A great section of author Kenneth Timmerman’s new book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender
Carl Levin understood that no president could govern effectively without putting his own highly skilled political appointees into key government positions. Although their numbers were small – the congressional “Plum Book” that was published every time a new president came into office listed just 7,000 in the year 2000 – they were critical. These were the men and women who gave direction to the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Effective political appointees were essential for any president to transform his political vision into action. Without them, a president was like a cork bobbing in the ocean, swept by the wind and the currents.
Levin and other top Democrats in the U.S. Senate were determined to prevent George W. Bush from getting the people he wanted into positions of power. Since all top nominees had to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that gave the Democrats – who held a 50-49-1 majority once Vermont Republican James Jeffords quit the Republican party unexpectedly in May 2001 – powerful tools.
Senate confirmation has always been a contentious process. Since the Nixon years, Senators Edward Kennedy and Joseph Biden have held conservative judges hostage to a litmus test on abortion and other left-wing causes. But at the start of the Bush administration, the Democrats took aim not at judges (that would come later) but at the president’s counter-terrorism and national security team.
For nearly seven months, Levin and this Democratic teammates prevented confirmation hearings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s top advisor’s – Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, Assistant Secretary of Defense fo International Security Programs J.D. Crouch, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman. “While Levin was holding up their appointments, the incoming Pentagon policy team had no legal or political authority to do their vital jobs – a fact that helps explain why it took eight months for the Bush administration to draw up a strategic operational plan to destroy al-Qaeda,” wrote J. Michale Waller, a defense and intelligence policy specialist at the Institute of World Politics.
The joke around the building was that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz the only political appointees who had cleared the Senate, “it was Home Alone 3,” one appointee said.
The sabotage continued via Clinton “holdovers,” people such as Peter F. Verga, Clinton’s deputy undersecretary of defense for policy integration, a major intelligence post. While “Verga made himself useful to the Rumsfeld team, he beavered to curry favor at the top, in part by snipping and playing bureaucratic games to make life difficult for the incoming defense policy team, Waller wrote.
Ken deGraffenreid was the administration’s pick to replace Verga. A former White House hand from the Nixon days, he had been writing about intelligence reform for years, so Rumsfeld decided to give him an opportunity to put his theories to work. By the time his appointment finally cleared the Senate, it was already July. But even then, the bureaucratic fencing continued.
“Verga just stayed in place,” deGraffenreid recalls. “I arrived – I had put my company out of business – and this guy wouldn’t leave his job. He had big office and I was put in the back room, next to the refrigerator, the copying machine, and the coffee-maker.”
That wasn’t the worst, deGraffenreid said. “I’m an old Navy pilot. I’ve lived in a hangar, so that part didn’t bother me. But then I went to Doug [Feith], and to use an old Navy term, I said, ‘What the f—?” Verga had used the six months he was alone in his office with only Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz above him to ingratiate himself with his new bosses. “He made them feel they owed him something, so they kept him in place,” deGraffenreid said.
It reminded him of Cook County, Illinois, where he had grown up. “If you wanted your street paved, you went to Mayor Daley. The Pentagon in July 2001 was like Cook Country in 1962. The Clintonistas were the Mayor Daley who ran the place. It took me six months to get rid of the son of a bitch,” he said of Verga. “I’m not sure that Rumsfeld and his undersecretaries ever recovered from that situation.”
Feith’s reputation as someone who refused to confront the partisan Democrats in the bureaucracy who was undercutting his own employees became legendary over the next five years. “They asked us to stick out our necks for this president,” another appointee who worked with Feith told me in confidence. “And then they chopped them off.”
While any new administration needs the benefit of experience of career diplomats, military officers, and intelligence experts, since the September 11 attacks these positions became critical in a way that only happens in times of war.
Richard Clarke was just the sort of person a new administration would want to have around as it crafted its approach to the terrorist threat from al-Qaeda. As counterterrorism “czar” during most of the eight Clinton years, he arguably knew more about al-Qaeda then any other American official.
But as Clarke’s strident and highly personal denunciation of the president and his top advisor’s during his March 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission showed, that experience could become a double-edged sword. Clarke’s self-serving account of how the Bush team failed to grapple with the al-Qaeda threat during the first eight months in office conveniently left out the failures of eight years of the Clinton administration, when the United States was attacked five times by al-Qaeda and did almost nothing in response. Clarke also neglected to mention in his public testimony that until just two months before the September 11 attacks, “nearly all the senior counterterrorism and intelligence officials on duty at the time were holdovers from the Clinton administration,” Waller noted.
“We were really quite taken aback by Clarke’s public testimony,” 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman told me the day after Clarke appeared before the Commission. “It differed dramatically with the fifteen hours of detailed, dispassionate testimony he gave in closed session, which was much more of an indictment of the eight Clinton years then the eight months of Bush. There was just a lot more policy to criticize. There wasn’t a lot of policy to criticize under Bush because the administration didn’t have its people in place for most of the eight months. Hell hath no fury like a bureaucratic scorned.” Lehman believed Clarke was bitter because the Bush White House hadn’t recognized his talents and given him the same power he had under Clinton, when he was treated as a member of the cabinet.
It appears those eight months of sabotage done by the Democrats worked quite well, and it continued for many years. To this day we live with the Democrat burrowers who have dug themselves into the State Department and never left. Hell, out of the 270 political appointee positions at the Pentagon, almost every single one was held by a holdover for the first five years of Bush’s presidency.
More on that in the next post.
See author page