The Enigma In Chief

As George W. Bush once noted, "you never know what your history is going to be like until long after you're gone." What I think he was trying to say is that, in time, historians may evolve toward a more positive view of his presidency than the one held by most of his contemporaries. At the moment, this seems a vain hope. Bush's three most obvious legacies are his decision to invade Iraq, his framing of a global war on terror after September 11 and the massive financial crisis. Each of these constitutes a separate epic in presidential misjudgment and mismanagement. It remains a brainteaser to come up with ways, however minor, in which Bush changed government, politics or the world for the better. Among presidential historians, it is hardly an eccentric view that 43 ranks as America's worst president ever. On the other hand, he has nowhere to go but up.

In a different sense, though, Bush's comment has some truth to it. We do not know how people will one day view this presidency because we, Bush's contemporaries, don't yet understand it ourselves. The Bush administration has had startling success in one area: keeping its inner workings secret. Intensely loyal, contemptuous of the press and overwhelmingly hostile to any form of public disclosure, the Bushies did a remarkable job of keeping their doings hidden for eight years.

Probably the biggest question Bush leaves behind is about the most consequential choice of his presidency: his decision to invade Iraq. When did the president make up his mind to go to war against Saddam Hussein? What were his real reasons? What roles did various figures around him—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice—play in the decision? Was the selling of the war on the basis of WMD evidence a matter of conscious deception—or of their own self-deception?

Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind and I recently debated on Slate the issue of how much we really know about Bush's biggest decision. Woodward, the author of four inside accounts of the Bush administration, believes that we do know the most important facts. He argues that Bush decided to invade Iraq in January 2003, that the reason was 9/11 and that Bush himself was the real decider. Suskind and I argue that we don't know how, when or why the decision was made—though we suspect it was much earlier. By the summer of 2002, administration officials and foreign diplomats were hearing that Bush's course was already set.

The disputed dates and details go to the most interesting larger issues about what went wrong during the Bush years. Did Bush's own innocence and incompetence drive his missteps? Or was it the people around him, primarily his vice president, who manipulated him into his major bad choices? On so many issues—the framing of the war on terrorism, the use of torture, the expansion of executive power—it is Cheney's views that prevailed. Yet at some point, perhaps around the 2006 election, Bush seems to have lost confidence in his vice president and stopped taking his advice.

To reckon with the Bush years, we need to understand what went on between these men behind closed doors. Despite some superb spadework by journalist Barton Gellman and others, we know very little about Cheney's true role. We have seen few of the pertinent documents and heard little relevant testimony. Congressional investigations and litigation have shed only the faintest light on Cheney's role in Bush's biggest blunders.