned about his own legacy and Miers is even more controversial and in some quarters discredited now after refusing to even show up to testify in Congress). Another way of taking this: the information about Roberts came from another source, perhaps a reliable one, and Roberts simply does not want that “credit.”
And Bush himself?
In recounting the Miers nomination and other controversies of the Bush presidency, Draper offers an intimate portrait of a White House racked by more internal dissent and infighting than is commonly portrayed and of a president who would, alternately, intensely review speeches line by line or act strangely disengaged from big issues.
What’s certain is that this is unlikely be dismissed by the White House as a lot of made-up quotations — since the White House cooperated in its writing:
Draper, a national correspondent for GQ, first wrote about Bush in 1998, when he was the Texas governor. He received unusual cooperation from the White House in preparing “Dead Certain,” which will hit bookstores tomorrow. In addition to conducting six interviews with the president, Draper said, he also interviewed Rove, Cheney, Laura Bush, and many senior White House and administration officials.
There are other revelations in the book, the Post reports, but none are earth-shattering.
Sources often have motives when they cooperate with a writer on a sensitive subject. Bush reportedly balked at first on doing it but decided to talk with Draper after the the first December 2006 interview. Perhaps a telling tidbit is that he also wanted to talk about his post-presidential plans.
Could this book be seen as a way to start to reshape the Bush administration’s history? Or as Karl Rove trying to influence history’s view of him on some controversial matters?
Or in years to come as historians and insiders shed more light on one of the most controversial and polarizing administrations in American history will it turn out that it overstated or understated disagreements within the Bush administration?
And will it turn out years from now that the new information will reveal Bush to have been more of a hands on, micromanaging President or a strangely disengaged one?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.