O’Neill: No Secret Files Were Used

Former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill denied Tuesday that classified documents were used in a book he participated in about his years in the Bush administration, and said government lawyers had approved the release of the materials.

Reacting to an announcement by the Treasury Department that it was launching an investigation into why an agency document stamped “secret” was used to illustrate an O’Neill interview Sunday night on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” O’Neill said, “The truth is, I didn’t take any documents at all.”

O’Neill told NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday that he had asked the Treasury Department’s chief legal counsel if he could “have the documents that are OK for me to have” for use in the book “The Price of Loyalty,” written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind. O’Neill was the principal source for the book and read the manuscript before it was published.

O’Neill said he believed that the Treasury investigation would show that Treasury employees who collected the materials he gave to Suskind to draw on as sources for the book had acted within the law.

A cover page for the documents might have suggested that they were classified material, O’Neill said, but “I don’t think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 documents.”

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters he was incredulous when he heard his longtime friend had gotten involved in a book that might be critical of the administration. He said he tried to convince O’Neill not to go ahead with the project.

“I picked up the phone and called him and said, ‘What is this business? Someone tells me you’re going to write ... one of those insider things,’ ” Rumsfeld recalled.

Rumsfeld said O’Neill assured him that the book would be “about policy and substance.”

This month, when Rumsfeld heard that O’Neill had in fact come out with a book critical of the administration, he called him again.

“I called him up and I said, ‘You didn’t go and do that, did you, Paul? I can’t believe that!’ “Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld said he has not read the book, but he challenged its assertion, as quoted in news accounts, that Bush planned from the administration’s earliest days to oust Saddam Hussein. He said that although the Bush White House had inherited the policy of “regime change” in Iraq from the Clinton administration, Bush made the decision to go to war “after trying everything else in the world.”

“The idea that he came into office with a predisposition to invade Iraq, I think, is a total misunderstanding of the situation,” Rumsfeld said.

He said the book’s portrayal of Bush as detached from policymaking and that he made decisions solely out of political motives was a “night-and-day” contrast to his experience with the president.

“I certainly don’t see validity to his criticism of the president at all,” Rumsfeld said. “My experience with the president is totally to the contrary.”

O’Neill told the “Today” show that he will “probably” vote for Bush in November, and said that he was chagrined at some of the “vivid” language he used during his hundreds of hours of interviews with Suskind.

“If I could take it back, I would take it back,” he said of a quote in which he said that Bush at Cabinet meetings was “like a blind man in a room full of deaf people.”

The O’Neill flap continued to spill over to the presidential campaign. Democratic contender Wesley K. Clark served with O’Neill in President Ford’s administration, when Clark was a White House fellow and O’Neill was deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Campaigning Tuesday in Manchester, N.H., Clark defended O’Neill and criticized the Bush administration for launching the investigation. He contrasted the quick move to investigate O’Neill with the slow pace of the inquiry into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, after her husband criticized Bush for allegedly overstating the threat to the U.S. posed by Iraq.

Times staff writer Eric Slater contributed to this report from Manchester, N.H.