The Worrier

Among the items on Vice-President Dick Cheney's schedule for Tuesday, September 11th, was a meeting with his old friend Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. Gingrich resigned from the House in 1998, after a Party revolt against his leadership, but he remained in Washington, taking his place among the city's professional thinking caste with a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute. He'd been given an office next to Jeane Kirkpatrick's, and a place on policy panels, and was getting handsome fees on the lecture circuit. Then, with the arrival of George W. Bush, Gingrich got what every Washington policy advocate most covets: he got inside. His old friend Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, named him to the Defense Policy Board. Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, is a former colleague of Gingrich's at Stanford's Hoover Institution, where he is a visiting fellow. Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, and Karen Hughes, the White House counsellor, routinely take his calls. Gingrich says simply, "I've got pretty remarkable access to all the senior leadership." Cheney values Gingrich's opinion highly enough to hear him out on even so delicate a subject as the one that Gingrich had planned to broach on September 11th—the President's inability to communicate effectively.

By the end of the first summer of Bush's Presidency, a season that began with the Republican loss of the Senate and deepening economic worries, it had become clear that the President's agenda was losing momentum. To Gingrich, the fault lay partly in Bush's sometimes tortured public performances. "People who were really, really for him were saying to me that they'd cringe at press conferences," Gingrich says. "They were just grateful if he got through without embarrassment." This worried Gingrich, who felt that Bush was neglecting one of his principal duties—to instruct. "The country needed a leader who could educate and rally the country, and the only person who can do that is the President of the United States. He was doing less than his full job if he wasn't capable of doing that—that was a job definition."

Gingrich, a firm believer in psychophysiology (he willed himself out of youthful shyness, he says, by learning to trigger an endorphin rush at the sight of a camera), had planned to talk to Cheney about getting Bush to focus on his communication problem. The terrorist attacks scrubbed the meeting that day, and, as it happened, the President himself soon answered Gingrich's concerns with his commanding speech before Congress on September 20th. "After the speech to the Congress, I tore up that particular memo," Gingrich says. "After that speech, you knew—O.K., this guy's awake now."

Awake, perhaps, but was George W. Bush truly ready for the challenge that Gingrich likens to the Second World War and to the Cold War struggle against Communism? "You have to remember," he says, "this is a Texas governor, learning to be leader of the world." When Gingrich considers the challenge ahead, and takes the measure of the Administration's performance so far, he is still worried. "We don't have a clue how we're going to deal with terrorism," he says.

As Gingrich's friends in the Administration must have known, the price of having Gingrich as an outside adviser is the same as it was during his time of national leadership—forbearance toward his natural state, which is one of alarm and agitation. Just as he surveyed the mostly peaceful and prosperous nineteen-nineties and saw grave dangers, Gingrich, a professor and a ravenous student of history, reviews the war on terror and discerns, even with the Northern Alliance sweeping across northern Afghanistan, the prospect of long-term failure.

"I am not for being pleasant when we are not winning," he says. "I just think that cheerleading is very dangerous. Churchill did not say, 'There won't be any more bombs tomorrow morning.' He said, 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.' He also said, 'We shall fight on the beaches.' And he meant it."

What Gingrich frets about is whether the Administration really means to act on the President's declared intention to root out global terrorism wherever it exists, and his assertion that the war in Afghanistan is just the beginning. To the hawkish members of the Administration, that means Iraq—divesting Baghdad of its weapons of mass destruction and, perhaps, undoing the regime of Saddam Hussein. Gingrich would have the President go further: confront Iraq even while the engagement in Afghanistan continues, and go after terrorist operations in Somalia and Sudan as well.

Such matters are the subject of much debate inside the Administration, and it is clear which team of senior advisers Gingrich is aligned with. Condoleezza Rice, he says, is a person for whom he has "tremendous respect," adding, "I think she'll do a very good job." Rumsfeld is "one of the smartest people in government, very determined, very serious." As for Secretary of State Colin Powell, Gingrich is diplomatic. "Colin is a very good diplomat, and a very good spokesman for America," he says. "I think that one of the weaknesses that Colin faces is that he is presiding over a bureaucracy that, at least since F.D.R.'s days, has been notorious for its inability to understand American goals. F.D.R. was fed up with it and routinely went around it. Eisenhower did the same." After carefully pointing out that members of the State Department were nevertheless "very smart, very decent people," he goes on, "Colin went in there, legitimately, to try to build their morale. He spent a lot of energy building their morale. But he didn't think, too, that it had to be a two-way contract, that they had to then think seriously about the President's policy. You get a lot of the same stuff out of the State Department. I don't blame Colin at all, except I think he ought to be tougher at imposing into the bureaucracy the direction the United States has been going in."

The inclination to broaden the war is at odds with the State Department's impulse to build and hold inherently fragile coalitions—which Gingrich dismisses as "the 1990 response." He says, "You have this State Department fetish with stability at this instant over getting to a realistic, honest assessment of the situation." Still, he is encouraged by the degree of Rice's influence over the President. "I think there's a section of the State Department that will once a day come up with a genuinely bad idea, and I think the strength of this Administration so far is that those ideas seem to die somewhere around the national-security office."

The prize in the contest is the President himself, who, Gingrich senses, is only now beginning to fill his role. In watching the President's homelandsecurity speech in Atlanta on November 8th, Gingrich was pleased to see Bush take the stage to the strains of "Hail to the Chief." "They didn't use to use 'Hail to the Chief'—that's changed," he said. "The President of the United States introduced by 'Hail to the Chief' is symbolically important. He was a little Jimmy Carterish early on about that, and now he's decided he's really the President of the United States. That's important."

On the evening that the war in northern Afghanistan began to turn decisively in favor of the Northern Alliance, Gingrich gave a talk to interns at the American Enterprise Institute, offering the nascent policy wonks his advice on life ("Dream big") and hard work ("If you work eighty hours a week, that's probably about right. If you work sixty, that's barely marginal"). Inevitably, his young admirers pressed for his views about the military campaign. "I am not convinced today we are winning," he told them. "I am very concerned about this campaign."

Gingrich later explained that he didn't doubt the final outcome of the fighting ("Unless we are just maniacally dumb, we are going to win this war; this is an overmatch larger than Desert Storm"), but he was concerned about the quality of the war planning behind it. "You don't get the sense of comprehensive campaign planning," he said. "We are better at dropping bombs than we are at designing a political, cultural campaign. So the guys who are all ready to go fight Desert Storm II in Afghanistan designed a mechanical military campaign without a political-cultural surrounding. And, in retrospect, the President probably should have waited two extra weeks, or three extra weeks, and made sure they had a plan that was coherent. Instead, we got action without meaning, in my judgment."

Gingrich's harsh assessment was due partly to his pique over a news article he had read that day about a Central Command directive that he found beyond comprehension. It had to do with the Army's 4th Psychological Operations group, or PsyOps, which had designed a radio propaganda campaign to be broadcast into Afghanistan. The planners wanted to broadcast music to the Afghans, partly as a reminder of their deprivation under the Taliban government, which banned music. The Central Command insisted that the broadcasts contain textual information only. "The Central Command didn't want to waste time with music, not understanding that that's why people listen to the radio," Gingrich says. "And you have to wonder, Who is the clown at the Central Command who didn't get this, O.K.? I mean, to have people who know nothing impose dumb ideas, instead of asking the people who know something—after a certain point, it becomes totally unacceptable."

In the end, the planners made their case, and the music was broadcast, but the dispute illustrated for Gingrich the lack of a fully considered, coherent program that included the key element of selling the idea of the American cause. "Somebody should have been saying, 'Let's assume we'll win.' That's our working assumption. Well, then, where's the planning team for victory? Where are the planes landing at Bagram and landing at these other airfields, dropping off all the goodies so that the people in what I would call 'liberated Afghanistan' are living proof on world television that America's allies do better?" He goes on, "There should be a planning team making that real and vivid, and that planning team should be producing real product that is changing the lives of people in 'liberated Afghanistan,' so it's live on television, so Al-Jazeera can go and interview people who're saying, 'God, I'm glad the Americans won—my kids have a flush toilet.' "

Such criticism poses the paradox that the people in charge of the war—Rumsfeld; his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; Condoleezza Rice—are Gingrich's closest allies. "I think Rumsfeld is a terrific guy, I think Wolfowitz is a great guy, but I think the underlying fact is that you have Bill Clinton's generals designing a campaign that is not very creative, and it's not very clever," Gingrich says. "I think it's important to recognize you have a very thin layer of Bush appointees over the Clinton bureaucracy."

Gingrich notes that George C. Marshall, Franklin Roosevelt's Army Chief of Staff, forced hundreds of colonels into retirement before Pearl Harbor, because he lacked confidence in them. "This Administration currently has fired nobody, and that's very dangerous, because it says that, no matter how mediocre you are, if you can give a good press conference you can keep your job. I think the President has got to be tougher, at every level."

Everyone in Washington agrees that the September 11th attacks were at least in part the result of a monumental American intelligence failure, but Gingrich takes issue with those who believe that now is not the moment for recrimination. The Central Intelligence Agency, he says, should be reorganized from top to bottom, and heads should roll. "We need to hold some people accountable for the last couple of years," he says. "I don't think you can just walk off and say that the very people who couldn't find bin Laden for six years are now looking for bin Laden, and say, 'Gee, don't you feel comfortable now? They're more serious now.' I just think you need a really thorough overhaul in the entire intelligence community."

Critics of the C.I.A. have laid the blame for its failures partly on a Clinton-era directive restricting recruitment of operatives with questionable human-rights records. The policy was defended recently before the Senate Intelligence Committee by a C.I.A. lawyer. Gingrich was dismayed, and says that Bush should have fired the lawyer before he returned to his office from Capitol Hill.

So far, at least, Bush has been more inclined to try to bolster the morale of his intelligence-gathering agencies, conducting pep rallies at both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. "It'll be interesting to see if George Bush moves from being leader of the American people, which he clearly now is, to genuine Commander-in-Chief," Gingrich says. "A Commander-in-Chief issues commands."

Gingrich, like Churchill, is one of those figures who fix on dangers only dimly perceived by others, and whose urgent warnings are often unheeded because of the messenger's complicated political biography. Gingrich issued his first warnings about the need to confront terrorism in his 1984 book "Window of Opportunity," and he has been a serious student of the subject ever since. In 1997, Gingrich and President Clinton jointly launched a commission to assess the near- and long-term threats to American national security, and when Gingrich resigned from Congress he joined the commission, which was headed by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. The commission's final report, issued in January, warned of the vulnerability of "the U.S. homeland" to "catastrophic attack."

Throughout the summer, Gingrich met with defense intelligence officials in the Pentagon to discuss how Secretary Rumsfeld might begin to warn Americans about the nation's domestic vulnerability. On September 11th, Gingrich says, he was saddened, but not at all surprised, by the attacks in New York and Washington, and he believes they may be followed by more catastrophic ones. "The two things I worry about most are a nuclear weapon and an engineered infectious disease," he says. "The third thing I worry about is an aerosolized anthrax delivered by air, or delivered through a subway, because a subway would act as a pneumatic system to spread it. The Army actually tested that years ago. It's very frightening." Then he adds, "Take the four airplanes, except this time have them be conventional trucks in the major tunnels during rush hour. And there are a lot of other things I'm not going to get into. But there are lots of conventional vulnerabilities in a high civilization that cause a lot of damage, O.K.?"

Gingrich believes that the two crucial aspects of homeland security—detection and prevention of attacks, and dealing with the consequences of catastrophe—are now woefully inadequate. "Because the victims all tragically died, the World Trade Center attack understressed our medical system," he says. "If we'd have had five thousand severely injured people coming out of those buildings, we'd have had a serious problem, too."

In his talk with the interns, Gingrich noted that the public reassurances regularly sounded by the Administration are unwarranted, and he took particular issue with Attorney General John Ashcroft's recent pronouncement that America had "emerged victorious" on the homefront in "the opening battle in the war against terrorism." Gingrich said, "The fact is, we are not currently winning at home. I don't regard six thousand dead Americans as winning the first round. We haven't caught anybody in the anthrax problem. We haven't caught anybody in this country, that I know of yet, on Al Qaeda's side, and we haven't caught bin Laden. How can we have won the first round?"

The new Homeland Security apparatus, Gingrich asserts, is not remotely ready for the challenge it is meant to meet—a problem that he implicitly blames, at least in part, on the decision by President Bush to select a political pal, Pennsylvania's former governor Tom Ridge, as the first Homeland Security chief. "I don't fault a Tommy Thompson or a Tom Ridge—these guys were terrific governors, they're close friends of mine," he says. "But national security is a really complicated area. I mean, four-star generals spend a career studying it. And to say to Tom Ridge, 'Come down from Harrisburg, take this thing over, and start telling the country what you think' is, I think, an inhuman burden. He's a terrific guy, and he'll eventually do a terrific job. But they've got to slow down, they've got to think more deeply about larger change. And I think it'll take a while to sort out."

He goes on, "We are just not serious yet. We're working very frantically, we're rushing around, we're doing things, but we're not slowing down and saying, 'What would it take three years from now to really be safer? What would it take three years from now to have a really big response capability?' I mean, we're doing things, we have lots of activities. But in the absence of coherent, systematic design, you can't distinguish activity from progress." The government's uncertain and seemingly confused response to the anthrax attacks, Gingrich insists, makes his case against the usefulness of bureaucracy in a moment of crisis. He cites the fact that the Centers for Disease Control still has no notion of which, or how many, laboratories have the Ames strain of anthrax (the strain that was used in the terror mailings). "It would not have been hard to have said on the opening day, 'Every laboratory that has anthrax will contact C.D.C. in the next six hours.' "

So far, it appears, the Administration figure who has most impressed Gingrich is the President himself. "Bush wanted to be sorta President—it was cool," he says. "And he meant well by it. Now Bush is being President, in a very different way. And my sense is he's learning pretty darned fast. I mean, I would say he impresses me more than any political leader since Reagan—his ability to learn profound things. I think of George W. Bush as a great game athlete who is not a very good practice athlete. And now he's in the real thing, and he's performing."

Gingrich is offering advice to the Administration, directly and indirectly, on matters ranging from the economy (he suggested giving travellers a thousanddollar tax credit for personal travel, such as flying on commercial planes) to finding a more efficient means to feed hungry Afghans (contract the job out to Wal-Mart). There is some evidence that the Administration is listening. Gingrich's only public criticism of Colin Powell came after the State Department issued its list of global terrorist organizations and omitted Hamas and Hezbollah, presumably out of reluctance to offend the states that support them, particularly Syria and Iran. Gingrich wrote a letter of complaint to Powell, and both groups were added to the terror list.

Richard Perle, who heads the Defense Policy Board that Gingrich sits on, attests that the former Speaker has a new influence. "Newt is listened to because he's persuasive, he's listened to because he's convincing," Perle says. "And it's not just because he's on the policy board. Most of what he has to say is not just in the policy board, which meets infrequently, but in his discussions with a variety of Administration officials."

Gingrich's own assessment of his renewed currency is that he deals in a commodity that is much in demand just now. "They like ideas," he says. "They know I've been around a long time. And they know they don't have to obey me. That's a very important distinction."

OK, for all you people who don't want to read this article because it's so long, here's the Cliff's Notes version.

Gingrich is enjoying renewed influence. He has long-time friendships with several major players in the Administration including Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney.

At one time Gingrich worried that Bush would not live up to his potential because of his seemingly poor communications skills. Following Bush's address to Congress, he no longer worries about that. "After that speech, you knew -- O.K., this guy's awake now."

Gingrich worries that the Administration may not fulfill Bush's stated goal of "rooting out global terrorism." Among the problems he sees are a State Department bureaucracy that has been on its own course since at least the days of FDR, often ignoring the stated goals of the United States in favor of coalition-building for its own sake; a Pentagon full of "Clinton's generals," and an Intelligence Community that needs a top-to-bottom overhaul. He is also concerned that there has been a lack of attention to planning for the day we win; he wants to see a big PR bonanza for the U.S. come from this, with Al-Jazeera televising happy Afghans telling their Muslim brethren, "Thank God the Americans won."

Gingrich does not believe we are taking 'homeland security' seriously enough. He likes Tom Ridge but thinks that national security is too complex a subject to be handed over to a newbie. He sees a lot of furious activity, but not much in the way of strategy or direction. Even simple things are going undone, like finding out how many labs had samples of the Ames strain of anthrax that was involved in the attacks.

The Administration figure that has impressed Gingrich the most is the President himself. Gingrich describes Bush as, "a great game athlete who is not a very good practice athlete," adding, "And now he's in the real thing, and he's performing."

Gingrich is successful in getting his ideas across. He is described as persuasive and convincing. He attributes at least part of this to the fact that he holds no office. "...they know they don't have to obey me. That's a very important distinction."

Very interesting. I have been willing to give Ridge some time to come up to speed, but I really think he needs to do more in getting the American people involved.

I disagree about the President's speaking, he did fine in his Inaugural speech, Address before Congress, etc. I think that he has quit worrying about speech faux pas, and that has been the difference in the press conferences.

I think that we will continue and win the war on terror. The President is determined to continue, and he is not one to give up. I do think that the Clinton appointees in the government are a problem, especially because right before Clinton left he made many of them civil service employees, so that they cannot be fired. That is a BIG problem.

Newt should enjoy his influence but avoid too much talk, which I think he has done here. He is succumbing to the temptation to be thought of as important by the press.

On the other hand, and to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps some of this is a message that the administration wants the wider world to see. Who knows?

On the other hand, and to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps some of this is a message that the administration wants the wider world to see. Who knows?

I really think Newt is speaking from his own personal experience and background. Here's what Gingrich said to Tony Snow on FOX News Sunday on September 16, 2001, only five days after the attack.

SNOW: Speaker Gingrich, you've also been privy to intelligence over the years. There's a lot of very generalized talk about states that sponsor terrorism, and you can look at the terrorist list. Let's be candid, who are we talking about?

GINGRICH: Well, this is public knowledge. This is not secret. We're talking about Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Syria and Iran as sort of the inner circle. I mean, those five countries have an unquestioned, continuing process of supporting state terrorism and supporting terrorists that have training. You can't have a training camp without a host government.

Let me also say that the process of defeating terrorism, I think, has to mean, as a minimum, that these five states are required to kick out all the terrorist groups and to drop their support of terrorism, period.

Otherwise, this whole campaign has no meaning.

SNOW: At this point, the United States is talking about possibly inviting Syria and Iran into a coalition. Do you really think they're going to fulfill the condition that you've just outlined?

GINGRICH: Well, actually, we have not approached Syria. Syria has approached us. And I think there's a very straightforward line here, and this a very important line for the United States.

If Syria is prepared to kick the 10 terrorist organizations headquartered in Damascus out of Syria, if Syria is prepared to help us clean up Lebanon and kick out Hezbollah, then I think Syria should be part of the coalition. But to allow Syria or Iran to pretend to be part of the coalition, while continuing to sustain terrorism, I think, would actually make a mockery of the whole effort.

~SNIP~

SNOW: Mr. Speaker, I want to backtrack and then move forward on the issue of the president's leadership.

Juan just mentioned that the president had issued approval to shoot down any aircraft not responding to signals headed toward Washington. What does that tell you about his competence as commander in chief?

GINGRICH: Well, I think that the president reacted very rapidly, I think, to the shock of Tuesday. By Wednesday, he clearly was moving into a war footing, and by Thursday, he has a very clear articulated general strategy.

And I think that the president both emotionally and morally reacted -- and I agree with Joe Allbaugh. I can't imagine a stronger ability to lead the country, and the country really has reacted to that. But in addition, having assembled a team before the crisis that includes Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld, I can't imagine a group sitting to discuss war that would be a more competent senior group that the United States could assemble in this generation.

SNOW: Secretary Rumsfeld and others have made the point that we are going to strike back and we've got to take the offensive against terrorism. In order to make that credible, in order to shake up terrorists, how swiftly and how decisively do we need to act?

GINGRICH: I think it's more important that we be decisive in our goals. The president has repeatedly said, Colin Powell has repeatedly said, we will not tolerate state-sponsored terrorism, we will not tolerate state-sheltered terrorism. If we communicate that and mean it, then countries like Syria and Iraq and Sudan and Afghanistan and Iran face a real future-deciding decision.

I mean, I think, second, we have to mobilize our forces, both diplomatically. I think, politically, I think we have a very real need to communicate, for example, to the Muslim world that anyone who wants a decent life, anyone who wants prosperity, anyone who wants a chance to have a government that's not ruthless and dictatorial and filled with secret police, we're your allies. We don't oppose Islam. There are more Muslims in the United States than there are Episcopalians. There were American Muslims who died on Tuesday because they were Americans. So I think we want to reach out very strongly.

And then I think we have to prepare to mobilize the American defense capability -- as Secretary Powell said, either by ourselves, if necessary, or with allies, when possible -- to communicate clearly that we are going to eradicate these overt systems.

You can't get the random nut terrorist who's hiding in a basement somewhere, but you can destroy terrorist camps. You can clean up governments that sponsor terrorism.

Yes, it's a big project. I think it's a three to five-year campaign. But I don't think this is like the war on drugs. I don't think this is a 20-year, hangout, have bureaucrats doing it occasionally. If we are serious, there will be no state-sponsored terrorism on the planet in three to five years.

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