intelligence value, I would have used the program for them as well.
On the morning of March 10, 2004, Dick Cheney and Andy Card greeted me with a startling announcement: The Terrorist Surveillance Program would expire at the end of the day.
“How can it possibly end?” I asked. “It’s vital to protecting the country.” Two and a half years had passed since I authorized the TSP in October 2001. In that time, the NSA had used the program to uncover key details about terrorist plots and locations. NSA Director Mike Hayden later said publicly that the program had been “successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States” and that it was his “professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States” if it had been operational before the attacks.
Andy explained the situation. While John Ashcroft had regularly recommended the renewal of the TSP since 2001, the Justice Department had raised a legal objection to one component of the program.
“Why didn’t I know about this?” I asked. Andy shared my disbelief. He told me he had just learned about the objection the previous night. The legal team must have thought the disagreement could be settled without presidential involvement. I told Andy to work with Ashcroft and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to solve the problem. In the meantime, I had to fly to Cleveland to deliver a speech on trade policy.
When I got back, I checked in with Andy. Little progress had been made. The Justice Department was sticking to its objection. My lawyers weren’t budging, either. They were convinced the program was legal.
“Where the hell is Ashcroft?” I asked.
“He’s in the hospital,” Andy replied.
That was news to me. I called John, who I discovered was recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery. I told him I was sending Andy and Al to talk to him about an urgent matter. They drove to the hospital with the TSP reauthorization order. When they got back, they told me Ashcroft hadn’t signed. The only way to allow the program to continue was to override the Justice Department’s objection. I didn’t like the idea, but I saw no other alternative. I signed an order keeping the TSP alive based on my authority as head of the executive branch.
I went to bed irritated and had a feeling I didn’t know the full story. I intended to get it.
“Mr. President, we’ve got a major problem,” Andy told me when I got to the Oval Office on the morning of March 12. “Jim Comey is the acting attorney general, and he’s going to resign because you extended the TSP. So are a bunch of other Justice Department officials.”
I was stunned. Nobody had told me that Comey, John Ashcroft’s deputy, had taken over Ashcroft’s responsibilities when he went in for surgery. If I had known that, I never would have sent Andy and Al to John’s hospital room.
I asked to speak to Comey privately after the morning FBI briefing, which he attended in John Ashcroft’s place. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Jim, but I knew he had a distinguished record as a prosecutor in New York. I started by explaining that I had an obligation to do what was necessary to protect the country. I felt the TSP was essential to that effort. He explained his concerns about the problematic aspect of the program. “I just don’t understand why you are raising this at the last minute,” I said.
He looked shocked. “Mr. President,” he said, “your staff has known about this for weeks.” Then he dropped another bomb. He wasn’t the only one planning to resign. So was FBI Director Bob Mueller. I was about to witness the largest mass resignation in modern presidential history, and we were in the middle of a war.
I called Bob into the Oval Office. I had come to know him well over the past two and a half years. He was a good and decent man, a former Princeton hockey star who had served in the Marines and led the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco. Without hesitation, he agreed with Comey. If I continued the program over the Justice Department’s objection, he said, he couldn’t serve in my administration.
I had to make a big decision, and fast. Some in the White House believed I should stand on my powers under Article II of the Constitution and suffer the walkout. Others counseled that I accept Justice’s objections, modify the program, and keep the administration intact.
I was willing to defend the powers of the presidency under Article II. But not at any cost. I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s firing of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox led his attorney general and deputy attorney general to resign. That was not a historical crisis I was eager to replicate. It wouldn’t give me much satisfaction to know I was right on the legal principles while my administration imploded and our key programs in the war on terror were exposed in the media firestorm that would inevitably follow.
I decided to accommodate the Justice Department’s concern by modifying the part of the program they found problematic, while leaving the TSP in place. Comey and Mueller dropped their resignation threats. The surveillance program continued to produce results, and that was the most important thing.
I was relieved to have the crisis over, but I was disturbed it had happened at all. I made clear to my advisers that I never wanted to be blindsided like that again. I did not suspect bad intentions on anyone’s part. One of the toughest questions every White House faces is how to manage the president’s time and when to bring policy disputes to his desk. The standoff over the surveillance program was a case of bad judgment. There was no shortage of disagreements in the years ahead, but nothing like this ever happened again.
One of my favorite books is the fine historian David McCullough’s biography of President Harry Truman. I admired Truman’s toughness, principle, and strategic vision. “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me,” he said when he took office suddenly in the final months of World War II. Yet the man from Missouri knew how to make a hard decision and stick by it. He did what he thought was right and didn’t care much what the critics said. When he left office in 1953, his approval ratings were in the twenties. Today he is viewed as one of America’s great presidents.
After she became secretary of state, Condi gave me a biography of Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson. Both books reminded me how Truman’s decisions in the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the foundation for victory in the Cold War and helped shape the world I inherited as president. Truman forged the NATO alliance; signed the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Defense Department; fought an unpopular war that enabled the rise of a democratic ally in South Korea; and pledged assistance to all countries resisting communist takeover, the Truman Doctrine.
As in Truman’s era, we were in the early years of a long struggle. We had created a variety of tools to deal with the threats. I made it a high priority of my second term to turn those tools into institutions and laws that would be available to my successors.
In some areas, we were off to a good start. The Department of Homeland Security, while prone to the inefficiencies of any large bureaucracy, was an improvement over twenty-two uncoordinated agencies. The FBI had created a new National Security Branch focused on preventing terrorist attacks. The Defense Department had established a new Northern Command with the sole responsibility to defend the homeland. The Treasury Department had adopted an aggressive new approach to disrupting terrorist financing. We had recruited more than ninety countries to a new Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at stopping international trafficking of materials related to weapons of mass destruction. Based in part on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, we had created a new National Counterterrorism Center and appointed a director of national intelligence—the largest reform of the intelligence community since Truman created the CIA.
In other areas, we had work to do. Some of our most important tools in the war on terror, including the TSP and the CIA interrogation program, were based on the broad authority of Article II and the congressional war resolution. The best way to ensure they remained available after I left office was to work with Congress to codify those programs into law. As Justice Robert Jackson explained in a landmark opinion in 1952, a president has the most authority when he is acting with the explicit support of Congress.
The challenge was how to present the TSP and the CIA interrogation program to Congress without exposing details to the enemy. I believed it was possible, but we would have to work closely with members of Congress to structure the debate in a way that did not reveal critical secrets. We were developing a strategy to do that. Then two events forced our hand.
“The
