The insider makes a quiet exit

Josh Bolten ’76, chief of staff to former President George W. Bush, is more quintessential policy wonk than politician, a man who takes “Princeton in the nation’s service” to heart. In the past nine years, he attracted little publicity. Yet, as policy adviser to the 2000 Bush campaign, then as deputy chief of staff, Office of Management and Budget director and finally as White House chief of staff, he has wielded sizeable influence and shouldered enormous responsibility.

When the second plane flew into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, then-Chief of Staff Andy Card whispered the news into the ear of a stunned Bush at a Florida school. Meanwhile, Bolten, who was Card’s deputy at the time, was in the White House with Vice President Dick Cheney, and both entered a secret bunker after the third plane hit the Pentagon. Seven years later, Bolten was with Bush when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoe at Bush during a press conference in Baghdad in December. In short, Josh Bolten has been through thick and thin, and he has Bush’s absolute trust, in ability and in loyalty.

From Karl Rove to senators and Hill staffers — some of whom are Democrats — to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, everyone seems to view Bolten as a good guy, an upstanding citizen and a hardworking and clear-thinking adviser. That is, to arguably one of the least popular presidents in history.

In an exit interview with The Daily Princetonian at his West Wing office on an evening in December, Bolten, 54, reflected on serving in the Bush administration.

“Well, you know, it’s much easier to be president if all you wanted to do was be popular … and you don’t ask the people or the international community to do hard things,” he said, slowly and calmly, in the manner of a man who chooses his words carefully, not to sound smarter but to convey exactly what he means. “This president has asked this country and the international community to do some very hard but necessary things.”

The president, the president — Bolten never forgets to bring the focus back to his boss in the few interviews he has conducted over the years, with Larry King, with the late Tim Russert on “Meet The Press” and with a couple of Washington Post reporters.

“It’s hard to do this job if you don’t have a lot of confidence in your boss,” Bolten told me. “And I’ve been blessed with having a boss in whom I have enormous confidence, that he’s very smart, he absorbs a lot of information quickly. And he makes good, reasoned decisions based on principle.”

It didn’t seem like he was trying to prove a point. He didn’t let on any pretenses that his audience might not agree. His confidence in Bush wasn’t pushy; it was a matter-of-fact statement supported by nothing but resolute, unwavering loyalty.

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Bolten said he believes, or at least hopes, that the Bush legacy will be reflected on positively: “When you think about the judgment of history, you’ve gotta think: Compared to what? The president has made some very tough choices, which I think, compared to what the trajectory would have been without those choices, stand up very well in history.”

That kind of steadfast belief in the boss is what compels him to name you chief of staff in the last two years of an increasingly chaotic administration. When Bolten succeeded Card in March 2006, the sense that the White House was in turmoil was palpable within and without. People were beginning to question the motives and efficacy of the Iraq war and laid heavy criticism of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

“Josh moved in during the final years, when people started to leave and move out,” Nick Allard ’74, a lobbyist for Patton Boggs who has known Bolten for many years, said in an interview. Allard, a Democrat, said that “Josh was a real stabilizing source. Sure, you had all those problems, [but] you can imagine what it would have been without him.”

In a recent Newsweek interview, Card said that if he could go back in time, he would have “left a year and a half earlier.” He also said that Bolten “does a better job at it than I did.”

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The job wasn’t easy, at least in part because it involved firing key staff. The shake-up was no piece of cake: Besides Card, those who left the White House in 2006 included Treasury Secretary John Snow, Press Secretary Scott McClellan and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ’54.

Firings, Bolten said in ironic reflection in a June 2008 visit to campus, are “something I’m personally ill-suited to do. But I’ve had a lot of practice.”

Early to rise — though not as early as Card — and late to rest, hounded by constant criticism, being charged with the unpleasant task of potentially making some very powerful people resent you and possibly being remembered as helping a man who ruined America. Why do it?

“Government service you get to do is a privilege. Government service in a time of consequence is a greater privilege,” Bolten said. “Because it is a time when the country needs good service all the more, and the stakes are big. So would I have rather been here in more pleasant times, in quieter times, with a better economy, with no wars? Absolutely. But do I feel privileged to have been here in a time of consequence? All the more so.”

Jerry Cox ’76, a friend of Bolten’s since both were in the Wilson School, said it was unlikely that Bolten ever considered his personal legacy. “I doubt it crossed his mind, how he would come out at the end of this,” explained Cox, the founder of a non-partisan think tank. “He had devoted himself completely. I honestly don’t know what other life he has.”

Bolten grew up and has spent the majority of his life in Washington, with the exception of brief interludes at Princeton and Stanford Law School before working at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and as a staffer in the White House during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. After a brief stint teaching at Yale, he left for Goldman Sachs in London, where he was chief counsel and a lobbyist for European Union affairs. He was the middle of three children in a Jewish family. His father Seymour Bolten, a World War II veteran and prisoner of war, was an undercover CIA agent. His mother, Stacy Bolten, taught history at George Washington University.

Bolten said that his desire to work in government was inspired by his father. “I really admired my father and his dedication to his work and serving the country,” he recalled. “And I knew what passion that gave him and what satisfaction that gave him, even though it paid poorly and the hours were long.”

The family was deeply intellectual. Ned Nalle ’76, Bolten’s college roommate and longtime friend, said that though weekends visiting the Bolten family were fun and exciting, there would inevitably be debate sessions. Seymour and Stacy, Nalle said, “would ask very challenging questions, and would push, push, push.” Yes or no answers were not acceptable.

It was in this environment that Bolten developed a propensity for entertaining opposing points of view. At Princeton — after attending the prestigious St. Alban’s School in Northwest D.C. — he was chair of the Honor Committee, president of the sophomore class and later president of Ivy Club.

He would come home to his roommates after resolving disputes, explaining that he had made sure to be fair. He was like a judge, Nalle said. “So and so says this. And the other side says this and that.” And so, “Mr. Justice Bolten,” as his friends called him, would come to a decision and “felt good that he had heard both sides,” Nalle said.

He used this same approach when he became Bush’s right-hand man, scheduling meetings between the president and others who didn’t necessarily agree, including dozens of congressmen and academics, immediately after taking the job. Bolten said he wanted to “make sure that the president hears all the sensible, legitimate points of view so that he can make a well-informed and reasoned judgment.”

Did the effort to be more inclusive of views change the image of the White House? Bolten isn’t so sure. “Changing the image of the White House and the president in the sixth year of the presidency, even if I may have had aspirations to do it, they were probably unrealistic … either that or I wasn’t up to the task,” he said.

In undertaking tasks, Bolten works in quiet, unobtrusive ways. “He doesn’t seek much publicity,” his brother Randall ’75 said in an interview after Bolten’s chief of staff nomination. “He is, in real life, much the way he seems when you see him speaking in a press conference. He is very sharp, very low-key and very witty.”

Ironically, Bolten’s under-the-radar persona is accompanied by widespread popularity. “People would leave a meeting with him and feel like they were listened to, and they went away liking him and respecting him — even people who disagreed with him violently still felt favorable towards him,” Cox said.

Allard noted, however, that though Bolten had always been “low key,” working in the Bush administration made him “by virtue of necessity, more of an inside person.” This became a source of tension between Bolten and Hill Democrats, when Bolten — acting under orders from Bush — refused to turn over documents relating to the firing of U.S. attorneys. Congress voted to cite him and former White House counsel Harriet Miers for contempt. The case is being litigated, but as of Jan. 20, Bolten is no longer custodian of those documents.

Despite the partisan tensions — which Bolten said in June is one of the biggest problems in the Bush administration — he made a serious effort to make the transition from the Bush presidency to the Obama administration as seamless as possible. He arranged a meal with incoming Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and all the living former chiefs of staff. In fact, Bolten was still heading into the office on Monday, Martin Luther King Day and the last full day of the Bush administration, when Nalle called him; most key staffers had already handed in their security clearances. Bolten did the same thing on the last day of the administration of Bush’s father. “I remembered saying to him, ‘Why [are you] working so ridiculously hard?’ ” Nalle said. “And he said, ‘That’s just good government.’ ”

This kind of unending devotion to a job is a trait Bolten has carried for a long time. Nalle said that while they were roommates, Bolten would stay up all night to work on papers or study for exams.

“Whatever my dreams and aspirations were” at graduation, Bolten said in June, “I had the fortune, in the jobs I’ve stumbled into, to exceed them.”

Good government and hard work are what Bolten aspires to do, through and through. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D), who was an executive at Goldman Sachs when Bolten worked there during the Clinton years, had told The New York Times that Bolten isn’t “ideological on much of anything.”

Bolten disputed this characterization. “No, that’s not true,” he said of being cast as a plain pragmatist. “I do have an ideology. Maybe they’re giving me the compliment of suggesting that I’m not an ideologue, which to me suggests somebody who is impractical and intentionally oblivious to the actual facts you’re dealing with. But I do have principles. Most of them are conservative.”

It seems, though, that whatever Bolten believes, it doesn’t matter too much to anyone. “I think Josh was the ultimate staffer,” Allard said, explaining that Bolten’s role was in implementation, and though “what he himself believed was almost irrelevant,” his ideologies were “sympathetic and compatible” to those of the Bush administration.

Whether that’s true all the time, no one knows; after all, it’s unlikely that two people can agree on all issues all the time. But if there was any private disagreement, Bolten wasn’t going to acknowledge it. For all intents and purposes, it made no difference in how he did his job.

Cox explained that in Bolten’s earlier years, he had worked for former Rep. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), a strong abortion rights advocate. “He did that job very effectively as well,” Cox said. “And if he had any opposite political views, it certainly didn’t conflict with when he was working for Packwood, and it didn’t reflect on how he worked for Bush.”

Bolten, however, doesn’t shy away from putting his interests on public display. He plays bass guitar in a rock band with Card and Card’s daughter. The Compassionates, as they are called, is “available for weddings and bar mitzvahs if anyone needs us,” Bolten said.

Bolten is currently dating Dede McClure. They met in high school, and she played in his band then, but they broke up when he left for Princeton. Thirty years later, they met again, and they now live together in Bethesda, Md. He’s an avid motorcyclist and rides a Harley Davidson. For the Christmas holidays last December, White House florists put up a Christmas tree decorated with Harley Davidson ornaments in Bolten’s office.

“He’s hard to categorize,” Allard said. “He’s the ultimate insider, a button-down technician of the bureaucracy. On the other hand, he’s a guitar-playing rock-band enthusiast and motorcycle rider who surprised everyone by bringing Bo Derek to Reunions [a few years ago].”

As the days of the Bolten-led bureaucracy come to an end, the Wilson School concentrator is planning on taking a break, perhaps indulging more in the rock band and motorcycle side of life.

“So I’ve been in an increasingly smaller bubble for almost 10 years now,” he said. “I’m guessing that I and a lot of my colleagues feel that we are tired.”