The American Vice Presidency (82 page)

In 1989, Reagan’s successor in the Oval Office, the senior George Bush, called on Cheney to come to the rescue again when the Texas senator John Tower’s nomination to be secretary of defense was rejected by the Senate. Reluctantly, after having survived two heart attacks, Cheney agreed to take over the Pentagon and was confirmed. After a third heart attack, he had successful bypass surgery and ran the Pentagon with his recommended appointee, General Colin Powell, as his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were an effective team through the ouster of the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega at the end of 1989 and the dramatic months of the reversal of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991. Cheney demonstrated his penchant for control of the news media by sharply limiting
coverage of the buildup to the American military response, requiring monitoring of reporters’ interviews and then a total blackout on the ground in the decisive stages that drove the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

In the summer of 1992, Bush sounded out Cheney about returning to the White House as his chief of staff, but Cheney preferred to remain at the Pentagon. When Bush failed in reelection in 1992, Cheney went back to Wyoming and private life. In early 1994, he considered a presidential campaign of his own for 1996, set up a political action committee, and started testing the waters. But he was getting nowhere and decided that at age fifty-three there was still time to have a lucrative career in the private sector. “I said I would like to be president but I said I wasn’t going to run,” he observed in a later interview for this book. “If I didn’t win, my health history would be blamed and that would disqualify me for future jobs.… I really put politics behind me.”
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In late 1995 Cheney joined the giant Halliburton oil services company and took over as chief executive officer at the start of 1996. In 1999, he discussed the possibilities of managing the presidential campaign of Texas governor George W. Bush but decided to stay at Halliburton. He told Joe Allbaugh, the governor’s chief of staff, “I’ve never met a happy vice president,” quoting Gerald Ford as saying his brief time was “the worst period in his public life” and that it was his job “to shoot down” costly programs sought by Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller.
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As early as March 2000, Bush had Allbaugh ask Cheney whether he would be interested in being Bush’s running mate. The answer was no. Among the reasons that Cheney said later he told Allbaugh: “Wyoming is a sure state. If he needs me to carry Wyoming, he’s not going to get elected anyway.” In a subsequent meeting with Bush and Karl Rove, Bush’s political adviser, Cheney said he told the prospective candidate that as head of a large oil company, his four previous heart attacks, and having been “kicked out of Yale and with two DUI’s,” he would be an easy target. Rove agreed, Cheney said.
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After Bush’s nomination, however, the Texas governor Bush asked Cheney to head the search for another running mate, and as a loyal Republican and proven staff man Cheney agreed to take on the task.

Cheney set up a small search team that included his elder daughter, Liz, her husband, Phil Perry, and Addington.
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Cheney acknowledged later that
in the process there usually were two lists of prospective nominees, one for “public consumption” to placate certain figures or party factions, and the “real” one of actual prospects.
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Each vice presidential prospect who was asked to supply detailed background information was told he was on “a very short list.”
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One of those approached, the former governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said when he agreed to be vetted that Cheney said, “We’ll get together. The only thing was, I never heard from him again.”
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In fact, Cheney wrote subsequently that Bush had told him “more than once, ‘Dick,
you’re
the solution to my problem.’ ”
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Cheney finally said he would consider being Bush’s running mate, but he had a few preliminary conditions: “I needed to … go through all the reasons he
shouldn’t
pick me.… I didn’t want him to be surprised, and I needed to make sure he vetted the vetter.”
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But Cheney himself said he did not fill out the questionnaire required of the others.

From all this it was not unreasonable to conclude that Dick Cheney, in his fortuitous position, was able to make himself in the end, as one biographer later put it, “the least worst option.”
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Dan Bartlett, later the communications director in the George W. Bush administration, observed, “Cheney was pushing on an open door,” while being able to leave the impression that he was not angling for the nomination for himself.
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In the legal battle of campaign lawyers and strategists leading up to the eventual election of Bush and Cheney, they left the combat to others in Florida. As the legal maneuvering to secure the presidency dragged on, the prospective vice president elect returned to Washington and assumed the task of preparing for the transition of power. In the transition process, most of the key White House staff jobs went to Bush loyalists from Texas. But Cheney saw to it that not only were some of his own loyalists placed on his vice presidential policy staff but also some were made assistants to the president, integrated with the White House staff.

Early in his vice presidency, he asked Addington as his general counsel to review the procedures under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, whereby he would be required, in the event of an incapacitated president, to “immediately assume the powers or duties of the office as Acting President.”
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But what if the vice president himself became incapacitated, a pertinent question in light of Cheney’s history of multiple heart attacks? Cheney
wrote a letter of resignation, signed it, and added a written instruction to Addington to present the letter to Bush “if the need arises.”
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Nine days after taking office, Cheney announced he would head a White House task force on energy policy that ostensibly would focus on the debate over global warming and other environmental issues. But in reality it would go far beyond that to a matter close to Cheney’s concerns—the protection and extension of presidential power. His first challenge was to counter Bush’s statements in the 2000 campaign indicating he accepted the scientific findings that man-made carbon emissions contributed to the “greenhouse effect” and climate change. Cheney suggested that the president dodge the issue by saying that “given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change,” he favored a further examination of various “innovative options.”
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The task force, with formal membership limited to executive branch staff but with the advice and testimony of unidentified outside participants in complete secrecy, soon raised the hackles of suspicious environmental groups. While the ongoing participation of all the major energy-producing companies was invited, more than a dozen “green” advocates were heard on a single day and were never invited back.
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Because the industry figures were not “members” of the task force, the White House insisted their identities did not have to be disclosed. Cheney persuaded Bush to go to court to protect his constitutional right to seek and obtain advice without public disclosure, as part of what advocates called the power of the “unitary executive.”

The executive shielded its disclosure by using the same all-purpose justification that would be invoked by Justice Department lawyers in other, later arguments for the executive’s right to use all means to obtain intelligence to preserve national security without legislative or judicial interference. Cheney later noted, “On the scale of risks, I am more concerned about depriving the president of his ability to act than I am about Congress’s alleged inability to respond.”
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In mid-April, two House committees turned for help to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Its director, David Walker, wrote directly to Cheney for the names of all participants and records of all task force meetings. Addington, as the vice president’s legal counsel, replied that the GAO as a legislative body “could not intrude
into the heart of Executive deliberations.” Cheney, ignoring Walker, wrote directly to the House and Senate, stating that complying “would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the Executive Branch.” When a federal judge ordered Cheney to appear and explain, he declined, and the matter eventually went to the Supreme Court, which sent it back to a lower court, where it died; Cheney’s “unitary executive” defense survived for the time being.
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“It was a major victory both for us and for the power of the executive branch,” he wrote later.
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In these first months of the administration, Bush handed Cheney another special portfolio, monitoring national security, and the gathering of intelligence against terrorist threats to American interests at home and abroad. Less than a month before the 2000 election, a small boat in Aden Harbor, in Yemen, had nearly sunk the navy destroyer USS
Cole
. Cheney declared, “Any would-be terrorist out there needs to know that if you’re going to attack, you’ll be hit very hard and very quick. It’s not time for diplomacy and debate. It’s time for action.”
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Accordingly, on May 8, 2001, Bush announced the creation of the new Office of National Preparedness, in which Cheney would plan for the “consequence management” of any domestic attack, particularly with weapons of mass destruction.
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The vice president had barely begun when, three months later, Bush and Cheney read the Presidential Daily Brief warning, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

On the morning of September 11, Cheney was at his desk in the White House when without warning the first of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was hit by a hijacked jet plane. He immediately placed a call to Bush, who was visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida. Unable to reach the president at once, within minutes Cheney was hustled out of his office by Secret Service agents to a secure underground bunker, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. He finally reached Bush aboard
Air Force One
and advised him not to return to Washington at once. Meanwhile, as fragments of information came to Cheney and a second plane hit the second tower, a military aide informed him that still another unauthorized commercial jet was swiftly approaching Washington. Twice the aide asked the vice president whether combat air patrol pilots had the authority to shoot down a suspected hijacked plane, and each time without hesitation Cheney said yes.
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The vice president had no specific authorization to give the order but acted as the emergency warranted. The exact details of whether Cheney ever sought and got Bush’s approval were never satisfactorily resolved.
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About a half hour after giving the order, however, Cheney reached Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and told him, “Pursuant to the president’s instructions I gave instructions for [the hijacked planes] to be taken out.” When Rumsfeld asked, “Who did you give that direction to?” Cheney replied that he gave it to the pilots, reached through air force communications.
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Thus began arguably the most dramatic episode in U.S. history of the nation being pulled into war and Cheney’s unexpected role in it. In ordering the first American defensive and retaliatory blow, he spent the next momentous hours as the prime conduit to the president, until Bush, after being diverted to Barksdale Air Force Base, in Louisiana, and then to Strategic Air Command headquarters, near Omaha, returned to the nation’s capital that night. Two days later, with key members of the National Security Council relocated to Camp David, Bush and Cheney began initial talks about going after the al Qaeda perpetrators. Cheney wrote later in his memoir, “Although we had discussed Iraq earlier in the day, I also took time now to say that Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists had trained and plotted, should be first,” before dealing with “the threat Iraq posed” to the West with its suspected development of weapons of mass destruction.
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Cheney’s performance in those first minutes and hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks presaged the dominant role he would play in the remaining years of the George W. Bush administration. Ironically, he had been prepared for it in a way by his part in the Reagan administration’s 1980s secret “continuity of government” drill called Project 908. Teams of essential federal officials were spirited out of Washington to undisclosed locations around the country, and Cheney, as a member of the congressional leadership, led one of the teams in a classified exercise of keeping the government going in the face of an enemy attack.
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This time it had been no drill, and Cheney slipped easily into the hierarchy of command, not by calculation, but by circumstance. Thereafter his determination to maintain the power of the executive branch in the conduct of the war arguably made him the most influential vice president in American history.

In an appearance on NBC News’s
Meet the Press
five days later, Cheney acknowledged the importance of working “the dark side, if you will,” to
find the terrorists, probing into “the shadows in the intelligence world … without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.”
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Thus the vice president broached the subject of surveillance that would eventually engulf him as the highest advocate of what came to be known as “robust interrogation” methods against suspected terrorists.

At Cheney’s instruction through Addington, a thirty-four-year-old deputy in Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, John C. Yoo, was assigned to write the legal cover for use of torture to break the will of captured terrorists.
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Yoo, an American-born son of South Korean immigrants, argued that an American president, as commander in chief of the armed forces under Article II, Section 2, had “plenary” or absolute powers, particularly in wartime. Yoo wrote that no law “can place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response.”
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