Misunderestimated

The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry, and the Bush Haters

Bill Sammon

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780060734305
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061748103
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A riveting portrait of President Bush as he broadens the war on terror overseas—and plunges into high-stakes political battles at home

"They misunderestimated me," George W. Bush famously remarked on the eve of his historic presidency. Fractured syntax aside, Bush was right: his detractors misunderstood his appeal to the American public, and underestimated his considerable political skills. In this compelling new book, Bill Sammon reveals how the president is turning these misperceptions to his advantage in the looming showdown with John Kerry and the Bush haters.

As senior White House correspondent for the Washington Times, Sammon has been granted extraordinary access to the president and his closest confidants, from political gurus Karl Rove and Andy Card to foreign policy advisers Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. The result is a compelling chronicle of the second eighteen months of George W. Bush's term, as the administration's focus shifts from al Qaeda and Afghanistan to Iraq and the 2004 election. Sammon's on-the-scene reporting and exclusive interviews with the president and his top advisers reveal how the White House is implementing the most profound shift in U.S. foreign policy in more than half a century, prompting an eminent Democratic historian to rank Bush alongside John Quincy Adams and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as one of America's "grand" strategists.

For the first time, Sammon discloses the president's vow that Kerry will "regret" bad-mouthing the liberation of Iraq, the seminal event in the post-9/11 phase of the Bush presidency. Rove even details for Sammon the White House strategy to paint Kerry as a condescending elitist whose "blatant" attempts to capitalize on his Vietnam experience will ultimately come back to haunt him.

Misunderestimated also meticulously tracks the rise of the Bush haters, a disturbing political phenomenon that colors everything from the war on terrorism to the presidential campaign. The impact extends to the press, which Sammon exposes for racing to brand Operation Iraqi Freedom another Vietnam "quagmire" less than eighteen months after making the same blunder during the Afghan war.

In Misunderestimated, Sammon takes readers inside the Oval Office for historic decisions of war and peace, aboard Air Force One for a daring, surprise descent into Baghdad, and even on an intimate tour of Bush's beloved Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. It's a mesmerizing account of a president determined not to repeat his father's two fundamental mistakes—abandoning Iraq and failing to vanquish the Democrats.

1

Rise of the Bush Haters

GEORGE W. BUSH STARED out the window of his limousine at the largest protest of his presidency. A thousand angry demonstrators—maybe more—were rampaging through the streets of Portland, Oregon, utterly overwhelming the meager contingent of police trying to restore order. The motorcade was headed directly into a melee so chaotic that the Secret Service could no longer guarantee the president’s safety. Indeed, three minutes before Bush’s limousine was supposed to make its final approach to the hotel, police lost control of Taylor Street altogether. They radioed the Secret Service, frantically directing the motorcade to a secondary route. Furious, the agents swung the president south and tried another approach. But the sophisticated protesters, using scouts with cell phones, got wind of Plan B. They rushed to head off Bush before he could penetrate the barricades surrounding the Hilton. Street cops joined in the footrace, hoping to prevent a calamity at Sixth Avenue. The president suddenly understood why his father had nicknamed this city “Little Beirut.”

More than anything, the younger Bush was struck by the virulence of the demonstrators. Although he was accustomed to encountering protests in almost every city he visited, most were perfunctory, half-hearted affairs, largely overshadowed by crowds of exuberant supporters. One almost felt sorry for the protesters, as if they were committing some unfortunate social gaffe. But these Portland protesters were different. They were seething with, well, hatred—there was no other word for it. Bush could see it in their contorted faces as they lunged toward the limousine, shrieking at the top of their lungs and extending their middle fingers. They jabbed placards that bore the most vulgar epithets imaginable. An attractive young woman with dark hair and sunglasses was brandishing a large sign that read BUSH: BASTARD CHILD OF THE SUPREME COURT. When she lifted it over her head with both arms, her sleeveless white T-shirt rode up to expose a swath of bare midriff above her low-slung jeans. The “belly shirt” was emblazoned with big black letters that spelled out the words F—BUSH. The protestors seemed to take delight in such in-your-face vulgarity. One of them held a large photograph that had been doctored to depict a gun barrel pressed against the president’s temple. Another waved a sign declaring, BUSH: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE, with an X over the word “alive.” It was hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the protesters would have welcomed an assassination attempt. So much for reasoned political discourse. Meanwhile, a man hoisted an enormous placard that bizarrely proclaimed: IMPEACH THE COURT-APPOINTED JUNTA AND THE FASCIST, EGOMANIACAL, BLOOD-SWILLING BEAST! Bush had seen signs in other cities calling him an idiot, a liar, even “commander in thief,” but never “a blood-swilling beast.” This was getting downright ugly.

The president began to have second thoughts about the venue for tonight’s event, a fund-raiser for Oregon senator Gordon Smith. Why did it have to be held in the heart of the city, where the protesters were obviously harder to control? In fact, Portland police had warned the Secret Service and the White House advance team to expect trouble. They cautioned that the centrally located Hilton would be exceedingly difficult to defend against the hordes of protesters who were certain to descend on downtown. They recommended that the fund-raiser be moved a few blocks north, to the Benson Hotel, where access would be easier to control. When White House officials refused to budge from the Hilton, police asked them to at least reconsider their plans to keep the president there overnight. It would be much safer to get him out of the central city, perhaps to the outlying home of a wealthy supporter. Yet the president’s handlers had dismissed the local cops as excitable yokels with overactive imaginations. They insisted on bringing Bush to the Hilton and keeping him there overnight. And now those same handlers were shocked by the size and severity of the protest. The unthinkable had happened—the motorcade route had been lost!

The president’s limousine was now on the secondary route, making its final approach to the Hilton. But protesters had already arrived from the original route and were spoiling for a fight. Worse yet, there were hardly any cops to hold them back.

“That’s him!” shouted one of ringleaders.

Several hooligans rushed the line of security vehicles that preceded Bush’s limousine—two police motorcycles, a white police cruiser, and a black Chevy Suburban full of Secret Service agents. They brazenly darted across the street between these speeding vehicles. One man, dressed all in black, sprinted directly in front of the president’s limousine, coming within a few feet of the leader of the free world. The rest of the mob pressed in from both sides of the street and let out a rolling “Boooooooooooo!” as the president passed. Although Sixth Avenue was a major bus thoroughfare, the local transit authority had closed it off with an abundance of orange traffic cones. Bush’s limousine barreled right over the rubber cones, which thumped angrily against the undercarriage. Further slowing the motorcade were the protesters themselves, who continued to pour into the street and gesticulate with their vitriolic placards.

9/11, read one. YOU LET IT HAPPEN, SHRUB.

BUSH KNEW, shrieked another, quoting the infamous newspaper headline Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had brandished on the floor of the U.S. Senate three months earlier.

Of all the insults hurled at Bush that day, he considered these the most profane. To suggest that he, the commander in chief, was somehow responsible for the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania—the biggest mass murder in the history of the United States—was nothing short of monstrous. Everyone knew the attacks were perpetrated by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network. Virtually the entire civilized world had united behind America’s swift and righteous routing of Afghanistan’s repressive Taliban regime, which sheltered al Qaeda. And yet these protesters were now blaming the whole thing on Bush.

The president could see that not all the placards were ad hominem attacks. Some, like the sign that admonished CREATE JOBS, NOT BOMBS, addressed the lackluster performance of the economy. Fair enough. The unemployment rate had risen from 4.1 to 5.8 percent since Bush took office. The federal budget had gone from a surplus of $124 billion to a deficit of at least $165 billion. And the stock market had recently sunk even lower than it had in the immediate aftermath of September 11. During a dozen business days in July alone, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost a staggering 1,677 points—more than a sixth of its value. Although 1,255 of those points had been recovered in the ensuing month, the market remained deeply shaken. Not that these protesters were exactly rooting for the stock market. For crying out loud, some were carrying banners that counseled: COMPOST CAPITALISM.

The Secret Service was really sweating bullets now. There weren’t enough police along the secondary route to cordon off the crowd. Wild-eyed protesters were approaching the motorcade from all directions; some coming within a few feet of the leader of the free world. F—YOU, MOTHERF—ER! declared one sign, with a picture of Bush’s face. Another read CHRISTIAN FASCISM, with a swastika in place of the letter “S” in each word. A third urged motorists to HONK IF YOU HATE BUSH. Such extravagant mean-spiritedness! Such gleeful derision! All raining down on the commander in chief as his limousine clumped awkwardly over the orange traffic cones.

Although most of the protesters looked too young to remember much about politics from a decade earlier, they seemed determined to remind Bush of his father’s presidency. One man had duct-taped a sign to his chest with the salutation, WELCOME TO LITTLE BEIRUT. A woman in frizzy pigtails and a black tank top waved a bright yellow sign that said: HEY! AVENGE YOUR FATHER ON YOUR OWN TIME! It was a reference, of course, to Iraq. Eleven years earlier, President George H.W. Bush had driven the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, only to stop short of ousting Saddam Hussein from Baghdad. “He cut and run early,” his son told me in a series of interviews in the Oval Office. That act of presidential restraint was not, alas, reciprocated. In 1993, Saddam tried to have the elder Bush assassinated during a visit to Kuwait.

Now the younger Bush was mulling whether to rid the world of this brutal dictator once and for all. The thought had been growing for nearly a year.

“The world changed for me on September 11, to the point where every threat then had to be reexamined,” Bush told me. “My presidency changed. I went from a peace president to a war president.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, some of Bush’s advisers, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, had urged him to strike both Osama bin Laden and Saddam simultaneously.

“I said no, let’s do something well first. Let’s first focus on achieving our objective in Afghanistan. We must destroy the al Qaeda bases and remove the Taliban,” Bush told me. “My theory is that in order to do hard jobs, you must stay focused. You don’t want to try to do too many things at one time.”

But after destroying the Taliban, the president didn’t want to lose momentum. As far as he was concerned, Afghanistan was merely one battle in an epic war that had begun on September 11. He viewed Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the next batch of threats, branding them as an “axis of evil” during his State of the Union address in January 2002.

“Eventually, obviously, Afghanistan settled down,” he said. “Iraq started getting into focus as we began to think about other theaters in the world. Where were we vulnerable? Where could we be hurt?”

Bush was particularly worried about Saddam’s well-documented efforts to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. He fretted that terrorists would obtain such weapons from “this madman who hated America.” But the old Cold War strategies of containment and deterrence seemed of little use in confronting this new threat.

“Deterrence—the promise of massive retaliation against nations—means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend,” Bush had said in a seminal speech at West Point on June 1. “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.” He added: “The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”

This muscular new foreign policy, dubbed “preemption,” was spelled out in the National Security Strategy drafted that summer by the president’s most trusted foreign policy aide, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. By articulating this profound change in U.S. foreign policy at West Point, Bush was laying the foundation for war against Iraq.

“Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives,” he told the cheering cadets.

The president’s preparations for war didn’t end at West Point. By late summer, he had quietly given tentative approval to a preliminary battle plan that included such specifics as deploying troops to Turkey for a northern front against Iraq.

Speaking of battlefields, that’s exactly what Portland looked like from the window of Bush’s limousine. One of the protesters actually hurled a rock that bounced off the windshield of a car in the presidential motorcade. The vehicle, which was behind Bush’s limousine, was packed with his most trusted advisers—counselor Karen Hughes, chief political strategist Karl Rove, and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. The aides were startled by the noise and stunned by the security breach. None of them had experienced anything like this. As the motorcade struggled down the home stretch, one particularly audacious protester lunged forward and pounded his fist on the “package”—White House parlance for the presidential limousine. The Secret Service couldn’t believe it. This was an even more grievous breach of security than a rock striking the presidential motorcade. Granted, the limousine was heavily armored. But if protesters managed to somehow stop and surround the package, all bets were off. Agents would have no choice but to use lethal force in order to protect the president. And to think the Portland police had warned them about just such a meltdown.

Instead of reproaching themselves for not heeding that warning, though, the Secret Service officials turned their wrath against the cops. As soon as the motorcade finally limped inside the bicycle-rack barricades and disgorged the president into the Hilton, the agents vented their anger at Assistant Portland Police Chief Greg Clark, who was in charge of security for the fund-raiser. How could you lose the motorcade route? How could you let a protester get close enough to lay a hand on the package? What if he had been carrying a plastic explosive like C4?

“The Secret Service agents got pretty upset with me,” said Clark, who rode in the presidential motorcade. “But they were warned. Oh, they were warned in spades. We knew things were gonna go south and we told everybody, including the Secret Service and the White House staff, that this was gonna be a bad deal. We had previous interaction with the protesters, so we knew we were gonna go to war with them. But I just don’t think the White House handlers chose to take us seriously. I’ll bet they’ll believe it in the future.”

Bush was escorted to the twenty-second floor of the Hilton to freshen up before his meetings. Stepping from the elevator, he entered a hallway with a door at either end. One was labeled “Governor’s Suite” and the other “Presidential Suite.” Bush headed for the latter, unaware that the signs had been switched just before his arrival. The White House advance team had scouted both rooms and chosen the Governor’s Suite for security reasons. But they didn’t want the president to think he would be staying in the hotel’s second-best room. So they arranged for a maintenance worker to unscrew the signs and reverse them, perpetrating a small fraud on the most powerful person in the world.

At length, the president emerged from his fraudulent suite and headed down to a first-floor banquet room to meet with a handful of business leaders. He went around the table, asking each person for ideas on how best to stimulate the economy, which was particularly sluggish in the Pacific Northwest. Bush listened politely as each leader responded, although it was obvious that everyone was distracted by the persistent noise of the protesters. The police had erected the barricades just 100 feet from the hotel in hopes that the demonstrators would be less disruptive if they could at least see the building where Bush was staying. But the strategy was backfiring. Emboldened by their proximity to such power, the protesters turned up the volume accordingly. They chanted, sang, and hollered at the top of their lungs. There was even an organized drum line. Half a dozen skilled drummers were outfitted with snare and bass drums of the sort used by college marching bands. In the center of each drum skin was a picture of the president’s face, surrounded by the words BEAT BACK BUSH’S WAR. The drummers slammed their mallets directly into the presidential visage, thwacking away in perfect unison and sending up a terrific racket. The drumbeat could be clearly heard through the windows of the conference room, although neither Bush nor any of the business leaders mentioned it during their meeting.

Afterward, the president retreated to the relative serenity of his suite to prepare for the upcoming fund-raiser. And yet even from the twenty-second floor he could see the protesters on the streets below. There were now perhaps 1,500 of them, and they seemed even angrier than when Bush had first arrived. Indeed, the sight of the president slipping into the hotel had energized the demonstrators, who ended up taking out their frustration on anyone who happened to have the singular misfortune of venturing too close to the Portland Hilton on August 22, 2002. Some poor commuter trying to drive home after work suddenly found his sport utility vehicle surrounded by the raging mob. Appalled by this bystander’s mode of transportation—a gas-guzzling SUV, the very symbol of America’s wretched excess—the protesters began rocking it from side to side. Fearful that he would be tipped over, the terrified motorist threw it in reverse and began backing up through the crowd.

Meanwhile, the same police officers who had failed to secure the primary and secondary motorcade routes were now needed inside the perimeter to help bolster the barricades. But in order to hold back the crowd from the inside, they first had to wade through it from the outside. Demonstrators interpreted this movement as retreat, which only excited them more. They began hurling bottles, boards, and crumpled traffic cones at the cops. Some officers had to endure the indignity of being pelted by vegetables. What kind of protesters packed their own produce? The police tried to move through the crowd in a methodical fashion, hoping this would convey authoritativeness. But it was no use. Far from being intimidated, the protesters began taunting and even shoving the cops. Suddenly the only thing that mattered to the officers was to reach the safety of the barricades. To hell with dignity; they could nurse their wounded pride later. Right now their all-consuming imperative could be summed up in one word: Retreat!

Things only got worse, however, when the reinforcements finally straggled through the perimeter. Officers were getting intelligence reports that agitators were attempting to rally hardcore groups of protesters to break through the barricades. Sure enough, pockets of demonstrators were probing for weak spots in the 360-degree perimeter. They prowled in a counterclockwise direction, forcing police to match their movements from inside the barricades. The most concerted foray came at Fifth and Taylor, where the Secret Service had erected a checkpoint. The crowd was defiantly pushing against the bicycle racks, de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1: Rise of the Bush Haters
• 2: “Something of a Churchill Scholar”
• 3: A Milestone and a Mission
• 4: Midterm Meltdown
• 5: The No-Gloat Zone
• 6: “Whining Pool”
• 7: “Hosed by the State of the Union!”
• 8: The “Get”
• 9: “Let’s Go”
• 10: “Misinforming the World”
• 11: The Rah-Rahs vs. the Wiseasses
• 12: Fly Boy
• 13: “A Long, Hard Slog”
• 14: Bonefishing in Belize
• 15: “We Got Him”
• 16: Vietnam Election
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Bill Sammon
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher