In the Bush White House, Paul O’Neill was the bespectacled swot in a class of ideological bullies who eventually kicked him out for raising too many uncomfortable questions. Now, 13 months later at a critical moment for the president, the nerd is having his revenge.
O’Neill’s account of his two years as Treasury secretary, told in a book published on Tuesday and in a series of interviews over the weekend, is a startling tale of an administration nominally led by a disengaged figurehead president but driven by a ”praetorian guard” of hardline rightwingers led by vice-president Dick Cheney, ready to bend circumstances and facts to fit their political agenda.
According to the former aluminium mogul and longstanding Republican moderate who was fired from the US Treasury in December 2002, the administration came to office determined to oust Saddam and used the September 11 attacks as a convenient justification.
As O’Neill, who sat in countless national security council meetings, describes the mood: ”It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this’.”
”From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill told the CBS network programme, 60 Minutes. In the book, based largely on his recollections and written by an American journalist, Ron Suskind, O’Neill said that even as far back as January 2001, when President Bush took office, no one in the NSC questioned the assumption that Iraq should be invaded.
In the book, The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, the author, Suskind, quotes from memoranda preparing for a war dating to the first days of the administration. ”One of them marked ‘secret’ says ‘Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq,”’ he told CBS television.
Oil contracts
He quoted from a Pentagon document entitled Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts, which, he said, talks about carving the country’s fuel reserves up between the world’s oil companies. It talks about contractors around the world from … 30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq,” Suskind said.
The administration, as described by O’Neill, was equally fixated on granting unprecedented tax cuts to the nation’s richest people who had bankrolled its election campaign. It was not prepared to listen to an anxious Treasury secretary warning of dangerously ballooning deficits. The president was ”clearly signing on to strong ideological positions that had not been fully thought through”, O’Neill says. Moderates like himself, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and Christine Todd Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, ”may have been there, in large part, as cover” for a hardline agenda, he argues. Of that trio, only Powell remains in the administration and he has privately made it clear he will not stay on for a second Bush term.
O’Neill’s memoir is one of the most damning White House exposés of recent times, and is already being quoted with relish by Democratic presidential contenders. It has sparked a furious damage limitation and denigration response by the president’s aides, one of whom told Time magazine in a revealing comment: ”We didn’t listen to him when he was there. Why should we now?”
White House aides have also pointed to O’Neill’s reputation as a gaffe-prone Treasury secretary, who at one point triggered a run on the dollar by suggesting that maintaining its strength was not a priority.
O’Neill says the president often did not have much to say at key discussions and it was the bullies of the Republican right who took over. After perceptions spread early in the administration that vice-president Dick Cheney and the Republicans’ political mastermind, Karl Rove, were really making policy, the White House publicity machine dedicated itself to building Bush up as a decisive leader. Presidential aides have ”leaked” anecdotes to the press showing Bush making tough decisions. In Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War, based principally on the celebrated Washington journalist’s interviews with the president and top officials, there is no doubt who is in charge as the nation faces its greatest challenge since Pearl Harbor.
O’Neill paints a very different picture. He describes Bush as mostly silent and inscrutable during policy debates in cabinet, and says there was hardly any real interaction between president and his department heads.
He describes those cabinet sessions as being ”like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people”. At the end of them, he said, cabinet members were left to make policy like ”blind man’s bluff” guessing what the president’s wishes were.
When the Treasury secretary went to the Oval Office for weekly discussions, he found he did all the talking. ”I wondered from the first, if the president didn’t know the questions to ask,” he tells Suskind, ”or if he did know and just did not want to know the answers?”
The one time the president does become engaged in economic policy discussion in Suskind’s book, it is to question the orthodoxy of his own administration’s policy during a White House discussion of a second round of tax cuts in November 2002, following triumphal midterm election results.
According to Suskind, who says he has a transcript of the meeting, the president asks: ”Haven’t we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut’s gonna do it again.”
The president suggests instead: ”Shouldn’t we be giving money to the middle?” But Rove, who has masterminded Bush’s election campaigns since his days in Texas, jumps in at this point in the transcript to urge the president: ”Stick to principle. Stick to principle.”
”He says it over and over again,” Suskind said. ”Don’t waver.”
In his own account, O’Neill discovers the hard line on tax cuts is coming from Cheney. Not knowing he was in his last weeks as Treasury secretary, he went to see the vice-president expecting to get a sympathetic hearing for his concerns over the deficit. Instead he is told: ”You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.”
O’Neill’s disillusion personifies a latent split in the Republican party between traditional moderates and followers of the president’s father, and the hardliners around the second President Bush. O’Neill served in the Nixon and Ford administrations before moving on to run the Alcoa aluminium corporation, where he dedicated himself to improving worker safety. He insists he continues to support the wider Republican cause but he is not going to be silenced. He declares: ”I’m an old guy, and I’m rich. And there’s nothing they can do to hurt me.” – Guardian Unlimited Â