New book details infighting, discord in Bush administration

WASHINGTON - John G. Roberts Jr., now the chief justice of the United States, suggested Harriet E. Miers to President Bush as a possible Supreme Court justice, according to a new book that describes more discord in the Bush White House than is commonly portrayed.

Miers, the White House counsel and a Bush loyalist from Texas, did not want the court job, but Bush and his wife, Laura, prevailed on her to accept the nomination, journalist Robert Draper writes in "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush."

Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, raised concerns about the selection but was "shouted down" and subsequently muted his objections, while other advisers did not realize the outcry it would cause within the president's conservative political base, Draper writes.

The nomination of Miers was one of several self-inflicted wounds that have damaged the Bush presidency during its second term. After Miers withdrew in the face of the conservative furor, Samuel A. Alito Jr. was selected and confirmed for the seat.

In recounting this and other controversies of Bush's tenure, Draper offers an intimate portrait of a White House racked by internal disputes and of a president who would, alternately, intensely review speeches line by line or act strangely disengaged from big issues.

Draper, a national correspondent for GQ magazine, first wrote about Bush in 1998, when he was the Texas governor. He received unusual cooperation from the White House in preparing "Dead Certain," which will be published tomorrow.

In addition to six interviews with the president, Draper also interviewed Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney, Laura Bush, and many senior White House and administration officials.

Draper writes that Bush was "gassed" after an 80-minute bike ride at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on the day before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and was largely silent during a subsequent video briefing from then-FEMA director Michael Brown and other top officials making preparations for the storm.

He also reports that the president took an informal poll of his top advisers in April 2006 on whether to fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

During a private dinner at the White House to discuss how to buoy Bush's presidency, seven voted to dump Rumsfeld, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, incoming chief of staff Joshua Bolten, the outgoing chief, Andrew Card, and Ed Gillespie, then an outside adviser and now White House counselor.

Bush raised his hand along with three others who wanted Rumsfeld to stay, including Rove and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. Rumsfeld's resignation was announced after the November elections.

The book offers more than 400 footnotes, but Draper does not make clear the sourcing for some of the more arresting assertions - such as one about the role Roberts played in the Miers nomination, which has hitherto not come to light. Conservatives highly praised the nomination of Roberts but criticized Miers as lacking conservative credentials.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that he had no comment on the book, including the assertion about Miers. Roberts could not be reached for comment, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said last night.

Draper offers intriguing details about Bush's personal habits, such as his intense love of bicycling. He reports that White House advance teams and the Secret Service "devoted inordinate energy to satisfying Bush's need for biking trails," descending on a town days before the president's arrival to find secluded hotels and trails the president would find challenging.

He also makes new disclosures about the behind-the-scenes infighting at the White House that helped prompt the change from Card to Bolten in spring 2006. By that point, he reports, some close to the president had concluded that "the White House management structure had collapsed," with senior aides Rove and Dan Bartlett "constantly at war."

He quotes Gillespie as saying while running interference for Alito's Supreme Court nomination: "I'm going crazy over here. I feel like a shuttle diplomat, going from office to office. No one will talk to each other."

Rove was not happy, Draper writes, with Bolten's decision to strip him of his oversight of policy at the White House, directing his focus instead to politics and the coming midterm elections.

Bolten noticed that other staff members were intimidated by Rove, and Rove was seen as doing too much, "freelancing, insinuating himself into the message world . . . parachuting into Capitol Hill whenever it suited him."

Draper writes that Rove told Bush it was a bad idea to select Cheney as his vice-presidential running mate in 2000: "Selecting Daddy's top foreign-policy guru ran counter to message. It was worse than a safe pick - it was needy."