Perspective

Exit strategies all their own

By PETER BAKER, Washington Post
Published October 14, 2007

There is so much turnover at the White House that on one recent Friday there were four farewell parties or last-day exits. President Bush poses for so many Oval Office photos with departing aides it feels like an assembly line. They have left for different reasons - new professional opportunities, a gentle or not-so-gentle nudge, young kids - but the cumulative exodus of so many key people at once has transformed the White House as it heads into the dwindling months of the Bush presidency. Under the best of circumstances the place is a pressure cooker that burns out its denizens in short order. Presidential aides arrive at 6 or 6:30 a.m. and do not leave until 8 at night or sometimes later. Even then, they remain tethered to the job through always-buzzing mobile telephones and BlackBerries. From the Washington Post, here are the thoughts of a few of them after they left.

William Inboden

"There's this overriding awareness that we're living and acting for the judgment of history," said William Inboden, who resigned last month as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council.

And as history judges, Iraq is always there. "It constantly looms," he said. "It is the inescapable presence, the inescapable reality. You see it in all these ways. People. Time. Money. Diplomatic and political capital. It sort of becomes the reality you live with and obviously we have to be able to."

The day after he left, Inboden kept reaching to his naked hip expecting to find his White House BlackBerry. It wasn't there.

Sara Taylor

Leaving the White House can resemble a 12-step program. "The first couple weeks are euphoria because you can sleep and all that," said Sara Taylor, the White House political director who spent eight years working for Bush before leaving in May. "I can't really explain it to you, but when you leave, there's just something that lifts." Then comes the depression. "It hit me in August - what do I do, how do I function, nobody calls me anymore. It was a month of weirdness. And now I'm back in my groove."

Peter Wehner

"I know the intentions were noble and the arguments to go to war - we believed there were weapons of mass destruction and (Saddam Hussein) was a malevolent figure," said Peter Wehner, who was White House director of strategic initiatives until August. "The fact that it didn't go so well is something you struggle with."

One cost has been friendship. Some people who were once close no longer talk with him, Wehner said. "The view is 'Pete was a nice guy, but he was taken over by the dark side, joined Rove world.' "

One who shares that view is journalist Joe Klein. "There are a number of us who were friendly with Pete back in the day who think he drank the Kool-Aid," Klein said. In May, Klein used his Time magazine blog to directly challenge a Wehner essay on politics and the war, chastising his onetime friend for ignoring "the lives lost and shattered" and the "vast damage" to U.S. standing done by the Iraq war. "I have two pieces of career advice," Klein wrote to Wehner. "Stop writing this swill and think about penance. Take some time to clear your head, a lot of time, and pay for your sins by emptying bedpans at Walter Reed."

Asked about such criticism, Wehner said he did not want to discuss anyone in particular. But he said he has been pained by the personal estrangements caused by the war. "We were friends," he said, "and I'm sad about that."

Dan Bartlett

As Bush's counselor, Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove often quarreled in the White House. By the end, colleagues said, they barely spoke except in formal meetings. Rove usually favored an in-your-face political strategy, while Bartlett advocated a less aggressive approach. And friends said Bartlett felt that Rove still saw him as the young kid who came to work for him 15 years ago.

Neither wants to talk about that now, and they spoke with each other by telephone recently. Bartlett shares Rove's aversion to revisiting the past. Asked about regrets, Bartlett said, "I can think of a banner on a certain ship," a reference to the infamous "Mission Accomplished" sign behind Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003.

After he left the White House, Bartlett bought an iPhone to replace his BlackBerry. "I was convinced it was broken on a Sunday afternoon because I literally didn't have a single e-mail all day," he said. "I had my wife send me an e-mail to make sure it was working. It went right through. So to go from 500 e-mails a day to zero was strange."

Bartlett left after his wife had another baby, leaving them with three children under age 4. He is 36. "I feel like 56," he said. "I'm starting to get some of those years back." He has known no profession but working for George W. Bush. "It's really weird to think I've got an entire life ahead of me," he said. But his youth carries an advantage. When he left, he told colleagues, "I'm younger than all of you so I'll write the last book."

Meghan O'Sullivan

It had been just a few days since Meghan O'Sullivan left her job at the White House. Just days since she gave up her Secret Service pass, her classified hard drive and her entree to the president. Mere days since she gave up any day-to-day responsibility for Iraq.

Too soon, evidently, for the dreams to end. "In fact, I was dreaming about Iraq last night," she said. "And I woke up and thought, 'When do you think this will stop?' "

As President Bush's top Iraq adviser while the war sank into an abyss over the past few years, O'Sullivan lived it every waking hour - and many of the sleeping ones. The dreams came every night, often prosaic, sometimes straight out of a war movie, filled with violence and menace. It was, she said, "all consuming."

Now she has left a White House under siege, and the war weighs on her. She still thinks regularly of the Iraqi leaders she has known who have been killed. "There is a certain heaviness that one carries with you when you have been in any realm of responsibility over something as serious as this and when there have been so many sacrifices," she said. "That does stay with you and you're conscious of it every day."

As she approaches age 40, she wanted "to make room for other things in my life," including apple-picking with her niece.

"The first thing I'm going to do is recapture my life," she said. "I'm taking a poetry class here. I'm going to do a triathlon. And I'm going to break all kinds of records on sleep. And then I'm going to devote the time to thinking about what happened, to thinking about the lessons learned."

[Last modified October 13, 2007, 21:16:14]