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Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
Jan. 11, 2004
Et Tu, O'Neill?
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is the main source for an upcoming book about the Bush White House, "The Price of Loyalty." (Photo: CBS)
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go." Paul O'Neill
O'Neill was fired by the White House a year ago for his disagreement on the president's policy on tax cuts. (Photo: CBS)
(CBS) A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.
Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run.
Entitled "The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.
But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
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Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.
Will this be seen as a “kiss-and-tell" book?
“I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure somebody will say all of that and more,” says O’Neill, who was George Bush's top economic policy official.
In the book, O’Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.
At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."
This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: “I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening … As I recall, it was mostly a monologue.”
He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.
O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind – and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.
Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book – including several cabinet members.
O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration – Donald Rumsfeld - warned O’Neill not to do this book.
Was it a warning, or a threat?
“I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned,” says Suskind. “Understandably, because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president. They said, ‘This could really be the one moment where things are revealed.’"
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Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.
“Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank you" notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive,” says Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings. “You don’t get higher than that.”
And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.
He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.
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Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.
He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.
“It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil in Iraq.”
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."
“The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ‘X’ during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ‘Y,’” says Suskind. “Not just saying ‘Y,’ but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.”
The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.
“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says, ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.’ … O'Neill is speechless.”
”It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society,” says O’Neill. “And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction.”
Did he think it was irresponsible? “Well, it's for sure not what I would have done,” says O’Neill.
The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O’Neill.
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Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. He was becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major damage control.
Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with the Irish rock star Bono.
“Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show,” says Suskind. “He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, ‘You know, you're getting quite a cult following.’ And it clearly was not a joke. And it was not said in jest.”
Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.
The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team.
“It's a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there,” says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.
He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged.
“He asks, ‘Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again,’” says Suskind.
“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’ Now, his advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.’ And the president kind of goes, ‘OK.’ That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again. ‘Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to say, ‘You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?’"
But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.
“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says Suskind. “Don’t waver.”
In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.
With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he was in the right.
But look at the economy today.
“Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was terrific,” says O’Neill. “I think the tax cut made a difference. But without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors for, against more tax cuts.”
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While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering.
“Hmmm, you really think so,” asks O’Neill, who says he isn’t joking. “Well, I’ll be darned.”
“You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O’Neill. “And they're going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because he was fired.”
“I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be hard put to,” says O’Neill.
Is he prepared for it?
“Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O’Neill. “Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
J. Hoberman on Cast Away, Village Voice, Dec. 20-26, 2000.
It's perversely appropriate that the holiday season would be marked by not one but two evocations of overwhelming solitude. Robert Zemeckis's Cast Away is an updated Robinson Crusoe in which Tom Hanks plays an excitable Federal Express manager who has just become engaged to America's sweetheart Helen Hunt when he is stranded alone on an uninhabited South Pacific atoll after his company cargo plane goes down in a Christmas Day storm.
Zemeckis's facility at F/X management is a given and the plane's crack-up is impressively visceral—the climax of Titanic compressed into 10 harrowing minutes of plunging vessels and flaming seas. Nor does the pummeling stop once Hanks is washed up on the white-sand beach of his personal Club Med. Island life is a baffling, bloody ordeal complicated by unsmashable coconuts and the bad tooth throbbing in the survivor's head like a time bomb. While Robinson Crusoe was a paean to the practical middle-class virtues that allowed its industrious hero (and the nation he represents) to re-create civilization out of nothingness, Cast Away is a far less triumphalist peek into the nothingness at the heart of civilization.
Fortunately, a few indestructible FedEx boxes wash ashore—one containing an apparently useless volleyball that, as soon as Hanks paints a face on its surface, becomes his combined pal, pet, and pagan idol. In another bit of product placement, Hanks calls the ball by its trade name: Wilson. Although Cast Away is very much Hanks's extreme everyman solo, his inanimate Man Friday deserves recognition as one of the year's best supporting actors. At the very least, Wilson gives the star a pretext for the movie's most emotionally wrenching scene. Alone with this absurd self-projection, Hanks spends four years on his island before building a getaway raft. The shot in which he looks back at his verdant prison, having arduously paddled free into the open ocean, is pure science fiction: He's blasted out into space, accompanied by his sidekick, Wilson.
The raft sequence has intimations of 2001 that don't stop even after Hanks returns to civilization (on a plane of total solitude) to hear how the "FedEx family" lost five of its "sons" and endures a bad-beyond-belief meeting with his dentist. I was amazed at the depth of alienation with which Zemeckis infused these scenes. But as if frightened at having conjured up the least compromising, bleakest vision of the human condition in any Hollywood A-picture since Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life, Zemeckis casts it away with pumped-up affirmation. God moves in mysterious ways. It's a wonderful life after all.
Ron Mueck
In like skin
By Juliet Herd, The Australian, 21dec02
RON Mueck is surveying his vast self-portrait, enigmatically entitled Mask II, and finding all manner of fault with it. "I just see all the things that don't look like me," the hyper-realist Australian-born sculptor says mournfully. "The nose is way too short, the face and ears should be longer and there should be more spots."
To the casual observer, the colossal sleeping head – almost 1.2m from chin to brow – could not be more realistic or less kind to its subject, with its rough stubble, nostril and ear hairs, pores and pimples. The slack, slightly open mouth offers a glimpse of teeth, gums and even saliva. Yet Mueck remains far from convinced.
"I feel older than he looks," he insists. "If anything, he doesn't look old or tired enough; he's far too peaceful." The artist may see himself as middle-aged and deeply lined but, in the flesh as opposed to fibreglass resin, he's a youthful 44 with a lean, sensitive face and brutally short haircut.
Since Mueck first burst on to the young British art scene five years ago when his naked, half life-size sculpture of his father, Dead Dad, was one of the hits of the Royal Academy's controversial Sensation exhibition, he has acquired a reputation for being excruciatingly media-shy. Although his natural wariness gives him an air of mystery, an asset in such a highly competitive, image-driven business, it quickly becomes apparent that his shyness is genuine.
He rarely submits to interviews and is coaxed into doing this one only on the pretext of having a brief chat, which turns into an extended discourse on the never-before-seen works he is showing from this month in his first Australian exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. His discomfort, though, is apparent when the photographer arrives and for a few anxious moments it seems he might bolt from the Anthony d'Offay gallery in central London, where he has been honoured with two solo shows in the past. A compromise is reached: Mueck will continue packing his pieces for shipment to Australia while the photographer snaps away.
Mask II, a new version of the first, glowering Mask self-portrait, will also be making the journey. Making its debut here is the tiny swaddled baby lying on a white plinth on the floor, its head resting on a pillow. The baby, inspired by photos of eastern European infants tightly wrapped in brown blankets and tied with string like little parcels, is part of a body of work created during Mueck's two-year term as artist-in-residence at London's National Gallery.
Other new sculptures include a striking 2.7m tall pregnant woman, eyes downcast, arms crossed above her head and stomach protruding to almost grotesque proportions; a naked man in a salvaged scout's boat, and a small crouching boy in a pair of shorts looking at a mirror. It is a tiny replica of Mueck's gigantic 4.5m Boy sculpture for London's Millennium Dome, which took eight painstaking months to execute and involved intricate work such as individually sanding the acrylic fibre hair to a tapered end for eyebrows and eyelashes. The shorts on both boys were made by Mueck's wife, Cas, a film screenwriter and former costume designer.
His National Gallery brief was to produce sculptures that were "in some way inspired by or connected to the collection". "I didn't want to do anything specific to a particular painting but the mother-and-child theme was one that was widely covered," explains Mueck, who is the father of two teenage daughters. The most graphic rendering of this is his newborn baby nestling, umbilical chord still attached, on its startled mother's stomach.
He has been rather grandly compared with masters such as Vermeer and Hilliard and, according to Newsweek critic Peter Plagens, Mueck can be credited with "redefining realism [by getting] verisimilitude, variation of scale and some kind of psychological insight into realistic sculpture".
"Oh, they can say what they like; it's very flattering and ridiculous," the former Jim Henson puppeteer demurs, giving an embarrassed laugh. "I'm not trying to tell anybody anything. I'm just surprised that a lump of fibreglass can elicit an emotional response."
He's not without detractors, of course, who dismiss him as a "one-hit wonder" and "model maker" in the tradition of Madame Tussaud. And he's not the only sculptor to specialise in super-realism – there's George Segal, John de Andrea and Duane Hanson, whose life-size American tourist figures are often confused with the real thing.
But as Mueck concedes: "A lot of those other sculptors deal less with the emotional side than the physical and, somehow, I don't know why, I do a bit of both." It's the vulnerability of his figures combined with the technical brilliance that elicits such a strong response.
Although he says his figures merely "evolve during sculpting" and it "seems like a fluke when I get it right", Mueck's empathy with the battling human spirit probably owes much to his fairly lonely, self-contained childhood in Melbourne. "I was really self-conscious as a teenager, I wanted to be invisible," he once said.
The son of toymakers – his father made wood carvings and his mother built a cottage industry making rag dolls – he started producing his own Sesame Street-inspired puppets from an early age. After failing to get into art school, he worked as a Myer window-dresser for three years before joining children's television show Shirl's Neighbourhood, where he made and operated puppet animals as a virtual one-man, self-taught band.
Mueck moved to London 20 years ago to work for the Henson empire, first as part of the Sesame Street and Muppet Show puppeteer team, then on the fantasy films Dreamchild and Labyrinth. He established a lucrative career making models for advertisements before influential art collector Charles Saatchi saw a Pinocchio figure he'd sculpted for his mother-in-law, renowned British painter Paula Rego, and promptly commissioned him to make four pieces – one of which was Dead Dad.
"I didn't try to get out of advertising – Charles Saatchi lured me out of it," says Mueck, disclaiming any ambition to become a serious sculptor. "I enjoyed advertising but I used to make things as an antidote to the 2-D advertising models."
Now firmly established, albeit reluctantly, as a YBA (young British artist) with his works featured in museums, national galleries and private collections around the world, Mueck is surprisingly nervous about exhibiting for the first time in his homeland. "I don't even want to think about it," he shudders of his first visit in five years. "I feel like I'm entering another world entirely – I don't know the Australian art scene."
If he'd stayed in Australia, he's not sure he would have been exhibiting on quite the same scale – his Dome Boy featured as the centrepiece at the 2001 Venice Biennale – but believes he would have been sculpting, whether it was "children's toys or garden gnomes".
"I don't know why I'm doing it but I don't know what else I'd be doing," says Mueck. "I'm not driven by art, it's just all I can do."
Ron Mueck Sculpture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, ends March 2, 2003.