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The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney MarriageBy PETER BAKER

The New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 10, 2013

In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring intothe distance as two White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of I. Lewis Libby.

“Do you think he did it?” Bush asked.

“Yeah,” one of the lawyers said. “I think he did it.”In March 2007, Libby, who had served as Dick Cheney‟s chief of staff, was convicted of lying to federal officials

who were investigating the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. officer. For the past two months Cheney had been pushing the president to grant Libby a full pardon before they left office. He would not let it go. Cheney brought it up again and again,first before Thanksgiving, then again around Christmas and finally throughout January 2009 as they prepared for the

transition to the incoming Obama administration. His lobbying was so intense that the president made clear to his aidesthat he did not want to talk with Cheney about it anymore.

Troubled by the decision hanging over him, Bush had asked the White House lawyers to re-examine the case tosee if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck, pored over trial

transcripts and studied evidence that Libby‟s lawyers had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury hadample reason to find Libby guilty.

“If I were on that jury,” Burck told Bush, “I would probably have agreed with them. You have to follow the law,and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand juryinvestigation and it is material to their investigation, that‟s a crime.”

The case had its origins in the politically fraught summer of 2003, when American troops had just invaded Iraq but were unable to find the unconventional weapons they had been told were there. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador,suggested that the White House ignored contrary evidence about Iraq‟s nuclear program in the months before the

invasion, a charge Cheney would deny. When the news media reported that Wilson‟s wife worked at the C.I.A., the F.B.I.opened an investigation into whether her identity was illegally divulged.

Libby testified that he first learned Valerie Plame Wilson was a C.I.A. official from Tim Russert, the NBC journalist. If true, this would mean he did not disclose secret information he learned as Cheney‟s chief of staff —  whichwould undercut the common theory that the leak came from Cheney‟s office and that Cheney was trying to takeretribution against Wilson by blowing his wife‟s cover. Libby‟s story clashed not just with Russert‟s version, but also with

those of eight other people, including fellow administration officials, who testified that they talked with Libby aboutWilson before his conversation with Russert. When Russert disputed Libby‟s depiction of events, Libby said simply thathe must have misremembered what had transpired, hardly an indictable offense.

“All right,” the president said when the lawyers concluded their assessment. “So why do you think he did it? Doyou think he was protecting the vice president?”

“I don‟t think he was protecting the vice president,” Burck said.

Burck figured that Libby assumed his account would never be contradicted, because prosecutors could not forcereporters to violate vows of confidentiality to their sources. “I think also that Libby was concerned,” Burck said. “Because

he took to heart what you said back then: that you would fire anybody that you knew was involved in this. I just think hedidn‟t think it was worth falling on the sword.”

Bush did not seem convinced. “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney,” the president said. If that was the

case, then Cheney was seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself on his behalf.

“Now I am going to have to have the talk with the vice president,” Bush said. That was the sort of unpleasant business that for eight years he had left to Cheney. It was the vice president who delivered the bad news, for instance, to

Paul O‟Neill and Donald Rumsfeld when they were fired.

Joshua Bolten, Bush‟s chief of staff, was also in the room, and he volunteered to handle it.

“Nah, nah,” Bush said. “I can do it.” But as several people close to him would later attest, the president wa s

dreading it.

 Not since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had two Americans in public office collaborated with such lasting effect as

George Bush and Dick Cheney. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, they confidently steered America through its most

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define. In return, Bush gave him access to every meeting and decision, a marked contrast to many of his predecessors.Franklin D. Roosevelt‟s appointment calendar shows only two meetings with Vice President Harry Truman after theywere inaugurated. When asked in 2002 how many times he had met privately with Bush, Cheney reached into his suit

 pocket and pulled out his schedule. “Let me see,” he said. “Three, four, five, six, seven  —  seven times.” Then he added:

“Today.”

Bush put him on the ticket in 2000 to balance his own inexperience. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the choice seemed

 prescient. Cheney‟s calm hand in the bunker that day and in the war cabinet in the weeks that followed gave Bushconfidence that he could depend on seasoned counsel as he began to confront a changed world. Cheney operated in

tandem with Donald Rumsfeld, his longtime mentor who gave him his first White House job under Richard Nixon andwas now serving as defense secretary. Together, they shared a vision of a world of threats that required a strong executive branch and an unapologetic assertion of American power. “He never came over to me and organized against some

decision or said we have to marshal suppor t for this or that,” Rumsfeld later told me. But he never had to. They werealmost always on the same page, executing the same vision.

By the second term, though, as that vision came under fire with the deterioration of Iraq and the failure to find theweapons that led to the invasion, Bush moved away from Cheney and turned increasingly toward Secretary of State

Condoleezza Rice, who supplanted Cheney as the president‟s most influential lieutenant. No one in the White House hadthe relationship with Bush that Rice had. She worked out with him, talked sports with him, dined with him and Laura in

the residence and spent weekends with them at Camp David. Over lunch one day in the first term, Rice told ChristineTodd Whitman, then the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, “I can count on one hand the days when I havenot spoken to the president over the last three years.” As Whitman later reflected: “She didn‟t have a life. Her life was all 

about that.”Bush turned to Rice to help repair the damage done by the administration‟s aggressive response to the Sept. 11

attacks. “We had broken a lot of china,” Rice told me. “But at that point, you have to leave something in place. That istrue with allies. It is true with the Middle East. It is true in putting together an international consensus on North Korea and

international consensus on Iran. And I don‟t think that is how the vice president saw it. I think he would have liked tohave kept breaking china.”

Only by the end of his sixth year did Bush finally conclude that Rumsfeld had to go, a decision that representedthe most fundamental break with Cheney, who was informed, not consulted. “It wasn‟t open for discussion by the time he

came to me,” Cheney told me. Cheney managed to preserve much of the national -security architecture he helped create, but he was now on defense more than offense, fending off changes that he thought would weaken the country or unravel

the policies he had urged. “Perhaps my clout was diminished,” Cheney said in a 2011 television interview. “That‟s possible. I wouldn‟t quarrel about that.” Indeed, by the time they left office, Bush and Cheney disagreed on a long list ofsignificant issues and policies. Where Bush was willing to pursue international diplomacy, empty secret C.I.A. prisons,sign an agreement to withdraw from Iraq and cut deals with Congress on military tribunals and warrantlesseavesdropping, Cheney resisted any compromise as a sellout of the principles they once shared.

And then there was the Scooter Libby pardon.

A few weeks before Barack Obama‟s inauguration, Joshua Bolten invited all of his predecessors to his office in the West

Wing to meet with his successor, Rahm Emanuel. Thirteen of the living 16 men to have served as chief of staff attended,including Cheney, who was Gerald Ford‟s top assistant. They went around the table one by one, offering advice. WhenCheney‟s turn came up, a devilish look crossed his face. “Whatever you do,” he said, “make sure you‟ve got the vice

 president under control.”

As Bush‟s final days in the White House approached, he did not exactly have his vice president under control.Cheney‟s lobbying campaign on behalf of Scooter Libby had become deeply disconcerting to the president. To Cheney, it

was a simple matter of justice. As he saw it, Libby had been pursued by an unprincipled prosecutor bent on damaging theWhite House. Neither Libby nor anyone else had been charged with the actual leak that precipitated the investigation,only with not testifying truthfully about how he learned about Wilson‟s identity. Years later, it would be revealed that thespecial prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, knew from nearly the start that Richard Armitage, Colin Powell‟s deputy, was theoriginal source of the leak, not Libby. Cheney believed that Fitzgerald‟s relentless investigation in spite of this fact was

 proof that Cheney was the real target, and that Libby was caught in the cross-fire. Libby had loyally served his country,Cheney argued, only to be made into a criminal. And Powell and Armitage stayed quiet as it happened. “The Powell-Armitage thing was such a sense of betrayal,” Cheney‟s daughter Liz told me. “They sat there and watched theircolleagues in the White House —  Scooter and everyone else —  go through the ordeal of the investigation, and all that

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time they both knew Armitage was the leaker.” Armitage and Powell said they were simply following investigators‟instructions to keep silent.

As Cheney pressed Bush for the pardon, the president put him off by saying he would wait to issue controversial

 pardons until near the end of his term, which the vice president took as an indication that Libby would be among them.Bush had already commuted Libby‟s prison sentence of two and a half years after it was handed down in 2007. As aresult, Libby never had to spend a minute behind bars, a decision that inflamed critics on the left, who argued that Bush

was interfering with justice, and on the right, who felt he had not gone far enough in quashing a bogus prosecution.

At the time, Bush said publicly that he was not substituting his judgment for that of the jury. So how would he

explain a change of mind just 18 months later? That was the argument Ed Gillespie, the president‟s counselor, made toCheney when he came to explain why he was advising Bush against a pardon. “On top of that, the lawyers are not making

the case for it,” Gillespie told Cheney, referring to the White House attorneys reviewing the case for Bush. “We‟ll beasked, „Did the lawyers recommend it?‟ And if the lawyers didn‟t, it‟s going to be  hard to justify for the president.”

The favoritism inherent in the clemency process had long been a source of frustration for Bush. “This process is broken,” he railed to aides. “It doesn‟t make any sense.” He suffered some embarrassment when, after a Christmas pardonof a Brooklyn developer convicted of mail fraud, the media revealed that the developer‟s father had donated tens ofthousands of dollars to Republicans, leaving the White House in the awkward position of taking back the clemency order.

It irritated Bush even more that he was coming under pressure from all directions. His lifelong friend Joe O‟Neillwrote him a letter on behalf of a bank officer who served time for falsifying documents. Another childhood friend from

Texas, Charlie Younger, pressed him to pardon a fellow doctor who served time on child-pornography charges. ClayJohnson, a Yale friend and White House aide, was lobbying Bush to commute the sentence of David Safavian, anadministration official convicted in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Bush granted the first request but rejected the

other two.

 Now it was time to deliver bad news to Cheney. Bush invited the vice president into the small private dining roomoff the Oval Office for their final lunch on Jan. 15. There would be no pardon for Libby, Bush said. It was a hard choice,

 but that was his decision.

“You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle,” Cheney snapped.

It might have been the harshest thing Cheney had ever said to him.

“The comment stung,” Bush wrote in his memoirs. “In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this, or even closeto this. I worried that the friendship we had built was about to be severely strained, at best.”

To Cheney, this was the final proof that Bush had lost his will. The president had been buffeted by critics for so

long that he would not stand up for what was right and jeopardize the relatively positive attention he was receiving for asmooth transition with Barack Obama. Perhaps it was even one last attempt to show who was actually in charge after all.

“Scooter was somebody —  you know, he didn‟t have to be there,” Cheney told me years later. “He came to serve.

He worked for me before at the Pentagon. He had done yeoman duty for us.” The conviction was a deep scar, Cheneysaid. “He has to live with that stigma for the rest of his life. That was wrong, and the president had it within his power to

fix it, and he chose not to. It is obviously a place where we fundamentally disagree. He knows how I felt about it.” Cheneysuggested that the president did not want to take the heat. “I am sure it meant some criticism of him, but it was a hugedisappointment for me.”

Famed for never second-guessing himself, Bush began to doubt his decision after his encounter with Cheney.

Libby, aware that his chances were grim, contacted Joshua Bolten, who considered Libby a friend, to ask to meet with the president directly.

“I‟m sorry, Scooter,” Bolten told him. “In fairness to the president, I can‟t permit that.”Then Cheney went to Bolten. “Scooter would like to visit with the president.”

“I know,” Bolten said. “I‟ve already told him no.”

“I‟d like you to ask the president directly,” Cheney said.

“I wish you wouldn‟t ask me to do that,” Bolten said. “But obviously the president would not want me screeninghim from any request of yours.”

Bush still refused. Bolten suggested to Libby that he meet with Fielding and Burck, the two White House lawyerswho reviewed his case. On the final weekend of the administration, Libby sat down with the two men in a booth atMcCormick & Schmick‟s, a chain seafood restaurant a few blocks from the White House. It was just after 11 a.m., and for

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the next 90 minutes, Libby made his case. He complained that the prosecution had suppressed expert testimony about theunreliability of memory, which Libby was sure would have exonerated him.

Fielding and Burck knew that pardons were typically issued not to people claiming innocence but to convicts who

had paid their debts to society and were seeking forgiveness. Under Justice Department guidelines at the time, the pardonattorney who prepared recommendations for the president did not even accept requests until at least five years afterapplicants had completed their sentences. They asked Libby if he would be willing to admit guilt and ask for forgiveness

to obtain a pardon.

 No, Libby said. “I am innocent. I did not do this.”

On the final frigid weekend of his presidency, Bush was at Camp David with his family and a few friends and advisers,including Bolten and Rice. The president was stewing over Libby. While the rest of the group was in another room, Bush

called his former adviser Dan Bartlett, who was back in Texas.“This sucks,” Bush said. “Here I am, supposed to be tryingto have a great weekend with my family, last weekend, and here I am knowing what a difficult decision it is going to be.”

Bartlett reassured him that he was making the right call.

Rice pulled him aside. “Don‟t let this be a pall over your last days,” she urged him.

Finally, it was Laura Bush who pressed him to stop dwelling on it. “Just make up your mind,” she said. “You‟re

ruining this for everyone.”

The following Monday, Bush had his final, definitive meeting with the White House lawyers, ending any

 possibility of reconsideration. There would be no pardon for Libby.

The next morning, Inauguration Day, Cheney showed up in a wheelchair, explaining that he had thrown his backout packing boxes at the vice- presidential mansion over the weekend. “Joe, this is how you‟re liable to look when yourterm is up,” Cheney joked to his successor, Joseph Biden.

Bush and Cheney separated as they left the White House, each joining his successor for the short motorcade tripto the Capitol. Bush climbed into an armored car with Obama. As the two men settled in and the vehicle began its slow,

circuitous path past the barricades and out of the White House grounds, Bush took the opportunity to offer one last pieceof advice. Whatever you do, Bush told Obama, make sure you set a pardon policy from the start and then stick to it. There

Bush was, in the final minutes of his presidency, and foremost on his mind was the rift with his vice president.

Bush retreated to Texas, where he resolved not to pass judgment on Obama, while Cheney became a fiery critic of

the new president. What set him off was a decision to reopen an investigation into C.I.A. interrogations of terror suspects.“Threatening to prosecute C.I.A. officials was indefensible,” Liz Cheney told me. “It was just so far beyond what you

could stay silent and watch.”

Cheney‟s public battle with Obama, though, seemed like a proxy for his private battle with Bush. Out of  his deep

respect for protocol, he could say only so much as he watched Bush compromise in their final years. But now he couldlash out at a Democrat. For Cheney, the betrayal of the C.I.A. officers became, in effect, an extension of the betrayal of

Scooter Libby. They were all men doing a job for their country and now had to pay for it. “Dick was terribly upset that hedidn‟t pardon him, get him off the hook,” Cheney‟s friend Bernie Seebaum told me. “The man did what he was expectedto do, and then he got in trouble for it. Nobody came to his rescue.”

Bush, on the other hand, was through with politics. He told visitors in Dallas that he felt liberated on the day ofObama‟s inauguration. “When I saw his hand go up, I thought, Free at last,” Bush said. When Rove regaled a dinner partyat Bush‟s home with his analysis of forthcoming Congressional elections, the uninterested former president paid littleattention, cracking jokes instead with a guest sitting next to him.

The passage of time has tempered some of the harsh judgments of Bush‟s administration. By this past summer, 49 percent of Americans now viewed him favorably, compared with 46 percent who disapproved, the first positive balance in

eight years.

As for Libby, still barred from practicing law despite the commutation, he has largely stayed out of the politicaldebates of the last several years. Only recently did he co-write a scathing critique of Obama‟s foreign policy for The WallStreet Journal.

Bush and Cheney see each other infrequently. Last spring, they reunited for the opening of the George W. Bush

Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University, outside Dallas. While Bush took aseat onstage with his fellow presidents, Cheney stepped down into the audience to sit with cabinet members and the Bushchildren. Condoleezza Rice had a speaking role; Cheney did not. Aware that many were wondering about their

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relationship, Bush made a point of praising Cheney‟s “loyalty, principle and strength” from the lectern. “I‟m pro ud to callyou friend,” Bush said.

But inside, the new library suggested a different reality. There were exhibits featuring the first lady and their

daughters, videos narrated by Rice, Bolten and Andy Card, and even statues of the presidential dogs. There was little signof Dick Cheney.

 Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times and a contributing writer for the magazine. This

article is adapted from his new book, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House .”