A message for the prez
Sen. Chuck Hagel has some unvarnished advice for George W. Bush
Battered by the bad news out of Iraq, President George W. Bush decided it was time to stiffen the spines of some anxious Republicans on Capitol Hill last week. So he went to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and held an hourlong pep rally in a basement conference room at the Capitol. Many of the 200 House and Senate Republicans in attendance emerged to say they were reassured. Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander called it "choir practice." But not for Chuck Hagel.
The 57-year-old Republican senator from Nebraska said the appearance by the president left more than a little to be desired. Bush "talked for an hour and did not take a single question," says Hagel. "He didn't listen, and I think this president needs to listen more. If he had taken questions he would have heard some things that might have been helpful."
The comments were vintage Hagel--calmly stated but brutally frank and increasingly troubling to an unsteady White House. Fellow Vietnam War veteran John McCain has long been the chief maverick among Senate Republicans, but it is Hagel, with his lower profile and sober demeanor, who may now be emerging as a more potent symbol of the angst that congressional Republicans are feeling over the direction of the war in Iraq--and its political consequences.
There's little doubt that Hagel has earned the right to speak up. A child of the Sand Hills of western Nebraska, he was working as a radio disc jockey when--along with his younger brother Tom--he volunteered for service in Vietnam. The brothers ended up in the same Army unit, and in March 1968, their armored personnel carrier rolled over a mine and went up in flames. Hagel, his face and chest on fire, dragged what he thought was his brother's lifeless body from the vehicle. Both survived, however, and spent months recovering in hospital beds next to each other. Chuck Hagel later became a successful businessman and moved into GOP politics.
"He is one of the few people [here] who actually fought in a war. I listen to him differently because of that," says Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee. Hagel also speaks from a powerful perch as the second-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There have been 19 Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq in 17 months, and Hagel has used that platform to tell the president that, had he heeded some different voices before the invasion of Iraq, he would not be in the current mess.
Hagel, who also sits on the Intelligence Committee, says that Bush "may be more isolated than any president in recent memory" and therefore susceptible to faulty advice. Much of that advice, Hagel says, has come from Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and former Pentagon official Richard Perle. But the problem, in Hagel's view, was compounded by the president's lack of foreign-policy experience.
"I think you've got a president who is not schooled, educated, experienced in foreign policy in any way, versus his father," Hagel says. "I think he was philosophically, intellectually more in tune with the neoconservatives'approach to 'let's go get them, and we'll worry about it later.' "
But later is now. And in Hagel's view, the administration in paying the price for being a bit too sure of itself before the war began. "I have always believed that a good, healthy dose of humility is the best prescription for anything that ails you politically," he says. "In this business of governing there are so many uncontrollables . . . and when those uncontrollables occur you are going to need friends, you're going to need some margins to govern. If you're arrogant, or are perceived as arrogant, you have no margin. And the first time you slip or stumble . . . then it'll be disastrous for you."
Arrogance, Hagel said, led some in the administration to believe that the U.S. entry into Iraq would be smooth. "What was said by our senior people going into Iraq about how we would be greeted, how we would be welcomed . . . .You have to understand the uncontrollables, the unpredictables."
Time for contemplation? Now Bush has got himself in a rut, Hagel says. "We need new ideas, new thinking. That's what I would tell the president:, 'Mr. President, you've got to spend some time by yourself . . . go run or look out a window.' He needs to spend time thinking through these deep, complicated issues."
Asked if Bush deserves to be re-elected, Hagel offers a response that's telling in its own way. "That's up to the American voters," he says. "I will vote for him, and I will support him, am supporting him, for re-election, but the American voters will make that decision."
Hagel's comments haven't endeared him to the White House, but those who have followed his career aren't surprised. He is part of a group of Republican senators that sometimes frustrates both the White House and the GOP leadership with its unwieldy independence. "I happen to say what I think, and I'm very blunt. That's just the way I am," Hagel recently told his hometown newspaper. Partly for that reason, Hagel grew close to his fellow Vietnam veteran, McCain, whom he endorsed for president in March 1999--one of only four senators to do so. After McCain fell, Hagel was on Bush's short list of vice presidential prospects. He won re-election to a second Senate term in 2002 with an incredible 83 percent of the vote, and some believe he may be presidential timber down the road.
For now, though, Hagel is content to offer critiques from the Senate. And he does see some room for hope. He believes the only path to success in Iraq is in repackaging the entire enterprise as an international effort. To the extent that the administration is following that course, he believes that it is moving in the right direction. Hagel himself has become an unlikely internationalist; he hails from a traditionally isolationist state but one that now depends heavily on exports. He traveled to 60 countries in a previous career as a cellphone entrepreneur, and in 1990 ran the G-7 summit meeting of foreign leaders. It's that forum (now the G-8), being held next month in Georgia, that Hagel thinks is the place to start rebuilding goodwill. Bush needs to "talk to our G-8 partners about how we are going to work together, and try to fasten back together our common purpose." Hagel says that if Bush reaches out to the other world leaders there, "I think he could overcome the questions about credibility."
Still, Hagel isn't trying to fool himself, the president, or anyone else about the enormity of the job ahead. "There are no good options in Iraq," he says. "It's going to be uncertain, it's going to be messy, and it's going to be dangerous." That's the way war is, after all. And Chuck Hagel understands that better than most.
This story appears in the May 31, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.