No one who has read or studied the large literature of memoirs and biographies of the Clintons and their circle can doubt the intimacy and the mutual dependence of their political and personal partnership.

No one can reasonably expect that partnership to end should Hillary Clinton be elected president. But the country must decide whether it is comfortable with such a sharing of the power and authority of the highest office in the land.

Yeah, we know from several participants that there was a meeting in the Old Executive Office Building on Martin Luther King Day weekend of 2002. Now, remember, this is just four months after the attacks on New York and Washington. And we still have things going on in Afghanistan, the war is not over there. There's still a lot to be done, and there is a meeting, at which only one or two people attend from each agency.

It appears that it was chaired by Wayne Downing, who had been Deputy National Security Adviser for Counterterrorism; he had taken over from Dick Clarke. And it appears as well that the briefing papers had been produced by the Office of the Vice President, and this is a fairly strange thing to some of those who were there. One of them, who was a very senior official, said to me, "It really was not clear at this period who was in charge of the U.S. Government," which is a very striking thing. ...

I think it really meant that no one knew whether the national security adviser was playing her traditional role as the coordinator of all the different agencies involved in the national security process, or whether the vice president's office had slipped into that role. Remember, there were a lot of questions about who was going to be chairing the meetings, if the vice president was going to be regularly attending principals committee meetings? And there were a lot of uncertainties as to who was really running the show.

Cheney has built up an enormous staff, much larger than any previous vice president. And he clearly has the president's ear on foreign policy issues, at a minimum in a way that no other vice president has ever had. And so, the papers at this meeting are circulated. ... They discussed just what would need to be done to go to war in, essentially, four months' time. And obviously, in meeting like this, you don't come to conclusions, you throw out all the problems that need to be assessed.

Well, at some point after this, [National Security Adviser] Condi Rice, who apparently didn't know about this meeting, got wind of it. And she insisted that all the papers be destroyed, and that there would be no further meetings along these lines.

What was her reaction to not being invited to the hearing, or the meeting?

According to those who were involved, she was aghast. She was furious. And frankly, for a national security adviser not to be invited to a meeting on whether the United States was going to go to war, and what it would take to do [so], is mind-boggling.


What does it tell you, or what did it tell your source?

Well, those people who were involved in this, and many others who didn't know about this meeting, but when told about it, said, "Yes, that's just further evidence of the extent to which a government within a government was driving foreign policy." That the traditional statutory process of a National Security Council that brings together the secretaries of state and defense, and all the other agencies sitting around deliberating, that that was no longer where the action was. That the meetings were happening, but they weren't necessarily the meetings that mattered. ...