Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
Peter Baker
Language: English
Pages: 832
ISBN: 0385525192
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Book
Theirs was the most captivating American political partnership since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: a bold and untested president and his seasoned, relentless vice president. Confronted by one crisis after another, they struggled to protect the country, remake the world, and define their own relationship along the way.
The real story of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney is far more fascinating than the familiar suspicion that Cheney was the power behind the throne. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with key players, and thousands of pages of private notes, memos, and other internal documents, Baker paints a riveting portrait of a partnership that evolved dramatically over time, during an era marked by devastating terror attacks, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and financial collapse. Peter Baker has produced a monumental and definitive work that ranks with the best of presidential histories.
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Mission. But it would ultimately destroy his relationship with Armey, who came to feel betrayed. “I deserved better than to have been bullshitted by Dick Cheney,” he said years later. “I can’t definitively say that Cheney purposely lied to me, but if you demonstrated it to me, I wouldn’t be surprised.” That same day, the British government released a dossier accusing Iraq of possessing banned weapons and went beyond even what the American intelligence agencies had been saying. Among other.
To Kennebunkport, but before heading off for some fishing with his father, he met with relatives of slain soldiers in a local elementary school. One was Hildi Halley, whose husband had died in Afghanistan. While the public saw Bush’s swagger, his private meetings with families that had lost sons and daughters and husbands and wives revealed a different side, one kept out of the media. Typically in such encounters, Bush sat down with each family separately, joined only by a single aide, usually.
Surge, that might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in Congress,” Karl Rove concluded. “Steve Hadley,” recalled William Luti, “kept saying that the surge policy should come from the military.” But Casey was “adamantly opposed” to adding more than two additional brigades and told Bush so by videoconference on December 12. Isolated from his generals and even his closest adviser, Bush found support in an unlikely quarter. John McCain, a staunch supporter of the war and an equally.
Half years, longer than that now.” That was the calculation: means and ends. If the threat was dire enough, then getting rough with a handful of suspects seemed a small price to pay, especially Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the acknowledged mastermind of September 11. Whatever it takes. “I wasn’t concerned just about guarding against another set of airplane hijackings,” Cheney went on. “That wasn’t the threat. The threat was the ultimate—a possibility of nineteen hijackers armed with a nuke or a.
Was Bush who changed, not in his core beliefs or his general personality, but in his approach toward the same goals. By the latter half of his presidency, he had grown more confident in his own judgments and less dependent on his vice president. He was willing to compromise on his most controversial terror policies in order to build a bipartisan foundation that would outlast his administration. He was more interested in rebuilding alliances and trying diplomacy than in preemptive wars.