Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?O'Neill Tells
'60 Minutes' Iraq Was 'Topic A' 8 Months Before 9-11
Jan. 11, 2004
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3Former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is the main source for an upcoming book
about the Bush White House, "The Price of Loyalty." (CBS)
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Paul O'Neill Speaks Out
Ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill speaks out for the first time about the Bush Administration. He reveals to 60 Minutes the President's case for war, tax cuts and relations with his staff. | Share/Embed
Paul O'Neill Speaks Out (3:32)
Et Tu, O'Neill? (2:24)
White House Reacts To O'Neill (1:08)
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(CBS) A year
ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury
Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on
tax cuts.
Now, O'Neill - 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. [Simon and Schuster, the book's publisher,
and CBSNews.com, are both units of Viacom.]
But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill.
Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
Paul
O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush
Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been
made.
Will this be seen as a “kiss-and-tell" book?
“I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so
I'm sure somebody will say all of that and more,” says O’Neill, who was
George Bush's top economic policy official.
In the book, O’Neill 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 O'Neill 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 wasn't 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.
O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron
Suskind – and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the
book.
Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book – including several cabinet members.
O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says
that someone high up in the administration – Donald Rumsfeld - warned
O’Neill not to do this book.
Was it a warning, or a threat?
“I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned,” says
Suskind. “Understandably, because O'Neill 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 O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.
“Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank
you" notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive,” says Suskind,
adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private,
high-level National Security Council meetings. “You don’t get higher
than that.”
And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security
Council meeting is one of O'Neill's 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 O’Neill, who
adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the
inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what
we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things
were laid and sealed.”
As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the
National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the
meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never
asked.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it.
The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For
me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. 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 O’Neill, who adds that
the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council
meeting two days later.
He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos.
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
O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes
that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals,
and even divvying up Iraq's 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. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil
in Iraq.”
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore
Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop
extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions,
then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And
I'm going to prevent that."
“The thing that's 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.”
The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six
months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts
through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. 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 O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.
“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says,
‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the
mid-term elections, this is our due.’ … O'Neill is speechless.”
”It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to
use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society,”
says O’Neill. “And I thought the weight of working on Social Security
and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax
reduction.”
Did he think it was irresponsible? “Well, it's for sure not what I would have done,” says O’Neill.
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. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O’Neill.
Meanwhile,
the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. 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, O'Neill 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.
“Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show,” says
Suskind. “He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting,
‘You know, you're getting quite a cult following.’ And it clearly was
not a joke. And it was not said in jest.”
Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the
president even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in
Texas.
The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr.
Bush began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of
giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a
head for O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the
economic team.
“It's a huge meeting. 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.
He says everyone expected Mr. 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.
“He asks, ‘Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again,’” says Suskind.
“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’ Now, his
advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the
entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.’ And the president kind of
goes, ‘OK.’ That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again.
‘Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't 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.
“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to
principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says
Suskind. “Don’t waver.”
In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting
in which O'Neill 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, O'Neill maintains he was in the right.
But look at the economy today.
“Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It
was terrific,” says O’Neill. “I think the tax cut made a difference.
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.”
While in the
book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was
surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president
unflattering.
“Hmmm, you really think so,” asks O’Neill, who says he isn’t joking. “Well, I’ll be darned.”
“You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be
stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O’Neill. “And
they're going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's
getting back because he was fired.”
“I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be hard put to,” says O’Neill.
Is he prepared for it?
“Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm
going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O’Neill. “Why would I
be attacked for telling the truth?”
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 he'll
continue to do."
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