(from nytimes.com)
"Mr. Rove can take heart in one fact: so far every other senior official caught up by the cascading series of questions that were touched off by 16 words in Mr. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address has survived, even prospered. Three of Mr. Bush’s closest advisers were involved in the drafting or reviewing of the now-discredited language, which said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
The most senior of them, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, accused the Central Intelligence Agency of feeding bad information to the White House. In an interview earlier this year, she said that “I was the national security adviser and the president said something that probably shouldn’t have been in the speech, and it was as much my responsibility” as anyone else’s. Mr. Bush not only stuck by her, he made her secretary of state.
Stephen P. Hadley, Ms. Rice’s deputy, stepped into the Oval Office in August of that summer to tell the president that he, not Ms. Rice, was the one responsible for letting the language into the speech, and by several accounts he offered to resign. Mr. Bush refused, and gave him Ms. Rice’s old job late last year.
And George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who had been sent a copy of the speech but did not read it before it was delivered, reluctantly issued a statement two years ago this week saying that “These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.” He later resigned, for unrelated reasons. Last December Mr. Bush rewarded him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom."
