Decision Points

morning of March 12. “Jim Comey is the acting attorney general, and he’s going to resign because you extended the TSP. So are a bunch of other Justice Department officials.”
    I was stunned. Nobody had told me that Comey, John Ashcroft’s deputy, had taken over Ashcroft’s responsibilities when he went in for surgery. If I had known that, I never would have sent Andy and Al to John’s hospital room.
    I asked to speak to Comey privately after the morning FBI briefing, which he attended in John Ashcroft’s place. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Jim, but I knew he had a distinguished record as a prosecutor in New York. I started by explaining that I had an obligation to do what was necessary to protect the country. I felt the TSP was essential to that effort. He explained his concerns about the problematic aspect of the program. “I just don’t understand why you are raising this at the last minute,” I said.
    He looked shocked. “Mr. President,” he said, “your staff has known about this for weeks.” Then he dropped another bomb. He wasn’t the only one planning to resign. So was FBI Director Bob Mueller . I was about to witness the largest mass resignation in modern presidential history, and we were in the middle of a war.
    I called Bob into the Oval Office. I had come to know him well over the past two and a half years. He was a good and decent man, a former Princeton hockey star who had served in the Marines and led the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco. Without hesitation, he agreed with Comey. If I continued the program over the Justice Department’s objection, he said, he couldn’t serve in my administration.
    I had to make a big decision, and fast. Some in the White House believed I should stand on my powers under Article II of the Constitution and suffer the walkout. Others counseled that I accept Justice’s objections, modify the program, and keep the administration intact.
    I was willing to defend the powers of the presidency under Article II. But not at any cost. I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Richard Nixon ’s firing of Watergate prosecutorArchibald Cox led his attorney general and deputy attorney general to resign. That was not a historical crisis I was eager to replicate. It wouldn’t give me much satisfaction to know I was right on the legal principles while my administration imploded and our key programs in the war on terror were exposed in the media firestorm that would inevitably follow.
    I decided to accommodate the Justice Department’s concern by modifying the part of the program they found problematic, while leaving the TSP in place. Comey and Mueller dropped their resignation threats. The surveillance program continued to produce results, and that was the most important thing.
    I was relieved to have the crisis over, but I was disturbed it had happened at all. I made clear to my advisers that I never wanted to be blindsided like that again. I did not suspect bad intentions on anyone’s part. One of the toughest questions every White House faces is how to manage the president’s time and when to bring policy disputes to his desk. The standoff over the surveillance program was a case of bad judgment. There was no shortage of disagreements in the years ahead, but nothing like this ever happened again.

    One of my favorite books is the fine historian David McCullough ’s biography of President Harry Truman . I admired Truman’s toughness, principle, and strategic vision. “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me,” he said when he took office suddenly in the final months of World War II. Yet the man from Missouri knew how to make a hard decision and stick by it. He did what he thought was right and didn’t care much what the critics said. When he left office in 1953, his approval ratings were in the twenties. Today he is viewed as one of America’s great presidents.
    After she became secretary of state, Condi gave me a biography of Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson . Both books reminded me how Truman’s decisions in the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the foundation for victory in the Cold War and helped shape the world I inherited as president. Truman forged the NATO alliance; signed the NationalSecurity Act of 1947, which created the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Defense Department; fought an unpopular war that enabled the rise of a democratic ally in South