While the vice president's office defended itself, the situation in Iraq developed in troubling ways. Presuming the war was essentially over, short of mop-up operations, Tommy Franks had decided against bringing in the First Cavalry Division as planned and announced his retirement. When Richard Myers asked him to reconsider, Franks lashed out at him. "Not going home?" he said. "Butt-fuck me." His command unit left behind in Iraq then withdrew from the country, and he was replaced by a recently promoted division commander named Ricardo Sanchez. Now the army's most junior lieutenant general, Sanchez found himself in charge with a headquarters designed to run a division, not a country, with just 37 percent of the staff such a post should have had. His ascension went largely overlooked in Washington. Donald Rumsfeld had interviewed Sanchez for his promotion to three stars but later said he had nothing to do with putting him in charge in Iraq, an astonishing disengagement in the most important theater for the American military. (Myers doubted Rumsfeld's account. "I just find that really hard to believe," he said.) The transition belied the increasing violence on the ground. More than two dozen American soldiers had been killed in combat since Bush declared major operations over under the "Mission Accomplished" banner, and the Pentagon had concluded that it was fighting five distinct groups, even though it refused to call that a guerrilla war or an insurgency. Bush was defiant. Talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room on July 2, he all but dared the insurgents to escalate their attacks.

"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush said. "My answer is: Bring 'em on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

The Texas swagger made headlines, but like his "dead or alive" comment in 2001 it drew concern from the first lady and others who deemed it cocky and even insensitive.

"Mr. President, can you imagine how that would sound to a mother who just lost her son in Iraq?" Ari Fleischer asked in a private moment.

Bush said he had not thought of that. "I was just trying to express my confidence in our military."

That offhand bravado became a rallying cry among insurgents in Iraq, who threw it back in Bush's face as the war escalated. And it helped reinforce for Bush what every president ultimately realizes, that words have multiple audiences; what makes sense for one set of ears has a drastically different impact on another. As his presidency wore on, Bush became more aware that he was simultaneously addressing not just the American public but troops in harm's way, the country's allies, the Iraqi people, and the enemy itself. He would eventually consider the "bring 'em on" comment one of his biggest gaffes, although its larger importance lay not in the words themselves but in the flawed analysis they revealed. What he faced in Iraq was not a relatively minor challenge that would be put down expeditiously.

NOR WAS THE Niger question. On July 6, Joseph Wilson unmasked himself, writing an op-ed in the New York Times, giving an interview to Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby in the Washington Post, and appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, all to allege that weapons intelligence "was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Cheney read the Times op-ed while flying back to Washington on Air Force Two from Wyoming. He clipped it, underlining eleven different parts and scrawling his own reactions above the headline. "Have they done this sort of thing before?" he wrote. "Send an Amb to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

The White House was pounded over the sixteen words and decided to retreat. At a briefing on July 7, the day after Wilson's public debut, David Sanger of the Times pressed Fleischer on Bush's statement in the State of the Union.

"So it was wrong?" Sanger asked.

"That's what we've acknowledged," Fleischer said.

But that did not end the matter. Cheney was upset and talked it over repeatedly with Libby. The vice president was "very keen to get the truth out," Libby later said. In the days that followed, Libby told Fleischer about Wilson's wife, and the two of them as well as Karl Rove discussed it with reporters. Critics later portrayed that as a systematic campaign to deliberately blow the cover of a covert CIA operative, which would be a crime. All involved denied it, and no one would ever be charged with it. What seems more plausible is that Libby and the others were trying to undercut Wilson's credibility by suggesting he went to Africa at the behest of his wife, not the vice president. Libby was so consumed by the matter that he called Tim Russert, the NBC News bureau chief, to complain about the commentary of the liberal MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews. What exactly was said during that call would later be in dispute.

Bush was leaving for a weeklong trip to Africa and not eager for the controversy to follow him. The day before he departed, he met with Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and George Tenet. Rice argued they should "just take the issue off the table" by repudiating the sixteen words and taking responsibility. Cheney opposed that, arguing that the information had been in the National Intelligence Estimate and cited legitimately. Even at that time, it had been reported that an Iraqi delegation had a few years earlier approached Niger about "expanding commercial relations"; Cheney and his allies argued that had to mean uranium, since that was the country's main resource. Besides, Cheney argued, the sixteen words were literally correct because they said the British government had reported this, which it had. But Bush eventually agreed with Rice, who then talked with Tenet about releasing a statement.

The situation worsened as Bush took off on Air Force One. With the president and Rice across the world, Cheney in Washington, and Tenet at a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, the administration's response over the next few days proved disjointed at best. Before Tenet could finish his statement, Rice felt pressured to put the fire out, so she marched back to the press cabin on Air Force One as it made its way to Entebbe, Uganda, on July 11.

"If the CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question," Rice told reporters.

Bush echoed her later that day when asked about it by a reporter at a beachside hotel in Uganda. The speech, he emphasized, "was cleared by the intelligence services."

What Bush and Rice considered factual statements were seen by Tenet as shifting blame, and he wondered if he might be fired or have to resign. In Sun Valley, he grew angrier as he wrote his own statement, going back and forth with the White House. Seventeen drafts later, he took his lumps: "First, CIA approved the President's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency. And third, the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President." But then he offered "a little history," noting that the CIA had disagreed with the British about the validity of the Niger report and had not included it among the key judgments in the National Intelligence Estimate, although it was mentioned in the body of the text. He did not mention that the CIA had gotten the White House to take the same allegation out of Bush's October speech in Cincinnati.

The swirling events opened a permanent rift between Tenet and the White House. Cheney and his allies believed Rice's admission only made matters worse, not better. "You put a bull's-eye on the White House," Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who had dealt with CIA officials over the speech, told Stephen Hadley that night. Joseph felt the admission fed into the perception that the White House had lied. Rice, Rove, and Dan Bartlett eventually came to the same conclusion, although it was not clear that there was much of a choice.

THE NEXT DAY, July 12, Cheney flew to Norfolk, Virginia, to help commission the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier. On the return flight, Libby entered his cabin on Air Force Two to tell him a couple of reporters had called about the Wilson story. Cheney dictated to Libby what he should tell them. Libby later that day talked with four reporters, and Valerie Wilson came up with two or three of them.

On July 14, the conservative columnist Robert Novak published a column identifying Valerie Wilson as a CIA operative. Novak had learned not from the Cheney camp but from one of Cheney's fiercest adversaries, Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy secretary of state, who mentioned it during an interview on other subjects. Armitage, an inveterate gossip, had also mentioned it to Bob Woodward during an interview for a book. Novak got it confirmed to his satisfaction from Karl Rove and then a CIA spokesman. Three days later, Matthew Cooper of Time, one of the reporters Libby talked with after the Norfolk trip, posted a story on the magazine's Web site mentioning the ambassador's wife; Cooper, like Novak, had also spoken with Rove. Judith Miller of the New York Times, who talked with Libby about Valerie Wilson, never published anything about her.

Libby and Rove at first thought the revelation might help them by making it clear that Joseph Wilson did not go to Africa on Cheney's behalf. But they quickly realized what an enormous miscalculation that was. Although Valerie Wilson was working as an analyst at CIA headquarters, she had previously been overseas undercover, and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act made it a crime to intentionally disclose the identity of a covert agent. Rather than questioning the origin of Wilson's trip, reporters focused on whether the White House had blown the cover of a CIA officer to punish a critic.

Matters got worse over the weekend when Michael Gerson found in his files the memo the CIA had sent him and Hadley warning them to take the Niger uranium story out of the president's Cincinnati speech the previous fall. Gerson brought the memo to Hadley, who was deeply embarrassed. The warning was on page 3 of a three-and-a-half-page memo, and Hadley had forgotten about it, but it was clear the White House had been previously alerted about the veracity problems with the Niger intelligence. It was his responsibility to vet the State of the Union, and he should have remembered the previous episode. Hadley, almost universally considered a soft-spoken, workaholic man of decency and honor, crafted a statement announcing his resignation.

The next morning, July 22, Bush found Hadley coming to see him alone before a meeting.

"Mr. President, I think I need to resign," Hadley said.

"Ugh, Hadley," Bush said, dismissing him.

Hadley raised his voice, something he almost never did. "Mr. President," he said, "you need to hear me out on this."

"All right, Hadley, I will hear you out."

Hadley explained that the president should expect the highest standards and those who work for him were invested with the national trust. It was no disgrace to accept responsibility for a mistake, he said. "In fact, that is exactly how the system should work, and that is what needs to happen here." Hadley mentioned his resignation statement.

"Let me see your statement," Bush said. He read it through. "It is a great statement," he said, "and you can use everything but the last paragraph," meaning the resignation.

"Mr. President, I think this is a mistake," Hadley protested.

"I know you do."

At that point, Cheney and other top advisers arrived for an 8:00 a.m. meeting. Bush decided to needle Hadley a bit. "Hadley wants to resign," he announced to the room.

"What's the matter, Steve?" Cheney asked. "Don't you like it around here?"

Hadley, embarrassed to have this play out in front of the group, made a shorthand version of his case but knew it was for naught. "Give your statement," Bush instructed, "but you are not resigning."

As it happened, Tenet that same morning brought a copy of the memo and a follow-up, intent on making the point that the CIA had warned the White House about the uranium claim in the past. After showing them to Hadley, Tenet went to Andy Card's office. As Tenet recalled, Card shook his head. "I haven't been told the truth," he said.

Hadley that afternoon invited reporters to the Roosevelt Room, where he explained what had happened and took responsibility. He and Bartlett stayed for an hour and twenty-three minutes, letting reporters exhaust every question to prove they were not hiding anything-except, that is, Hadley's attempt to step down. Asked if he had offered to resign, Hadley said, "My conversation with the president I'm not going to talk about."

A week later, the CIA notified the Justice Department that the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity may have constituted a crime.

16.

"Welcome to Free Iraq"

Stephen Hadley was not the only one contemplating stepping down that summer. Unbeknownst to almost anyone outside the Oval Office, Vice President Cheney offered three times to drop off the reelection ticket in 2004.

"Mr. President," Cheney said during one of their weekly lunches, "I want you to know that you should feel free to run for reelection with someone else. No hard feelings."

President Bush looked at him with worry. Was he okay? Was there anything wrong with his heart?

No, Cheney said. He just recognized that it might be easier for Bush to win with someone else.

Cheney understood he had become a magnet for attacks, portrayed by critics as the dark force behind the throne. His poll numbers were still relatively strong in those days, far above where they would eventually sink; some 54 percent of the public approved of him, according to Gallup, and 51 percent thought Bush should keep him on the ticket. But the benefit he brought in 2000 as counsel to an inexperienced president no longer applied. Cheney remembered helping to push Nelson Rockefeller off the ticket in 1976 so that Gerald Ford could beat Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, and he thought George H. W. Bush should have replaced Dan Quayle in 1992.

"The reason I did it-I believed that it was one of the few things 41 could have done in '92 to change the scenario enough to have a shot," Cheney said years later. "I had been through the thing with Ford and Rockefeller and concluded that we had to get Rockefeller out if we were going to win the nomination." And so, he said, "I always saw the vice president as expendable in a sense. I do today."

Bush, who had urged his father to replace Quayle with Cheney in 1992, brushed off his vice president. But Cheney came back at him during one of their weekly lunches. "The first couple of times I brought it up, I had the impression that he didn't take me seriously," Cheney recalled. "So I brought it up a third time, and he said okay and went away and thought about it." Cheney said it was not an offer made lightly. "I mean, all the president had to say was, 'Dick, I am ready to make a change,' and I was out of there. I would have made it easy."

Bush did think about it and even came up with a potential replacement, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader from Tennessee. He liked Frist's demeanor, his medical background, the generational change he might represent. Frist had been a key ally on elements of the compassionate conservative agenda, including PEPFAR, and the two were working together on legislation expanding Medicare to cover prescription medicine. But Bush never contacted Frist. He quietly confided in only a few aides, individually and not in a meeting, including Andy Card, Karl Rove, and Dan Bartlett, and it remained a closely held secret. Bush did not mention it to reelection strategists like Ken Mehlman and Matthew Dowd or even to Condoleezza Rice. Cheney kept it secret from most of his staff and even longtime friends like Donald Rumsfeld and Alan Simpson. "I knew nothing about it," Simpson said.

The fact that Bush was tempted, even briefly, suggests that the relationship was beginning to change. As he described it in his memoir, Bush noted that Cheney "helped with important parts of our base" but "had become a lightning rod for criticism from the media and the left. He was seen as dark and heartless-the Darth Vader of the administration." More telling, though, was Bush's mention of the perception that Cheney really ran the White House. "Accepting Dick's offer would be one way to demonstrate that I was in charge," Bush said. All the talk of Cheney as secret puppet master had begun to rankle him, and he wanted to prove he was the boss.

Even though they were unaware of Cheney's offer, the issue was the subject of repeated conversations among the president's campaign advisers. Some like Dowd wanted to replace Cheney-his candidate was Rice-both because of the drag he had become and because they needed to think about the future of the party and who would run for president in 2008. "Many of us came to the conclusion there was a Cheney problem," Dowd said later. Rove, though, would not entertain it, and Bartlett put off the dissidents. "This is being considered," he said. "Stay tuned."

But privately, Bartlett warned Bush against the switch. Even though Bartlett was among the Bush aides who had been most frustrated at times with Cheney, he believed replacing him on the ticket would backfire. "People would say, 'What does it say about Bush?' " he reflected. "The Dems would pile on and would not give any credit. I don't think it would have successfully distanced himself from any of the controversial decisions. For every problem you think you're solving, you're creating two more." While replacing running mates between terms was common early in the country's history, no incumbent president had done it and gone on to win since Franklin Roosevelt. It would call into question the fundamental judgment of the president, suggesting the very first decision he made as a potential national leader had been wrong.

Bush went back to Cheney and turned him down; Cheney thought it was "a few days later," while Bush remembered it being "a few weeks later." Either way, Bush concluded, "I hadn't picked him to be a political asset; I had chosen him to help me do the job. That was exactly what he had done."

For Cheney, the offer was an act of statesmanship, a selfless proposition making it easier for the president to consider what most incumbents entertain in the backs of their minds heading toward reelection year. Yet at the same time, it also had the effect of taking the issue off the table early. Once he made up his mind, Bush rarely revisited a decision, and Cheney had now prompted him to recommit to his vice president.

"It was a clever move by Cheney," said one longtime friend of both men. "Cheney doesn't do things that aren't calculated and thought through." Cheney had given Bush a chance to reassure himself that he really was in charge. "Reminding people that he was the boss was his great weakness, whether it was the shadow of his dad or his own insecurity or Rove or Cheney," said the friend. "It was important to him. Emotionally, he had to remind people he was in charge." Cheney had played to that insecurity. Moreover, in raising the issue, "Cheney reminded Bush of Cheney's place in Bush world, and in the administration, in the White House, and of the centrality of his advice to Bush. 'This is something I value.' It's smart."

BUSH AND CHENEY were both surprised to pick up the Washington Post on September 8 and find an op-ed article by Jerry Bremer headlined "Iraq's Path to Sovereignty." In it, Bremer outlined a seven-part plan to turn Iraq back over to Iraqis, one that envisioned writing a constitution, submitting it to a national referendum, and then electing a government before America would pull back.

Bremer had gotten started in July by appointing a twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council to advise him on running the country in the interim. The council had thirteen Shiites, five Sunni Arabs, five Kurds, a Turkmen, and a Christian. But recent weeks had seen violence grow. American forces had tracked down Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, notorious for their cruelty, and killed them in a firefight. Hussein vowed revenge by promising to kill Bush's daughters, a threat that George and Laura kept from the twins even as the Secret Service ramped up security.

Then insurgents drove a truck bomb into the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, headquarters for the UN contingent, cratering the building and leaving twenty-three bodies littered amid the rubble. Among them was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the world body's top diplomat in Iraq and a man widely admired by the Bush administration and its critics alike. Bush had met Vieira de Mello when Condoleezza Rice brought him by the Oval Office. Now he was dead, a tragedy that would result in the United Nations pulling most of its foreign workers out of Baghdad.

The Americans increasingly retreated behind the walls of their own fortress, a secured area that became known as the Green Zone. The occupation authority that was building up was a haphazard affair, cobbled together with little understanding of the country it was tasked with running. Muslim workers in the cafeteria were left to serve bacon and pork. Some of the civilians recruited to manage America's new protectorate had been screened by the conservative Heritage Foundation. A twenty-four-year-old who worked at a real estate firm and had never been to the Middle East was assigned to rebuild the stock exchange. An army officer busied himself rewriting Iraq's traffic laws by cutting and pasting from Maryland's code. A twenty-one-year-old who had yet to finish college and whose most significant job until then had been ice-cream truck driver was among those charged with purging the Interior Ministry of militia members.

The American military strategy was still to pull troops out, despite the violence. There was a sense that the armed forces had done their job and the longer they remained, the more it would stimulate resistance. But Robert Blackwill, a longtime diplomat assigned by Rice to study the Iraq situation, sent her a memo urging as many as forty thousand more troops, a recommendation that went unheeded by Rumsfeld and the White House. "You should have flooded the zone in the first place," Powell said. "Rather than flooding the zone, Don wants a moat."

Bremer thought his plan outlined an orderly handover and was in keeping with everything he had been telling Washington for months. But Washington evidently had not gotten the message because his Post op-ed set off alarm bells in the White House and the Pentagon. Even Rumsfeld, who had just spent a couple days with Bremer, was surprised to read it in the newspaper. The plan suggested Americans would remain as occupiers for another two years. For Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had been pushing for a quick handover, this was unacceptable. They began thinking about how to accelerate the return of sovereignty.

But as they did so, Cheney's right hand, Scooter Libby, who would normally be the instrument of advancing the vice president's views, was increasingly distracted by the CIA leak scandal. Libby believed Bremer needed to be reversed but felt his own effectiveness was compromised.

On September 16, the CIA gave the Justice Department a memo outlining its internal probe and seeking an FBI investigation into who leaked Valerie Wilson's identity. The same day, Scott McClellan, who had moved up to replace Ari Fleischer as White House press secretary, told reporters that it was "totally ridiculous" to blame Karl Rove but offered no such defense of Libby.

News of the CIA request broke ten days later, when NBC News reported it. At the White House, the report of the investigation request was seen as a deliberate attempt by the CIA to draw attention away from a Senate decision to investigate the agency's flawed intelligence on Iraq. Tenet "was using that as a diversion and it worked," Adam Levine, a White House press aide, said later. Tenet wrote in his memoir that he had nothing to do with making the referral.

The Washington Post dealt the next blow, reporting on September 28 that "two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists" to out Valerie Wilson before Robert Novak's column ran, a sensational claim that roiled Washington with its implication of an orchestrated hit campaign. An unnamed senior official was quoted saying, "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge." The report was generated partly from a conversation between Mike Allen, a Post reporter, and Levine. It was true that Libby, Rove, and Ari Fleischer had talked with several journalists about Valerie Wilson, though not all before the Novak column and not all by making cold calls volunteering the information. And the phrase "before Novak's column ran" had been inserted by an editor who misunderstood the timing. Talking with reporters about Valerie Wilson after her identity was already disclosed by Novak was different from disclosing it in the first place.

The story drove a further wedge into the Bush-Cheney team. McClellan, who had denied that Rove had been involved, now confronted him again. Rove acknowledged that he had spoken with Novak.

"He said he'd heard that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA," Rove explained. "I told him I couldn't confirm it because I didn't know."

McClellan was bothered because Rove had never before volunteered even talking with Novak. "Were you involved in this in any way?" McClellan asked.

"No," Rove said. "Look, I didn't even know about his wife." He did not mention that he had also spoken with Matthew Cooper of Time about Wilson's wife.

Bush called to grill Rove too. "Are you the one behind this Novak column?" he remembered asking.

In the president's recollection, Rove told him that he had spoken with Novak but it "had nothing to do with Valerie Plame" and she "had never come up." If Bush's memory was correct, Rove had misled him.

Rove remembered the conversation differently. In his memoir, he wrote that he told Bush that Novak had asked him about Wilson and he replied, "I have heard that too," but that was all. "Bush sounded a little annoyed but took my word," Rove wrote.

The morning after the Post story, Bush passed along Rove's assurance to McClellan.

"Karl didn't do it," Bush told McClellan.

"I know-" McClellan began.

"He told me he didn't do it," Bush went on.

Andy Card gestured with his hands to indicate that Bush should not talk about it.

"What?" Bush asked with irritation. "That's what Karl told me."

"I know," Card said. "But you shouldn't be talking about it with anyone, not even me."

McClellan told Bush he planned to say at his briefing that it was a serious issue that should be examined.

"Yeah, I think that's right," Bush said. "I do believe it's a serious matter. And I hope they find who did it."

McClellan returned to let the president know he would say publicly that anyone involved would no longer work in the administration.

Bush agreed. "I would fire anybody involved," he said.

But while Rove and Libby were involved, so was Richard Armitage. Novak wrote a column on October 1 noting that his original source was "no partisan gunslinger," and Armitage realized that meant him. He called Colin Powell to admit his role and then approached prosecutors. While the State Department lawyer told the White House vaguely that the department had information it was sharing with prosecutors, he did not give any details, and the White House lawyers did not want to know. Wary of compromising the investigation, neither Powell nor Armitage told Bush or Cheney. Their caution would permanently sour their relationship with Cheney once he later learned of it.

Cheney was upset Rove had been exonerated from the White House podium while Libby had not. Libby scratched out notes of what he thought McClellan should say on his behalf: "People have made too much of the difference in how I described Karl and Libby. I've talked to Libby. I said it was rediculous [sic] about Karl and it is rediculous [sic] about Libby. Libby was not the source of the Novak story. And he did not leak classified information."

Libby showed it to Cheney, who added his own notes to the bottom of the page: "Has to happen today. Call out to key press saying same thing about Scooter as Karl. Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." Presumably, Cheney meant Libby had been forced to clean up the mess the two of them blamed on the CIA. Cheney took the issue to Bush, who agreed Libby should be cleared from the podium as well.

At 8:30 a.m. on October 4, Card called McClellan at home. "The president and vice president spoke this morning," Card said. "They want you to give the press the same assurance for Scooter that you gave for Karl."

McClellan called Libby to hear his denial directly.

"Were you involved in the leak in any way?" McClellan asked.

"No, absolutely not," Libby said.

McClellan then called four reporters to convey the denial.

THE IRAQ WAR was taking a toll inside the White House, and the situation on the ground was no better. Frustrated by Bremer's performance and Donald Rumsfeld's hands-off management of it, Rice prevailed upon Bush to create the Iraq Stabilization Group under her to improve coordination between Washington and Baghdad. When David Sanger of the New York Times heard, Rice confirmed it to him without letting Rumsfeld know the story was coming.

Rumsfeld erupted when he saw the newspaper on October 6. "The story indicates Condi stated that the reorganization was developed by herself, the Vice President, Powell and Rumsfeld," the defense secretary wrote in a memo to Bush and Cheney. "I was not consulted-only advised." If Rice was so eager to run the Iraq political account, Rumsfeld essentially said fine, he would be happy to off-load it. He recommended that "Jerry Bremer's reporting relationship be moved from DoD to the President, Condi Rice or Colin Powell, as you may determine." After all, Rumsfeld wrote with evident pique, Bremer already "has been reporting directly to Colin, Condi and you," and "Condi, in effect has been [sic] announced that that is the case."

Bush told Rice to calm Rumsfeld down. "You need to make it right with Don," he said.

He suggested she go to Cheney. She did, and he promised to talk with Rumsfeld.

When she saw Rumsfeld a week later, she pulled him aside and apologized.

Rumsfeld was unforgiving. "You're failing," he told her bluntly. "You could have said something in the NSC meeting in front of the president and the principals."

"Don," Rice replied, "you've made mistakes in your long career."

"Yes," he said, "but I've tried to clean them up."