Washington watch

The first hint that it really could be McCain, and not Jeb Bush, for the Republicans in 2008. And Anatol Lieven says goodbye to the Carnegie Endowment
July 22, 2005
Looks like McCain in 2008
Forget that little joke in the Cheney household about Laura Bush being the best Republican candidate to beat Hillary Clinton in 2008. The fix is already in for John McCain, despite the bad blood between McCain and the Bush team over the way they destroyed him with push polls ("How would you feel if you knew he had a black baby?") in the South Carolina primary in 2000 (McCain and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi girl). Bush's mountain-biking partner Mark McKinnon, the strategist and television ad expert who ran Bush's air war in 2000 and 2004 has signed for McCain's presidential run in '08. It is hard to think that could happen without Bush's approval, which suggests the Bushies mean it when they tell people that the next in line in the dynasty, Florida governor Jeb, is not going to run. McKinnon is known as an oddball (his television company is called Maverick Media) with liberal tendencies. He used to work for Texas Democratic governor Ann Richards, who once described Bush as being born "with a silver foot in his mouth." But things may not be so simple—the word is that McKinnon's deal with McCain has an escape clause, saying he can back out if Jeb Bush or Condi Rice throw their hats into the ring.

Anatol Lieven leaves Carnegie
Life can get rough in the American think tank world, particularly for British scholars who don't know their place. The Times's best-ever Russian correspondent Anatol Lieven—also a regular Prospect writer—has departed from the Carnegie Endowment in unhappy circumstances. His powerful new book on American nationalism (America Right or Wrong) inspired a waspish New York Times piece hinting that he was both anti-American and antisemitic. That's the neocon way of giving you both barrels. It was very unfair, and very lethal in modern Washington, potentially threatening the fund-raising streams on which think tanks depend. Carnegie grandees deny being influenced by it, but told Lieven that they were unable to guarantee any more funding to keep him going. (In fact, their fundraising was under budget because they seem to have assumed that the jailed Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky would continue to fork out millions, despite being behind bars. Not so.) Carnegie president Jessica Matthews, a veteran of the famously vacuous global affairs office in the national security council of Jimmy Carter's White House, came up with a compromise, a short-term project that would send Lieven back to Moscow, out of the way of vengeful neocons. Lieven was saved by the New America Foundation, which found him money for two more years.

Joined-up intelligence
Maybe there is something to this post-9/11 pledge to break down the bureaucratic barriers that kept the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies from talking to one another. Condi Rice has hired Henry Crumpton to replace Cofer Black as terrorism chief at the state department. (Black was the guy who thrilled Bush at the Camp David meetings after 9/11 by promising that the CIA could not just take out the Taleban in Afghanistan, but leave them with "flies walking on their eyeballs.") Harry the Crump is one of the few figures who can claim both CIA and FBI credentials. His last job was running the CIA's national resources division, which means he was in charge of US oil interests. Before that, he was director of the CIA's centre for counter-terrorism and before that he was deputy head of international terrorism operations for the FBI.

Carl Bernstein's bucks
Thanks to the unveiling of Deep Throat, Carl Bernstein has become trendy again, which means his long-planned book on Hillary Clinton is now one of the hottest items in publishing. Foreign and subsidiary rights that were proving hard to shift are now going for telephone numbers, although not as high as the Woodward and Bernstein instant book on Mark Felt, the deputy FBI chief who was their ultimate Watergate source. Not that they need the money, even with Bernstein's expensive tastes. Two years ago, the duo scored a cool $5m by selling all their Watergate papers (except the bits about Deep Throat) to the University of Texas. Their old boss, Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, has hinted that the paper waived its own rights of ownership because Bernstein was a bit short of the readies. Not any more.

Nice Mr Hadley
The president's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has started going to staff meetings at the state department. But the Rachmaninov-loving Hadley, a former US navy officer who went to Yale Law School before rising in the Republican ranks to become deputy national security adviser to Condoleezza Rice in Bush's first term, has continued to defer to her now that she runs state and he has succeeded her. They are also friends; Hadley and his wife are seldom seen on the social circuit without Rice. It was Cheney who first brought Hadley into the Bush campaign team back in the 1990s. Hadley explains that he navigates between all these 900-pound gorillas because "I work for the 2,000-pound gorilla," but his extraordinary talent for self-effacement also helps. He's so good at it that flying back by commercial airline from the president's ranch at Crawford last year, he was stopped and made to take his shoes and belt off by the security guards at Waco airport.