A Time to Regroup

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But whether or not he's in trouble with the law, friends say, he's certainly in trouble with Bush. Rove will continue managing the intersection of politics and policy in the White House but will have to regain the unfettered powers he once held. "The President's relationship with Karl has been damaged over the scandal," a Bush friend says. A source close to Rove says when Bush asked Rove whether he was responsible for leaking Plame's CIA identity to columnist Robert Novak, Rove told him "absolutely not." While that may have been strictly true, Fitzgerald's indictment suggests that Rove did at least discuss Wilson's wife with Novak, as he did with TIME's Matthew Cooper. As for Cheney, who retained Libby as the scandal unfolded and did not follow the advice of some to move him out five months ago, his relationship with Bush has suffered "a strain, not a rupture," says a presidential adviser. That much was clear when the White House let it be known that Card had called Cheney to inform him of the choice of Miers. In earlier times, he would have been intimately involved in such a decision.

Cheney's standing has suffered mainly because Libby emerges as such a liability. Fitzgerald threw the book at him not for anything he said to reporters but for what he said to the FBI and the grand jury. The indictments suggest that the aide whose aim was to spin the war might have tried to spin the prosecutor. "Lying was a remarkable act of stupidity on Libby's part," says Richard Nixon's former White House counsel John Dean. "He's old enough to know better. He watched Watergate and Iran-contra. To try to pull the leg of the grand jury was really quite remarkable."

As expected, Libby promptly resigned, and Bush and Cheney expressed their regrets and followed with the inevitable promise to focus on the nation's business. By itself, the departure of Libby won't necessarily affect Bush Administration policy toward Iraq. Although Libby was one of the earliest and most urgent proponents of the war, he doesn't seem to have been as influential in charting U.S. policy since the invasion. But the indictments once again cast light on the Administration's case for invading Iraq and come against a backdrop of growing discontent about the war and where it's headed among some of Bush's former allies.

Until recently, the doubts about Bush from the right have focused on the mismanagement of the war rather than on the decision to go to war. But even before the Libby indictments, the wall of silence had been crumbling. First there was the Oct. 19 speech by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, in which Wilkerson charged that a "cabal" of Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had "flummoxed" a President who is "not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either." Even more stinging was the interview given by Brent Scowcroft--National Security Adviser to Bush's father during the first Gulf War--to the New Yorker, in which he not only questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq but also criticized the wider Bush doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East.