One Thousand and Sixty-Five Days To Go

By NANCY GIBBS, Mike Allen

The daily intelligence briefing at the White House is a secret, serious affair, conducted each morning for the President in the Oval Office by the experts in charge of knowing as much as possible about as much as possible. The President routinely asks what's going on in some of the darkest corners of the world. But last week George W. Bush's concerns included what was going on in an office down the hall, where Vice President Dick Cheney had been lying low since shooting his friend Harry Whittington in a late afternoon quail hunt in Texas over the weekend. Not just the communications pros and the commentariat but Bush too understood that Cheney needed to get out there and tell his story, but the Vice President was still resisting. Until Cheney said something, Bush couldn't talk to reporters either. There would be no other story, no other message than that the Vice President of the United States had accidentally shot a man and was refusing to talk about what had happened. It was clear to those who talked to Cheney that he was truly dismayed. "If this were happening to someone else, he'd be ho-ho-ho-ing about the feeding frenzy," said a former Cheney aide. "But he has caused the feeding frenzy here." Whatever Cheney's reasons, his reticence was frustrating the President, said an official involved in deliberations between the two. Yet even now, Bush made a very soft sell to the partner to whom he often defers.

Bush and Cheney had a quiet talk. According to a Republican official, the President told Cheney how much he too loved Whittington. He acknowledged what a crushing experience it must have been to see Whittington fall after Cheney pulled the trigger on a bird, failing to see his friend nearby. But it was time to defuse the furor that followed. Whittington was being blamed for the accident, and Cheney knew that White House spokesman Scott McClellan was getting barbecued by a White House press corps insistent on knowing why it took almost a full day to make the shooting public. After one of McClellan's press briefings, Cheney deadpanned, "He looks like he's having fun." Cheney knew what to do, being acquainted, as anyone in his position would be, with that most familiar and degrading of political rituals, the act of public penitence. Once that was accomplished, through the ministry of Fox News' Brit Hume, "the President was satisfied," said someone who was involved in the discussions. "I wouldn't have said that last weekend or Monday." A friend of the Vice President's reports that Cheney "believes that he handled this in an appropriate way. But he recognizes that the rest of the world doesn't believe that."

IT'S MOMENTS LIKE THESE, SO TRIVIAL IN some ways yet so memorable in others, that can waste time on the political calendar in ways that are clear only to history. Bush and Cheney have barely over 1,000 days left and things they want to get done. But to succeed, they need to resist as long as possible the forces that make Administrations irrelevant. "Some people in the White House are worried that this will hasten the start of the formal lame-duck period, which they were hoping to put off until after the midterm elections," said a Republican official. "This showed a weakened President and a Vice President in a bubble within a bubble." The minute the November midterms are over, attention will turn even faster than usual to the 2008 presidential and vice-presidential race, because some states are holding their primaries earlier and both nominations are wide open. Bush's approval rating, according to a new TIME poll, is lodged at 40%, Cheney's at 29%. Bush and Cheney have little hope of driving an agenda if they are not in control of it or if they are playing defense. And these days Bush's challenge, and Cheney's, is not that their enemies hate them, since it has been forever thus; it is that they are increasingly at odds with their friends.

FOR A PRESIDENT DESPERATE TO TURN THE corner after a wretched 2005, last week's circus was the last thing he needed. This has been a season of doubt about the Administration's competence, candor and instinct. In serial scenes of domestic violence, Republicans are attacking their own. An all-Republican House panel concluded last week that Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff made decisions during Hurricane Katrina "late, ineffectively or not at all." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was grilled about Iraq by cranky Republican Senators: "I don't see, Madame Secretary, how things are getting better," said Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. "I think things are getting worse. I think they're getting worse in Iraq. I think they're getting worse in Iran." Over at the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican chairman Pat Roberts suggested that the National Security Agency's no- warrant surveillance program could come under the authority of a special court, while at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican chairman Arlen Specter continued to raise questions about the program's legality. "You cannot have domestic search-and-seizure without a warrant," Specter said. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney publicly criticized Bush for the failures of the hugely expensive Medicare prescription-drug plan.

What the hunting furor did, beyond occupying the airwaves for a week and stalling what momentum the President may have had, was expose in the most public way yet the extent to which Cheney runs an independent operation and raise the question of how much the White House can control him--or wants to. Cheney makes his own rules; he decides what intelligence matters, what secrets are worth keeping and what force is worth using, and he defends his positions with a breathtaking indifference to consequences and to complaint from those who disagree. He went off to spend a relaxing--and unannounced--weekend hunting with friends who also happened to be donors and lobbyists at a time when both species find themselves under fire. And it turned into a nightmare for everyone involved.

It is one thing to rebuff reporters to protect some policy or principle, a right Cheney has asserted many times before. But this time the only thing Cheney was protecting was himself. If Rule No. 1 of damage control is Get the news out fast, the second is Don't embarrass the boss. Breaking both rules at once is a poor idea. White House counselor Dan Bartlett, communications director Nicolle Wallace and McClellan all recommended to Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, and his deputy Karl Rove on Sunday, the day after the shooting, that the White House make an immediate statement and were alarmed that the whole system seemed to have seized up, according to several Republican sources.

How do you make a powerful Vice President do something he doesn't want to do, however much the President needs it? From the earliest days of this Administration, the President has been comfortable having a Vice President who answers only to him and pretty much scares everyone else. When Cheney simply shut down after the accident, there was no one else in the White House with the nerve or clout to bring him back online. Cheney "has a very protective family, plus there is an unfortunate intimidation factor," says a former Administration official. "Very few staff--either in Cheneyworld or Bushworld--are comfortable raising issues in a straightforward manner or giving constructive advice." Over the years and especially during these past hard months, the official says of Cheney, "this has not served him well. There is a culture around him of deference and reverence. More often than not, he is told what people assume he wants to hear rather than what he wants to hear."

After that final nudge from the President Wednesday morning, Cheney retreated to his office with his longtime adviser Mary Matalin, chief of staff David Addington, daughter Liz and, later, his press secretary, Lea Anne McBride, to prepare. Matalin and McBride laid out all the questions being raised about the incident. Cheney just soaked it in "like a sponge," Matalin said, but not only did he not rehearse his answers, he also gave no indication of how he would respond. Matalin heard the full version of the accident only when he taped the interview.

Cheney appeared genuinely shaken by what had happened. "The image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind," Cheney said. "I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment." But when it came to explaining his delay in getting the story out (see page 32) and his reluctance to speak, the V.P. expressed no regret, which was entirely in character. In any event, it might not have been necessary. White House aides had come to believe that the aggressive way reporters were pursuing the story was working to Cheney's advantage.

By the time Bush took questions from reporters the next day, White House aides say, he was basically sick of the topic. "The President really thought that this was fundamentally a judgment call about when you inform the press about a hunting accident," said an adviser who had talked to him. "While that's important in some ways when you're the Vice President, it's not as important as other matters that come before the President." As for critics on the Hill, a House Republican leadership aide said Cheney will remain the lawmakers' top back channel to Bush. "A hunting accident, even with their bungling, isn't going to change that. It's been helpful that the press has been so obnoxious and such prima donnas. It made people here feel sorry for the White House." Says Senator Lindsey Graham: "I've seen nothing in my dealings with the White House to suggest that this Vice President has lost any political standing within the Administration." And everyone was relieved to see Whittington emerge from the hospital, grateful to his doctors, gracious to the press, sorry for what Cheney had been through and describing the whole thing as a "cloud of misfortune and sadness that is not easy to explain."

ACTUALLY, WHATEVER CLOUDS REMAIN OVER the White House were not hard to explain, say those who have studied weather patterns between Bushland and Cheneyland. They have always been separate worlds, far more than the public image of a tight, disciplined team suggests. Bushland is by instinct more reformist, more political, more female and, in places, deeply devout. Cheneyland is more Establishment, more male, more button-down, more secretive. One man came to town worried about domestic affairs; the other was focused entirely on matters foreign, although 9/11 forced a convergence. One man wants to do the deal, find the compromise; the other avoids it like the plague.

Other presidencies have had their own silent divisions: Clinton had Hillaryland (a more liberal and activist core); George H.W. Bush had Quayleland (a more conservative and activist core). But in one respect Cheney's shop has been completely different from any Vice President's since the Truman years. When Bush recruited him as his running mate in 2000, Cheney made his priorities clear: he would do the inside work and leave the outside work to others. The campaign team described a parade in which Cheney would meet and greet voters. "Um," said a Cheney staff member tentatively, "Mr. Cheney does not like to shake hands." That was actually always part of his appeal: between his age, his four heart attacks and his aura of grouchiness, Cheney was the first Veep in generations to hold the Heartbeat Away portfolio without actually aspiring to the job.

The advantage for Bush was that it meant Cheney could be the lightning rod, draw the fire away from the President and not much care how badly he was burned. Every good cop needs a bad cop, the partner who leans so far forward that Bush can seem measured in comparison, even as together they haul the entire debate further and further toward their shared vision. Cheney came into office talking about treaties that deserved to be broken, like the ABM Treaty, and powers that needed to be restored. In Cheneyland, it is gospel that Congress took far too much authority from the presidency in the wake of Watergate, particularly with the War Powers Resolution and congressional oversight of foreign policy and the CIA. He fought successfully all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to keep the 2001 deliberations of his energy task force secret. He was the most outspoken advocate of a bare-knuckled foreign policy, building his own national- security staff, which drove Colin Powell's State Department berserk; Powell chief of staff Larry Wilkerson called Cheney's operation "a cabal" of "extreme nationalistic ... and messianic" members. Cheney pressed the case that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein long after others in the Administration had backed off. He said American troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and maintained that Saddam had amassed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. When the Administration was charged with distorting prewar intelligence, Cheney went after the critics as "dishonest and reprehensible."

But in recent months the internal dynamic has shifted. Through the first term, Cheney's dominion over foreign policy was unchallenged. And while he remains the Administration's voice on national security, the ascendance of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the distraction of the CIA-leak investigation and public doubts about the handling of the Iraq occupation mean the Vice President often finds himself advocating rather than orchestrating. An overstretched military narrows Administration options; Rice talks often about realistic approaches, and the Administration is more willing to acknowledge the utility of allies and even the U.N. than to pursue the more confrontational approach of Cheneyland. This has been most obvious in Bush's handling of North Korea and Iran, where Administration policy has softened noticeably, aligning the U.S. with countries that the President had been at odds with over Iraq. Cheney was also the White House point man in trying to thwart Senator John McCain's effort to ban torture of detainees in U.S. custody anywhere in the world. Even after Bush yielded to McCain, Cheney's staff worked hard to try to narrow the restrictions in the legislation.

The internal divide over how hard to push on an issue as contentious as torture reflects how even six years in office together has not integrated the Bush and Cheney teams; in fact, in some ways they have grown further apart. It was Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, now indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, who designed Cheneyland, which is largely housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across from the White House. Determined to maintain tight control, Libby created a bottleneck beneath Cheney by trying to keep "all sensitive or politically interesting information to himself," a former Bush aide says. That sometimes cut Cheney off from hearing additional points of view even from his own aides. Libby's successor, David Addington, was viewed as so unyielding and difficult when he was the Vice President's counsel that he has poor relations with many West Wing aides, who are referred to collectively in Cheneyland as "across the street." Some members of the President's staff have never met their counterparts in Cheneyland. Many on Cheney's staff see Bush's aides as too liberal, while some Bush aides view the vice-presidential staff as wing nuts.

Bush and Cheney have evolved. "Over time, the President has grown more confident," a presidential adviser says. "His other advisers have become more experienced and more confident about issues that they might have deferred to Cheney on. It's a natural thing." Some Republican officials said the flap over the shooting might accelerate the normal process whereby Presidents push their Vice Presidents away toward the end, often because the Veeps are running on their own but sometimes just so it is clear who owns the legacy. "No one remembers F.D.R.'s Vice Presidents," says a Bush aide, suggesting the scale of the legacy to which Bush aspires.

The Libby trial may make Bush want to ensure some distance. Libby told Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigating the CIA leak that his "superiors" had authorized him to reveal classified information from a secret report about Iraq's weapons capability. Could Cheney have been one of those superiors? In his Fox interview, Cheney declared that "there is an Executive Order that specifies who has classification authority and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President but also includes the Vice President." In fact, a 2003 update of a 1995 Executive Order gives the Vice President additional authority over classification of documents, but there is debate about whether the authority also applies to declassification. When Hume asked Cheney what he knew about Libby's assertion, the Vice President said, "It's nothing I can talk about," since he could be called as a witness in the investigation.

Libby's motions could go on through this year; jury selection won't begin in the case until 2007. That guarantees the story will continue to crop up in the headlines, risking embarrassment for the Vice President. "The President doesn't like people screwing up," says a former Administration official. "Libby, even if he's found innocent, screwed up, and that's Cheney's problem because he's Cheney's guy."

All these events have revived Washington's favorite parlor game--"Who'll replace Cheney?"--which has been played ever since he needed a cardiac procedure after two months in office, but no one who knows the President well thinks he would cut Cheney loose. His remaining in power, however, does not tell you how much power remains to him. More than one friend who was sure Cheney would serve out his term--"barring the intervention of the Almighty," as an aide said--inadvertently spoke of the Vice President in the past tense while describing Cheney's standing. "Cheney didn't win every battle," an official close to the Vice President said as he ruminated about the wide swath his hero had once cut. Enough people talking about him that way can only make it harder to win the next fight that comes along.

With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr., Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Michael Duffy/Washington