QUOTES FROM A VANITY FAIR ORAL HISTORY
ON THE BUSH PRESIDENCY:
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell:
[Dick Cheney] became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush -- personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.
Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser:
The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. 
And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don't give the president a lot of long memos, he's not a big reader -- well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?
Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign:
I had done a poll that finished the morning of 9/11. I was going to go to Washington that day to present the findings to Karl [Rove]. The amazing thing about that is: not a single question was asked about foreign policy, terrorism, national security. In the poll I'd been sitting on, Bush’s approval I think was 51 or 52 percent. Twenty-four hours later his approvals are 90 percent.
John Bellinger III, legal adviser to the National Security Council, and later to the secretary of state:
The Department of Justice often was the decisive voice on detainee matters, but the Justice Department really never lived up to its name. It was not the Department of Justice -- it was often the Department of Litigation Risk, and they saw everything through the perspective of whether a decision might result in some kind of liability, whether someone might get sued or prosecuted. But that's not the only role of the lawyer. The role of the lawyer is also to exercise good judgment and to look at 
long-term consequences, and ultimately to do what’s the ethically and morally correct thing.
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives:
[W]hoever was with him at the time -- it was probably Andy Card, Andy and Karl -- they were like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, it’s fine. We'll get back to it. That afternoon we get a call from Josh Bolten, who was at the time the head of domestic policy, saying, O.K., we need to have a "compassion" meeting. I'll never forget the discussion -- we're sitting around the table, and someone says, I know what we should do. We should tackle chronic homelessness. I hear there are like 15,000 homeless people in America.
What can you say to that?
Jay Garner, retired army general and first overseer of the U.S. administration and reconstruction of Iraq:
When Shinseki said, Hey, it’s going to take 300,000 or 400,000 soldiers, they crucified him. They called me up the day after that, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They called me the next day and they said, Did you see what Shinseki said? And I said yes. And they said, Well, that can’t be possible. And I said, Well, let me give you the only piece of empirical data I have. In 1991, I owned 5 percent of the real estate in Iraq, and I had 22,000 trigger pullers. And on any day I never had enough. So you can take 5 percent -- you can take 22,000 and multiply that by 20. Hey, here's probably the ballpark, and I didn't have Baghdad. And they said, Thank you very much. So I got up and left.
Kenneth Adelman, a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board:
I said to Rumsfeld, Well, the way you handled Abu Ghraib I thought was abysmal. He says, What do you mean? I say, It broke in January of -- what was that, '04? Yeah, '04. And you didn't do jack shit till it was revealed in the spring. He says, That's totally unfair. I didn't have the information. I said, What information did you have? You had the information that we had done these -- and there were photos. You knew about the photos, didn't you? He says, I didn't see the photos. I couldn't get those photos. A lot of stuff happens around here. I don’t follow every story. I say, Excuse me, but I thought in one of the testimonies you said you told the president about Abu Ghraib in January. And if it was big enough to tell the president, wasn't it big enough to do something about? He says, Well, I couldn't get the photos. I say, You're secretary of defense. Somebody in the building who works for you has photos, and for five months you can't get photos -- hello?
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program:
In the fall of 2002, I was doing something I'd been doing for years, which was developing and editing the [Climate Change Science Program's] annual report to Congress. And it had been drafted with input from dozens of federal scientists and reviewed and vetted and revised and vetted some more.
And then it had to go for a White House clearance. It came back to us over the fax machine with Phil Cooney's hand markup on it. I flipped through it and saw right away what he was doing. You don't need to do a huge amount of re-writing to make something say something different; you just need to change a word, change a phrase, cross out a sentence, add some adjectives. And what he was doing was, he was passing a screen over the report to introduce uncertainty language into statements about global warming. The political motivation of it was obvious.
Matthew Dowd:
Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. 
Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter. I knew when Katrina -- I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We're done.
Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel:
Now, there's a way of looking at the Cheney-Addington position on executive power which is not unlike some of the most extreme assertions of Lincoln and Roosevelt. But there are important differences. One is that both Lincoln and Roosevelt coupled this sense of a powerful executive in times of crisis with a powerful sense of a need to legitimate and justify the power through education, through legislation, through getting Congress on board, through paying attention to what one might call the "soft" values of constitutionalism. That was an attitude that Addington and I suppose Cheney just did not have. The second difference, and what made their assertion of executive power extraordinary, is: it was almost as if they were interested in expanding executive power for its own sake.
Anthony Cordesman, national-security analyst and former official at the Defense and State Departments:
In reality, a great deal of what Secretary Rice did seems to have been based as much on a search for visibility as any expectation of real progress. . . . Setting artificial deadlines and creating yet another set of unrealistic expectations did not lay the groundwork for sustained real progress. It instead created new sources of frustration and again made people throughout the Arab and Muslim world see the United States as hypocritical and ineffective.
David Iglesias, former U.S. attorney in New Mexico and one of the fired prosecutors:
When I got the phone call, on Pearl Harbor Day, it came completely out of the blue. Mike Battle, the head of the executive office of U.S. attorneys, said very directly, Look, you know, we want to go a different way, and we'd like you to submit your resignation by the end of next month. I said, What's going on? Mike said, I don't know, I don't want to know. All I know is that this came from on high.
I knew that U.S. attorneys were only asked to resign essentially for misconduct, and I knew I hadn’t committed any misconduct. I knew my office was doing well by the Justice Department’s internal metrics. Logically that only left one possibility, which was politics.
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president:
At the end of the day I think the divisiveness of this presidency will fundamentally come down to one issue: Iraq. And Iraq only because, in my opinion, there weren't weapons of mass destruction. I think the public's tolerance for the difficulties we face would've been far different had it felt like the original threat had been proved true. That's the fulcrum. Fundamentally, when the president gets to an approval rating of 27 percent, it's this issue.
David Kuo:
It's kind of like the Tower of Babel. At a certain point in time, God smites hubris. You knew that right around the time people started saying there’s going to be a permanent Republican majority -- that God kinda goes, No, I really don't think so.
Photographs by Annie Leibovitz
winds of Katrina that tore the Bush presidency from its moorings.
invasion and ouster of a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11 soured, no WMD were found, American troops were not home by Christmas, the occupation begat an insurgency that targeted the occupiers, and then a civil war.
Instead, it revealed in real time who Bush really was as the eyes of the world focused on New Orleans and Washington: A president equal parts aloof and inept.
is hovering in the mid 20s, lower than President Nixon's after Watergate.
