Confessions of a White House Insider

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

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/a...>

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."

From the Jan. 19, 2004 issue of TIME magazine