www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml
CBS A year ago, Paul ONeill was fired from his job as George Bushs Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the presidents policy on tax cuts. Now, ONeill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run. Entitled The Price of Loyalty, the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.
Paul ONeill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made. Ive come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so Im sure somebody will say all of that and more, says ONeill, who was George Bushs top economic policy official. In the book, ONeill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate. At cabinet meetings, he says the president was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection, forcing top officials to act on little more than hunches about what the president might think. This is what ONeill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening As I recall, it was mostly a monologue. He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasnt his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa. ONeill readily agreed to tell his story to the books author Ron Suskind and he adds that hes taking no money for his part in the book. Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book including several cabinet members. ONeill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration Donald Rumsfeld - warned ONeill not to do this book. Understandably, because ONeill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president. They said, This could really be the one moment where things are revealed. Not only did ONeill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents. Everythings there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten thank you notes, 100-page documents. Stuff thats sensitive, says Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings. And what happened at President Bushs very first National Security Council meeting is one of ONeills most startling revelations. From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go, says ONeill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic A 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept.
For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the United States has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap. And that came up at this first meeting, says ONeill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later. One of them marked, secret, says, Plan for post-Saddam Iraq, adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001. Based on his interviews with ONeill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraqs oil wealth. He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts, which includes a map of potential areas for exploration. It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: If we dont stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then were going to have a serious problem coming down the road. The thing thats most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said X during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing Y, says Suskind. Not just saying Y, but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that ONeill argued against a second round of tax cuts. It was about how to use the nations resources to improve the condition of our society, says ONeill. And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction. The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of a praetorian guard that encircled the president to block out contrary views. He was becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major damage control. Twice during stock market meltdowns, ONeill was not available to the president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with the Irish rock star Bono. He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, You know, youre getting quite a cult following. Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab at ONeill in public, at an economic forum in Texas. He thought the presidents habit of giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for ONeill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there, says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged. Well, shouldnt we be giving money to the middle, wont people be able to say, You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for? But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in. And nine days after that meeting in which ONeill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign. With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, ONeill maintains he was in the right. But without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors for, against more tax cuts. Bush, he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering. Youre giving me the impression that youre just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book, says Stahl to ONeill. I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think theyll be hard put to, says ONeill. Well, I dont think I need to be because I cant imagine that Im going to be attacked for telling the truth, says ONeill. White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what hell continue to do.
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