More from the book:

He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under
discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president
was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was
uncharacteristically engaged.

“He asks, ‘Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second
tax cut's gonna do it again,’” says Suskind.

“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’” Now, his
advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the
entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.’ And the president kind of
goes, ‘OK.’ That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again.
‘Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able
to say, ‘You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it
good for?’"

But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove
jumped in.

“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to
principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says
Suskind. “Don’t waver.”

In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in
which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax
cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.


Harry Krause wrote:

Saturday, Jan. 10, 2004
Confessions of a White House Insider
A book about Treasury's Paul O'Neill paints a presidency where ideology
and politics rule the day
By JOHN F. DICKERSON

If anyone would listen to him, Paul O'Neill thought, Dick Cheney would.
The two had served together during the Ford Administration, and now as
the Treasury Secretary fought a losing battle against another round of
tax cuts, he figured that his longtime colleague would give him a hearing.

O'Neill had been preaching that a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax
cuts would exacerbate it. But others in the White House saw a chance to
capitalize on the historic Republican congressional gains in the 2002
elections. Surely, Cheney would not be so smug. He would hear O'Neill
out. In an economic meeting in the Vice President's office, O'Neill
started pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget
deficits threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. "Reagan proved
deficits don't matter," he said. O'Neill was too dumbfounded to respond.
Cheney continued: "We won the midterms. This is our due."

A month later, Paul O'Neill was fired, ending the rocky two-year tenure
of Bush's first Treasury Secretary, who became known for his candid
statements and the controversies that followed them. Rarely had a person
who spoke so freely been embedded so high in an Administration that
valued frank public remarks so little.

Now O'Neill is speaking with the same bracing style in a book written by
Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind. The Price of Loyalty:
George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill traces
the former Alcoa CEO's rise and fall through the Administration: from
his return to Washington to work for his third President, whom he
believed would govern from the sensible center, through O'Neill's
disillusionment, to his firing, executed in a surreal conversation with
Cheney, a man he once considered a fellow traveler. Suskind had access
not only to O'Neill but also to the saddlebags he took with him when he
left town, which included a minute-by-minute accounting of his 23 months
in office and 19,000 pages of documents on CD-ROM.

So, what does O'Neill reveal? According to the book, ideology and
electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his
tenure that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of
ideas. The incurious President was so opaque on some important issues
that top Cabinet officials were left guessing his mind even after
face-to-face meetings. Cheney is portrayed as an unstoppable force,
unbowed by inconvenient facts as he drives Administration policy toward
his goals.

O'Neill's tone in the book is not angry or sour, though it prompted a
tart response from the Administration. "We didn't listen to him when he
was there," said a top aide. "Why should we now?"

But the book is blunt, and in person O'Neill can be even more so.
Discussing the case for the Iraq war in an interview with TIME, O'Neill,
who sat on the National Security Council, says the focus was on Saddam
from the early days of the Administration. He offers the most skeptical
view of the case for war ever put forward by a top Administration
official. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I
would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," he told
TIME. "There were allegations and assertions by people.

But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference
between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and
conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions. To me there
is a difference between real evidence and everything else. And I never
saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real
evidence." A top Administration official says of the wmd intelligence:
"That information was on a need- to-know basis. He wouldn't have been in
a position to see it."

From his first meeting with the President, O'Neill found Bush unengaged
and inscrutable, an inside account far different from the shiny White
House brochure version of an unfailing leader questioning aides with
rapid-fire intensity. The two met one-on-one almost every week, but
O'Neill says he had trouble divining his boss's goals and ideas. Bush
was a blank slate rarely asking questions or issuing orders, unlike
Nixon and Ford, for whom O'Neill also worked. "I wondered from the
first, if the President didn't know the questions to ask," O'Neill says
in the book, "or if he did know and just not want to know the answers?
Or did his strategy somehow involve never showing what he thought? But
you can ask questions, gather information and not necessarily show your
hand. It was strange." In larger meetings, Bush was similarly walled
off. Describing top-level meetings, O'Neill tells Suskind that during
the course of his two years the President was "like a blind man in a
roomful of deaf people."

In his interview with TIME, O'Neill winces a little at that quote. He's
worried it's too stark and now allows that it may just be Bush's style
to keep his advisers always guessing. In Suskind's book, O'Neill's
assessment of Bush's executive style is a harsh one: it is portrayed as
a failure of leadership. Aides were left to play "blind man's bluff,"
trying to divine Bush's views on issues like tax policy, global warming
and North Korea. Sometimes, O'Neill says, they had to float an idea in
the press just to scare a reaction out of him. This led to public
humiliation when the President contradicted his top officials, as he did
Secretary of State Colin Powell on North Korea and Environmental
Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman on global
warming. O'Neill came to believe that this gang of three beleaguered
souls—only Powell remains—who shared a more nonideological approach were
used for window dressing. We "may have been there, in large part, as
cover," he tells Suskind.

If the President was hard to read, the White House decision-making
process was even more mysterious. Each time O'Neill tried to gather
data, sift facts and insert them into the system for debate, he would
find discussion sheared off before it could get going. He tried to build
fiscal restraint into Bush's tax plan but was thwarted by those who
believed, as he says, that "tax cuts were good at any cost." He was
losing debates before they had begun. The President asked for a
global-warming plan one minute and then while it was being formulated,
announced that he was reversing a campaign pledge to cut carbon dioxide
emissions and pulling out unceremoniously from the Kyoto global- warming
treaty, short-circuiting his aides' work. The President was "clearly
signing on to strong ideological positions that had not been fully
thought through," says O'Neill. As for the appetite for new ideas in the
White House, he told Suskind, "that store is closed."

To grope his way out of the wilderness, O'Neill turned to his old
friends from the Ford Administration, Alan Greenspan and Dick Cheney.
According to the book, Greenspan agreed with many of his proposals but
could not do much from his Delphian perch. When O'Neill sought guidance
from the Vice President about how to install a system that would foster
vigorous and transparent debate, he got grumbles and silence but little
sympathy. Soon O'Neill concluded that his powerful old colleague was
rowing in a different direction."I realized why Dick just nodded along
when I said all of this, over and over, and nothing ever changed," he
says in the book. "This is the way Dick likes it."

Where ideology did not win, electoral politics did. Overruling many of
his advisers, the President decided to impose tariffs on imported steel
to please voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia
and Ohio.

When the corporate scandals rocked Wall Street, O'Neill and Greenspan
devised a plan to make CEOs accountable. Bush went with a more modest
plan because "the corporate crowd," as O'Neill calls it in the book,
complained loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency. "The
biggest difference between then and now," O'Neill tells Suskind about
his two previous tours in Washington, "is that our group was mostly
about evidence and analysis, and Karl (Rove), Dick (Cheney), Karen
(Hughes) and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics. It's a huge
distinction."

A White House that seems to pick an outcome it wants and then marshal
the facts to meet it seems very much like one that might decide to
remove Saddam Hussein and then tickle the facts to meet its objective.
That's the inescapable conclusion one draws from O'Neill's description
of how Saddam was viewed from Day One. Though O'Neill is careful to
compliment the cia for always citing the caveats in its findings, he
describes a White House poised to overinterpret intelligence. "From the
start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we
could take him out and change Iraq into a new country," he tells
Suskind. "And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about
finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying,
'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"

Cheney helped bring O'Neill into the Administration, acting as a
shoehorn for O'Neill, who didn't know the President but trusted the wise
counselor beside him. So it was perhaps fitting that Cheney would take
O'Neill out. Weeks after Bush had assured O'Neill that rumored staff
changes in the economic team did not mean his job was in peril, Cheney
called. "Paul, the President has decided to make some changes in the
economic team. And you're part of the change," he told O'Neill. The
bloodless way he was cut loose by his old chum shocked O'Neill, Suskind
writes, but what came after was even more shocking. Cheney asked him to
announce that it was O'Neill's decision to leave Washington to return to
private life. O'Neill refused, saying "I'm too old to begin telling lies
now."

Suskind's book—informed by interviews with officials other than
O'Neill—is only a partial view of the Bush White House. Bush's role on
key topics like education, stem-cell research and aids funding is not
explored. Bush's role as a military leader after 9/11 is discussed
mostly through O'Neill's effort to stop terrorist funding. Bush comes
across as mildly effective and pleased with O'Neill's work. The book
does not try to cover how Bush engaged with his war cabinet during the
Afghan conflict or how his leadership skills were deployed in the making
of war. On the eve of the Iraq war, however, O'Neill does tell Suskind
that he marvels at the President's conviction in light of what he
considers paltry evidence: "With his level of experience, I would not be
able to support his level of conviction."

There is no effort to offer an opposing analysis of O'Neill's portrayal
of his tenure. The book lists his gaffes—he ridiculed Wall Street
traders, accused Democrats of being socialists and disparaged business
lobbyists who were seeking a tax credit that the President supported—but
it portrays these moments as examples of brave truth telling in a town
that doesn't like it. White House aides have a different view: It wasn't
just that O'Neill was impolitic, they say; his statements had real
consequences—roiling currency markets and Wall Street. What O'Neill
would call rigor, Bush officials say, was an excessive fussiness that
led to policy gridlock and sniping within the economic team.

O'Neill says he hopes that straight talk about the broken
decision-making process in the White House will highlight the larger
political and ideological warfare that has gripped Washington and kept
good ideas from becoming law. Perhaps naively or arrogantly, or both, he
even believes it may help change the climate. Ask him what he hopes the
book will accomplish, and he will talk about Social Security reform in
earnest tones: tough choices won't be made in Washington so long as it
shuns honest dialogue, bipartisanship and intellectual thoroughness.
O'Neill may not have been cut out for this town, but give him this: he
does exhibit the sobriety and devotion to ideas that are supposed to be
in vogue in the postironic, post- 9/11 age.

Loyalty is perhaps the most prized quality in the White House. In the
book, O'Neill suggests a very dark understanding of what happens to
those who don't show it. "These people are nasty and they have a long
memory," he tells Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out
even in the face of inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate
loyalty to something he prizes: the truth. "Loyalty to a person and
whatever they say or do, that's the opposite of real loyalty, which is
loyalty based on inquiry, and telling someone what you really think and
feel—your best estimation of the truth instead of what they want to
hear." That goal is worth the price of retribution, O'Neill says. Plus,
as he told Suskind, "I'm an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing
they can do to hurt me."