UNIT 10READINGS- THE NEW MILLENNIUM

AMERICAN SOCIETY in 2000According to the 2000 census, the resident population of the United States was 281.4 million, making it the third most populous nation in the world.

The fastest growing regions of the US in the 1990s continued to be in the West and in the South. With the growth in population came greater political power and as a result of the shift of congressional representatives and electoral votes to these regions. The 2000 census reported that 50% of US residents lived in suburbs, 30% in central cities, and only 20% in rural regions.

Immigration:The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 attempted to create a fair entry process for immigrants, but failed to stop the problem of illegal

entry into the US from Mexico. The law was also criticized for granting amnesty to some undocumented immigrants from Mexico and the Americas. In 2000, the Hispanic population was the fastest growing segment of the population and emerged as the largest minority group in the nation. Asian Americans also represented another fast-growing part of society, with a population of more than 10 million. By 2000, 10.4% of the population was foreign-born, a high percentage but well below the levels of the 1870s through the 1920s. Immigration accounted for 27.8% of the population increase in the 1990s, and was a key stimulus to the economic growth during the decade. Without immigration, the US was on a path to experience a negative population growth by 2030.

Aging and the Family:As the US becomes more ethnically diverse, the population is also “graying,” with a steady increase in life expectancy. By 2000, 35 million people were

over 65 (12.3%), but the fastest-growing segment of the population was those 85 and over. As the baby-boom generation ages, there is growing concern about health care, prescription drugs, senior housing, and Social Security. It is estimated that in 2030 that there will be only about 2 workers for every person receiving Social Security. The decline of the traditional family and the growing number of single-parent families had become another national concern. The number of families headed by a female with no husband soared from 5.5 million (10.7%) in 1970 to 12.8 million (17.6%) in 2000. Single women headed 47.2% of black families in 2000, but the same trend was also evident in white and Hispanic households with children under 18. Children in these families often grew up in poverty and without adequate support.

Income and Wealth:In many ways, Americans were achieving the American dream. Homeownership continued to climb during the prosperity of the 1990s to 67.4% of all

households, up from 62.9% in 1970. The economy was continuing to generate more and more wealth. Per capita money income in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars rose dramatically, from $12,275 in 1970 to $22,199 in 2000. However, in 1999 the top fifth of American households received more than half of all the income. The average after-tax income for the lowest three-fifths of households actually declined between 1977 and 1997. In addition, the distribution of income varied widely by race, gender, and education. For example, the median income in 2000 was $53,256 for white families, $35,054 for Hispanic families, and $34,192 for black families. High school graduates earned only half the income of college graduates. The US was the richest country in the world, but among industrialized nations, it also had the largest gap between lowest and highest paid workers and the greatest concentration of wealth among the top-earning households. This concentration reminded some of the Gilded Age.

CHALLENGES OF THE 21 st CENTURY The US entered the 21st century with unrivaled economic and military dominance in the world. However, international terrorism, economic problems,

and partisan politics exposed the nation’s vulnerabilities.

Political PolarizationThe early 21st century elections revealed a nation closely divided between a conservative South, Great Plains and Mountain states, and a more

moderate to liberal northeast, Midwest, and west coast. As a result of this division, a few swing states determined federal elections. The more traditional, religious, and limited or anti-government rural and many suburban areas went Republican, while the more diverse large urban centers and internationally minded coasts voted Democrat. The shift of Southern white conservatives after the 1960s from the Democratic to the Republican Party transformed American politics. In the 1990s, Southern conservatives such as Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Tom DeLay of Texas, and Trent Lott of Mississippi took over the leadership of the Republican Party, making it more conservative and partisan. As the party of Lincoln the party of Ronald Reagan, moderate Republicans lost influence and primary contests to conservatives. In the state legislatures, both parties gerrymandered congressional districts to create “safe seats,” which rewarded partisanship and discouraged compromise in Congress.

Disputed Election of 2000:The presidential election of 2000 was the closest since 1876, and the first ever to be settled by the Supreme Court. President Clinton’s vice president,

Al Gore, easily captured the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, selecting Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Jewish American to run for national office, as his running mate. Governor George W. Bush of Texas, the eldest son of former President George H. Bush, won the nomination of the Republican Party, and selected Dick Cheney, a veteran of the Reagan and elder Bush administrations (secretary of defense) as his running mate. Both candidates fought over the moderate and independent vote, Gore as a champion of “working families” and Bush running as a “compassionate conservative.” Ralph Nader, the candidate for the liberal Green Party, ran a distant third, but he probably took enough votes from Gore to make a difference in Florida and other states. Gore received over 500,000 more popular votes nationwide than Bush, out of over 105 million votes cast, but victory hinged on who won Florida’s 25 electoral votes. Bush led by only 537 popular votes in Florida after a partial recount, but Democrats asked for an additional manual recount of the error-prone punch-card ballots. The Supreme Court of Florida ordered hand recounts of all the votes, but the Republicans appealed the decision in the federal courts. In the case Bush v. Gore, the US Supreme Court, ruled in a split 5-4 decision that matched the party loyalty of the justices. The court majority ruled that the varying standards used in Florida’s hand recount violated the Equal-Protection Clause of the 14 th Amendment, and that there was not enough time left to conduct a lawful recount. Vice President Gore ended the election crisis by accepting the Supreme Court’s ruling. Bush won with 271 electoral votes against Gore’s 266 (one Democratic elector abstained).

Domestic Policies and Problems:President Bush aggressively pushed his conservative agenda: tax cuts, deregulation, federal aid to faith-based service organizations, pro-life

legislation, school choice, privatization of Social Security and Medicare, drilling for oil and gas in the Alaska wildlife refuge, and voluntary environmental standards for industry.

REPUBLICAN TAX CUT- In 2001, Congress, enjoying rare budget surpluses, passed a $1.35 trillion tax cut spread over ten years. The bill lowered the top tax bracket, gradually eliminated estate taxes, increased the child tax credit and limits for IRA and 401(k) contributions, and gave all taxpayers an immediate tax refund ($300 or $600). In 2003, President Bush pushed through another round of tax cuts for stock dividends, capital gains, and married couples. Democrats criticized the tax cuts for giving most of the benefits to the top 5% of the population, and for contributing to the doubling of the national debt during the Bush presidency from about $5 trillion to $10 trillion.

EDUCATIONAL AND HEALTH REFORM- In 2002, President Bush championed the bipartisan “No Child Left Behind Act.” It aimed to improve student performance and close the gap between well-to-do and poor students in the public schools through nationwide testing of all students, granting students the right to transfer to better schools, funding stronger reading programs, and training high-quality teachers. Later in2002, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision ruled that local government funding of school vouchers for religious schools did not violate the “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment. These victories for school-choice advocates put more pressure on public schools to raise student performance or lose funding. Republicans also passed laws to give seniors in Medicare the option to enroll in private insurance companies. Congress also fulfilled a campaign promise by President Bush to provide prescription drug coverage for seniors. Democrats criticized the legislation as primarily designed to profit insurance and drug companies.

ECONOMIC BUBBLES AND THE RECESSION OF 2001- The technology boom of the 1990s peaked in 2000 and was over by 2002. The stock market crashed; the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 38%. The unemployment rate climbed to 6%,the highest in 8 years, and the number of people living in poverty increased for the first time in eight years. The country experienced in 2001 its first recession since the early 1990s. The Federal Reserve fought the recession by cutting interest rates to 1.25%, the lowest in 50 years. The recession, along with Bush’s tax cuts and increased defense spending, turned the surplus of the past Clinton budgets into more than a $400 billion annual deficit by 2004. The end of the technology boom-bust cycle (1995-2002) encouraged many investors to move their money into real estate, which created another speculative “bubble” (2002-2007) that would burst with even more tragic consequences in Bush’s second term.

CORPORATE CORRUPTION- Fraud and dishonesty committed by business leaders also hurt the stock market and consumer confidence in the economy. Large corporations, such as Enron and WorldCom, had “cooked their books” (falsified earnings/profits), with the help of accounting companies and lenders. Public opinion forced the president and Congress to call for strengthening the regulatory powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission and jail time for those convicted of these white-collar crimes. Revelations of corporate corruption gave new life to a congressional bill to stop the flood of special-interest money into political campaigns. The law that passed banned unlimited donations (“soft money)” to political parties. However, it did not stop advertising by special interest groups.

The War on Terrorism:Terrorism and nations suspected of supporting it dominated US foreign policy after September 11, 2001. George W. Bush entered the White House

with no foreign policy experience, but surrounded himself with veterans of prior Republican administrations, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense under his father. General Colin Powell became his secretary of state, the first African American to hold the position. President Bush’s confident and aggressive approach against terrorism won over many Americans, but his administration often alienated and angered other nations.

ROOTS OF TERRORISM- The US was faulted by many in the Arab world for siding with Israel in the deadly cycle of Palestinian terror-bombings and Israeli reprisals that killed hundreds of innocent people. However, the causes of anti-Americanism often went deeper. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire, the last of the Islamic empires, was replaced in the Middle East by Western-style secular nation-states. Religious fundamentalists decried modernization and the corruption of “the House of Islam,” an ancient Islamic ideal of a realm governed by the precepts of the Koran and Sharia law. The stationing of American troops in the Middle East after the Persian Gulf War was seen as another violation of their lands. Islamic extremists, such as Osama bin Laden and the supporters of Al Qaeda (“the Base”), preached jihad, which they defined as a holy war against the “Jews and Crusaders” to restore a Islamic caliphate or realm from Africa and the Middle East through East Asia. The restrictive economic and political conditions in the Middle East also provided a fertile breeding ground for recruiting extremists.

EARLY TERRORIST ATTACKS- A truck bomb of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993 that killed 6 people brought home for the first time the threat posed by Islamic extremists. In 1998, the US responded to the terrorist bombing of 2 US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by bombing Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan. Their leader, Osama bin Laden, had fled to Afghanistan and allied himself with the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalists who had taken over Afghanistan. In 2000, US armed forces also learned the nature of “asymmetric” warfare conducted by terrorist, when two suicide bombers in a small rubber boat nearly sank a billion dollar warship, the USS Cole, docked in Yemen.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001- The coordinated attacks by Al-Qaeda terrorists in commercial airlines on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, as well as the Pentagon near DC, and a fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania claimed nearly 3,000 lives. The attacks galvanized public opinion as nothing had done since Pearl Harbor in 1941, and they empowered the Bush administration to take action. Bush aggressively pursued al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and gained the support of Congress and most nations, including Pakistan and Russia, to pursue and root out terrorists. In the US, the assets of groups suspected of supporting terrorism were frozen, suspects were rounded up, and an executive order set up secret hearings and military tribunals to try foreigners accused of terrorism.

WAR IN AFGHANISTAN- Bush declared that he wanted bin laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders “dead or alive”. After the Taliban refused to turn him over, their government was quickly overthrown in the fall of 2001 by a combination of US bombing, US Special Forces, and Afghan troops in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Into 2003, US and Afghan forces continued to pursue Al Qaeda in the mountains bordering Pakistan, but they failed to capture bin Laden. Hamid Karzai, with support from the US, became head of the government in Kabul, but Afghanistan remained unstable and divided by the Taliban insurgency and tribal conflicts.

HOMELAND SECURITY- After the 9/11 attacks, most Americans were willing to accept background checks and airport searches. The Patriot Acts of 2001 and 2003 gave unparalleled powers to the US government to obtain information and expand surveillance and arrest powers. However, most Americans were troubled by unlimited wiretaps, the collection of records about cell phone calls and emails, the use of military tribunals to try suspects accused of terrorism, and the imprisonment of suspects indefinetly at a US prison in Guantanamo, Cuba. First the Democrats, then the president, called for a new cabinet position for domestic defense. To enhance security, the Bush administration created a new Homeland Security Department by combining more than 20 federal agencies with 170,000 employees, including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, Customs, and Immigration and Naturalization. This was one of the largest reorganizations of government since the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II. Many in Congress questioned why the FBI and the CIA were left out of the new department. In 2004 a bipartisan national commission on terrorism criticized the FBI and the CIA, as well as the Defense Department, for failing to work together to “connect the dots” that may have uncovered the 9/11 plot. Under pressure from the families of 9/11 victims, Congress followed up on the commission’s recommendations, creating a Director of National Intelligence with the difficult job of coordinating the intelligence activities of all agencies.

GEORGE W. BUSH FOREIGN POLICY- The Bush administration worked with European nations and Russia to expand the European Union and NATO, supported admission of China to the World Trade Organization, and brokered conflicts between the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan. However, the Bush administration also refused to join the Kyoto accord to prevent global warming, walked out of the United Nations conference on racism, abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, and for years would not negotiate with North Korea or Iran. Critics questioned whether the administration valued cooperation with the nations of the world or instead followed a unilateralist approach. The president argued, in what became known as the “Bush Doctrine,” that the old policies of containment and deterrence were no longer effective in a world of stateless terrorism. To protect America, the president claimed that the US would be justified in using pre-emptive attacks to stop the acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) by terrorists and by nations that support terrorism.

IRAQ WAR- President Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, singled out Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as the “axis of evil.” While US intelligence agencies were finding no link between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration pursued a pre-emptive attack on Iraq before Saddam Hussein

could build and distribute WMDs (nuclear and biological) to terrorists. Critics of the policy, overseas and at home, charged that the real purpose of a war was “regime change,” and that the administration failed to work with its allies and the United Nations. Late in 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell negotiated an inspection plan with the UN Security Council, which Iraq accepted. In the following months, UN inspectors failed to find WMDs in Iraq. Nevertheless, the Bush administration continued to present claims of their existence based on intelligence information that proved false.OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM- In early 2003, Bush declared that Iraq had not complied with numerous UN resolutions since 1991, and “the game was over.” Without winning support of the UN Security Council, the US launched air attacks on Iraq on March 19. In less than 4 weeks, US armed forces, with the support of the British and other allies, overran Iraqi forces, captured the capital city, Baghdad, and ended Hussein’s dictatorship. When the US forces could not find WMDs in Iraq, criticism of the “war of choice” and the “regime change” mounted both at home and overseas. The defeat of the Iraq army and the capture of Hussein in Dec 2003 did no end the violence. Diverse groups of Iraqi insurgents (Sunni followers of the former dictator, Shiite militias, and foreign fighters, including Al-Qaeda) continued to attack US/allied troops and one another. Millions of Iraqis fled the country or were displaced by the attacks. The Bush administration was widely criticized for going to war without sufficient troops to control the country and for disbanding the Iraqi army. Pictures of the barbaric treatment of prisoners by US troops at Abu Ghraib also diminished America’s reputation in Iraq and globally. By mid-2005, 1,700 American soldiers had been killed and over 13,000 wounded in Iraq.

RESULTS OF THE MIDETERM ELECTIONS in 2002 Bush and the Republicans successfully made the war on terrorism the main issue of the congressional elections of 2002. The Republicans took control

of the Senate again and strengthened their majority in the House. For the first time since the 1950s, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, and conservatives carried the Supreme Court on most issues. Bush then pushed through another round of tax cuts, which included the elimination of taxes on stock dividends for investors and the reduction of taxes for married couples. Opponents argued that half of the tax cuts went to the richest 10% of the population, and the cuts were irresponsible during wartime. Congress also fulfilled a campaign promise of Bush to provide prescription drug coverage for seniors.

ELECTIONS OF 2004 AND A BUSH SECOND TERMAmerica entered the 2004 elections divided not only over the war in Iraq, but also by the limited economic recovery, tax cuts and the deficit, and

social issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and the role of religion in public institutions. The Democrats were optimistic as they faced an incumbent president with an approval rating of only 50%. Democratic voters in the primaries selected Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts as their presidential candidate, and he chose a rival in the primaries, Senator Kerry attacked President Bush for his handling of the war in Iraq, favoring drug and insurance companies, pushing tax cuts for the wealthy, and running up huge federal deficits. President Bush ran on his popular image as a strong and consistent leader in the war and a compassionate conservative at home. He successfully painted his opponent as a “flip-flopper” on defense issues and a “tax-and-spend liberal.” The Bush-Cheney campaign successfully energized its conservative base on issues such as tax cuts, gay marriage, abortion, and the liberal media. Bush also benefitted from the feeling that a wartime president and his team should have the opportunity to finish the job in Iraq. In the November 2004 election, unlike the election of 2000, George W. Bush won both the popular vote and a clear electoral-college vote majority. President Bush defeated Senator Kerry by about 3.5 million votes (51%), and captured 286 electoral votes to his opponent’s 252. The country remained divided, much as it was in 2000. Republicans won by heavy majorities in the South and the Western heartland (adding Iowa and New Mexico in 2004) and the West Coast states. Republicans also expanded their majorities in the Senate and the House, and continued to gain on the state level, especially in the South, which left the party in the strongest position it had enjoyed since the 1920s. Both parties agreed that the Republicans used volunteers more successfully than the Democrats in registering and getting out their voters. Some analysts interpreted the election results as revealing a deep cultural divide between sophisticated, diverse, and international-minded coastal urban centers that voted Democratic, and more traditional, religious, and nationalistic rural and small-town areas that went Republican. Democrats were left to wonder why low-and-middle-income workers continued seemingly to go against their own economic interests and vote Republican for moral issues, such as gay marriages. In his second term, President Bush interpreted the election not only as a mandate to continue his foreign policy, but also to replace part of the Social Security System with private investment accounts. This was part of an effort to move Americans from dependence on government programs toward what he called an “ownership society.” The president, with the support of a 55-vote Republican majority in the Senate, was also in a position to fill federal court vacancies with conservative judges. By 2005, the conservative political resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s seemed nearly complete. The Republican Party was in its strongest position since the 1920s.

Four More Years of War: The reconstruction of Iraq had made some headway by 2005 when the Iraqis held their first election, created a national assembly, and selected a

prime minister and cabinet ministries, but the violence continued. The Sunni majority that had ruled Iraq under Hussein began to work with the Shiite majority and the Kurds in the new government. At first, these steps did little to reduce violence, which killed on the average 100 Americans and 3,000 Iraqis a month. In the US, the bipartisan Iraqi Study Group recommended steps to have the Iraqis take greater responsibility for their country and set a timeline for US withdrawal. President Bush rejected a timetable, and in early 2007 sent an additional 30,000 troops in a “surge” to establish order. By late 2008, militia violence and American deaths were down in Iraq, and the US had started to turn over control of the provinces to the Iraqi government. In Afghanistan, the Taliban stepped up their attacks. For the first time, the number of Americans killed there outnumbered those killed in Iraq. President Bush turned over to the next president two unresolved wars and incomplete efforts to deal with nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration, though, did have the satisfaction of knowing that they had not been another major terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 in 2001.

Washington Politics:After his reelection victory in 2004, President Bush pushed Congress to privatize Social Security by encouraging Americans to invest part of their Social

Security payroll deductions in various market investments. His administration also argued for immigration reform, which was blocked by conservatives who criticized it as “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast hard and flooded New Orleans in August 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed both to anticipate and respond to the crisis. More than 1,000 people died, and tens of thousands of others (mostly poor people) were left in desperate conditions. A variety of scandals tarnished many Republicans. Some of these scandals involved taking bribes from lobbyists, committing perjury and obstruction of justice, and having improper relations with congressional pages. The Republican majority leader of the House, Tom DeLay, was forced to resign over his gerrymandering scheme in Texas. These failures, along with dissatisfaction with the Iraq War, helped the Democrats win control of both houses of Congress in 2006. President Bush, however, did leave a lasting impact on the federal courts by appointing two conservatives to the Supreme Court- John Roberts (as Chief Justice) and Samuel Alito- and increasing conservative majorities in the federal appellate courts.

The Great Recession: The housing boom of 2002-2007 was fueled by risky subprime mortgages and speculators who borrowed to “flip” properties for a quick profit. Wall

Street firms packaged these high-risk loans into a variety of complex investments (“securitization”), and sold them to unsuspecting investors around the world. As soon as housing prices started to dip, the bubble burst. Prices collapsed, foreclosures climbed, and investments worth trillions of dollars lost value. Investors panicked, which caused many banks and financial institutions at home and overseas to face failure. This resulted in a credit or “liquidity” crisis, because banks either lacked funds or were afraid to make the loans to businesses and consumers necessary for the day-to-day functioning of the economy. As the crisis deepened within credit markets, Americans were also hit with soaring gas prices (well over $4 a gallon), stock market declines of more than 40%, and rising unemployment. In early 2008, the federal government tried a $170 billion stimulus package and took over a few critical financial institutions such as quasi-governmental mortgage institutions (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) but the crisis was not over. In September, the bankruptcy of the large Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers led to panic in the financial industry. This forced the Bush administration to ask Congress for additional funds to help US banks and restore the credit markets. The controversial Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was passed, creating a $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to purchase

failing assets that included mortgages and mortgage-related securities from financial institutions. Conservatives attacked TARP as “socialism” while liberals attacked it as a bailout of the Wall Street executives who caused the problems. As with the Great Depression, the causes of this crash will be debated for years. Some blamed the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too low. Others criticized excessive deregulation of the financial industry. And others saw the cause in government efforts to promote home ownership. Moreover, real estate bank fraud and Ponzi schemes, such as the $18 billion stolen by Bernie Madoff, also helped to destroy investor confidence. Whatever its cause, the crisis significantly affected the 2008 election.THE ELECTION OF 2008

For the Democrats, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, wife of former President Bill Clinton, was the early favorite to become the first woman to head a national ticket. However, the big surprise of this election came after a long primary battle. A 47-year-old, charismatic African American, junior senator from Illinois, Barrack Obama, captured the Democratic nomination for president. Obama chose as his running mate Joseph Biden of Delaware, an experienced member of the Senate. In the shadow of the unpopular Bush administration, the Republicans nominated Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Vietnam War hero and a political “maverick” who hoped to appeal to undecided voters. McCain selected Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, a 44-year-old, relatively unknown politician. She became only the second woman to run for the vice presidency on a major political party ticket. The McCain-Palin ticket briefly led in the polls, but he economic crisis, Obama’s message for change, and his well-funded grassroots campaign helped the Democrats win in November. The Obama-Biden ticket gained 7 million more votes than McCain-Palin. Obama won a decisive 364 electoral votes to McCain’s 174 by taking 8 states (including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina) that had been won by Bush in 2004. The Democrats also increased their majorities in the House and Senate well beyond their victories in 2006. An estimated 1.5 million people, the largest crowd ever to attend a presidential inauguration, gathered around the US Capitol to witness the historic oath-taking of the nation’s 44th American president. The election of the first African American as president of the United States was historic, but Barack Obama and the Democrats now faced the country’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, two unfinished US wars, and a world increasingly skeptical of US power and leadership.

THE FIRST OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, 2009-2013Obama appointed his Democratic primary foe, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State and Eric Holder as the first African-American Attorney General.

Obama reappointed a Republican, Robert Gates, as Secretary of Defense to provide operational continuity in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The Transition:The rapidly growing economic crisis dominated the transition between President Bush and President Obama. Congress approved the use of the

second half of the controversial TARP funding- $350 billion. At Obama’s request, Bush used more than $10 billion of TARP funds to support the failing automakers, General Motors (GM) and the Chrysler Corporation.

Presidential Initiatives: President Obama singed a number of executive orders to overturn actions of the Bush administration. He placed a formal ban on torture by requiring

that Army field manuals be used as the guide for interrogating terrorist suspects. The new president expanded stem-cell research and ended restrictions on federal funding of overseas health organizations. One of the first bills passed by Congress that Oban signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that strengthened protection of equal pay for female employees. Obama failed to carry out all of his campaign pledges. He had vowed to close the US prison at Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, but failed to win needed Congressional support.

Economic Stimulus: The “Great” or “Long” Recession started in late 2007 in the US, and while financial sectors such as the stock market had recovered by 2013,

unemployment peaked at more than 10% in 2009 and persisted at levels above 7% through 2013. Based on Keynesian economic ideas to avoid a greater depression, Obama and the Democrats enacted a number of programs to promote recovery and financial reform. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided a $787 billion economic stimulus package designed to create or save 3.5 billion jobs. Included was $288 billion for tax cuts to stimulate spending, and $144 billion to help state and local governments maintain jobs and services. The balance of the package was for construction projects, health care, education, and renewable energy. With General Motors and Chrysler Corporation near collapse, the Obama administration became deeply involved in the recovery of the domestic auto industry. The government temporarily took over General Motors (“Government Motors”) while it went through bankruptcy, and guided the sale of Chrysler to Fiat, an Italian automaker. The popular “Clash for Clunkers” program provided $3 billion in incentives to US residents to scrap old cars in order to promote sales and to purchase new, more fuel-efficient vehicles. The Great Recession revealed serious flaws in the federal oversight of financial institutions. The comprehensive Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) was designed to improve regulations of banking and investment firms, and to protect taxpayers from future bailouts of “too big to fail” businesses. The act also set up a new Bureau of Consumer Protection to regulate consumer products, such as mortgages and credit cards. Some criticized the act for not breaking up the big banks that contributed to the meltdown of the economy and needed the bailouts.

Health Care:The US “fee for service” medical system was the most expensive in the world, but produced mixed results. It promoted innovation, but left more than

45 million people outside the system to seek medical care in emergency rooms. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care of 2010 (“Obamacare”) aimed to extend affordable health care insurance to an additional 25 to 30 million Americans through combinations of subsidies, mandates, and insurance exchanges while introducing medical and insurance reforms to control health care costs. The act required insurance companies to accept patients regardless of pre-existing conditions and to spend at least 80% of every premium dollar on medical care, or rebate their customers. Republicans opposed the law for its regulations and costs. Many Americans were confused by its complexity.

Budget Deficits: The recession both lowered the federal tax income collected and increased government spending on recovery programs. The combination tripled the

annual deficit to $1.75 trillion in 2009 (the largest in history), and increased the national debt from $9 trillion in 2007 to $16 trillion by 2012. Economists were not as worried about the short-term deficits as much as the long-term growth of the national debt. As the baby boom generation reached retirement age, rising Medicare and Social Security costs would also add to future deficits. In 2010 Obama created a presidential commission to make recommendations “to achieve fiscal responsibility over the long run.” The commission produced the “Bowles-Simpson Plan,” which would have eliminated the deficit by 2035 through $2 of spending cuts for every $1 increase in revenues. The compromise was widely praised, but rejected by Democrats for its cut to social services and by Republicans for its tax increases. “Compromise” had become a dirty word in Washington.

The Tea Party and the 2010 Midterm Elections: The president’s initial efforts at bipartisanship were largely rejected by the Republicans, but the Democrats controlled Congress during part of

Obama’s first 2 years, which enabled them to pass landmark legislation with little or no Republican support. The opposition to the deficits, the growing national debt and “Obamacare” coalesced in a loosely united conservative and libertarian movement known as the Tea Party. Many in the movement focused on economic issues and limited government, but others campaigned on gun rights, prayer in school, outlawing abortions, and undocumented immigration. In the fall of 2010, the Republicans took control of the House with a 242 to 193 majority, and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate to 53 votes, which included two independents.

Congress in Gridlock:In a very partisan political climate, divided government produced budget stalemates, threats of government shutdown, and a danger of default on the

national debt. The rival parties produced competing plans to reduce the deficit by more than $4 trillion, but could not agree on taxes or spending cuts. In August 2011, as the deadline to raise the debt ceiling closed in, the two sides agreed to cut $900 billion in spending and an additional $1.4 trillion cuts to be worked out by a bipartisan super-committee. The uncertainty and gridlock in Washington led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US AAA credit rating. A presidential election year is usually not very productive, but 2012 proved the least productive year in Congressional history since 1947, passing only 61 bills out of 3,914. Even the infamous “do-nothing Congress” of 1948 passed more legislation. The super-committee also failed, and the threat of “sequester” across-the-board spending cuts seemed likely in 2013.Obama’s Foreign Policy:

Obama was elected in part because of his opposition to the Iraq War and his promise to end the unilateral approach overseas that had damaged the reputation of the US during the Bush presidency.

IRAQ: In early 2009, the President developed a plan to wind down US ground combat operations in Iraq. US military support and air power continued to help the Iraqi forces battle insurgents through the end of 2011, when the last of US forces were withdrawn. Nearly 4,500 US soldiers had died in Iraq and about 32,000 had been wounded in action during this controversial war. Iraqi deaths in the war were well above 100,000. After the US left, Sunni and Al-Qaeda insurgents continued to terrorize the majority Shiite government.

AFGHANISTAN: The Obama campaign charged that the Bush administration had ignored Afghanistan by invading Iraq. As president, Obama made fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan a priority. He approved adding 17,000 troops to the US forces in Afghanistan in 2009 and then 30,000 more in 2010. The counterterrorism surged proved effective in Afghanistan, but the increased use of pilotless drone attacks on terrorists in Pakistan intensified anger against the US.

DEATH OF OSAMA BIN LADEN: In May 2011, Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan in a clandestine operation of the CIA and Navy SEALS. The death of bin Laden and other top leaders of Al-Qaeda raised the question of whether the US role in the area was completed. In 2012, President Obama and President Karzai of Afghanistan signed a long-term partnership agreement. The new focus for US forces was to train and support the Afghanistan military and to end the US combat mission by the close of 2014.

ARAB SPRING: In June of 2009, President Obama traveled to Egypt and gave a speech at the University of Cairo calling for a “new beginning” in relationships between the Islamic world and the United States. The president was soon tested through his response to a wave of protest across the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 known as the “Arab Spring.” Civil unrest and armed rebellion toppled governments in Tunisia, Libya (the leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was killed), Egypt (the leader, Hosni Mubarak, was imprisoned), and Yemen, and produced an ongoing civil war in Syria. Governments in Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia made a variety of concessions to protestors to maintain peace. Obama’s sympathy for pro-democracy protestors upset US allies in the conservative oil-rich Persian Gulf states. At home, Obama was criticized for not intervening more forcefully in failed state such as Libya and Syria.

ASIA AND EUROPE: Events in the Middle East limited the president’s planned “pivot” to Asia. The administration understood that America’s economic and strategic future would be closely tied to the Pacific Rim. Economists predicted that by 2030, the economies of Asia would be as large as the combined economies of North America and Europe, ending two centuries of Western dominance. US preoccupation with the Middle East, terrorism, and budget gridlock provided China with more opportunities to project its growing power around the world. At first, President Obama was praised in Europe primarily for not being George W. Bush. The European Union continued to struggle through the debt crisis in member countries such as Greece, Spain, and Ireland. It took German leadership to save the euro as a common currency. One commentator summed up the Atlantic partnership, “Europe does not want to be pushed around by the US, but it wants the US to push others around on its behalf.”

ELECTION OF 2012The issues related to the Great Recession and “Obamacare” dominated the 2012 general elections, especially job creation and the long-term fiscal

health of the United States. Obama won the Democratic nomination without a serious challenge. In contrast, nine Republicans contested in a long, hard-fought battle for their party’s nomination before Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, won. Obama defeated Romney with 332 to 206 electoral votes, and a five million advantage in the popular vote. As in 2008, Obama carried important swing states such as Florida, Virginia, and Ohio. The president also ran very strongly among Hispanic voters, wining 71% of their vote. Hispanics, the fastest growing demographic group in the nation, counted for 1 out of every 6 Americans in the 2010 census. Political analysts predicted that unless Republicans gained more Hispanic support, they would become uncompetitive in future nationwide elections.

SECOND OBAMA ADMINISTRATIONRepublicans could celebrate keeping their strong majority in the House of Representatives. The Democrats picked up two votes in the Senate, but the

election left Washington politics deeply divided.

Budget Brinkmanship: The expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012 complicated the impasse over the budget. In the early hours of January 1, 2013, Congress finally

passed a compromise tax bill that preserved the Bush tax cuts for incomes of $400,000 and less, but allowed the top tax rate to go back to 39.6% for higher incomes. However, Congress was unable to compromise on the budget, so the automatic “sequester” cuts went into effect in March. In October, the Republican effort to defund the Affordable Care Act resulted in a shutdown of the government for 16 days, and threatened default on the national debt. Last-minute legislation again put off the budget crisis to early 2014. The approval rating of Congress dropped to 10%, and other nations questioned the global economic leadership of the US.

Gun Violence:The mass shooting of moviegoers in Colorado and the killing of 26 young children and teachers at a school in Newtown, Connecticut sparked another

debate over guns, and how to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental health problems. President Obama’s proposals to tighten gun laws and background checks went nowhere in the face of the opposition from gun rights advocates.

Terrorism in Boston:The fear of home-grown terrorism proved real when two self-radicalized brothers set off two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in April

2013, killing 3 people and injuring more than 250 others. Both young men, Chechen brothers Dzhokar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarvaev, seemed motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs. The local police and FBI were able to hunt down the escaping suspects, but not before they shot and killed a police office. Tamerlan died when his brother drove over him in a car they had hijacked while engaging with law enforcement. Dzhokar was found hiding in a docked boat and was arrested to stand trial. In April 2015, a jury found him guilty of all 30 charges against him. The case also proved how difficult it is to prevent such attacks by isolated individuals.

Foreign Policy:In the second Obama administration, the Middle East remained unstable. A civil war in Syria became the focus of international debate after the

country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, used poisonous gas on the rebels. The US threatened to bomb Syria in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons. However, the attack was avoided when, with the aid of Russia, the Syrians agreed to give up all their chemical weapons. In Iran, the election of a new leader provided an opportunity to restart negotiations over the country’s nuclear energy program. For the US and its allies, the goal was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. In addition to problems in the Middle East, developed nations such as the US faced increased competition for natural resources from developing economic powers, such as China and India. Conflicts over territorial waters in the East and South China Seas and Arctic Ocean were also added to the challenges of the 21 century.

RULINGS OF THE ROBERTS COURTThe repeated observation that Americans try to settle their most vexing problems in the courts still held true in the early 21 st century. Since the

appointments by Presidents George W. Bush of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the court often had a 5-4 conservative majority. President Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010. Since each was replacing a moderate or liberal justice, neither changed the balance of the court.

Affirmative Action and Voting Rights:Conservatives had been attacking efforts by Congress and local governments to address the legacy of racial discrimination through affirmative action

since the 1970s. In 2007, the Roberts Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that local school districts could not use race to assign students to achieve diversity. While the Court overturned the actions of local school districts, it deferred to states on voting rights. For example, it upheld an Indiana law requiring citizens to have a photo identification card to vote. Supporters argued that it would help prevent fraud. Critics charged it would primarily hinder poor and minorities from voting. More broadly, in 2013, the Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder stuck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (renewed in 2006). This provision required that certain states with a history of voter discrimination obtain prior federal approval of any changes in voting laws. Roberts argued that the times had changed enough that minority voters no longer needed the same protections, and the Court sent the act back to Congress to be rewritten.

Elections and Money:After decades of efforts to limit the influence of big money in elections, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission

(2010) that corporations were “legal persons” and had the same rights as individuals to buy ads to influence political elections. In 2013, the Supreme Court heard arguments to overturn the federal limits on campaign contributions, which some worried would open the door to wider corruption of elected officials.

Environment:The Obama administration used the stimulus bill to promote reduced reliance on oil and more development of alternative energy sources, such as

solar and wind. However, many in Congress disagreed with the science behind global warming and opposed tighter controls of greenhouse gases. With Justice Kennedy joining the more liberal justices, the court ruled 5-4 in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) that the EPA has the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Gay Rights and Same-Sex Marriage:The gay rights movement achieved significant gains in the 21st century. In 2010, Congress repealed the Clinton era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to end

discrimination of gays in the military. In 2013, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling declared the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional, and let stand the California court’s overturn of a state law (Proposition 8) banning same-sex marriage in that state. However, the states in 2013 remained divided over the issue with 14 states allowing same-sex marriage by law or court order, while 35 others banned it in their constitutions or by law. Opponents want marriage defined as being a union between one man and one woman only. Many opponents believe that same-sex marriages threaten the existence of traditional marriages and are detrimental to children raised by same-sex parents. As of May 2015, 37 states plus the District of Colombia passed laws to allow same-sex marriages in their states. In the spring of 2015, the Supreme Court started hearing oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges which is seeking to challenge bans in the remaining 13 states that do not allow for same-sex marriages.

Immigration:The questions of the future of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants and border security also divided the nation and the courts. Unhappy

with federal policies, Arizona took on the issues. In Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting (2011), the Roberts Court ruled that a state had the right to require employers to check the immigration status of potential employees. However in Arizona v. United States (2012), Justice Kennedy again voted with the four more liberal justices, and the Court ruled that federal immigration law preempts most of the state’s anti-immigration law. In November 2014, President Obama announced an executive order that would grant amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. The order was meet with opposition from Congress and a question about the constitutionality of the executive order itself.

Health Care:President Obama’s chief legislative accomplishment of his first term, the Affordable Care Act, known to the public as “Obamacare,” was under

continuous attacks in Congress and the courts. Besides the costs and complexity of the law, the legal debate centered on whether the federal government had the authority to mandate Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty. In 2012, the case of National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius (NFIB) finally made it to the Supreme Court.

In the hearing, the fate of health care law did not look promising when Justice Scalia asked whether the federal government could next require Americans to buy broccoli. However, in a surprising 5-4 decision, Chief Justice Roberts, leading the four more liberal justices, ruled that the requirement that individuals must purchase health insurance or pay a penalty was a constitutional exercise of Congress’s authority to levy taxes. Roberts angered many conservatives with this decision, but he then joined the more conservative justices in a further ruling that limited Congress’s authority under the interstate commerce clause and limited its power to forces states to expand Medicaid. About half of the states used the latter ruling to justify not expanding Medicaid, which they argued would eventually be too expensive for them to afford. These decisions resulted in many low-income people not receiving health insurance.

In the summer of 2014, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. In the case, corporations were seeking religious exceptions for the requirement to cover contraceptives under the Affordable Health Care Act. The 5-4 ruling of the court stated that employers with religious opposition to things like birth control, IVF, and abortion, among other reproduction issues, could not be forced to provide insurance coverages for their female employees because it violated the First Amendment freedom of religion. The court used a previous ruling in which corporations were deemed protected under the 14th Amendment as the basis for their ruling. Opponents of the court’s decision stated that the refusal to cover contraceptives was an attack on women’s rights.

Impact of the Roberts Court:

Some observers noted that, with a divided Congress too dysfunctional to address the complex issues of the times, more decisions were falling to the courts to settle, from elections to health care. If so, the Roberts Court may become one of the more powerful Courts in American history.

The Lessons of September 11 by John Lewis Gaddis

Americans of the current generation will never forget the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, DC. As President Roosevelt said of Pearl Harbor, September 11 is “a date which will live in infamy.” For the rest of our lives, we will remember the scenes of unbelievable horror flickering on our television screens- scenes that were played over and over again that day. The TV cameras first showed one of the Trade Center towers with a gaping hole in it, caused, we initially thought, when a passenger jet accidently crashed into it. But soon another jet airliner appeared at the corner of our TV screens, suddenly veered, and crashed into the second tower in an explosion of flame and smoke. Then, one by one, the great buildings collapsed, sending enormous clouds of dust, ash, and debris boiling through the streets and engulfing people who were running for their lives. What remained of the twin towers, once masterpieces of modern architecture, engineering, and construction, were mountains of smoldering rubble with an untold number of victims trapped inside. When the TV cameras swept the NYC skyline, there was a huge, haunting hole where the twin towers had once stood.

Thanks to television, we also saw the terrible damage caused by another passenger jet when it crashed into the Pentagon. We soon learned that the three jet airliners, with passengers on board, had been hijacked by Muslim terrorists from the Middle East, who turned the planes into guided missiles. A fourth hijacked airliner, headed for Washington (probably to hit the White House or the Capitol), crashed in Pennsylvania. Investigators believe that some heroic passengers wrested control of the aircraft from the terrorists and crashed the plane in order to thwart their murderous objective.

The strikes against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were the worst hostile acts by foreign terrorists ever carried out on US soil. Officials estimate that the attacks killed more than 3,000 people- the exact total may never be known- and wounded and maimed a great many more.

The events of September 11 have forever marked our generation, just as Pearl Harbor marked an earlier generation. Those murderous acts unified the country as no events had done in more than a generation. The inspirational leadership of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of NYC brought us even closer together. So did the courage and sacrifice of the NYC firefighters and police, many of whom were killed when the towers collapsed. The country gave President George W. Bush an extraordinary high approval rating when he vowed to bring the guilty parties to justice and make war on terrorists wherever they could be found. He called it “the first war of the 21st century.”

When American intelligence identified Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network, based in Afghanistan, as the culprits, President Bush acted swiftly. By his orders, American air and ground forces invaded Afghanistan, vanquished the brutal Taliban regime that had harbored the terrorists, obliterated al-Qaeda training camps, killed countless numbers of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, and drove the survivors into mountain hideouts. The vast majority of Americans resolutely supported the war and President Bush’s handling of it. As this volume went to press, the fighting in Afghanistan was still going on. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s murderous chief, remained at large.

In the aftermath of September 11, Americans across the country were frightened and insecure, all the more so when administration officials warned us to expect further terrorist acts on US soil. “It’s still America the beautiful,” said Tom Brokaw of NBC, “but now it is also America the vulnerable, and it will take another great generation to bind up the wounds.” The attacks of 9/11 were so overwhelming, so unspeakably evil, that they still defy comprehension. How do we find meaning in that cataclysmic day? How did it happen? What does it portend for the future? Can history help us understand it?

In the following selection, John Lewis Gaddis, an expert on the history of foreign policy, discusses the lessons of 9/11 from a historical perspective. Focusing on the post-Cold War decade, he explains how the failures and shortcomings of American foreign policy created anti-American feelings in much of the world. Washington officials, in particular, were too insensitive to the fact that American power and wealth “were being blamed” for the inequities caused by the globalization of capitalism. He warns us that 9/11 was a historic turning point, thrusting us into a new era that is “bound to be more painful than the one we’ve just left.”

Gaddis believes- and the editors of Portrait of America agree- that a knowledge of history can ease our fears and help us endure the difficult days ahead. As Civil War historian James M. McPherson reminds us, the US has been tested many times in the past and has “emerged from the trauma stronger and better than before.” Historian Pauline Maier finds a lesson in the American

Revolution that speaks to us across the centuries. “Americans joined arms and became a nation in the wake of an outside attack. Good of an unpredictable sort can come out of evil.”

We’ve never had a good name for it, and now it’s over. The post-cold war era- let us call it that for want of any better term- began with the collapse of one structure, the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and ended with the collapse of another, the World Trade Center’s twin towers on September 11, 2001. No one, apart from the few people who plotted and carried out these events, could have anticipated that they were going to happen. But from the moment they did happen, everyone acknowledge that everything had changed.

It’s characteristic of such turning points that they shed more light on the history that preceded them than on what’s to come. The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t tell us much about the cold war. It suddenly became clear that East Germany, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself had long since lost the authority with which the US and its NATO allies had continued to credit them right up to the day the wall came down. The whole history of the cold war looked different as a result. Having witnessed the end, historians could never again see the middle, or even the beginning, as they once had.

Something similar seems likely to happen now to the post-cold war era. For whatever we eventually settle on calling the events of September 11- the Attack on America, Black Tuesday, 9/11- they’ve already forced a reconsideration, not only of where we are as a nation and where we may be going, but also of where we’ve been, even of who we are. Our recent past, all at once, has been thrown into sharp relief, even as our future remains obscure. To paraphrase an old prayer, it’s obvious now that we have done some things which we ought not to have done, and that we have not done other things which we ought to have done. How much health there is in us will depend, to a considerable degree, on how we sort this out.

But first things first. No acts of commission or omission by the US can have justified what happened on 9/11. Few if any moral standards have deeper roots than the prohibition against taking innocent life in peacetime. Whatever differences may exist in culture, religion, race, class, or any of the other categories by which human beings seek to establish their identities, this rule transcends them.

The 9/11 attacks violated it in ways that go well beyond all other terrorist attacks in the past: first by the absence of any stated cause to be served; second by the failure to provide warning; and finally by the obvious intent to time and configure the attack in such a manner as to take as many lives as possible- even to the point, some have suggested, of the airplanes’ angle of approach, which seemed calculated to devastate as many floors of the twin towers as they could. Let there be no mistake: this was evil, and no set of grievances real or imagined, however strongly felt or widely held, can excuse it.

At the same time, though, neither our outrage nor the patriotic unity that is arising from it relieves us of the obligation to think critically. Would anyone claim, in the aftermath of 9/11, that the US can continue the policies it was following with respect to its national defense or toward the world before 9/11? Americans were not responsible for what happened at Pearl Harbor; but they would have been irresponsible in the extreme if they had not, as a consequence of that attack, dramatically altered their policies. Nobody- given the opportunity to rerun the events leading up to that catastrophe- would have handled things again in just the same way. It’s in that spirit, I think, that we need a reconsideration of how the US had managed its responsibilities in the decade since the Cold War ended, not with a view to assigning blame, indulging in recrimination, or wallowing in self-pity, but rather for the purpose- now urgent- of determining where we go from here. Patriotism demands nothing less.

The clearest conclusion to emerge from the events of 9/11 is that the geographical position and the military power of the US are no longer sufficient to ensure its safety. Americans have known insecurity before in their homeland, but not for a very long time. Except for Pearl Harbor and a few isolated pinpricks like Japanese attempts to start forest fires with incendiary bombs in the Pacific Northwest in 1942, or the Mexican guerilla leader Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, the US has suffered no foreign attack on its soil since British troops captured Washington and burned the White House and the Capitol in 1814. There’s a macabre symmetry in the possibility that the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11- which crashed presumably after an uprising among the passengers- probably had one of these buildings as its target.

Few other nations have worried so little for so long about what is coming to be called “homeland security.” The late Yale historian C. Vann Woodward even went so far as to define this lack of concern as a central feature of the American character. “Free security,” he insisted, had done as much to shape Americans’ view of themselves as had the availability of free, or almost free, land. The 20th century, to be sure, eroded that sense of safety, but this happened as a result of the larger role the US had assigned itself in world affairs, together with ominous shifts in the European balance of power. It did not arise from any sense of domestic insecurity. We entered WWI to ensure that Germany did not wind up dominating Europe, and we were preparing to do the same thing again in WWII when the Japanese attack, followed by Hitler’s own declaration of war, removed any choice in the matter from us.

Even so, the continental US remained secure throughout the long and bloody conflict that followed. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese could bomb our cities or occupy our territory, as we eventually would do to them. And despite the incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans during the war, the only significant fifth-column network operating within the US at the time was that of an ally, the Soviet Union- a fact not discovered until after the war had ended. The world might be unsafe, but homeland security could be taken for granted almost as easily during the total wars of the 20 th century as it had been throughout most of the 19th century.

The Cold War made the American homeland seem less secure in two ways: when spies working on behalf of the Soviet Union were shown to have betrayed the country; and as the prospect arose that Soviet long-range bombers and later intercontinental ballistic missiles might soon be capable of reaching American soil. The spies were mostly rounded up by the time

McCarthyism reached its peak in the early 1950s, a fact that helps to account for why that season of paranoia went away as quickly as it did. The nuclear danger never entirely went away, and for a while it was a palpable presence for Americans who saw their public buildings designated as fallout shelters even as they were being encouraged, for a while, to build their own in their own backyards.

Despite moments of genuine fear, however, as during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, the only images we had of destroyed American cities were those constructed by the makers of apocalypse films and the authors of science fiction novels. Real danger remained remote. We had adversaries, but we also had the means of deterring them.

Even Cold War insecurities, therefore, never meant that Americans, while living, working and traveling within their country, had to fear for their lives. Dangers to the American homeland were always vague and distant, however clear and present overseas dangers may have been. The very term “national security,” invented during WWII and put to such frequent use during the Cold War, always implied that both threats and vulnerabilities lay outside the country. Our military and intelligence forces were configured accordingly.

That’s why the US Commission on National Security in the 21st Century- often known, for its co-chairs Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, as the Hart-Rudman Report- distinguished between “national” and “homeland” security when it warned of our domestic vulnerabilities, with uncanny prescience, in March 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, we have not only adopted the concept of “homeland security”- it has become synonymous with national security. Such is the revolution in our thinking forced upon us by the events of that day. It means that Americans have entered a new stage in their history in which they can no longer take security for granted: it is no longer free- anywhere, or at any time.

What was striking about 9/11 was the success with which the terrorists transformed objects we have never before regarded as dangerous into weapons of lethal potency. There was nothing exotic here like bombs or even firearms. They used instead the objects of everyday life: pocket knives, twine, box-cutters and, of course, commercial aircraft. The terrorists also combined what may seem to us to be a primitive belief in the rewards of martyrdom with the most modern methods of planning, coordination, and execution. We confront, therefore, not only a new category of easily available weaponry, but a new combination of skill and will in using it.

The attack’s cost-effectiveness was equally striking. No previous act of terrorism came close to this one in lives lost and damage inflicted. The dead were almost twice the number killed in some three decades of violence in Northern Ireland. They are ten times the toll on both sides in the most recent round of the Israeli-Palestinian intifada. They exceed, in deaths suffered on a single day, the most violent battles of the American Civil War. The operation required the lives of 19 terrorists and expenditures of about $500,000. The “payoff,” if we can use such a term for such a brutal transaction, was approximately 5,000 dead and perhaps as much as $100 billion in recovery costs. Rations like these- some 263 victims for every terrorist, and $2,000 damage for every dollar expended- cannot help but set a standard for which future terrorists will aspire.

The whole point of terrorism is leverage: to accomplish a lot with a little. This operation, in that sense, succeeded brilliantly- even allowing for the fact that one of the four planes failed to reach its target, and that more planes may have been in danger of being hijacked. As a consequence, the images of terrified New Yorkers running through the streets of their city to escape great billowing clouds of ash, dust, and building fragments; or of the government in Washington forced to seek shelter; or of several days of skies devoid of the contrails we have come to expect aircraft to add to the atmosphere over our heads- these memories will remain in our minds just as vividly as the images, from 6 decades earlier, of American naval vessels aflame, sinking at their own docks within an American naval base on American territory.

Security, therefore, has a new meaning, for which little in our history and even less in our planning has prepared us . That leads to a second conclusion, which is that our foreign policy since the Cold War ended has insufficiently served our interests. National security requires more than just military deployments or intelligence operations. It depends ultimately upon creating an international environment congenial to the nation’s interests. That’s the role of foreign policy. Despite many mistakes and diversions along the way, the US managed to build such an environment during the second half of the 20 th century. The Soviet Union’s collapse stemmed, in no small measure, from its failure to do the same thing.

As a consequence, the world at the end of the Cold War was closer to a consensus in favor of American values- collective security, democracy, capitalism- than it had ever been before. President George H.W. Bush’s talk of a “new world order” reflected a convergence of interests among the great powers which, while imperfect, was nonetheless, unprecedented. Differences remained with the European Union, Russia, China, and Japan over such issues as international trade, the handling of regional conflicts, the management of national economies, the definition and hence the protection of human rights; but these were minor compared to issues that had produced two world wars and perpetuated the Cold War. Americans, it seemed, had finally found a congenial world.

What’s happened since, though? Can anyone claim that the world of 2001- even before 9/11- was as friendly to American interests as it has been in 1991? It would be silly to blame the US alone for the disappointments of the past decade. Too many other actors, ranging from Saddam Hussein to Slobodan Milosevic to Osama bin Laden, have helped to bring them about. But the question that haunted Americans after Pearl Harbor is still worth asking: given the opportunity to rerun the sequence, what would we want to change in our foreign policy and what would we leave the same?

The question is not at all hypothetical. The administration of George W. Bush has already undertaken, in the wake of September 11, the most sweeping reassessment of foreign policy priorities since the Cold War ended. Its results are not yet clear, but the tilt is far more toward change than continuity. That is an implicit acknowledgement of deficiencies in the American approach to the world during the post-cold war era that are clearer now than they were then.

One of these, it seems, was unilateralism, an occupational hazard of sole surviving superpowers. With so little countervailing power in sight, such states tend to lead without listening, a habit that can cause resistance even among those otherwise disposed to follow. The US managed to avoid this outcome after its victory in WWII because we had, in the Soviet Union, a superpower competitor. Our allies, and even our former adversaries, tolerated a certain amount of arrogance on our part because there was always “something worse” out there; we in turn, fearing their defection or collapse, treated them with greater deference and respect than they might have expected given the power imbalances of the time.

With our victory in the Cold War, though, we lost the “something worse.” American ideas, institutions, and culture remained as attractive as ever throughout much of the world, but American policies began to come across as overbearing, self-indulgent, and insensitive to the interests of others. Our own domestic politics made things worse: with the White House in the control of one party and the Congress in the hands of another during most of this period, it was difficult to get a consensus on such matters as paying United Nations dues, participating in the International Criminal Court, or ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mines Convention, or the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. During most of the Cold War, knowing what our enemies would make of our failure to do these things, it would have been easy.

A second problem arose, largely as a result of this unilateralism: we neglected the cultivation of great power relationships. We seemed to have assumed, perhaps because we were the greatest of the great powers, that we no longer needed the cooperation of the others to promote our interests. We therefore allowed our relations with the Russians and the Chinese to deteriorate to the point that by the end of that decade we were barely on speaking terms with Moscow and Beijing. We failed to sustain one of the most remarkable achievements of American foreign policy during the Cold War- the success of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in creating a situation in which our adversaries feared one another more than they feared us…

This happened chiefly as a result of a third characteristic of our post-Cold War foreign policy, which was a preference for justice at the expense of order. We had never entirely neglected the demands of justice during the Cold War, but we did tend to pursue these by working with the powerful to get them to improve their treatment of the powerless. We sought to promote human rights from the inside out rather than from the outside in: sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we did not.

With the end of the Cold War, however, we changed our approach. We enlarged NATO against the wishes of the Russians, not because the Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarians added significantly to the alliance’s military capabilities, but rather because these states had suffered past injustices and therefore “deserved” membership. We then used the expanded alliance to rescue the Kosovars and bomb the Serbs, despite the fact that in doing so we were violating the sovereignty of an internationally recognized state without explicit United Nations approval. Unsurprisingly, this angered not just the Russians but also the Chinese, both of whom had discontented minorities of their own to worry about…

A fourth aspect of our post- Cold War foreign policy followed from the third: it was the inconsistency with which we pursued regional injustice. We were, as it turned out, by no means as adamant in seeking justice for the Chechens or the Tibetans as we were for the Kosovars: Moscow and Beijing, despite their nervousness, had little to fear. But by applying universal principles on a less than universal basis, Washington did open itself to the charge of hypocrisy. It was worse elsewhere, as in Somalia, where our reluctance to take casualties of our own revealed how little we were prepared to sacrifice for the rights of others, or in Rwanda, where we responded to the greatest atrocities of the decade by simply averting our eyes.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, we tolerated the continuing Israeli dispossession and repression of Palestinians even as we were seeking to secure the rights of the Palestinians; and we did nothing to adjust policy in response to the fact that an old adversary, Iran, was moving toward free elections and a parliamentary system even as old allies like Saudi Arabia were shunning such innovations. There was, in short, a gap between our principles and our practices: we proclaimed the former without linking them to the latter, and that invited disillusionment. There are several reasons why the rantings of bin Laden resonate to the extent that they do in so many parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; but surely this is one of them.

A fifth problem was our tendency to regard our economic system as a model to be applied throughout the rest of the world, without regard to differences in local conditions and with little sense of the effects if would have in generating inequality. The problem was particularly evident in Russia, where we too easily assumed a smooth transition to market capitalism. Our efforts to help came nowhere near the scope and seriousness of the programs we’d launched to rebuild the economies of our defeated adversaries after WWII.

Meanwhile, Washington officials were less sensitive than they should have been to the extent to which American wealth and power were being blamed, throughout much of the world, for the inequities the globalization of capitalism was generating. Capitalism would have expanded after the Cold War regardless of what the US did. By linking that expansion so explicitly with our foreign policy objectives, however, we associated ourselves with something abroad that we would never have tolerated at home: the workings of an unregulated market devoid of a social safety net. Adam Smith was right in claiming that the pursuit of self-interest ultimately benefits the collective interest; but Karl Marx was right when he pointed out that wealth is not distributed to everyone equally at the same time, and that alienation arises as a result…

Finally, and largely as a consequence, the US emphasized the advantages, while neglecting the dangers, of globalization. There was a great deal of talk after the Cold War ended of the extent to which that process had blurred the boundary between the domestic and the international: it was held to be a good thing that capital, commodities, ideas and people could move more freely across boundaries. There was little talk, though, of an alternative possibility: that danger might move just as freely. That’s a major lesson of September 11: the very instruments of the new world order- airplanes, liberal policies on immigration and money transfers, multiculturalism itself in the sense that there seemed nothing odd about the hijackers when they were taking their flight training- can be turned horribly against it. It was as if we had convinced ourselves that the new world of global

communication had somehow transformed an old aspect of human nature, which is the tendency to harbor grievances and sometimes to act upon them.

What connects these shortcomings is a failure of strategic vision: the ability to see how the parts of one’s policy combine to form the whole. This means avoiding the illusion that one can pursue particular policies in particular place without their interacting with one another. It means remembering that actions have consequences: that for every action there will be a reaction, the nature of which won’t always be predictable. It means accepting the fact that there’s not always a linear relationship between input and output: that vast efforts can produce minimal results in some situations, and that minimal efforts can produce vast consequences in others… Finally, it requires effective national leadership, a quality for which American foreign policy during the post-Cold War era is unlikely to be remembered.

So what might we have done differently in the realm of foreign policy? Quite a lot, it’s now clear, as we look back on a decade in which it appears that our power exceeded our wisdom… Where do we go from here? Will the events of September 11 bring our policies back into line with our interests? Can we regain the clarity of strategic vision that served us well during the Cold War, and that seemed to desert us during its aftermath? Shocks like this do have the advantage of concentrating the mind. Those of us who worried, during the 1990s, about the difficulty of thinking strategically in an age of apparent safety need no longer do so. As was the case with Pearl Harbor, a confusing world has suddenly become less so, even if at horrendous cost.

What’s emerging is the prospect, once again, of “something worse” than an American-dominated world- perhaps something much worse. The appalling nature of the attacks on NYC and Washington forged a new coalition against terrorism overnight. The great power consensus that withered after 1991 is back in place in expanded form: the US, the European Union, Russia, China and Japan are all on the same side now- at least on the issue of terrorism- and they’ve been joined by unexpected allies like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and perhaps even, very discreetly, Iran. Terrorism can hardly flourish without some state support; but 9/11 brought home the fact that terrorism challenges the authority of all states. Everybody has airplanes, and everything that lies below them must now be considered a potential target. Just as fear of the Soviet Union built and sustained an American coalition during the Cold War- and just as the prospect of nuclear annihilation caused the Soviets themselves ultimately to begin cooperating with it- so the sudden appearance of “something much worse” is a paradoxical but powerful ally in the new war that now confronts us.

Maintaining this coalition, however, will require tolerating diversity within it. That was one of our strengths during the Cold War: the US was far more successful than the Soviet Union in leading while listening, so that those we led felt they had an interest in being led. NATO survived, as a consequence, while the Sino-Soviet alliance and the Warsaw Pact did not. If the global coalition against terrorism is to survive, it will demand even greater flexibility on the part of Americans than our Cold War coalition did. We’ll have to give up the unilateralism we indulged in during the post-Cold War era: the Bush administration, prior to 9/11, had seemed particularly to relish this bad habit. We’ll have to define our allies more in terms of shared interests, and less in terms of shared values. We’ll have to compromise more than we might like in promoting human rights, open markets, and the scrupulous observance of democratic procedures. We’ll have to concentrate more than we have in the past on getting whatever help we can in the war against terrorism wherever we can find it. Our concerns with regional justice may suffer as a result: we’re not likely to return soon to rescuing Kosovars, or to condemning oppression against Chechens and Tibetans. The compensation, one hopes, will be to secure justice on a broader scale; for terrorism will offer little justice for anyone.

Even as we pursue this path, we’ll need to address the grievances that fuel terrorism in the first place. Once again, these are Cold War precedents: with the rehabilitation of Germany and Japan after WWII, together with the Marshall Plan, we fought the conditions that made the Soviet alternative attractive even as we sought to contain the Soviets themselves… Can we apply the same strategy now against the conditions that breed terrorists in so many parts of what we used to call the “third” world? We’d better try, for some of these regions are at least as much at risk now as Europe and Japan were half a century ago.

The era we’ve just entered- whatever we decide to call it- is bound to be more painful than the one we’ve just left. The antiterrorist coalition is sure to undergo strains as its priorities shift from recovery to retaliation. Defections will doubtless occur. Further terrorist attacks are unavoidable, and are certain to produce demoralization as well as greater resolve.

But it does seem likely, even at this early state in the war they have provoked, that the terrorists have got more than they bargained for. “What kind of a people do they think we are?” Winston Churchill asked of the Japanese in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It’s worth asking the same of our new enemies, because it can hardly have been their purpose to give the US yet another chance to lead the world into a new era, together with the opportunity to do it, this time, more wisely.

The Bush-Cheney Legacy Washington Post January 15, 2009

A roundtable discussion with The Washington Post’s Genre Robinson, Bob Woodward, and Barton Gellman.

Gene Robinson: Hello and welcome to washingtonpost.com. I’m Gene Robinson and today I’ll be joined by Bob Woodward and Bart Gellman, my colleagues, for a roundtable discussion of the legacy of the administration of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. Bob, you have written three books now about the Bush administration…

Bob Woodward: Four books.

Robinson: Four now.

Woodward: Yea, right.

Robinson: Four now.

Woodward: And my wife says if there’s a fifth she’s gonna shoot me. [Laughter]

The Bush-Cheney Legacy:

Robinson: Obviously there’s something that fascinates you about this administration. So what do you think is the one thing George Bush is going to be remembered for?

Woodward: Well, I think he’s going to be remembered for lots of things. The defining event is the Iraq War, because that was a war of choice. As we know that war is not over [as of 2009], 146,000 troops there, almost the same number of civilian contractors. It is a massive land army in presence in the heart of the Middle East. General Petraeus is keeping that large force there because he knows it’s not over, it’s not stabilized.

Ah, Bush of course hopes that that’s going to turn out well and there is an outside chance it’s possible and he’ll be Harry Truman. It’s also possible that it’s going to, and the preponderance of evidence is, that it may not turn out well. And, so, but you know the financial crisis is a giant legacy, and I’m wondering what the financial crisis is going to be called. Is it going to be called Wall Street-gate, Capitalism-gate, ah, Bush-gate, Cheney-gate?

Robinson: Since you are responsible for the original gate, we’re not going to call it a gate at all, [laughter] we’re going to call it the financial crisis. We’ll get, we’ll get back to Iraq I’m sure. But I want to ask Bart. Bart, your book Angler is the definitive look at Dick Cheney and so I want to ask you the same question. What is the one thing Dick Cheney is going to be remembered for?

Bart Gellman: I think Dick Cheney is going to be remembered for his attempt to expand the powers of the executive and the presidency and for his overreach on that front and for the backlash that came against him.

Robinson: Was he indeed a uniquely powerful vice president?

Gellman: He clearly was uniquely powerful as vice president. I think in the modern era he’s the most powerful person’s who’s ever held office who was not president. He’s the nearest thing I guess you could say to the deputy president we’ve ever had.

The Roots of War:

Robinson: You know Bob, I would tend to agree, just in general, that Iraq is probably the headline of the Bush-Cheney administration. So take me back. Where was the germ for Iraq really laid? Does it come out of the first Gulf War? Does it come out of 9/11? Where does it come from?

Woodward: Well, it comes from like all historical causation a convergence of events. 9/11 was significant, changed the world. I agree with Bart that Cheney was such a presence after 9/11, such a steamroller for the offensive mode that became really the Bush doctrine. That it was in the chronology from 9/11 until they launched the Iraq War, the war plan looked easier. So it was going to be quick, as Cheney with great intensity said, we’re going to be welcomed with sweets and flowers.

There was a sense that we had to do something. There was a sense that was valid that Saddam was a bad actor. But when you look back on that, and study it and study particularly the neglect and the failure to manage the aftermath, it’s hard to look at it as a good thing.

Robinson: Bart, how do you see Dick Cheney’s role in the run-up to the Iraq War, indeed, in the decision to go to war in Iraq?

Gellman: His role, and in fact his chief of staff’s Scooter Libby’s role, were very important. I like what Bob said about convergence. I think that George Bush and Dick Cheney sort of came to the gates of Baghdad by way of two very different paths, and they converged on the same point of view and the same decision.

Cheney saw this in much more sort of classical security and balance of power terms. He wanted to send a message. Some of his staff told me, and this was something we didn’t know before, that he was looking for a demonstration effect. The idea you sort of knock one bad guy down to send a message to others. He was actually more worried about North Korea and Iran as constituting this nexus he always talked about between hostile states, WMD and terrorists who would use them. But those were not attractive military options, and he hoped to deter them with this kind of war.

I mean, the other surprising thing that we didn’t know before, is that despite his public comments, Cheney was quite ambivalent about the war. He thought it was a close call. Once he made the call, and once the president made the call more importantly, he would go and make it a 100% case in public. But he was worried it wouldn’t turn out well.

Woodward: And the other factor here is the mind of George Bush. In one interview, he told me, I believe we have a duty to free people, to liberate people. And that liberation, the freedom agenda, was a giant driver. You had the support, the encouragement of Cheney, the intelligence community saying Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. And Bush looked at this, ah, as an opportunity. And I think when he stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier with the well-remembered sign mission accomplished, he had that sense. They’ve done it, they’ve really pulled something off that was going to be important.

I’ve reached the conclusion, I never kind of questioned Bush’s sincerity. I think he really wanted to do the right thing. The problem is, and this is if you’re looking for a theme in all of this, it juxtaposes very dramatically with Cheney. Bush doesn’t like homework, whereas Cheney-

Robinson: Right, he does all his homework, doesn’t he-

Woodward: Cheney is all homework, is all homework and he knows how to marshal arguments and evidence. And so after the appearance on the aircraft carrier was that sense, “Oh, we’ve done it.” And of course on the ground in Iraq is the intelligence people who were telling Bush and Cheney both, “This is turning into a catastrophe.” And they didn’t wake up for really years.

The 9/11 Factor:

Robinson: In terms of deciding to go to war in Iraq and also how to prosecute the war, I do wonder what impact 9/11 had on the mindset of each man. I ask because I’ve been talking to another of the principals who was in and around the White House that day, and I once in a conversation I said, um, something to the effect, I know what it must have been like in the administration that day. And this person said, “No you don’t. You have no idea what it felt like, the feeling that we had missed something, the feeling that we were under attack, the feeling that we had to do everything we could to avoid another attack.” Was that sort of sense of responsibility, weighty responsibility present in Dick Cheney? Was it present in George Bush?

Gellman: Yea, it’s hard to remember how intense that moment was. It wasn’t just that, sort of Dick Cheney in the bunker under the White House and President Bush sort of outside a Florida classroom and then on Air Force One, are watching the great symbols of American capitalism and American military might falling down, or burning.

It’s that they believed another attack was very likely imminent. That there were crucial things they didn’t know and that something worse might be right around the corner. And that’s why Cheney begged George Bush not to come back to Washington right away. But the idea that Washington might not be here tomorrow. And so Dick Cheney pressed very hard on the idea that we have to take off all the restraints.

And for him, although there’s a lot of disagreement with this in the intelligence community, coercion, cruelty works in interrogations. For him, ah, domestic surveillance was essential. What good is listening in to terrorists overseas when the ones who might already be in our borders are the ones that we really have to worry about? And right down the line, and so 9/11 on the one hand intensified Cheney’s long-standing views about the sort of over-bureaucratization and over-legalization of national security and on the other hand gave him an opportunity to press that agenda.

Woodward: And he kind of became the self-appointed examiner of worse-case scenarios. And that, I mean, Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Solution [sic: The One Percent Doctrine]- if there’s a one percent chance that it might happen, you have to take all steps. And- see it Bart agrees with this because he’s the expert on it- the nightmare for Cheney was a nuke going off in an American city, and that is not something you can dismiss. And he was right analytically that that had to be prevented. If that happened and hundreds of thousands of people were killed, 9/11 would be a footnote in the history books.

So, I remember going to interview Cheney in October of 2001. And I had known him quite well and interviewed him extensively when he was Defense Secretary for the first Gulf War. And he was kind of laid back and direct, but he was just like a stretched rubber band in October 2001. He was, he was just off balance to the extent that Dick Cheney ever gives off balance. And it was this fear, a legitimate fear, and Bart uses the right word, I think, that in their response there was an overreaching that maybe looked necessary at the moment.

But there should have been somebody there saying, you know, about the wiretapping- it’s called domestic surveillance, I think it’s kind of really not domestic surveillance, but it’s listening in on these calls from people in this country, abroad, which they do all the rime- and somebody should have said now wait a minute, let’s legitimize this, let’s legalize it, let’s make some of this transparent rather than crawl in the bunker. And so they really-

Torture and Interrogation:

Robinson: They certainly didn’t want to, and the surveillance or wiretapping or eavesdropping, the secret CIA prisons, and as far as I’m concerned, the interrogations which you mentioned. How does a fundamentally decent man like George Bush, a fundamentally decent man like Dick Cheney get to the point where they can sit in the, you know, the White House and discuss torturing people?

Woodward: Well, I mean I think what they did in the White House is they avoided the details and they didn’t really ask the kinds of questions they should have had. What does this mean enhanced interrogation? So I don’t think we’re going to find was that vivid discussion of it. What I think happened is they had this responsibility for protecting the country. If there had been other attacks, large attacks, many attacks, quite frankly- and this doesn’t speak well to the country- probably these things wouldn’t have been an issue, people would have accepted it and the dark side would have been okay.

The problem is there weren’t more attacks, and that’s another thing for books in the future, exactly why that happened. But they didn’t realize, and of course leadership entails looking at changed circumstances and altering your behavior, and they didn’t do that.

Gellman: If I could just say a word on this. First of all, Cheney persuaded Bush not to go to Congress to ask for legislation on thinks like surveillance and interrogation because asking means you think you need permission. And it’s Cheney’s view that the president doesn’t need permission. And so surprisingly to a lot of people, Cheney played very little role in the Patriot Act. That’s legislation. He was interested in what Bush could do on his own.

I have to disagree in emphasis I think a little bit with you, Bob, about the details of interrogations, because you’ve talked to all these people. People who were in the room during these crucial meetings, especially in 2003 and 2004, say they got very explicit about what was going to be done, and they got very explicit because George Tenet demanded it. Tenet was saying, “Don’t give me vague instructions, tell me to interpret them and then hang us out to dry one day. If I’m going to go ahead with waterboarding or sleep deprivation, you’re going to know exactly what we’re doing.”

Woodward: I guess there’s a big dispute on that, and it will be interesting to see when all of the sides are presented. And, ah, waterboard- I mean there’s a way to describe waterboarding where it’s kind of is, what did Cheney call it? A “dunk” or something like that? A dunk in the water-

Robinson: We’re not dunking for apples, I don’t think so-

Woodward: And then there’s a way to describe the way it really is, and I think they got, as often the case- and this is the theme, the lack of homework- they got sugarcoated versions of these things and they persuaded themselves, “Well this is going to work and this is necessary.” And that’s a giant part of their legacy.

Gellman: But Cheney had actually been thinking about coercion and interrogations for a very long time. Back in the 80s he sat on the intelligence committee at the time when William Buckley, the station chief of the CIA in Beirut was kidnapped, tortured and killed by Hezbollah. And as a member of the committee he got a chance to review some videotape of Buckley and his treatment and it was gruesome. And Cheney expressed a lot of concern at that time about what the implications were for US secrets in the Mideast. His premise was torture works. Now in this administration they’ve redefined torture so narrowly that it’s actually almost impossible to commit it. But he explicitly was arguing for throwing off the restraints against cruelty- cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, that’s the language of Geneva- that he said didn’t and shouldn’t apply.

Woodward: What’s interesting, and this goes right to the core, did Bush- whose responsible for all of this- ask questions and have the mindset to kind of say, “Hey what are you really doing, what does this involve? Let’s get detail so I know what I’m approving.” And as I understand it, they skimmed over that as Bush skimmed over so many things.

Gellman: This is where the whole homework point comes in and it’s exactly right. Bush got by all his life on charm and instinct, and his ability to read people. And Cheney was Mr. Homework, he came to class, he didn’t read the book, he read the teacher’s edition.

Responding to Hurricane Katrina:

Robinson: Exactly. Moving on, let’s just switch one topic for a second. I’d like to move to a couple of domestic issues. Hurricane Katrina, and the response to that: I was in New Orleans the week of the flood and I just saw things that made me lose sleep for months afterward, [things] I just didn’t think I could, I would ever see in an American city. How do you read the administration’s response, or lack of response, to Katrina? To what would you attribute that?

Woodward: It’s exactly what we’re talking about: a failure to understand and involve yourself in details so you make the right decisions. As we know now, Bush said he didn’t get the weather report and there’s video of him getting the weather report, whether it sunk in or not. And that was a symbol. And what was so interesting about the response was that they couldn’t recover in time to kind of show real leadership and an identification with the agony you witnessed firsthand.

Gellman: One of the secrets of Cheney’s success is that he decides what he cares about and what he doesn’t, and he didn’t care about this in terms of a mission for the federal government, in terms of a mission for him.

Bush actually asked him, we didn’t know this before, to be the czar of the of the government’s response. He is, after all, maybe the preeminent crisis manager of the administratio0n, an extremely talented manager. And he politely declined. You know, he didn’t say and he would never say that he would refuse an order from the president. He said, “If it’s all the same to you Mr. President, I’ll focus elsewhere.” And Bush expressed some irritation with that, according to Dan Bartlett who talked about the meeting. So Bush asked him to go down, assess how it’s going. He came back and said, “This guy you just said ‘heck of a job Brownie’ is a disaster,” but he washed his hands of it after that.

Robinson: So the picture that emerges, the president had made Michael Brown, the former official with the International Arabian Horse Association, head of FEMA, our emergency response agency. It’s a complete disaster. In other words, it’s not the sort of detail, that part of government, the actual nuts and bolts of government, is not the kind of sort of detail that George Bush would have paid attention to and if it wasn’t something that Dick Cheney wasn’t interested in, it didn’t necessarily get done? Is that-

Woodward: Yea, I think that’s exactly right. I mean you decoded it, Bart, when Cheney wouldn’t step in, that meant there was a vacuum.

The Lame Duck:

Gellman: The details glaze George Bush’s eyes. Just take the federal budget- this is where the government puts its money where its mouth is. It has enormous impact. In every other administration, and Bob would testify to this, if a cabinet officer or secretary

of state or defense says, “White House you’re not giving me enough money and it’s a really big deal,” they’d come to the president and they’d appeal it in the Oval Office. In this administration, the bucks stop at Dick Cheney kind of literally. He was the head of a newly-invented budget review board, and that shielded George Bush from the details he didn’t want.

Woodward: When I interviewed Bush this May, so about seven, eight months ago, about the Iraq War, for 2 mornings in the Oval Office I kept looking around Bush’s chair to see if there was a suitcase packed-

Robinson: laughter

Woodward: -because he had that sense of, “I’m getting out of here,” an impatience with questions. I mean at one point, he just kind of turned to Hadley, the national security adviser who was also there during the interviews, and said, “Huh, we’re going to have to go through all of this.” And here, he had a chance- because the questions were very “What did you think, what did you do, what did you do it?”- a megaphone to kind of explain what he did. And instead of using that as an opportunity, he got impatient. He literally said at one point, “I’m hungry- my lunch is waiting.” You know-

Robinson: You can’t have that.

Woodward: - Why are you bothering me with this Iraq War that I decided on and I am responsible for and has not gone well for so many years? It’s mildly mind-boggling.

Gellman: It’s almost a bookend of your four books. You know you start off with Andy Card going to fetch a hamburger because the president asked him to from the early account, and with his legacy being interrupted for lunch.

Woodward: From hamburger to-

Cheney- Public v. Private:

Robinson: It there any, sort of looking back, reflection, self-criticism from Dick Cheney?

Gellman: Cheney is in the never apologize, never explain school in public. On the other hand, he is very interested in honest after-action reports, after-action assessments. There was a defense intelligence agency analyst named Derek Harvey, who came to the White House and gave a very sort of dark assessment of progress of the war in Iraq. Bush heard him once and never wanted to hear it again, Cheney called him back over and over again. He was saying things that Cheney was saying- they were the opposite of what Cheney was saying in public, and Cheney kept saying it in public- but he wanted to know.

He wanted to know that fine-grained detail, he wanted to learn lessons from it. I doubt he’ll ever say it. Liz Cheney, his older daughter, wants him to write a memoir, but this is so out of keeping with everything we know about him, I’d be surprised.

Woodward: Lynn Cheney told me, I think it was last year sometime, that she and her husband, the vice president, Dick Cheney, are going to do some kind of book. So we will see. But Bart’s exactly right, there is- and Derek Harvey is a magnificent example of somebody bringing the truth in a very authoritative way, and Bush was just, “Oh my God, I don’t want to deal with this.” And Cheney had him back, and back, and back.

The Financial Crisis and Barack Obama’s Transition:

Robinson: I don’t think we can finish this conversation without focusing on the financial crisis. Is this, how do we assess the administration’s performance? Temptation is to say somebody was asleep at the switch. Obviously it’s not entirely the fault of any White House. But how do- were they paying attention? How do you see this? Bob?

Woodward: The real honest answer is, we don’t know. We’re in the early stages of it. One CEO who traveled up to New York, said it’s nice to be in this backwater because I come from Washington, DC, which is now the financial capital of the United States, because we own all the banks.

Robinson: [Laughter] We do.

Woodward: And, ah, we being the taxpayers. There is going to be, not a day of reckoning, but a series of years or reckoning on this. And the question, legitimately always goes back to, the famous Nixon question: What did the president know and when did he know it on these issues? I happened to sit sometime earlier this year on an off-the-record dinner where Cheney was there, and one of Wall Street’s barons spoke, Cheney sat next to him, and the baron said, “We are going into the soup. We are in and on the edge of a real crisis.” And Cheney just kind of sat there and smiled. And at the end of the dinner, I said, if I ever right a novel about the financial collapse in the United States, it’s going to open with this dinner [laughter].

Robinson: Yea, but, that just doesn’t compute, to me, with what we know about Dick Cheney. This is not, doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of detail that would slip his attention.

Gellman: Here’s how it does compute. Cheney never shows his cards, as Bob well knows. He will sit through a long meeting and answer a lot of questions, often, but he doesn’t even reveal his learnings. That’s something he develops privately. And the problem with knowing a lot about it in this administration is that Cheney really is a purist on free market, and as strong an anti-regulator you get in the upper reaches of government. And there was a reluctance to conceptualize, for example, the big banks running what amounts to a big utility and controlling in many ways the supply of money in the economy, shifting risk to the taxpayers, which is the government’s job.

And so it’s not all government, and it’s not all Bush, because it started with Clinton. But the decisive hands off in regulation of Wall Street came under Bush for very direct reasons that they didn’t believe in regulation.

Robinson: Right, right. No, they didn’t believe in it, and, but, you know again, Cheney is big on after-action reports. If you see that something isn’t working. I just think of him as being pragmatic enough to take a look at it. But, but, you’re right-

Woodward: As Bart says, it’s not his portfolio, it’s not his focus, and I think one of the Cheney rules is, focus on the big issue. Keep your eye on the ball. And he still is haunted- and rightly so, it’s good somebody is haunted about the possibility of a serious nuke going off in an American city- and those are all real issues. And, you know, on a positive note, at least to this point there has not been another attack in this country-

Gellman: Nuke or biological weapons was his other huge focus-

Woodward: Yea, that’s right.

Gellman: And the question arises, in reference to what you said earlier, how many one percent threats can you afford to face now? How many can you afford to treat as if there one percent, because, we don’t have the resources and we can’t afford the price of addressing every one of those as if it’s a certainty?

As one example, Cheney wanted Bush to order that every American be inoculated against smallpox, because even though it’s been eradicated as a disease, he feared it might be placed in the hands of terrorists as a weapon. Bush found out that this was going to kill two or three hundred Americans. Dan Bartlett says he was sitting in the room wondering how he’s going to sell that as a public relations campaign, and Bush got off the bus. He said, I’m just not going to kill several hundred people against a maybe threat down the road.

Woodward: That’s a perfect example of that, but you get- what, you know, what is the condition of the country that is handed to Barak Obama? And you know, that ultimately, I mean the Bush legacy starts on January 20, 2009.

History vs. Public Opinion:

Robinson: We have a few minutes left, and I just want to ask a question to each of you. George Bush and Dick Cheney leave office at the height of unpopularity. Bush’s popularity ratings are subterranean, there’s a feeling of “Let’s just get it over with and get on with the new thing.” How-

Woodward: Dick Cheney jokes, it’s funny, about Bush tells this joke about [how] Cheney will come to him and say, “Hey, Mr. President, how do you get your popularity ratings so high?” Because compared to Cheney, they are [laughter].

Robinson: So Bart, with what you know about Dick Cheney, his joking aside, is that how it affects him? Or does it have more of an impact?

Gellman: I think he really, truly, as much as anyone who ever held a high office, does not care what we think. He has his eye on the verdict of history, he’s pretty sure he knows what that verdict will be. And he doesn’t believe that public opinion is competent to make decisions on government.

Robinson: He’s going to [unintelligible] for the historians.

Gellman: Although, although he gets in their way too, because he has put up a lot of road blocks to historians finding out what really happened.

Robinson: That’s true, that’s another-

Woodward: There’s a lot of evidence to support what Bart says about Cheney-

Robinson: But what about Bush?

Woodward: - but my sense of Cheney and Bush is that they do care. That this idea, particularly with Cheney, and you know, the steel shield that he carries around, that underneath, it’s not fun to be such a figure of disregard and hostility. And in the end, I think that’s the way Bush looks at it, and it hurts.

Robinson: George Bush has essentially said, as Fidel Castro said in his famous trial in 1953, you know, history will absolve me. Does he believe that history will absolve him?

Woodward: To a certain extent, that’s all he’s got.

Robinson: [laughter]

Gellman: Dick Armey, who was once a very close ally to both men, the minority leader of the Republicans in the House, told me that if you’re looking, if you’re sitting in Bush or Cheney’s shoes now, it would behoove you to think that history will absolve you. But he, an old friend and ally of theirs, said that he thinks that history will judge both of them quite harshly.

Robinson: Well, thank you both for being here this morning, Bob Woodward and Bart Gellman. For the Washington Post and washingtonpost.com I’m Gene Robinson and thanks for tuning in.

UNIT 10

Name: ____________________________________________________________ Date: __________________ Pd: ___

QUESTIONS- New Millennium Readings

1. The LEAST controversial actions of President George W. Bush were regarding:a. War in Iraqb. Hurricane Katrinac. Economic crisis of 2007-08d. “No Child Left Behind”

2. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 can be most directly attributed to:a. His education and energy reform proposalsb. Public distrust of John McCainc. Economic crisis of 2007-08d. War in Iraq

3. Analyze the presidency of George W. Bush. What were the highlights and lowlights of his administration? Refer to specific examples from the readings to support your answer.

4. How and why did terrorism become a focus of American foreign policy after the end of the Cold War? Cite specific examples of terrorism.

5. How have the events of 9/11changed the relationships between the US and other nations? Cite specific references from the readings.

6. What challenges does the US face in the 21st century? What do you consider to be the biggest advantage and the US has in the new millennium? What is the most difficult challenge for the US in the global world? Refer to specific examples from the readings to support your answer.