Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [229]
CHAPTER 31
The Case for Regime Change
Fifteen days after 9/11, the President asked me to join him in the Oval Office alone. Our meetings almost always included some combination of the vice president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of state, the national security adviser, or the White House chief of staff—but not on the morning of September 26.
The President leaned back in the black leather chair behind his desk. He asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq. He knew the Joint Chiefs and I were concerned about Saddam Hussein’s attacks on our aircraft in the northern and southern no-fly zones, but two weeks after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, those of us in the Department of Defense were fully occupied.
He wanted the options to be “creative,” which I took to mean that he wanted something different from the massive land force assembled during the 1991 Gulf War. I certainly did not get the impression the President had made up his mind on the merits of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. In fact, at the September 15 NSC meeting at Camp David days earlier when Iraq had been raised, he had specifically kept the focus on Afghanistan.
I told him I would review CENTCOM’s existing Iraq plan and speak to General Franks about updating it.
There was another matter President Bush wanted to discuss with me that morning. “Dick told me about your son,” he said. “Are you and Joyce doing okay?”
Although Nick had been in recovery from drug addiction at the time of Bush’s inauguration, his condition had been fragile, and he had relapsed. He had tried several times to turn his life around, but by the late summer of 2001, he was bottoming out again. He would disappear for periods, turning up occasionally in various towns across the West. Joyce and I had left Washington at the end of August to spend Labor Day weekend in New Mexico. After being out of touch for weeks, Nick reappeared in Taos while we were there.
In a long, painful visit, we again tried to convince him to seek treatment. My inclination was to do whatever it took to get him clean, even if it was against his wishes. Joyce understood better than I did that addiction was a disease that people eventually have to overcome on their own. As parents we could only offer support, encouragement, and a direction. Nick was weighing heavily on my mind when I returned to Washington in early September. One part of me was always thinking of him and the terrible state he was in. But in the days after 9/11, being distracted wasn’t an option.
On September 18, a week before my meeting with President Bush, Nick had called Joyce from Taos. “Happy birthday, Mom,” he said. He then told her he was leaving to check into a treatment center. Valerie’s husband, our son-in-law Paul Richard, and a friend of ours in Taos had agreed to take him. Nick said they had convinced him, and he was ready.
I had shared the information on Nick with Cheney, who had apparently passed it on to Bush. Because I knew the President had a great deal confronting him, I was surprised that he was mentioning our son, but he spoke with such concern that my family troubles seemed to be the only thing on his mind.
I told the President the activity surrounding 9/11 had not given me much time to think about our situation. But Joyce and I desperately wanted Nick’s treatment to be successful this time.
“I love Nick so much,” I said.
“You have my full support and prayers,” Bush said.
What had happened to Nick—coupled with the wounds to our country and the Pentagon—all started to hit me. At that moment, I couldn’t speak. And I was unable to hold back the emotions that until then I had shared only with Joyce. I had not imagined I might choke up in a meeting with the President of the United States, but at that moment George W. Bush wasn’t just the President. He was a compassionate human being who had a sense of what Joyce and I were going through.
Bush rose from his chair, walked around his desk, and