American Experience (1988) s32e07 Episode Script

1
(helicopter blades whirring)
(radio chatter)
(over radio):
Roger, 10-4.
NARRATOR:
After the worst terrorist attack
in U.S. history, Americans
turned for hope and reassurance
to a recently elected president
many had thought
was unprepared for the office.
The heir of a political dynasty,
George Walker Bush had led a
wayward life in his youth,
until he found religion
and a focus.
DAVID FRUM:
George W. Bush has a famous name
and a wealthy family
but, until he's 40,
nobody thinks
he's going anywhere.
BUSH:
Thank you, brother.
NARRATOR:
After two terms
as the governor of Texas,
he became president in 2000,
following a controversial
election victory.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT:
He intended to be
a domestic president.
That's where his concentration
was, and he hardly had a chance.
Almost out of the gate,
you know, he's hit with 9/11.
(crowd cheering)
NARRATOR:
Standing atop the rubble
of the World Trade Center
in New York,
just days after the attack,
Bush conveyed strength
in the face of fear.
MAN:
George, we can't hear you!
I can hear you!
(crowd cheers and laughs)
NARRATOR:
The president called upon
Americans
to unify
around a common purpose
I can hear you, the rest of
the world hears you
NARRATOR:
A global war on terror.
And the people who knocked
these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.
(crowd cheers)
EUGENE ROBINSON:
I think he believed
that he had been chosen
for this task.
That he had been somehow chosen
to be president
of the United States
at this crucial moment.
Not even perhaps knowing
why he had been chosen,
but that here he was.
NARRATOR:
In the days after 9/11,
Bush's popularity soared.
Then a series of major crises
and fateful decisions
unleashed forces that would
shake his confidence
and change the course
of his presidency.
♪
ANNOUNCER:
This program contains content
which may not be suitable
for all audiences.
Viewer discretion is advised.
(radio chatter)
MAN (over radio):
Three, two, one, launch.
(rockets roaring, exploding)
BUSH:
My fellow citizens,
at this hour,
American and coalition forces
are in the early stages
of military operations
to disarm Iraq,
to free its people,
and to defend the world
from grave danger.
(explosions echo)
NARRATOR:
On March 19, 2003,
President George W. Bush
announced
the start of the war in Iraq.
The air bombardment
continued overnight.
Then, 50,000 ground troops,
led by the I Marine
Expeditionary Force
and the Army's V Corps
swept into Iraq.
Go, go!
♪
Get the (no audio) off the road!
BUSH:
The people of the
United States and our friends
and allies will not live at the
mercy of an outlaw regime
that threatens the peace with
weapons of mass murder.
We will meet that threat now.
May God bless our country
and all who defend her.
(machine gun firing)
NARRATOR:
At first, the war unfolded far
better than Bush expected.
(guns firing)
U.S. soldiers advanced
rapidly up the Euphrates Valley,
crushing pockets of resistance.
REPORTER:
This entire campaign
is like none other
in U.S. military history.
One of the fastest advances
probably
in the history of warfare ever,
not just modern warfare.
NARRATOR:
American forces found
that Saddam's vast army had
largely melted away.
REPORTER:
In the town of Zawbaa,
Iraqi citizens are tearing down
posters of Saddam Hussein
and American troops are being
treated as liberators.
♪
NARRATOR:
And within just three weeks
MARINE:
Yeah, let's go!
NARRATOR:
The first detachment of Marines
reached the heart
of the capital, Baghdad.
(chanting and cheering)
(cheering and whistling)
ARI FLEISCHER:
There's no TV
in the Oval Office,
so I went to the outer oval,
and there's a TV in there,
and I could see the rope around
Saddam's statue
and the tank pulling it over,
and I said, "President,
you should watch this."
So he came out, and we watched
that statue come down.
(crowd cheering and yelling)
FLEISCHER:
The president was
interested in seeing
how the crowd
wanted the statue down.
(cheering and yelling)
FLEISCHER:
He took it in as a pretty
important moment.
But he didn't say much.
NARRATOR:
After taking Baghdad
with an army less than a third
the size of the force
that Bush's father had assembled
to defeat Saddam Hussein
in 1991,
the mood in the administration
was euphoric.
The scenes of free Iraqis
celebrating in the streets
are breathtaking.
Watching them,
one cannot help but think
of the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse
of the Iron Curtain.
The U.S. military and its allies
have gone in there so swiftly,
just like Donald Rumsfeld
had said.
Yes, America!
Yes, yes, Bush!
RADDATZ:
You can have the sound down.
You don't have to listen
to anything.
You see those images
and it's people celebrating.
♪
(fighter jet engine roaring)
NARRATOR:
On May 1, a buoyant George Bush
flew out to the U.S.S. Lincoln,
moored just off the coast
of San Diego,
to salute returning troops.
ANDY CARD:
This was, this was a fun
experience for the president.
He was really looking forward
to the Abraham Lincoln. Why?
Because he was going to fly on a
plane and land on the carrier,
so he was excited.
BUSH:
Yes, I flew it!
(all laughing)
ELISABETH BUMILLER:
The intention was to show off
the end of the war.
Good job.
BUMILLER:
They were very careful
about the lighting,
I remember they, they
They wanted the light to be
that sort of golden-hour light,
so he landed
in the late afternoon.
It looked great.
("Hail to the Chief" playing)
(crowd cheering and applauding)
Major combat operations
in Iraq have ended.
In the battle of Iraq,
the United States
and her allies have prevailed.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
NARRATOR:
Though the president
did not say so
in his scripted remarks,
a large banner behind him
proclaimed the war over.
BUMILLER:
Bush makes his speech,
and the speech wasn't quite as
triumphal as the setting,
but what people remember
is the setting.
NARRATOR:
Within weeks, however,
the situation on the ground in
Iraq had already taken
an unanticipated turn.
What we'd been told to expect
is,
we're going to defeat
the Iraqi army.
Many of them
will come over to our side
because they will welcome us.
And instead, of course,
the minute Saddam left,
his subordinates left,
then their subordinates,
and ultimately all order,
all government collapsed.
CARD:
We had been told
there would be
some Iraqi generals that would
wave the white flag
and come in behind us and say,
"We'll direct traffic,
"we'll turn the water on,
we'll keep
the electricity going."
And the bureaucrats
were good bureaucrats,
and they would show up
and do their job.
And the truth is, the
white flags didn't get waved,
the troops didn't show up,
and the bureaucrats
didn't return to work.
(people talking in background)
NARRATOR:
As Iraq ground to a halt and
became a free-for-all,
homes and stores,
museums, hospitals,
and electric plants were looted.
ROBIN WRIGHT:
The Iraqis, who had been
repressed for so long,
saw suddenly
all the instruments of power,
and of the state disappear,
and this was a moment,
whether it was to go in
and get light bulbs
or to steal a million dollars
from a bank,
it was an opportunity
a lot of people couldn't avoid,
and when you saw
other people doing it,
everyone started doing it.
The American government
was there
with its troops
and didn't think it was its job
to be the police for Iraq.
It wasn't there
to stop the looting.
(guns firing)
(yelling)
RUMSFELD:
Freedom's untidy,
and free people are free to make
mistakes and commit crimes
and do bad things.
They're also free to live their
lives and do wonderful things.
And that's
what's going to happen here.
"Free people are free to make
mistakes."
Um, as if we bore no
responsibility,
and as if this shouldn't have
been expected.
It was an incredible thing
to say,
as if the success of this
unbelievably ambitious
and risky enterprise
didn't depend on what was
happening right then
in the streets of Baghdad,
as if it was already
a done deal.
♪
NARRATOR:
In Washington,
hawks, led by Vice President
Dick Cheney
and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld,
counseled Bush to pull
U.S. troops out of the country
and turn the government over
to a compliant Iraqi leader
as quickly as possible.
Secretary of State Colin Powell
and the president's
national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, warned that
to leave so precipitously
would spell disaster.
Rumsfeld and Cheney's idea
was "in and out."
And all of a sudden,
Powell and Dr. Rice jump in
and grab the president and say,
"No, you have occupational
responsibilities
"under international law.
"We gotta stay, and we gotta
try to do something
for the Iraqi people
and for Iraq."
Bush is undecided,
and all of a sudden
the president leans, leans,
and makes the decision that
we're staying.
NARRATOR:
Bush made the decision,
but left the details to others.
Most importantly, he didn't
provide the extra troops needed
for an occupation.
CARD:
There was a decision
to be lean
and count on others showing up
to secure the peace,
and I think
that was probably naive.
There was not as much discussion
that I remember
in the National Security Council
about the process
of organizing a government
and identifying leaders.
(cameras clicking)
NARRATOR:
Bush left the job
of running Iraq
to a civilian administrator,
Jay Garner.
But with no troops under his
direct command,
Garner was powerless
to stop the looting.
The problem was that they had
underestimated
the forces they were
setting loose.
(crowd chanting)
BAKER:
This was a country that had been
torn by sectarian differences
for many years, that have been
kept under the boiling pot
by a totalitarian dictatorship.
REPORTER:
Today, hundreds protested
against the arrest
by U.S. soldiers
of one of their religious
leaders.
(chanting)
BAKER:
Once we got rid of that,
the sectarian differences
suddenly came to the fore.
Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni groups
were now
free to fight for power
in the vacuum that had emerged
with the toppling
of the government.
NARRATOR:
As protests intensified
and the looting worsened,
Garner floundered.
So Bush decided to step in.
♪
Rather than addressing the
underlying issue
of troop numbers, however,
he chose to make
a change in leadership.
And just three weeks after
Garner had arrived in Baghdad,
Bush nominated
a diplomat-turned-
management-expert
named Jerry Bremer
to replace him.
BAKER:
Jerry Bremer had been a
well-respected diplomat
and lieutenant
of Henry Kissinger,
but had never done anything like
what they were asking him to do,
and he becomes the viceroy,
in effect, of occupied Iraq.
BUSH:
Today, it's my honor
to announce
that Jerry Bremer
has agreed to become
the presidential envoy to Iraq.
NARRATOR:
After just one meeting,
Bush had decided that Bremer
was the man for the job,
even though he had no experience
in the Middle East.
He's a can-do type person.
He shares the same values
as most Americans share,
and that is our deep desire
to have a, an orderly country
in Iraq
that is free and at peace.
(chuckling)
WILKERSON:
This is the dysfunctionality
of the
decision-making team again.
Jerry Bremer gets called in
because Jay Garner is not
big enough, he's not, you know,
a name.
And the president tells Jerry
in the Oval,
"You have carte blanche."
♪
NARRATOR:
Bremer arrived in Baghdad
with the full authority
of Bush behind him.
The problem was, Bush hadn't
clearly articulated
what he wanted.
ROBERT DRAPER:
Bush made the decision,
very much like George W. Bush,
very much like this kind of
Harvard Business School
way of doing things, that, look,
you know, "I'm going to
"I'm going to put the right guy
there,
and I'm going to leave the
details to him."
REPORTER:
The new U.S. civil administrator
for Iraq
are meeting here with
Iraqi leaders.
BREMER:
We agreed we need to do
some work
in restoring law and order.
ROBERT GATES:
There was no decision made
on a single strategy on how
we're going to do this,
and then,
with the appointment of Bremer,
it all got delegated to Baghdad.
Bremer used to brag
that he was Bush's man.
Well, in practice, he was
supposed to report to Rumsfeld,
but Rumsfeld never felt like he
had control over him, so
But at the end of the day,
the responsibility for that
has to rest in the White House.
NARRATOR:
Bremer moved immediately
to assert his control.
DRAPER:
Bremer makes very quickly
a couple of extremely fateful
decisions.
NARRATOR:
His first order
was to fire members
of Saddam's Ba'ath party from
their government jobs.
Many were public servants
and teachers,
Ba'athists in name only.
(chanting)
They didn't solve any problem.
They only speaking
and we didn't need
speaking only, we need works.
(chanting)
NARRATOR:
A week later,
Bremer issued his second order,
which disbanded
the entire Iraqi army, security,
and intelligence infrastructure.
PACKER:
Suddenly you had hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis,
armed Iraqis,
with a very keen motive
to try to make trouble
for the Americans,
and no stake in
what the Americans said they
were there to do.
NARRATOR:
Bremer's decisions marked
a radical change
of course in Iraq and went
directly against the plans
that Bush had signed off on
just weeks earlier.
But, comfortable with his
decision
to delegate authority to Bremer,
Bush said nothing.
BAKER:
Bush gives
a lot of leeway to Bremer.
He believes he shouldn't be
over-micromanaging
from 8,000 miles away.
And so when people tell him,
wait a second,
"Why is Bremer doing this, he
hasn't cleared that with us?",
Bush backs him up
Bush stands by him.
NARRATOR:
As Iraq continued to spin
out of control
and Bremer struggled
to restore order,
the occupation entered
a new phase.
CHARLES GIBSON:
Today, American forces endured
one of the most violent days
since President Bush said
the major fighting was over.
NARRATOR:
On May 26,
a team of two American Humvees
was patrolling the highway
between Baghdad and the airport
when they drove over
what appeared to be a backpack
lying in the road.
The Humvee in front of us,
we seen it, like,
it hit, like, a bump,
and it exploded.
It's about the biggest explosion
I've seen since the war started.
It was a huge explosion.
NARRATOR:
The explosion killed
a 25-year-old Army private
named Jeremiah D. Smith.
It was the first
of what would become
regular attacks
on coalition forces
using improvised explosive
devices,
or I.E.Ds.
(I.E.D. explodes)
SOLDIER:
I.E.D.!
Let's go!
Look for a target!
(guns firing rapidly)
FLEISCHER:
Things started to really turn
for the president.
After the war was over,
after we "won,"
after major combat was over,
after we hoped war was over,
war all of a sudden resumed.
(guns firing,
explosions echoing)
SOLDIER:
It's a (no audio) car bomb.
(soldiers and people yelling)
FLEISCHER:
The fedayeen and the now
guerrilla-style attacks
that increasingly started to
take the lives
of American servicemen and women
in Iraq,
it started
to grow and grow and grow.
NARRATOR:
Reports of casualties
came in daily.
REPORTER:
Yesterday, two ambushes
left four American troops dead.
REPORTER:
One U.S. Special Operations
soldier killed,
eight others wounded.
REPORTER:
Four dead and 13 injured
in three separate attacks.
SOLDIER:
(no audio) smoking, hurry up!
Let's go!
SOLDIER 2:
Hey, their vehicle's on fire!
NARRATOR:
In the eight weeks since Bush's
"Mission Accomplished" speech
aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln,
67 American soldiers had died
and another 201
had been injured.
U.S. forces were facing a
well-organized insurgency
spearheaded by
former Iraqi soldiers
that Bremer had dismissed.
But in Washington,
the president and his team
refused to admit it.
Can you tell us why you're so
reluctant to say
that what's going on in Iraq now
is a guerrilla war?
Um, I'll do my best.
(stammering)
I guess the reason I don't use
the phrase "guerrilla war"
is because there,
there isn't one,
and it would be
a misunderstanding
and a miscommunication to you
and to the people of the country
and the world.
NARRATOR:
But, for all the arguments
over how to characterize
the conflict,
the uptick in attacks on
American forces was undeniable.
REPORTER:
The White House is aware
that governing Iraq
and containing unrest
through the hot summer months
may be costly in American lives,
and critics will continue
to pose the question
of whether America won the war
only to lose the peace.
NARRATOR:
Three months in,
George W. Bush's war in Iraq
was already very different
from his father's Gulf War.
He had taken Baghdad with no
clear objective
and only one ally, the British.
This was in stark contrast to
the international coalition
that his father had assembled.
Now, facing growing
difficulties,
Bush doubled down on his
commitment there.
Instead of just disarming
Saddam,
he placed new emphasis
on the goal
of establishing a democracy
in Iraq.
Having liberated Iraq
as promised,
we will help that country
to found
a just and representative
government, as promised.
Our goal is a swift transition
to Iraqi control
of their own affairs.
People of Iraq will be secure
and the people of Iraq will run
their own country.
The president early on
did see evidence
that this was going to be a
struggle,
but he continually looked
on the bright side
of how Iraq would blossom after
the invasion.
PACKER:
It is a quality in Bush
that is appealing to some
people, which is his optimism,
his belief in the inherent
goodness in people.
But that very innocence about
themselves, about America,
about our capacity to do harm
as well as good, was fatal.
I mean, it was a religious faith
in America's goodness.
And I think Bush saw himself
and the country
as agents of a great purpose,
whose unimpeachable goodness
would carry it through
to the other side.
NARRATOR:
As the attacks intensified,
the non-stop questions about
progress in the war
began to exasperate
the president.
REPORTER:
Today, President Bush said
foreign fighters,
Ba'ath party members,
and Iraqi criminals should take
their best shot,
because U.S. forces will answer.
There are some who feel like
that if they
attack us, that we may decide to
leave prematurely.
They don't understand what
they're talking about
if that's the case
Let me finish.
There are some who feel like,
that, you know,
the conditions are such that
they can attack us there.
My answer is, "Bring 'em on."
We got the force necessary
to deal with
the security situation.
Of course we want
FLEISCHER:
As we left the Roosevelt Room,
I walked back into the Oval
with the president,
and I said, "Mr. President,
"think of how 'Bring it on'
"sounds to a mom or a wife
who's got a husband or a son
"who's fighting for us in Iraq,
'Bring it on.'
You want to send that signal
that, 'Attack us'?"
BAKER:
It's the cowboy persona that he
projects, right?
From his point of view,
he's trying
to embolden his own troops.
But it also projects
a certain cockiness
that strikes some as
the wrong way to go.
He's actually asking for a fight
that's not necessarily
going to develop.
NARRATOR:
With his daily briefings
from Iraq
containing a steady drumbeat
of reports on casualties,
Bush turned
to a different mission:
the AIDS crisis in Africa.
♪
In Senegal, the first stop on a
five-day trip to the continent,
he visited Gorée Island,
where slaves had been weighed
and measured
before they departed through
what was known
as "The Door of No Return."
BUSH:
One of the largest migrations
of history
was also one of the greatest
crimes of history.
NARRATOR:
The heart of the trip
was Bush's announcement
of a bold commitment of U.S. aid
to fight the pandemic.
Africa has the will to fight
AIDS,
but it needs the resources,
as well.
(audience applauding)
Over the next five years,
my country will spend
$15 billion
to fight AIDS around the world,
with special focus here on the
continent of Africa.
NARRATOR:
Though there was little appetite
in Congress
for such a huge program of
foreign aid,
Bush forced the issue.
The money was supposed to care
for ten million people
living with H.I.V./AIDS,
and provide antiretroviral drugs
for two million people infected
with H.I.V.
The program became known by its
acronym, PEPFAR.
I don't think the president
expected,
certainly none of us expected,
that one of the main initiatives
of the Bush administration
would turn out to be an assault
on the AIDS pandemic in Africa,
but I think the president saw it
as a moral imperative.
MICHAEL GERSON:
One of the essential commitments
that he talked about again
and again
in the context of PEPFAR is the
biblical phrase,
"To whom much is given,
much is required."
I think that explains a lot
about the Bush presidency,
this feeling that America
is blessed
and that we have
a responsibility to others
based on that blessing.
It's comparable to the
Peace Corps
and other efforts that defined
America's role in the world.
ROBINSON:
Not a lot of presidents
can say credibly
that, "A decision I took
saved millions of lives,"
and that one did.
It was just one of the biggest
things that happened
in the last 20, 30 years.
(chanting):
Bush must go, now!
We're going to be chasing Bush
until we chase him out of Iraq.
No more Bush!
NARRATOR:
By June, opposition
to the war was building at home
and around the world.
At the root of the protesters'
anger
was the belief that Bush
had lied
about Iraq having weapons
of mass destruction.
Why did the U.S.
go to war in Iraq?
9/11 was an excuse.
No imminent threat,
no weapons of mass destruction.
Now the administration keeps
changing its story,
but they can't change the facts.
NARRATOR:
Inside the administration,
officials were confident
that they would find
Saddam's biological, chemical,
and nuclear weapons.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS:
Is it curious to you
that, given how much control
U.S. and coalition forces
now have in the country,
they haven't found
any weapons of mass destruction?
RUMSFELD:
Not at all.
The area in the south
and the west and the north
that coalition forces control
is, is substantial.
It is, happens not to be
the area
where weapons of
mass destruction were dispersed.
We know where they are,
they're in the area
around Tikrit and Baghdad
and east, west, south,
and north, somewhat.
NARRATOR:
As U.S. forces took control of
more of Iraq,
Bush had an Army unit search
these areas for WMD.
They scoured arms depots
and abandoned bases,
sending daily reports back
to the White House.
FLEISCHER:
Well, I'll never forget,
there was one meeting
in the Oval Office where he was
getting an update from the field
about an Iraqi military base
in the western portion of Iraq,
in the middle of a desert,
that was excessively reinforced,
had a lot of people at it,
and it just didn't seem right.
Why would they have,
in the middle of nowhere,
all these forces?
And we thought, bing,
we found it.
We thought we found where
they've got the WMD.
We thought all along that we
were going to find them.
DAN BARTLETT:
We were all continually stunned
when week after week goes by,
and we haven't found
weapons of mass destruction.
It, it literally felt like it
was humanly impossible
for us not to find anything.
NARRATOR:
As the search dragged on,
Bush demanded to know exactly
who was in charge.
No one gave him an answer.
There was this
Keystone Cops moment
where everybody is pointing
at each other,
and it's, uh, nobody wants
anything to do with it.
Rumsfeld says, "I'm running
a military operation here.
I'm not the guy who's supposed
to be in charge of this."
Bremer is trying to constitute
a new government.
That's not his
number-one priority.
NARRATOR:
Frustrated, Bush brought in
America's leading expert on
Iraq's nuclear weapons,
David Kay.
Kay hadn't been involved
in making the case for the
invasion.
But in the 1990s,
after the Gulf War,
he had uncovered a secret Iraqi
nuclear weapons program.
Now he was asked to pick up
the search again.
KAY:
The president was unhappy
with the military's role
in doing it,
and they wanted someone who had
not been involved
in the initial assessments.
And so, I said yes, foolishly,
I guess.
NARRATOR:
In mid-June, as Kay prepared to
travel to Baghdad,
he went to the C.I.A.
headquarters
in Langley, Virginia,
to pore over the intelligence
reports about Iraq's WMD.
This was the same evidence that
Secretary of State Colin Powell
had used to make the case for
war in his speech
to the United Nations
just four months earlier.
It was literally a case of the
hair on the back of your neck
sort of goes up, you're,
"Something's not right here,"
because it was hearsay,
it was communication intercepts
that were
"Nebulous" is the most generous
way
They were quite unclear
as to what they meant.
They certainly didn't seem to
point necessarily to WMD.
So you worked on missiles?
NARRATOR:
Once in Iraq,
Kay found that
Vice President Cheney
and his chief of staff,
Scooter Libby,
were monitoring his every move.
KAY:
I would be asleep
and I'd get someone pounding on
my door
saying, "The White House is
on the line."
It was usually Scooter Libby.
And sometimes, it was something
as insane as
a set of coordinates
for where they thought
the WMD was.
Raw intelligence is something
that you do not give to amateurs
or the uninformed,
because it's easy
to make mistakes.
We had enough to do
without that sort of
interference from Washington.
NARRATOR:
Kay had a team of 1,400 experts
looking for Saddam's WMD.
The longer he was in Iraq
without announcing that he'd
found them, however,
the more the pressure grew on
the administration
to justify the invasion.
REPORTER:
Is U.S. credibility on the line
over weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq?
Uh, I'm not exactly sure
what that means.
I mean,
Iraq had a weapons program.
Intelligence throughout
the decade showed
they had a weapons program.
I am absolutely convinced,
with time,
we'll find out that they did
have a weapons program.
♪
NARRATOR:
Then, in early July 2003,
the American public saw the
first crack in the case for war.
NEWSCASTER:
Today, a former
U.S. ambassador said
the administration may have
taken the country to war
under false pretenses.
REPORTER:
Did the Bush administration
exaggerate
some of the intelligence on
Saddam's weapons program
in order to justify war with
Iraq?
♪
NARRATOR:
A retired U.S. ambassador,
Joseph Wilson,
had been sent by the
administration to Niger
to investigate claims that Iraq
had sought to buy uranium there.
In a widely read op-ed piece in
"The New York Times,"
Wilson said the claim was false.
BAKER:
People often forget
or underestimate
how important it was,
but it went to the heart
of the Iraq question.
Did the administration mislead
the public in some way?
Did it intentionally deceive the
American people
in order to go to war?
NARRATOR:
Furious at Wilson,
the White House began publicly
discrediting him
and his conclusion.
But the effort backfired,
and the fallout
further hurt Bush's credibility.
DAVID GREGORY:
This week, the White House
was forced
to admit the Iraq-Niger
connection was bogus.
As a result, critics have
sharpened their charge
that the administration may have
misled the public
in making the case for war.
ANDREA MITCHELL:
New questions tonight
about whether the administration
ignored its own experts
to hype more alleged evidence
against Saddam Hussein.
NARRATOR:
The final nail in the coffin
of the hunt for Iraq's WMD came
in January 2004,
when David Kay told Bush
the intelligence reports
had been wrong.
There were no WMD.
DIANE SAWYER:
50 percent of
the American people
have said that they think the
administration
exaggerated the evidence
going into the war with Iraq.
Weapons of mass destruction,
connection to terrorism.
Are the American people wrong,
misguided?
There is no doubt that Saddam
Hussein was a threat.
Again, I'm just trying to ask
and these are supporters,
people who believed in the war
who have asked the question.
(laughing)
Well, you can keep asking
the question,
and my answer is going to be
the same: Saddam was a danger,
and the world is better off
'cause we got rid of him.
It's hard for someone like
George W. Bush,
who views himself as a decider,
who views himself as
not swaying from side to side,
seeing the world
not in shades of gray
which it usually is but seeing
it in black-and-white terms.
It's hard for him to say,
"I made a bad decision."
PACKER:
The harder it got,
the more he bore down
and persisted, because it was
all a test of his resolve.
It was all about his mettle.
And I think that happens to
presidents during war.
I mean, Johnson felt that
Vietnam was a test
of whether he could stick it out
and not be the first American
to lose a war,
but it's dangerous when
it becomes personal.
It's dangerous when you can't
allow doubt to enter,
because doubt can lead to
course corrections
or changing your mind or not
doing it in the first place,
and none of that entered.
(audience applauding)
NARRATOR:
As he had done since childhood,
George Bush deflected
unpleasantness with humor
to defuse the tension
around the search for WMD.
There's a White House
Correspondents' Dinner
where the president is expected
to give a humorous talk,
and he tries to make fun of it.
Those weapons of mass
destruction gotta be somewhere.
(audience laughing)
Nope, no weapons over there.
(audience laughing)
BAKER:
In the room that night,
people laughed
and thought it was funny,
but the next day, a lot of
people woke up and said,
"There's nothing funny
about this."
Saddam Hussein was a bad guy,
and getting rid of him might
or might not have been
worth doing anyway,
but that wasn't the reason
people thought that they were
going to war.
(audience applauding)
DRAPER:
I believe
that George W. Bush
is an honest man,
in the sense that he doesn't go
around lying to people,
except insofar as he's not
willing to face the truth.
That doesn't make him a liar,
but it means sometimes that he's
saying things that aren't true,
and that's what happens
when you're someone who is not
fully in possession of the truth
and not willing to engage
in the rigors of finding out
whether or not
what you're
about to say is the truth.
PACKER:
My view,
in the great question of whether
they were lying to the rest of
us or lying to themselves,
is that they
were lying to themselves,
and they were doing it because
the alternative is difficult.
To face the truth,
to change your mind,
to change your actions,
that didn't fit
their political plans.
It didn't fit their characters.
NARRATOR:
The ongoing war in Iraq
was never far
from Bush's thoughts.
And by the spring of 2004,
he was getting more and more
reports
about one town in particular:
Fallujah, the City of Mosques,
which had emerged as the
epicenter
of the Sunni insurgency against
U.S. forces.
REPORTER:
Fallujah has been one of the
most dangerous places
in Iraq for U.S. troops.
Protests against U.S. forces
here are frequent
and sometimes violent.
NARRATOR:
On March 31, 2004,
insurgents ambushed
four Americans who worked
for a U.S. military contractor,
Blackwater.
(chanting, yelling)
NARRATOR:
They were burned,
and their charred bodies were
dragged through the streets,
then hanged from a bridge.
The president
did not want it to be ignored.
This was not just another
day in a battle.
He wanted us to have a response,
and he wanted people in Iraq to
see that there was a response,
but he also wanted the world
to see
that this wasn't going to stand.
This collection of killers
is trying to shake
the will of the United States.
America will never be
intimidated
by a bunch of thugs
and assassins.
(explosions booming in distance)
NARRATOR:
Usually content
to delegate such decision-making
to others,
instead, Bush ordered
the commencement of a large-
scale attack on Fallujah
over the objections of local
Marine commanders.
REPORTER:
The Marines have Humvee patrols
going out across the city.
All day and all night,
they have come under fire.
NARRATOR:
The political fallout was
immediate.
Some members of the interim
Iraqi government resigned.
Even British Prime Minister
Tony Blair,
Bush's staunchest ally,
counseled against the mission.
The Brits are saying,
"Whoa, wait a second, this is
a disaster, we need to stop."
And then Bush pulls back out.
And this sort of in-and-out,
scattershot kind of decisions on
Fallujah,
it's not his finest moment of
the war, that's for sure.
(siren blaring)
ROBIN WRIGHT:
Fallujah was emblematic of the
fact the Bush administration
didn't understand Iraq.
(talking in background)
ROBIN WRIGHT:
It saw Iraq only through
the prism of Saddam Hussein,
a dictator,
and it knew so little about
what Iraq was, who its people
were, where their hearts were,
what their identity sources
were,
what they wanted,
that they really blew it.
(chanting)
NARRATOR:
On the same day that Marines
were pummeling the
Sunni stronghold of Fallujah
(yelling)
NARRATOR:
American troops came under
sustained attack
from a Shia uprising in other
parts of Iraq.
(guns firing)
Armed militants, led by a fiery
cleric, Moqtada Al-Sadr,
seized control of major towns
in the South
and even parts of Baghdad.
PACKER:
The uprising was massive,
and it was devastating
for the Americans because
one sectarian enemy was a lot to
handle, but two,
and you pretty much have
the whole of Iraq against you.
So, suddenly, what had seemed
like a very painful,
but slowly upward path toward
reconstruction
and creating
a sovereign Iraqi government
looked like, um, just a war.
REPORTER:
This week has been
one of the deadliest
for U.S. troops
over the past year.
REPORTER:
Earlier today, at least one
Marine died in the city
REPORTER:
killing two U.S. servicemen.
In Baghdad
♪
NARRATOR:
As attacks
on U.S. troops intensified,
questions about Bush's handling
of the war took a back seat
in the media to profiles
of American casualties.
REPORTER:
Beaver Dam is in mourning.
One of its native sons perished
serving his country in Iraq.
REPORTER:
A man who died too young,
three days after his
25th birthday.
A devoted husband, loving son,
and brother.
WOMAN:
He loved music,
he loved entertaining people,
he did magic tricks.
NARRATOR:
148 soldiers were killed in
April 2004
in more than
50 separate attacks,
more than all
the casualties suffered
in the original invasion.
REPORTER:
By sunrise, two Americans
and two suspected attackers
had been killed.
NARRATOR:
Aides often found President Bush
staring at the list of
casualties on the blue sheet,
the first thing he saw
when he arrived in the
Oval Office each morning.
As he read the names,
he knew that he would soon
confront
many of these soldiers'
grieving families.
Whenever the president would
travel outside of Washington,
we would always find out
how many families of
the fallen were present
in that area and we would then
invite them
to visit with the president.
Sometimes it'd just be out
in the hangar,
and he would listen
to the families
talk about
their lost loved ones.
FLEISCHER:
He sent these people to war.
It was his decision that led to
people being wounded
or losing their lives,
and he knew
he had to join those families
and take whatever it was
those families wanted
to say to him.
Sometimes it was loving,
sometimes it was religious.
Sometimes it was compassionate.
Sometimes it was angry,
and he knew he had to take it.
♪
DANA PERINO:
Most of the families
were very happy
to see the president, overjoyed,
right?
The honor that was so great.
But there was one family
Their son
was not going to make it.
And he was on life support,
and this mom was so mad.
And she railed at the president
and yelled and yelled,
and he didn't try to leave.
And the husband said,
"Mr. President, thank you,"
you know,
tried to calm his wife down,
the president said,
"It's okay, I, I can stay,"
and he said,
"No, we thank you,"
and shook hands, continued on.
We saw about five more patients
after that.
But I'll never forget that we
get on the helicopter,
Marine One, to head back,
and he says,
"That momma sure was mad at me,"
and he looked at me, and I said,
"Yes, sir."
And he looked out the window,
and I saw this one tear came
down his cheek,
and he said,
"And I don't blame her a bit."
And we got back to the
White House,
and it was back to business.
NARRATOR:
For all Bush's efforts to focus
on other issues,
the fight against Al Qaeda
and the war in Iraq
required his full attention.
In April 2004,
"The Washington Post" obtained
secret memos written after 9/11
which laid out a legal
justification
for using what Bush's
administration called
"enhanced interrogation
techniques."
They were designed to extract
information
about imminent attacks from a
small number of Al Qaeda leaders
being held in undisclosed
locations around the world.
They thought
in those beginning days,
and even maybe
the beginning years,
that there might be another
attack any day now,
and they needed to figure out
who this network was
and how to find them
and how to kill them.
What they did with the captives
is,
they hid them in
foreign countries.
They didn't want to allow the
Red Cross or the U.N.
to monitor their conditions.
They didn't necessarily want to
treat them humanely, either,
and that's where you get
the so-called "enhanced
interrogation techniques."
NARRATOR:
When news of the extreme
techniques broke,
Bush again dug in,
defending his policy.
Mr. President,
I wanted to return
to the question of torture.
What we've learnt from these
memos this week
is that the
Department of Justice lawyers
and the Pentagon lawyers have
essentially worked out
a way that U.S. officials
can torture detainees.
We're a nation of law,
we adhere to laws.
We have laws on the books.
You might look at those laws,
and that might provide comfort
for you.
They had defined torture as
organ failure or death.
And so anything short of that,
especially if it's monitored
by a doctor
so that the guy can't die,
then that's not torture.
So I think Bush
is convinced that,
although we're treating people
harshly,
we're not torturing anyone.
And you've got to really, really
think about that hard,
because how on Earth could
anybody think
that we
weren't torturing anyone?
NARRATOR:
As Bush's war on terror grew,
hundreds of low-level detainees
were sent to Guantánamo Bay.
Many had nothing to do with
Al Qaeda
or the attacks of 9/11.
Still, soldiers began using
enhanced interrogation
techniques
on these detainees, too.
All this was kept secret until
the morning of April 28, 2004.
The Arab world woke up today
to shocking photos
that apparently show U.S. troops
abusing detainees at a prison
outside Baghdad.
(battering ram pounds door)
NARRATOR:
With the insurgency
in Iraq gaining ground,
American troops had been filling
up the prison called Abu Ghraib
with suspected bomb makers
and guerrilla fighters.
For months, reports of abuse
at Abu Ghraib
had made their way up
the chain of command
all the way to
Secretary Rumsfeld,
who had done little until dozens
of explosive photos
were leaked to the press.
BAKER:
Some of those prisoners were
piled on top of each other
naked.
The most horrific photograph
shows one of the Iraqi detainees
standing on a box,
and he had been told
if he fell off the box,
he would be electrocuted.
WOLF BLITZER:
The pictures have led
to charges against
six United States soldiers,
and the images
may have damaged the American
mission in Iraq.
REPORTER:
"It's wrong, wrong,
100 percent,
and a crime," says Khalil.
"You came to liberate us from an
unjust dictator,
who killed and tortured us."
(protesters chanting)
NARRATOR:
Later investigations
would reveal
that the abuse of prisoners at
Abu Ghraib
was a direct result of
Bush's decisions.
Commanders in Iraq were advised
to "Gitmo-ize"
interrogations there
to gain intelligence
on the insurgency.
PRIEST:
What we found was
that there was a migration
of the tactics used by a small
number of C.I.A. operatives
against the suspects
in the black sites.
It migrated over to this
unit of low-level soldiers
not trained in interrogations
or even prisoner guarding.
They were bored, and cruel.
BUMILLER:
Abu Ghraib was devastating
for the administration.
It showed the kind of rot
that was occurring in Iraq under
American occupation,
and it showed how far off we had
come from American ideals.
NARRATOR:
The behavior of American
soldiers at Abu Ghraib
shook Bush, but to him,
there was no connection
with his decision to approve
harsh interrogation techniques
on Al Qaeda suspects.
I didn't like it one bit.
But I also want to remind people
that those few people
who, who did that
do not reflect the nature
of the men and women
we've sent overseas.
NARRATOR:
With no satisfactory response
forthcoming from
the secretary of defense,
calls for Rumsfeld's
resignation mounted.
I think the president
of the United States
should fire the
secretary of defense, Rumsfeld.
SHEILA JACKSON LEE:
I ask the speaker of the House
to command an open session here
on the floor of the House
for Secretary Rumsfeld to come
and tell us
why he was hiding reports
for two months,
why no one knew about
the reports,
and why these kinds of heinous
and ridiculous acts
are going on.
We want peace over war
♪
NARRATOR:
12 days after the Abu Ghraib
images went public,
Bush met
with his secretary of defense.
Rumsfeld handed Bush
a letter of resignation,
but the president refused it.
(cameras clicking)
Instead,
with Rumsfeld at his side,
he praised his defense secretary
in front of
the assembled press corps.
Mr. Secretary,
thank you for your hospitality.
And thank you for your
leadership.
You are courageously leading
our nation
in the war against terror.
You're doing a superb job.
You are a strong
secretary of defense,
and our nation owes you
a debt of gratitude.
PRIEST:
On Abu Ghraib, really, nobody is
held responsible.
There are charges against
the low-level soldiers
that carried this out, but,
from Rumsfeld on down,
nothing happens;
on the contrary,
Bush exonerates him in public.
NARRATOR:
No one was held accountable
for the program of torture
or enhanced interrogation
at the black sites or the prison
at Guantánamo Bay, either.
Bush and most of
the president's closest advisers
held to a deep-rooted conviction
that the brutal interrogation
techniques were necessary.
I can say that questioning
the detainees in this program
has given us information that
has saved innocent lives
by helping us stop new attacks.
The procedures were tough,
and they were safe
and lawful and necessary.
(audience applauding)
NARRATOR:
When the U.S. Senate conducted
an investigation
of the interrogation program,
however,
it found that the tactics had
done untold damage to America
and had not been effective
in averting attacks,
despite claims by the C.I.A.
ROBINSON:
It's not legal,
and whether you call it
enhanced interrogation
or whatever,
it's not legal under U.S. law,
it's not legal under
international law,
and it's certainly,
I would say to George W. Bush,
not legal under God's law.
The torture was just a stain
on our national soul.
WILKERSON:
There are 34 coroner's reports,
34 that say "homicide."
We killed 34 people
in detention.
Now, only a few of those have
been revealed
and a few people
have been punished for it.
But that's the ultimate torture,
I mean, that's even
their definition of torture
We murdered people.
PRIEST:
I don't think there's any
evidence
that torture or the black sites
kept us safer.
On the contrary, I think there's
a lot of evidence
that it made it much more
dangerous for every American
who went overseas,
who fought overseas,
because the stories
that came out
about the Abu Ghraib
mistreatment
and the Guantánamo mistreatment
were the best recruiting tools
that Al Qaeda ever got,
no question about that.
They have picked up people on
the battlefield,
they've listened to people
talking through surveillance,
and they absolutely know that
that mistreatment
fueled a new generation
of recruits,
and they are still using all
those images to do that.
♪
NARRATOR:
With the Iraq War taking
such a dark turn,
Bush was tested in ways
he had never anticipated.
He turned to history, devouring
books on wartime presidents,
most notably Abraham Lincoln.
♪
In public, he was careful to
keep such introspection hidden,
always looking ahead,
and never second-guessing
decisions he'd made,
despite mounting pressure to
acknowledge mistakes.
BARTLETT:
I remember vividly
a primetime press conference in
the East Room.
JOHN DICKERSON:
Thank you, Mr. President.
After 9/11, what would your
biggest mistake be,
would you say, and what lessons
have you learned from it?
Hmm.
I wish you'd have given me this
written question ahead of time,
so I could plan for it.
Uh
BARTLETT:
And I believe it was
John Dickerson
who posed this question,
and it really got the president
in one of those cases that he
sometimes would call,
"Well, I got myself
in a rhetorical cul-de-sac."
John, I'm sure historians will
look back and say,
"Gosh, he could have done it
better this way or that way."
Uh
BARTLETT:
But what he was tempering,
that he did not
and would not do,
is to call this a war a mistake.
You know, I just, uh
I'm sure something will pop
into my head here
in the midst of this
press conference,
with all the pressure of trying
to come up with an answer,
but it hadn't yet.
He thinks that what they are
trying to say
is it was a mistake
to go to war.
He won't admit that, that's not
something he will say.
So he stumbles over the answer,
and it becomes
kind of this indelible moment
of his presidency.
(cheering)
NARRATOR:
As the summer of 2004
approached,
Bush turned his attention away
from Iraq
and began planning
for his re-election campaign.
(chanting):
Four more years!
NARRATOR:
After all the difficulties
with the war,
he relished traveling
the country
and being among his supporters.
TIM NAFTALI:
There was a lot riding
on the '04 campaign,
for George W. Bush
and for his father.
This would be the vindication
of the Bushes.
The Adams,
the only other family thus far
to have produced two presidents,
they were two
one-term presidents.
If George W. Bush won in '04,
the Bushes would have achieved
something
no other political family had in
American history:
re-election.
NARRATOR:
With America so deeply polarized
over Iraq,
Bush and his team knew that
re-election would be a struggle.
KARL ROVE:
Bush's approval rating is at 63
in the spring of 2003,
and by election day, it was 51.
(crowd chanting, whistling)
ROVE:
Now, when we planned for the
re-election, we did not think
that the glory days
are gonna last forever.
We knew we were in for a tough
race and planned accordingly.
NARRATOR:
Bush and Rove decided to
energize their base
by having the president
come out forcefully
against same-sex marriage.
I believe in the sanctity
of marriage.
NARRATOR:
He called for
a constitutional amendment,
and Republicans placed votes
on the ballot
in several key states.
And he allowed his political
guru, Karl Rove,
to play on misunderstanding
and bigotry.
And it was done cynically
in order to ensure
turnout in places where
opposition to the war
made George W. Bush's chances
iffy.
NARRATOR:
Opposition to the
Iraq War had become
a defining issue for Democrats,
and their candidate, Senator
John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran,
made it the centerpiece
of his campaign.
Now, we realize the president's
misled us
on weapons,
misled us on the reasons,
misled us on a host of
different things.
NARRATOR:
Bush focused his campaign not on
the war in Iraq,
but on the continuing threat of
terrorism.
After September the 11th,
we could not fail to imagine
that a brutal tyrant who hated
America, had ties to terror,
had used weapons of mass
destruction,
might use those weapons
or share the capability of those
weapons with terrorist enemy.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
The Iraqi people are free
and America and the world
are safer.
BAKER:
"Do you want somebody who is
going to
"protect you or not?
"I'm the one who's going to
protect you.
"That other guy, John Kerry,
is weak
and he's not going
to protect you."
NARRATOR:
Bush also knew he had to define
his opponent
before he was able to establish
himself on the national stage.
That task was taken on by
Vice President Cheney.
Senator Kerry has also said that
if he were in charge,
he would fight a
"more sensitive" war on terror.
(audience laughing)
Those who threaten us and kill
innocents around the world
do not need to be treated
more sensitively.
They need to be destroyed.
(audience applauding)
What Bush does is,
turns this war hero
into a symbol of defeatism.
And it sells and it resonates in
a country that is still
looking for, for security.
(cheering)
NARRATOR:
Still, as Kerry gained
in the polls,
an obscure group based in Texas
began airing ads attacking his
military record.
John Kerry betrayed the men
and women
he served with in Vietnam.
He dishonored his country,
he most certainly did.
I served with John Kerry.
John Kerry cannot be trusted.
They chop up Kerry to bits.
ANNOUNCER:
Can you trust anything he says?
I mean, man alive,
it was a classic Bush race,
kill or be killed.
NARRATOR:
When critics denounced the ad
as a vicious smear on a veteran,
the Bush campaign denied knowing
anything about it.
You didn't know anything about
the Swift Boat ads
before they went on the air,
did you?
No, I didn't.
Karl Rove
know anything about it?
Don't think so.
Um
In other words,
are you asking whether
we coordinated this
in our campaign?
No, whether they gave you
a heads up
they were going to do it.
Not to my knowledge.
You look
for your opponent's strength,
and then you try to make it
a liability.
You couldn't put Rove or Bush's
fingerprints on it,
and yet, at the same time,
it just has the complete aura
of having originated that way.
And particularly since the whole
thing's came out of Texas.
NARRATOR:
The attack on Kerry's war record
helped neutralize
one of Bush's most glaring
vulnerabilities:
his preferential treatment
in avoiding the draft
as a National Guard pilot.
BAKER:
It's a kind of
counter-intuitive argument
to some extent, because it's
Kerry who, of course,
had been a veteran of combat
in Vietnam, and Bush had not.
He had been at home in the
Texas Air National Guard,
but Bush makes the case
that he is the only one
who can defend the country
at a perilous moment
and that Kerry would weaken
our defenses.
BUSH:
Thanks a lot.
NARRATOR:
Bush hit his
final campaign stop in Ohio
and headed back to the
White House
to watch the returns come in.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you so much, we really
appreciate it.
NARRATOR:
The early exit polls had Kerry
comfortably ahead,
but that changed as the evening
wore on.
TOM BROKAW:
At this stage in the game,
John Kerry and George Bush
are getting the same states
that Al Gore and George Bush
got four years ago.
It comes back down to Florida,
Florida, Florida.
And this time you add its twin,
Ohio.
NARRATOR:
With the race still uncertain,
Bush went to bed.
Finally, at around 11:00 a.m.
the following day,
as Ohio remained in the
Republican column,
Kerry called the president to
congratulate him on his victory.
CARD:
It was funny, the Oval Office
setting was much calmer
than what was happening in any
other room in the White House.
He was not overly exuberant.
He was kind of, "We did it,"
and he almost seemed as if,
"I've got to start working on my
second term.
Now I've got to get to work."
(crowd cheering)
BUMILLER:
It's amazing he won.
By any account, George Bush
should've lost that election,
given all the things he was
facing, all the headwinds
CROWD (chanting):
Four more years!
BUMILLER:
And yet, John Kerry was not
a strong candidate,
and the nation was still
reacting to 9/11.
There was still fear about what
could happen.
There's an old saying:
do not pray for tasks equal
to your powers,
pray for powers
equal to your tasks.
In four historic years, America
has been given great tasks
and faced them with strength
and courage.
Our people have restored
the vigor of this economy
and shown resolve and patience
in a new kind of war.
Our military has brought justice
to the enemy
and honor to America.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
SUSKIND:
He comes out of it, he wins,
and he wins it using a playbook
which is not all that dissimilar
from what gets him elected
president confidence.
"I'm your man.
"I am certain, unflappable,
and sharp in my focus"
You know, there he is, W.
And he kind of moves out into
his own sunlight at that point.
♪
Thank you all, please be seated.
Yesterday, I pledged to reach
out to the whole nation,
and today I'm proving that
I'm willing to reach out
to everybody
by including the White House
press corps.
(others laughing)
♪
NARRATOR:
George W. Bush had always craved
approval
from his parents, from his
classmates, from voters.
With his re-election,
he believed he had finally
earned it.
No longer was he the
"illegitimate president"
whose claim to power rested on a
disputed Supreme Court decision.
Now he believed he had the
chance to wipe the slate clean
in Iraq and bring home the
troops in victory
rather than humiliating defeat.
You asked, "Do I feel free?"
Let me put it to you this way.
I earned capital in the
campaign, political capital.
And now I intend to spend it.
It is my style.
NARRATOR:
Boosted by sweeping Republican
victories
in the House and Senate,
Bush planned to spend
his political capital on an
ambitious domestic agenda
that he had hoped would get
his presidency back on course.
At the top of his list were two
contentious issues:
Social Security and immigration.
BUSH:
When you win,
there is a feeling that the
people have spoken
and embraced your point of view.
DRAPER:
The Bush re-election
wasn't anything close to a
landslide.
But to this administration,
after what they'd been through
in November and December of
2000, it felt like a landslide.
Gosh, we're going to have a lot
of fun, then.
(laughs):
Thank you all.
DRAPER:
This administration
was riding high.
They felt like the ship will get
righted in Iraq,
and in the meantime, we got
a lot of good work to do.
Just met with my Cabinet.
I'm proud of every person here.
They've done a great job
for the country.
NARRATOR:
Bush moved quickly
to bolster loyalists
and jettison critics
within his administration.
Just ten days
after the election,
Colin Powell resigned under
pressure.
Bush named Condoleezza Rice as
his new secretary of state.
Equally notable were the changes
he chose not to make.
He kept on Dick Cheney
as vice president
and Donald Rumsfeld,
the architect of the Iraq War,
as secretary of defense.
Good morning!
Good morning.
NARRATOR:
And on January 20, 2005,
George W. Bush took a journey
from the White House
to the Capitol that his father
had been denied.
ANNOUNCER:
Ladies and gentlemen,
the president
of the United States,
George Walker Bush.
(crowd cheering)
SUSKIND:
He's in uncharted territory for
any Bush, ever.
WILLIAM REHNQUIST:
I, George Walker Bush
I, George Walker Bush
He's vindicated, he's affirmed,
he's in a place his father
never tread,
into the second term
of a U.S. presidency.
I will faithfully execute
The office of president
of the United States.
The office of president
of the United States
So help me God.
So help me God.
Congratulations.
SUSKIND:
Kind of frees him up.
And at this point,
he starts to slip out
of some of the brittle, bullying
petulance
that inhabited
a good part of his life
as the son of the president
who'll never measure up.
Vice President Cheney,
Mr. Chief Justice
The best hope for peace
in our world is the expansion of
freedom in all the world.
GERSON:
President Bush said,
"Will you write
my second inaugural?"
He said, "I want it to be
the freedom speech.
I want it to be remembered as
the freedom speech."
STEPHEN HADLEY:
The second inaugural
was a reflection
of the president's confidence in
the power of individuals
to make right decisions
for themselves
and their families.
That's core George W. Bush.
So it is the policy of the
United States
to seek and support the growth
of democratic movements
in every nation with the
ultimate goal
of ending tyranny in our world.
PACKER:
He was giving the most
high-flown,
wildly utopian speech since
Woodrow Wilson.
This was not the Bush who came
into office in 2001,
but 9/11 and Iraq
brought out something in his
character
that wanted to be
a great figure in history
and to be on the side
of the angels.
Wouldn't have been enough just
to privatize Social Security.
He needed more than that, he
needed to free the Middle East,
and that's what he
set out to do.
NARRATOR:
Bush laid out an ambitious plan
for advancing American values
abroad, notably in Iraq.
The case for tying the invasion
of Iraq to 9/11,
as argued most vigorously by his
vice president,
was consigned to history.
BAKER:
If you look at Bush and Cheney,
Cheney has a very realpolitik,
dark view of the world.
There's evil out there,
we must, we must go after it.
Bush believes that there is evil
out there,
but he does also aspire
to bigger, better things.
Now, I mean, some people thought
that was naive,
and some people thought it was
even messianic,
but I think it was born of
this idea
that the war on terror couldn't
just be about killing bad guys.
It had to be about something
bigger and more uplifting.
We had to make the world
a better place.
Good morning.
NARRATOR:
The work would begin,
Bush believed,
with the first elections
held in Iraq since the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein.
BUSH:
In just four days from now,
the people of Iraq will vote
in free national elections.
Terrorists in that country have
declared war
against democracy itself,
and thereby declared war
against the Iraqi people
themselves.
Yet the elections
will go forward.
Millions of Iraqi voters will
show their bravery,
their love of country, and their
desire to live in freedom.
The voting part
was really important to him.
He believed in the
universal freedom agenda.
This was the first opportunity
to be able to vote,
and it was a hopeful time,
actually.
NARRATOR:
In all, eight million Iraqis
cast a ballot.
At many polling stations,
the mood was jubilant,
with crowds dancing and children
playing soccer
in streets guarded by thousands
of Iraqi and American forces.
RADDATZ:
Going from polling station to
polling station,
it felt so good, you felt
like it was a breakthrough.
Watching these long lines,
and women lined up,
and how much it meant to them.
And people were so proud.
NARRATOR:
That day at least,
something wonderful appeared to
be unfolding,
and Bush's grand vision for a
democratic Iraq
seemed within grasp.
BUSH:
Today, the people of Iraq
have spoken to the world,
and the world is hearing
the voice of freedom
from the center of the
Middle East.
The Bush administration took it
as the sign
that all the naysayers had been
wrong,
that this was the future.
We were now on the right road.
But in fact, Iraq, on the
ground, was disintegrating.
(guns firing)
NARRATOR:
The election revealed
the country's deep divisions.
The minority Sunni Arabs
were excluded from power,
and their resentment further
stoked the insurgency.
President Bush compared it to
the birth of the United States.
He said the voice of freedom had
been unleashed in Iraq,
ignoring the fact
that there had been
a hundred attacks on
polling stations,
that less than two percent
of people in Anbar Province,
the place where the insurgency
really had its roots,
turned out to vote.
It was totally misunderstanding
what had happened in Iraq.
NARRATOR:
Hungry for good news,
Bush ignored the signs
of brewing trouble in Iraq.
Instead, he now turned
his attention
back to his domestic agenda.
ROVE:
He won by actually,
during the campaign, talking
about a couple of issues:
immigration reform and Social
Security modernization.
So he thought, you know, look,
"I'm not going to coast."
NARRATOR:
Bush had always dreamed of doing
big things.
Now he had his chance.
He started with Social Security,
relying on Karl Rove to help him
craft and pitch his bold plan
to privatize the program
to the American people.
He embarked
on a whistle-stop campaign
that hit 60 cities in 60 days.
BUSH:
There's a lot of issues
we could talk about,
but I'm here
to talk about Social Security.
(crowd cheering)
BUSH:
Social Security
is a big issue,
and it's an issue that we must
address now.
Because now's the time to get
something done
on the big issue
of Social Security.
(crowd cheering)
GERSON:
We campaigned week after week
all across the country on
Social Security reform,
trying to use
this political capital,
and no minds were changed.
NARRATOR:
Weakened by the ongoing
conflict in Iraq, Bush found
that his ambitions
exceeded his political strength.
What happened was, the
Republicans were behind him
on it like, so far behind him,
you couldn't even see them.
They were not there to support,
and it became pretty clear that
this first effort
out of the gate
after the second inauguration
was not going to be successful,
legislatively.
CARD:
We got zero traction from
the Republican leadership,
House or Senate, same thing with
immigration reform.
So two of his big initiatives
that we really wanted to do,
we couldn't get momentum on the
Hill to introduce them.
NARRATOR:
That summer, Bush retreated
to his Crawford ranch
for five weeks to rest
and strategize about how to
regain the political initiative.
But again, his presidency
was soon overtaken by a crisis.
MICHAEL BROWN:
Everyone, let's go ahead
and get started.
It's noon, we have a lot of
business to cover today.
NARRATOR:
On August 24,
Bush's emergency managers,
led by FEMA director
Michael Brown, began making
preparations for
a dangerous storm
bearing down on the Gulf Coast.
We're gonna do whatever it takes
to help these folks down there,
because this is,
to put it mildly,
the big one, I think.
Hurricane Katrina is a monster
of a storm,
both in size and intensity
It is simply massive.
NARRATOR:
By August the 28th,
Hurricane Katrina
had become one of the largest
and most powerful storms
ever recorded,
with sustained winds of
175 miles an hour.
Brown briefed the president
on plans
for a coordinated federal
and state response.
BUSH:
I want to assure the folks
at the state level
that we are fully prepared
to not only help you
during the storm, but we will
move in whatever resources
and assets we have at our
disposal after the storm
NARRATOR:
As fears of the impending storm
grew,
residents of New Orleans
began fleeing the city.
But tens of thousands of people
were unable to leave,
and were forced to take shelter
wherever they could.
(wind whipping)
(thunder clapping, wind howling)
At 6:10 a.m. on August 29,
Katrina made landfall
in Louisiana.
Waves of water surged
into low-lying areas.
(radio static buzzing)
911 OPERATOR:
Police operator 1-6.
WOMAN:
Yes, 911, I need help.
911 OPERATOR:
Where are you, ma'am?
WOMAN:
I'm in the Ninth Ward.
WOMAN 2:
I'm stuck in the attic, me
and my little sister
and my mom, and we got water in
the whole house.
WOMAN 3:
I'm gonna die.
The water's started rising
in the attic, ma'am,
and I'm gonna drown
in the attic.
NARRATOR:
As the rescue efforts began
that morning,
emergency workers were relieved
that New Orleans had avoided a
direct hit
when the storm altered course
at the last moment.
President Bush decided
to carry on
with a planned speech
on Medicare in Arizona.
I know my fellow citizens here
in Arizona
and across the country
are saying our prayers
for those affected by the
Hurricane Katrina.
Our Gulf Coast is getting hit
and hit hard.
(heavy winds whipping)
NARRATOR:
Though the storm had passed,
New Orleans was only just
beginning to feel
the full impact of
Hurricane Katrina.
Two hours after landfall,
levees in the Lower Ninth Ward
gave way.
(man shouting)
NARRATOR:
Floodwaters killed
a hundred people
and forced survivors
to clamber to safety.
MAN:
Hold the rope,
let him pull to the boat!
(music playing at rally)
NARRATOR:
Bush once again decided to carry
on with his schedule,
flying to San Diego for an event
at a Navy base.
We had a big debate about
whether he should go
and speak to the troops in
San Diego.
We felt like we're still at war,
and there's one thing
that the president couldn't be
criticized doing
is speaking with the troops.
NARRATOR:
Later that day,
crucial levees protecting
the city center in New Orleans
began to crumble and collapse.
Parts of the city soon lay
under 15 feet of water.
REPORTER:
80 percent of New Orleans
flooded.
The levees have broken, and
they're having a difficult time
trying to fix the situation.
The damage is staggering
REPORTER:
The real concern is anybody
who decided
to ride the storm out inside
their house,
they may have actually drowned.
♪
(people calling)
NARRATOR:
New Orleans was now
a major disaster zone,
with over 50,000 people still
stranded in emergency shelters.
The president decided to fly
back to the White House.
On Air Force One,
his aides debated
whether to let journalists
see him
surveying the damage
from his seat.
There's some staff
that let the press
up to the front of the cabin,
they took that picture
of him
just looking out the window.
And it was one of the few times
where his
unbelievable political instincts
let him down.
REPORTER:
President Bush had
Air Force One
descend to 2,500 feet
and fly over the disaster area
for about 35 minutes.
CARD:
He was crucified for flying over
and not stopping.
Well, I guarantee,
if he had stopped,
he would have been crucified
even worse.
REPORTER:
President Bush once again showed
a lack of instant,
immediate leadership.
And it just gets back to how
powerful images are
in a presidency, in life,
but those iconic images that
The ones that cut against us
The "mission accomplished,"
the obviously, the looking
out of the aircraft
those, those are searing.
(chanting):
We want help!
All these people you see
here are dying.
NARRATOR:
Five days after Katrina hit,
much-needed federal assistance
had yet to reach New Orleans.
(chanting):
Help!
This morning, I found one lady
in a wheelchair dead
in the ladies' bathroom, and
another lady laying on the floor
by the ladies' bathroom, dead.
And then there's this guy right
here that's dead,
that's been sitting out here for
a while.
ROBINSON:
The human toll in
New Orleans,
the flooded streets,
the squalor,
and desperation of people
at the convention center
and at the Superdome,
and it was every bit as bad
as, um,
as, as history records.
NARRATOR:
And the story of presidential
indifference
was soon compounded by accounts
of federal incompetence.
BRIAN WILLIAMS:
"Where is the aid?"
It's the question people keep
asking us on camera.
Brian, it's
an absolutely fair question,
and I got to tell you
from the bottom of my heart
how sad I feel for those people.
The federal government
just learned
about those people today.
RAY NAGIN:
I need reinforcements.
I need troops, man, I need
500 buses.
I've got 15,000 to 20,000 people
over at the convention center,
it's bursting at the seams.
Don't tell me 40,000 people are
coming here.
They're not here!
It's too doggone late.
Now get off your asses
and let's do something
and let's fix the biggest
goddamn crisis
in the history of this country.
SUSKIND:
Katrina ends up being
immediate domestic version
of Iraq.
Bad planning,
warnings that Bush doesn't heed,
people in various positions who
don't do their job
the way any president would want
them to,
and all of it comes
a cropper with Katrina.
It's not across the world in
Baghdad now,
it's right in New Orleans.
BARTLETT:
I remember a conversation
in which somebody in the
White House said,
"Look, it's going to be clear
to everybody
"that the mayor and the governor
aren't up to the task,
that they're failing,"
and my point was, yes,
that's why they want
the president to take over.
♪
NARRATOR:
Nearly 2,000 people died in
Hurricane Katrina.
Most of them were elderly,
trapped in homes and hospitals,
unable to flee or find shelter
from the storm.
Hundreds of thousands more were
displaced,
forced to live in temporary
accommodation for months on end.
On September 2,
Bush finally visited
the Gulf Coast
to survey the damage in person.
But he was still unable to
overcome
a perception of being
out of touch.
The good news is, and it's hard
for some to see it now,
that out of this chaos is going
to come a fantastic Gulf Coast,
and that's, and that's what I've
come down to assure people.
Again, I want to thank you all
for
And Brownie,
you're doing a heck of a job.
The FEMA director is working
24
(audience applauding)
GERSON:
It did illustrate a limit
of his leadership style.
His natural tendency is
to build people up
as they're confronting crisis.
That's what he normally does.
But this was a case
where I think
a little more impatience
would have been justified.
BARTLETT:
It was a damaging blow,
politically,
to the president.
We would like to tell ourselves
otherwise,
but it put our own allies
and party in a tough spot.
Even at the height of the
Iraq insurgency, that period
and the days and weeks after
Katrina
were as challenging as anything
in the entire presidency.
BUMILLER:
George Bush actually said that,
at one point,
that Katrina was worse on his
presidency
than the Iraq War had been,
because what it's exposed was
complete incompetence.
RAHM EMANUEL:
First Sergeant Alan Nye Gifford.
Specialist David H. Ford IV.
Staff Sergeant
Virgilio E. Neelum.
Sergeant First Class
Lawrence E. Morrison.
NARRATOR:
On October 22, 2005,
the Iraq War reached
a grim milestone
when Staff Sergeant
George T. Alexander, Jr.,
of Clanton, Alabama,
died of his wounds
after an I.E.D.
struck his vehicle.
He was the 2,000th American
soldier to die
in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
(chanting):
Not one more!
NARRATOR:
Americans had grown increasingly
weary
of the continued occupation.
MAN:
Bush lied,
and thousand and thousand
innocent children died in Iraq.
CINDY SHEEHAN:
George Bush said
that the families
can rest assured that their
children died for a noble cause.
And I want to ask him,
"What is that noble cause?"
NARRATOR:
To shore up public support,
Bush announced a withdrawal
of U.S. troops
from frontline operations.
BUSH:
We will increasingly move out of
Iraqi cities,
reduce the number of bases from
which we operate,
and conduct fewer patrols
and convoys.
As the Iraqi forces gain
experience
and the political process
advances,
we will be able to decrease our
troop levels in Iraq
without losing our capability
to defeat the terrorists.
(yelling)
NARRATOR:
Just months later,
an already violent conflict
descended
into even greater chaos.
An explosion destroyed the
Golden Mosque of Samarra,
one of the holiest
Shiite shrines
in all of the Middle East.
REPORTER:
The explosion that left the
Samarra Mosque's
famous gold dome in ruins came
at dawn.
Within hours, Shia protesters
converged on the rubble
of what they consider
holy ground.
PACKER:
Throughout 2003, '04, and '05,
Iraq got worse and worse
and worse.
But the true turning point
was February 2006,
when Al Qaeda insurgents bombed
the Golden Mosque,
and that opened
the gates of hell,
and it was that was when
civil war was full-blown.
PETRAEUS:
After that moment,
the violence statistics just go
like this.
And initially, you think, well,
it might burn itself out.
The problem was,
at the very time
that the violence
was increasing,
we were moving out of
neighborhoods
back onto big bases,
so it got even worse.
NARRATOR:
By the fall, mutilated bodies
littered the streets.
Car bombings occurred daily.
Iraqi forces were overwhelmed
as Shia death squads
roamed Baghdad.
Sunni militants fought back,
joined by thousands
of new Al Qaeda recruits
radicalized by
the U.S. invasion.
Bush's vision
of a democratic country
anchoring peace
in the Middle East
was more distant than ever.
REPORTER:
Leading Republicans now
acknowledge
that the situation in Iraq
is bad.
JOHN WARNER:
It seems to me that
the situation
is simply drifting.
We clearly need a new strategy.
Obviously, by any measurement,
we're in a lot of trouble in
Iraq.
JAMES MANN:
The war in Iraq, by 2006,
is so unpopular
that the Republicans
begin to recognize that
they're in trouble
even for the congressional
elections, and at one point,
Mitch McConnell, who is the
Republican minority leader
in Senate, makes a secret trip
to the White House
and tells Bush,
"You've got to start
"withdrawing troops from Iraq,
because otherwise,
we're going to get clobbered."
ROVE:
There are people streaming into
the Oval that say, "Get out."
But Bush knew that that would be
Vietnam all over again.
That would be withdrawal
and defeat,
and the country
couldn't stand it.
NARRATOR:
Public opinion polls showed
that nearly two-thirds of
Americans disapproved
of Bush's management of the war.
Republicans began urging
the president
to fire his defense secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld,
in the hope of limiting their
losses in the midterm elections.
BUSH:
I hear the voices,
and I read the front page,
and I know the speculation.
But I'm the decider,
and I decide what is best.
And what's best is for
Don Rumsfeld
to remain
as the secretary of defense.
NARRATOR:
Behind the scenes,
Bush finally accepted
that he had to change.
Instead of leading by gut
and delegating policy details
to others,
he now ordered a root-and-branch
analysis of the Iraq War.
For months,
Bush immersed himself
in the details of military
and political strategy.
BAKER:
In running the Iraq War, he had
basically outsourced
the decisions to Paul Bremer,
to the generals,
to Don Rumsfeld,
for three years.
And it's only in late 2006,
three years into the war,
with things going very,
very badly,
that he finally kind of asserts
his own decision-making
on the war.
SUSKIND:
He digs deep.
He's calling for reports,
people are, like, "What?"
"Give me this, give me that.
"What do we know about this?
I want this tomorrow.
I need to know everything,
and don't you be spinning me."
That's what presidents are,
always are thinking.
Bush is thinking that way now.
"We need to pull this out of the
fire, and that's my job.
I am the president,"
and in he goes,
acting like a president.
NARRATOR:
Bush learned of
a counter-insurgency operation
in a small town in
Northern Iraq.
The effort had succeeded
in quelling violence
by securing the safety of
Iraqi civilians
through selective
military force.
The idea was the brainchild
of General David Petraeus.
Bush seized on the example,
deciding to make it the
centerpiece of his strategy
for the whole country.
Rather than a troop withdrawal,
the new plan
would feature a surge of more
than 20,000
additional U.S. soldiers.
It was very clear,
even from afar,
that job one had to be to secure
the Iraqi people,
and that the Iraqi security
forces could no longer do it
without us going back
into the neighborhoods.
And that was the biggest
of the big ideas
about the surge.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff
was unanimously opposed
to the surge.
They had almost no faith that
the U.S.
was going to be able to address
the political issues
that had unleashed opposition
to the United States,
that had fueled an insurgency.
BOLTEN:
I think it was the chief of
staff of the Army who said,
"Mr. President,
just to be direct,
I'm worried that you'll break
the Army."
And the president took it in,
and he leaned forward,
and he said, "Let me tell you
"what I think
will break the Army.
"What I think will break
the Army,
"what I think will break the
spirit and the determination
"of this country
and the respect this country has
"around the world
is if we retreat before the job
is done."
NARRATOR:
With his new plan taking shape,
Bush decided to change
the leadership at the Pentagon,
something he had
stubbornly resisted.
After Republicans suffered huge
losses in the 2006 midterms,
he finally asked his
defense secretary
to resign.
After a series of thoughtful
conversations,
Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed
that the timing is right
for new leadership
at the Pentagon.
NARRATOR:
In Rumsfeld's place,
Bush appointed the security
expert Robert Gates.
PETRAEUS:
There were two George W. Bushes
when it came to the Iraq war.
There was a George W. Bush
of the first three
or four years of the war,
who essentially subcontracted
control of the war to his
secretary of defense.
And then there was
a George W. Bush
after the defeat in November
2006 at the midterm elections,
who takes charge, and now
he is going to be the decider.
NARRATOR:
The lingering question:
What did all these changes mean
for Bush's relations with
Vice President Cheney,
whom he had not consulted
on the change in leadership
at the Pentagon?
So, here is a new defense
secretary coming in,
replacing the person
Cheney was closest to
of any public official in
American life, Rumsfeld.
And Bush is telling him,
"Don't worry,
"Cheney is not as important as
people make out.
I'm the main person
in this administration."
It is Bush seizing control,
not just of military strategy,
but really
of his whole administration.
He's pushed out Rumsfeld
and he's moving Cheney
to the side.
ANNOUNCER:
The president
of the United States
and Mrs. Laura Bush.
NARRATOR:
Bush's new strategy
for the Iraq War
was finalized over the holiday
season as 2006 drew to a close.
BARTLETT:
The surge of troops in Iraq was
one of the most
gut-wrenching policy decisions
I saw the president make.
Everybody and everything
suggested that
pulling out was going to be the
most important thing,
and we did just the opposite.
And this is the surreal aspects
of a presidency.
He's making these massive
life-and-death decisions,
and every night for three hours,
he's hosting holiday parties,
which he has to look happy
and take pictures with people
from all around the country,
and he is literally grinding on
his teeth in these pictures
as he's weighing the different
decision points around Iraq.
NARRATOR:
To sell the surge
to the American public,
Bush had been forced
to take a rare step:
admit his mistakes.
George W. Bush
did not like to change his mind,
he didn't like to be told he was
wrong,
and, and if there was a
personality trait
that was his biggest
shortcoming, that was it.
The situation in Iraq
is unacceptable
to the American people,
and it is unacceptable to me.
Our troops in Iraq
have fought bravely.
They have done everything
we have asked them to do.
Where mistakes have been made,
the responsibility
rests with me.
WOMAN:
Thank you, guys
NARRATOR:
To lead the surge, Bush turned
to the architect
of the model counter-insurgency
strategy,
General David Petraeus.
He said, "Get over there
and fix this damn thing.
You know, this is catastrophic."
General, it's good
to have you here.
Great to be here,
Mr. President, thank you.
PETRAEUS:
He started each week
in Washington,
7:30 in the morning,
Monday morning,
Eastern Standard Time,
in the Situation Room
for an hour
with his entire
national security team.
And it was completely
unprecedented.
Around half the troops
he's requested
have arrived on the scene.
These troops are all aimed at
helping this Iraqi government
find the breathing space
necessary
to, to do what the people
want them to do.
That's a hell of a
transformation
to going from being the guy
who didn't want to do
the details
to being the guy who is
infinitely doing the details.
I how it happened,
a recognition, I guess,
that his whole reputation could
go down the tubes
based on one thing, Iraq,
and it wasn't looking good.
(car horns honking)
NARRATOR:
Gradually,
the surge of additional troops
began to pay dividends.
In September 2007,
Bush claimed success.
BUSH:
Conditions in Iraq
are improving.
We are seizing the initiative
from the enemy.
The troop surge is working.
RADDATZ:
You could really feel it
on the ground,
that things were changing,
that there was
a new sheriff in town,
that they were going to approach
this in a different way.
GATES:
You could see people
in the streets,
book stalls open again,
families in amusement parks,
and things like that,
and that started to happen
pretty quickly.
PACKER:
From the point of view of
civilians who were just caught
in between
these two brutal forces
the Shia death squads,
the Sunni insurgents
It was welcome.
Anything was welcome.
There was a tremendous amount
of anger at the Americans
(man yells in Arabic)
PACKER:
But it was very hard for Iraqis
to say, "Just go home," because
they knew that, as feckless
and incompetent as we had been,
we still were the only force
that stood between
these warring factions.
(audience cheering)
PACKER:
It looked like the best gamble
of the war
and the first good news
of the war, really,
and it lasted for a while,
but it was not a solution.
It just was a stopping
of the bleeding.
NARRATOR:
Bush never got
the democracy in Iraq
that he envisioned.
But the situation on the ground
did stabilize.
He now hoped for a quiet end
to his presidency.
Who else is coming?
WOMAN:
The vice president
and Josh Bolten.
Good, okay.
NARRATOR:
But an administration that had
been defined
by unexpected crisis
would not end in a desired calm.
The trouble began with a barely
perceptible disturbance
in the housing market.
Home ownership in America
is at an all-time high.
(audience cheering
and applauding)
NARRATOR:
Bush had long extolled the
virtues of owning a home.
BUSH:
Tonight we set a new goal:
seven million more affordable
homes in the next ten years,
so more American families will
be able to open the door
and say, "Welcome to my home."
(crowd cheers)
NARRATOR:
By the middle
of his second term,
the housing market was on fire
with the promise
of cheap loans and prices
that could only go up.
REPORTER:
Since 2000,
the price of
a single-family home
has jumped 77 percent in
New York City,
92 percent in Miami,
and 105 percent in San Diego.
There was TV show after TV show
talking about how you could
get rich by flipping your house.
There was this whole plethora
of new products
that people had never really
thought about before.
You didn't have to have
any income
or any assets, and you could
still get a mortgage.
COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER:
Thanks to their flexible
lending rules,
Paul got a quick approval.
It was just, it was insane.
NARRATOR:
At the heart of it all
was Wall Street,
where financial alchemy turned
high-risk mortgages into
seemingly safe assets
that banks sold for
huge profits.
Then, in 2007,
interest rates went up,
and the mortgage market
hit the skids.
REPORTER:
With interest rates
climbing back, many homeowners
are having a hard time
paying their mortgages.
REPORTER:
Home prices are down
for the first time
in more than a decade.
REPORTER:
Facing a growing number
of Americans
who are finding themselves one
crisis away from financial ruin.
NARRATOR:
Although borrowers were hurting,
Wall Street banks seemed secure,
if only because of their
enormous size.
But on September 15, 2008
MEREDITH VIERA:
With the crash of the titans,
Wall Street in panic mode
this morning.
NARRATOR:
The investment bank
Lehman Brothers
suddenly collapsed,
triggering full-scale
financial crisis.
WILLIAMS:
Lehman is by far the largest
bankruptcy
ever in this country.
Today Wall Street had one of its
worst days on record.
MAN:
I've never seen markets like
this, so things are really
monumental down here.
NARRATOR:
The failure of
Lehman Brothers
brought home to the
Bush administration
the grim realization
that a dozen other
financial institutions
were at risk of collapse,
due to the high-risk mortgages
at the heart of
the housing bubble.
McLEAN:
It was this sudden moment
where you realize
these subprime mortgage-backed
securities,
which you thought of as esoteric
and therefore somehow contained,
had actually somehow
spread like water
through the entire financial
system into every crevice
where water could possibly run,
there they were,
and just waiting to,
to turn into a tsunami.
REPORTER:
Citigroup is simply too big
to fail.
WILLIAMS:
Today the Fed's
had to print more money.
MATT LAUER:
Government apparently was
concerned
that A.I.G. is too big to fail.
REPORTER:
The Dow losing more than
five-and-a-half percent today,
its second straight day of
huge losses.
REPORTER:
There's just no light
at the end of this tunnel
right now.
Investors are always trying
September and October
of 2008 were really,
I thought, the scariest of the
entire Bush administration.
9/11 was a horrible
and, of course, by far,
the most devastating moment
during the entire eight years
of that presidency,
but from the standpoint
of an ongoing threat
that everybody
in government knew
that we had to do
something about,
in the financial crisis,
it was really scary.
In this difficult time,
I know many Americans
are wondering about
the security of their finances.
Every American should know
that the federal government
continues to enforce laws
and regulations
protecting your money.
NARRATOR:
Bush's treasury secretary,
Hank Paulson,
realized that his
piecemeal efforts
to stabilize the financial
system were not enough.
Confidence in Wall Street banks
had shattered,
and as lending dried up,
businesses across the country
faced
the very real prospect of
bankruptcy.
PAULSON:
These big institutions
on Wall Street
where money moved with
a click of a mouse
at the speed of light
around the world
if you had another big bank
or two having failed,
it would have been hard
to figure out
how to even put the thing back
together again.
I had visions of
food lines,
massive unemployment,
disasters that were worse than,
uh, the Great Depression.
NARRATOR:
Paulson requested an urgent
meeting with Bush
to deal with the
burgeoning crisis.
He needed Congress
to approve a radical plan
to take the toxic assets
off banks' balance sheets.
He called it the Troubled Asset
Relief Program, or TARP.
PAULSON:
We knew we needed to get
something big.
So TARP had to be big enough
to create market confidence,
and we asked for 700 billion.
And the reason we did was,
we didn't think we could get
something
with a T in front of it
A trillion sounded too much,
and 700 billion seemed like
about the most we could get.
There are a lot of voices,
especially on the
Republican side,
who said the right thing to do
is just, you know,
let it go, let it go.
People made bad bets, let,
they have to pay the bills.
Let the banks fail.
If it's all the banks,
let all the banks fail.
Any kind of bailout
was deeply antithetical
to everything that Republicans
generally
And President Bush,
in particular believed in.
He believed in the market.
And he did not come to the
presidency
to bail out people
who made bad bets
on mortgage-backed securities.
NARRATOR:
On September 18, 2008,
Paulson met with Bush.
He brought with him the chairman
of the Federal Reserve,
Ben Bernanke, and together,
they made their case
for a massive government bailout
of Wall Street.
PAULSON:
Much of it's a blur,
but I remember the president,
the vice president, Josh,
and a whole lot of other people
in the Roosevelt Room.
He asked if this
was the worst
he'd seen the markets,
and Ben said
you'd have to go back
to the 1930s to see
a situation like that.
He then said, "Is there anything
more the Fed can do?"
And I think that was the
critical point in the meeting.
And Ben looked him in the eye
and said,
"There's nothing more
we can do."
♪
BAKER:
And it's a really clarifying
moment for him.
And after Paulson leaves
and after Bernanke leaves,
he goes back to the Oval Office
and a couple of aides come in
after him,
and he's just pausing
to let this sink in.
The words
"another Great Depression"
are hanging over him
at this point.
He's in the final year
of his presidency.
This is what's going to happen?
And he says, "If there's going
to be another Great Depression,
you can be damn sure I'm going
to be Roosevelt and not Hoover."
He is not going to sit there
and just hold back.
FRUM:
He had learned the first impulse
is not the right one,
and he learned something with
the limits of ideology.
President Bush responded to the
financial crisis
in a very non-ideological way.
Thanks for having me.
FRUM:
He remained a
conservative Republican
leading an administration of
conservative Republicans,
but they had also learned
from history.
One of the things that went
wrong in Iraq
was, the more you knew about
Iraq,
the less likely you were
to be listened to
in the decision about
the Iraq War.
In 2008, the more you knew about
the Great Depression,
the more likely you were to be
included in the question,
"How do we not have another
Great Depression?"
NARRATOR:
A few days later,
Bush announced the plan to buy
up toxic mortgage assets.
With the situation becoming
more precarious by the day,
I faced a choice:
to step in with dramatic
government action
or to stand back and allow the
irresponsible actions of some
to undermine
the financial security of all.
I'm a strong believer in
free enterprise,
so my natural instinct is to
oppose government intervention.
I believe companies that make
bad decisions
should be allowed
to go out of business.
Under normal circumstances, I
would have followed this course.
But these are not
normal circumstances.
The financial crisis hit
at absolutely the worst time.
It was weeks ahead of
a national election.
So he was being attacked by
Republicans as well as Democrats
and by both
presidential candidates.
So he was taking it
from all sides.
Plus, he had an economy
on the brink,
but he didn't let any of that
get him down.
Americans think that someone
who's very articulate
publicly is bright,
and someone that isn't
as articulate publicly
isn't as bright.
I have watched President Bush
in private,
and in private,
he commands the room
and he focused on
what needed to be done.
There's no doubt he handles the
financial meltdown
better than Iraq.
And he acts decisively in
support of Paulson
and the others to settle
and anchor this thing
before the ship starts listing.
NAFTALI:
At the end of his presidency,
he showed the wisdom of
Franklin Roosevelt.
And Bush starts a TARP process
which is finished by Obama,
and at least at that moment,
George W. Bush was thinking of
his legacy.
And he did not want his legacy
to be partisan.
NARRATOR:
Bush had evolved as president,
but too late to save his
flagging popularity.
On November 4, 2008,
Republicans were handed
the sweeping defeat
that many had anticipated.
It was, above all,
a verdict on the Iraq War.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT:
If you want to talk about
George W. Bush's legacy,
it will always be overshadowed
by the catastrophe
of the invasion of Iraq.
It's just unbelievable how much
of America's wealth was lost,
not to mention
just the loss of life
and the loss of faith that
Americans have
that their country is doing
the right thing.
(cameras clicking)
Thank you.
NARRATOR:
As the clock counted down
on his presidency,
Bush joined White House
correspondents
for a final press conference.
REPORTER:
Do you think, in retrospect,
that you have made any mistakes,
and, if so,
what is the single biggest?
You can make,
only make decisions, you know,
on the information at hand.
BAKER:
He has been beset
by so many crises,
so many catastrophes,
so many threats,
so many challenges,
that it would have been
overwhelming
to almost anyone else.
History will look back
and determine that
which could have been done
better, or, um
You know, mistakes I made.
Clearly, putting a
"mission accomplished"
on a aircraft carrier
was a mistake.
BAKER:
Some of it was his own creation
and some of it wasn't.
There have been disappointments.
Abu Ghraib, obviously, was
a huge disappointment
during the presidency.
I thought long and hard
about Katrina.
You know, could I have done
something differently?
Not having
weapons of mass destruction
was a significant
disappointment.
I don't know if you want to call
those mistakes or not,
but they were things didn't
go according to plan.
Let's put it that way,
you know, um
God bless you.
WAYNE SLATER:
It's a presidency
that will always be defined
by 9/11,
always be defined
by the response to it,
which his utmost ardent
supporters will say
was the response of a hero
thrown into the fire,
which his critics will say
to get engaged in a war
that we're still involved with
all these years later.
And whatever you think of
George W. Bush,
how well you think he did
or how poorly you think he did,
he went through eight years
of a presidency
that was just exactly what
he wanted,
a consequential presidency.
ROBINSON:
I have this vivid image of Bush
in the rubble
of the World Trade Center with
the bullhorn.
And that's a moment when,
I think,
every American was proud of
George W. Bush.
He had a measure of support
that no president could
ever dream of.
And in a sense,
he squandered it.
NARRATOR:
He was leaving America still
fighting two wars
he had started,
in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
And Iraq had still not become
the catalyst for a democratic
revolution
across the Middle East
that Bush had hoped for.
DRAPER:
The president's virtues and
vices were one and the same.
You have the big-picture
visionary,
who is also the person who won't
pay attention
to the details when he needs to.
You have
the consummate competitor
who needs to have
the adrenaline rush
of the possibility of defeat
before he'll act.
You have a person who believes
he's a leader,
and doesn't know
what's happening beneath him.
The fact that this man could be
all of these things at once
help us understand
why the Bush presidency
is going to be a bit of a riddle
for historians.
He's going to be judged as a guy
who seemed very simple
and, in fact, was a very
complicated man.
♪
BOLTEN:
I was with President Bush
on the morning of
January 20, 2009,
the last half-day
of the presidency,
and I remember coming into the
Oval Office,
and I found the same guy
that I found
every morning at 6:45.
If anything, a little more
relaxed than usual,
at peace with becoming
former president.
I mean, that, that was his
personality.
We decided just to wander around
the West Wing
for a couple of minutes just to
look around,
and he greeted some of the
workers, much to their surprise.
And then we went back
to the Oval Office,
and I thanked the president
for the privilege of serving,
as I had for eight years,
and he said it was a
"It was a privilege
for all of us."
And after we spoke those last
words, he put his coat on,
and he walked out the door
to the Rose Garden
from the Oval Office,
and I watched him leave, and I
noticed he didn't look back.
♪
♪
♪
ANNOUNCER:
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George W. Bush"
is available on DVD.
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♪
♪