White House Does Damage Control
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening. Thanks so much for joining us tonight. Welcome to a brand new week here. I'm Paul Zahn. The world, the news, the names, the faces, and where we go from here on Monday, January 12, 2004.</s>ZAHN (voice-over): "In Focus" tonight: The White House goes on damage control, as the former treasury secretary attacks. Also, my interview with Pete Rose. I think it went pretty well.</s>PETE ROSE, FORMER MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PLAYER: If she had been a guy, I would have knocked her on her ass.</s>ZAHN: Tough questions and new confessions from Pete Rose. And new research on what whether your I.Q. makes you a more productive employee. The results may surprise you.</s>ZAHN: Those stories and more straight ahead, but, first, here's what you need to know right now at the top of the hour. President Bush met with Mexican President Vicente Fox today, with two leaders agreeing on the issues of immigration and Iraq. Mexico's leader backed Mr. Bush's plan to grant legal status to undocumented workers in the U.S. and congratulated him on the capture of Saddam Hussein. The two men will attend a 34-nation summit taking place in Monterey. Now on to the story of a shocking charge against the Bush administration from a one-time insider. "In Focus" tonight, a former Cabinet secretary says in a new book that the plans to go to war in Iraq were even in the works before the 9/11 attacks.</s>PAUL O'NEILL, FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY: From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth. Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?</s>ZAHN: Well, with that and new questions into whether O'Neill used classified information in his interview, senior White House correspondent John King joins us now. Good evening, John.</s>JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good evening to you, Paula. Now a preliminary inquiry under way at the Treasury Department into just that question you just raised. In watching the "60 Minutes" report last night, Treasury officials say they believe they saw some classified documents that are not supposed to leave government files when a Cabinet secretary leaves government service. So they have asked the inspector general at the department to look into the question -- no one making an allegation just yet -- But to look into the question as to whether Secretary Paul O'Neill improperly or perhaps illegally took classified materials with him when he left the government a little more than a year ago. Now, White House officials, Paula, say they have nothing to do with this inquiry and were not told about it. And Treasury officials say it was made out of an abundance of caution. Again, they're not accusing the former secretary of anything, but they say they will look into this. On the broader question, of course, Paula, the president was asked about this book in Mexico today. He would not answer the question as to whether he felt betrayed. He did defend his decision to go to war. Back here at the White House, though, aides do call it, in their view, a backstabbing betrayal -- Paula.</s>ZAHN: So if this investigation ends up going anywhere, John King, what could potentially happen to former Treasury Secretary O'Neill?</s>KING: Well, potentially, if the secretary did take classified materials -- when he leaves, he goes through an exit interview, just like any employee of the government. He's supposed to leave any sensitive information behind. If he said he did not take anything improperly and he did, he could be subjected to some form of an ethics inquiry or possibly charges. But we should be very careful. No one is making that accusation tonight. And, Paula, Democrats are rushing to say, if you go back and read Bob Woodward of "The Washington Post"'s last book, he acknowledges in the beginning of the book that he got access to all kinds of notes from National Security Council meetings, classified documents from very senior administration officials. The Democrats say they see a double standard.</s>ZAHN: John King, thanks so much for the update. Appreciate it. We're going to get more reaction now from David Frum, the president's former speechwriter. He co-wrote the well-known axis of evil speech and has a new book out called "An End to Evil: Strategies For Victory in the War on Terror." We asked him whether O'Neill's description of the president as being -- quote -- "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people" -- end of quote -- is accurate.</s>DAVID FRUM, FORMER SPEECHWRITER FOR PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, if I tell you that my problem with the president was that he never laughed at any of my jokes, one possible conclusion is that the president had no sense of humor. But there's another possible conclusion, which is that I wasn't very funny. And I'm sorry that Paul O'Neill feels the president didn't listen to his ideas. And maybe they were excellent ideas and the president should have listened. But it's also possible the president concluded that they weren't so excellent and that the right way to deal with this was a noncommittal, "Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm, we'll see." That is a time-honored executive branch technique.</s>ZAHN: All right, but, even in your own book, you describe the president as this: "He is impatient and quick to anger, sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and, as a result, ill-informed."</s>FRUM: But here's a difference. And notice when you listen. The president sometimes didn't ask every question that you might want him to ask. But my description of him is a man who is engaged. And he's complaining the president withdrew from him and didn't listen to him and didn't seem to pay attention. Whenever you've got a problem with other people, there are always two candidates to blame. One is yourself and one is somebody else. And you always start with somebody else and only reach yourself by a long process of elimination.</s>ZAHN: But it was you yourself who described the president as ill-informed. That must have troubled you when you worked for him.</s>FRUM: I was sometimes -- there are things he sometimes didn't know that you might think that he ought to know. I'm sure -- and that's a fault. But the kind of sort of general indifference that Paul O'Neill -- disengagement that Paul O'Neill depicts, that is not right. I think where he is really wrong in understanding how the president was thinking about Iraq. Again, I'm not privy to his confidences and his thoughts. But the idea that there are people in the administration who had decided that Saddam Hussein had to go, that wasn't news. That decision was made by many people in the United States in 1998, when Congress passed a law called the Iraq Liberation Act and President Clinton signed it, saying Saddam Hussein had to go. The plans had been prepared since the middle '90s. But a plan is a very different thing from a decision. Paul O'Neill isn't saying anything untrue, but he's allowing people to draw untrue inferences if he's suggesting that the kind of plan that we saw in 2003 was something that was an agreed decision of the president's early in 2001.</s>ZAHN: All right, David, you've got to help me with something. I'm listening to you and I'm hearing what you're saying. You find this criticism of the president very personal. Yet, on the other hand, you're a guy that made some money off the president's back. You left the administration. You wrote a book some folks in the administration weren't crazy about. Secretary O'Neill is not taking a dime from this book. Everybody knows he's a multimillionaire. And if what he's saying, as you just said, is not untrue, then how can you have a problem with him writing this book?</s>FRUM: I didn't criticize him for writing this book. I criticized him for saying things that, while true, might lead people to draw false conclusions. Everybody who goes into the White House has the experience of not being treated as the important person they think they are. And that's a comment theme,whether they're as important as Paul O'Neill or whether they're a speechwriter. That's your feeling. If you're going to write about your experience in a way that is interesting to anybody other than your immediate relatives and the people who hate the guy irrationally, you have to get past your own feelings about, gee, why wasn't I treated like the important guy I think I am, and say, this story was never about me. This story was about the president.</s>ZAHN: My conversation with former White House speechwriter David Frum. Now let's get some perspective from our political experts, our regular contributor Joe Klein, a senior writer for "TIME" magazine. Joining us from Washington is regular contributor and former Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, and University of New Orleans presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, whose latest book is "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War." Good to see all of you.</s>DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Thank you.</s>ZAHN: Doug, I want to start with you this evening. Is this nothing more than sour grapes on Secretary O'Neill's part?</s>BRINKLEY: Well, I think it's more than that. Secretary of treasury is not some far-flung African ambassador whining or some very obscure assistant secretary. He was secretary of the treasury and has great insights to how the Bush administration operates. It certainly has to wound the president that O'Neill would come out with these sort of allegations and revelations at this time, particularly because Iraq is so sensitive right now, and that he's a president who doesn't like people going off the reservation. He doesn't like what he -- a sense of disloyalty. No president does. But this president, like Harry Truman, particularly loathes it. I think O'Neill made the right move by not taking money, by cooperating with a very respected "Wall Street Journal" investigative reporter on this story. And it certainly has to fuel the Democratic flames that have been complaining about the -- that this administration had planned the war all along and the rest of it, meaning going to the U.N. and the long drawn-out vote in the U.S. Senate and what not, was nothing but a charade, that this was an administration hell-bent on war.</s>ZAHN: Victoria, why the change of heart on O'Neill's part? And, in fact, everybody knew he wasn't crazy about getting whacked by the administration. But here's what he said just about a month after being fired -- quote -- "I am a supporter of the institution of the presidency and I'm determined not to say any negative things about the president and the Bush administration. They have enough to do without having me as a sharpshooter." What happened?</s>VICTORIA CLARKE, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I don't know. I don't know how you can account for a change of heart like that. He's worked in previous administrations. He knows things like this aren't helpful. And it's disappointing. But as Senator Bob Dole said today, every administration has one. There's always somebody who goes out, goes out early, under less-than-favorable circumstances, as was the case here. So maybe it's just a little bit of payback.</s>ZAHN: There is some buzz around Washington today, Torie, that, in fact, Secretary Rumsfeld had approached Secretary O'Neill when he heard that he was up to writing this book and tried to get him to change his mind. Can you shed some light on that report? Is there any truth to it?</s>CLARKE: There has been. There has been a story going around today that the White House somehow asked Secretary Rumsfeld to go and try to talk Paul O'Neill out of it. And that is completely untrue. Rumsfeld and O'Neill know each other. They've known each other for years. They've had conversations, including about this book. And without going into details of those conversations, you can draw a conclusion from Secretary Rumsfeld's often stated distaste for kiss- and-tells. This is not the way he thinks you conduct your affairs.</s>ZAHN: Joe, let's bring you into the discussion and talk about what kind of mileage you can expect the Democrats to get out of this on a couple of fronts, on the issue of Iraq, and then the overarching issue of the allegation on O'Neill's part that this is a disengaged president who rarely offered an opinion on anything he heard in a meeting.</s>JOE KLEIN, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, first of all, this is sour grapes on Paul O'Neill's part, and second of all, it is a kiss-and- tell. And such works are unseemly while the president is still in office. Having said that, though, this is a particularly interesting kiss-and-tell, because Paul O'Neill represents ground-zero traditional Republicanism. And what does he take the president to task on? Two issues. We've heard about the war, the precipitous nature of the way the administration went into the war. But almost more importantly, he takes the president to task for tax cuts. In fact, he says that the president at first didn't understand why there should be another tax cut for the rich. This is what conservatism used to be. And if this book has any real use, it's to show how far the Republican Party and how far this administration has moved from used to be called conservatism.</s>ZAHN: And go on to the issue of sufficient that he intimates that was said about Cheney and his lack of concern about deficits, Joe.</s>KLEIN: Right. I think that what we've seen in this administration is a return to the supply-side-ism of the Reagan administration, which was, admittedly, a way to starve the beast, to make sure that the government couldn't become more activist in the future. And traditional conservatives, people like Bob Dole, have always thought that that was wildly irresponsible. Now, obviously, the Democratic Party, which has kind of moved into the slot that the conservatives, traditional conservative Republicans, used to play are going to be hugely happy about this, but it just shows you how far the political pendulum has swung.</s>ZAHN: And a final thought from you, Douglas, on how you think this White House will continue to deal with it? John King saying the Treasury Department, that this investigation was sort of launched on its own, the White House had nothing to do with it, and whether the story has any resonance at all long term.</s>BRINKLEY: Well, it's yet to be seen. It's certainly now part of this national debate on, was the war in Iraq necessary? I think the Iraq part is the most interesting. There's a case being built against the president that the White House knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. And a voice like O'Neill joining the Democratic choir of, you know, Deans and Kerrys and Gephardts and the like, criticizing the administration on the war in Iraq is now part of the history books. The key is going to be the way that the White House deals with this. And what are those documents that Mr. O'Neill has? And were they legitimate ones, top secret ones he was allowed, or were they classified documents that he was not allowed to take and didn't let them know that he had? So I think that will play out. This could be something that's just a topic of the week and it will kind of wrap up by the weekend, or it could be something that has longer legs if it turns out that O'Neill has only started to let out what he knows about certain aspects of what occurred in the Bush White House. What we do know is, he was in the catbird seat to know an awful lot of things.</s>ZAHN: And I guess it will be many months before we have the answers some of those questions you just raised. Douglas Brinkley, thanks so much.</s>BRINKLEY: Thanks.</s>ZAHN: Joe Klein, Torie Clarke.</s>CLARKE: Thanks, Paula.</s>ZAHN: One week to go before the Iowa caucus, and a surprise for Howard Dean, as Dick Gephardt is making it a tight race. We're going to look at the great undecided factor. And my no-holds-barred interview with Pete Rose. Rose talks candidly about his gambling and whether he still is playing the odds.</s>ZAHN: Do you still have a gambling problem?</s>ROSE: I don't think so. I don't think so at all.</s>ZAHN: Do you still bet on baseball?</s>ZAHN: Also, here's an I.Q. test for you to figure out. We'll give you the answer later on. Find out why getting questions like these right may signal success at work.