Interesting questions
With Cheney now known to be delusional (insisting there's still a change WMDs will be found, etc) his being in charge of the transition was, in hindsight, probably a bad idea.
The Clinton-Bush Transition Seemed to Be Tidy. Was It?
By TODD S. PURDUM
ASHINGTON, April 2 — Aside from deaths in office, it was among the shortest presidential transitions in American history: the five and a half weeks from the Supreme Court's ruling in the disputed election of 2000 to George W. Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001. And yet it was considered among the smoothest.
The transition was led by Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, himself White House chief of staff to Gerald R. Ford. The new defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was also filling a post he had held under Mr. Ford. Other top officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, had served in similar arenas in the first Bush administration, and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, was staying on from the Clinton years.
It was a team that was right up to speed.
Or was it?
"There are a lot of changes in eight years, both on the surface and more subtle changes, in whatever areas you want to talk about, and certainly in national security," said Charles O. Jones, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who is an expert on presidential transitions.
"It's possible that previous experience, which we normally think of as an advantage, can also kind of lock you out of attention to all of what has changed during that time, simply because you weren't a part of it," Mr. Jones said. "That isn't to say they ignored it. It's just to say that all the subtleties involved are not something that you're up to speed on, necessarily."
That was the essence of the politically explosive accusations last week by the former counterterrorism coordinator for the Clinton and Bush administrations, Richard A. Clarke: that the Bush team had viewed terrorism as important, but not urgent. In addition, the staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported that the deputy director of central intelligence, John E. McLaughlin, had "felt a great tension" involving "the new administration's need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency."
