- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A
former senior aide to President Bush apologized on Monday after being quoted
in an article saying a band of "Mayberry Machiavellis" were running
a White House where politics trumped policy.
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- The Esquire magazine article -- which extensively quoted
John DiIulio, the former head of Bush's stalled effort to aid religious
charities -- represents a rare criticism by a one-time insider of a Bush
White House which has placed a near-total lid on internal dissent.
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- "John DiIulio agrees that his criticisms were groundless
and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. He sincerely apologizes
and is deeply remorseful," DiIulio's office said in a statement. The
statement was distributed by the University of Pennsylvania, where DiIulio
works as a professor.
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- The article, in the January issue of Esquire, quoted
DiIulio and unnamed White House officials as saying top Bush aide Karl
Rove had assumed unprecedented power at the White House and that political
calculations regularly trumped policy concerns.
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- "There is no precedent in any modern White House
for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,"
DiIulio was quoted as saying. "What you've got is everything, and
I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the
Mayberry Machiavellis," he said.
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- Mayberry, North Carolina, the fictional setting for the
classic television hit "The Andy Griffith Show," is a symbol
for small-town simplicity and backwardness.
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- DiIulio said in the article that domestic policy in particular
had suffered in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
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- "Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on
social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge
and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking,"
he said. He called the Office of Homeland Security, created after last
year's attacks, "remarkably slapdash."
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- Under Rove, he said, the White House has sought to steer
legislation and policy "as far right as possible."
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- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer rejected the article's
charges. "Any suggestion that the White House makes decisions that
are not based on sound policy reasons is baseless and groundless,"
Fleischer said.
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- He said DiIulio, a Democrat who resigned last year after
sparring with religious conservatives, had spoken with officials of his
old office at the White House about the article but declined to elaborate.
"I think his statement speaks for itself. He did issue an apology."
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- DiIulio said in a statement Monday that he had held a
long conversation with the article's author, Ron Suskind, which he had
believed was off-the-record, and that he had then offered Suskind a long
memo in October outlining his views.
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- "Several quotes and anecdotes concerning or attributed
to me in the article are not from that response," he said.
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- Suskind said that he had made clear he did not regard
the cited conversation as off the record and that he had checked the accuracy
of comments attributed to DiIulio.
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