Vice (4 page)

When the names and affiliations of those who met with Cheney regarding energy policy are examined in the light of day, one thing becomes clear: The secrecy in this case was essential. It has become operational policy for a government colluding with powerful corporate sponsors. It's also a personal fetish of Dick Cheney. "I had one lawyer tell me the vice president is against
all
Freedom of Information Act requests," says Fitton. The lawyer was
Shannen Coffin
, who was co-counsel with Solicitor General Ted Olson when he defended Cheney
against the GAO suit
. When Scooter Libby resigned as Cheney's chief of staff, to be replaced by David Addington, it was Coffin who took Addington's place as legal counsel to the vice president.

Unless Dick Cheney is the Republican nominee in 2008 and succeeds George W. Bush, this administration will move on and policy will change. The Congress will respond to the hot reality of global warming. The EPA will deal with the environmental hazards of fracking. Another president will begin to pick up the pieces of what remains in Iraq. Yet the structural changes Dick Cheney forced on the government will remain with us. The drastic reinterpretation of the Constitution and the new rules that govern the relationship between the executive and legislative branches will be hard to undo.

Cheney had done far more than rewrite the constitutional guidelines that govern the balance of power between the two branches. He seized the power of Congress by what might be described as an act of adverse possession. Then he and his legal counsel, David Addington, went to court to create the case law that makes the new guidelines the legal precedent Bruce Fein describes as a gun held to the head of Congress.

"It was a signal to the nation and certainly to everybody in this town that this is the way things are going to be done," Fitton says. "They refused to release the information and litigated this to the hilt. . . . It was a strong signal at the very beginning."

For Cheney, the beginning was thirty years past—in the collapsing administration of Richard Nixon and the brief presidency of
Gerald Ford
. The present would be devoted to creating a vice presidency insulated from any accountability—from the Congress and even from the president with whom he shared executive power.

On September 29, 1974, thirty-three-year-old Dick Cheney, still fit and with a full head of hair, was personally presented to President Gerald Ford as his new deputy chief of staff. Cheney would later describe it as the day he and Donald Rumsfeld "took over at the White House."

"We moved in on a weekend and the president happened to be in the Oval Office on that Sunday," Cheney reminisced, before describing how Rumsfeld brought the commander in chief over to meet his new staffer.

Cheney may have arrived in the West Wing by invitation of the forty-two-year-old Rumsfeld, Ford's new chief of staff, but over the course of the next two years, the apprentice would replace the master and become the youngest White House chief of staff in the history of the United States, the leader of a national presidential campaign, and a voice in the president's ear as the nation strove to recover from the madness of Richard Nixon. The path to understanding the most powerful vice presidency in American history begins with the education of Richard B. Cheney
in the Ford White House
.

"No president in modern times had ever taken office in more challenging circumstances," Cheney has said about Ford. The echoes and in some cases the amplification of the issues surrounding Nixon's collapse and Ford's resulting tempestuous two-year term are everywhere to be found in the
administration of
George W. Bush: the dramatic expansion of
executive power
, the debates on wiretapping and the CIA, an obsession with secrecy, attacks on the media, leaking sensitive information to strike at bureaucratic opponents, and even the current disregard for environmental protection. A common thread through it all is Dick Cheney.

Cheney's astonishing streak of professional luck began in 1968, when he won a fellowship from the
American Political Science Association (APSA)
, which sent him to
Washington, D.C.
, the place where he would spend most of his adult life. More important, it put him in the office of Wisconsin Republican congressman
Bill Steiger
, a strong supporter of the
APSA fellowship
program. Steiger was one of the giants of the House, according to congressional scholar
Norman Ornstein
: "He had a tremendous impact on policy even though he was a Republican in a Democratic Congress." In a move that would be unthinkable today, the congressman put his avidly curious student at a desk right inside his office, so Cheney could observe everything Steiger did.

There are two versions of the story on how Cheney came to the attention of
Donald Rumsfeld
. A four-term Republican congressman from Illinois, Rumsfeld had resigned his seat in 1969 to accept a Nixon appointment to run the
Office of Economic Opportunity
, which had been created by
Lyndon Johnson
to coordinate the war on poverty. Looking to get a running start, he sought advice from his friend and former colleague Steiger. The man-of-action version of what happened next has Cheney spying Rumsfeld's letter on Steiger's desk and then taking it upon himself to write a ten-page policy memo on running a federal agency. The memo so impressed Steiger that he passed it on to Rummy. A more plausible version has Steiger (who died in 1978) assigning Cheney the task of collecting information on the
OEO
for Rumsfeld. Whichever version is correct, Rumsfeld regarded Cheney's report so favorably that he hired him to be his executive assistant.

The politically ambitious former fighter pilot had insisted that Nixon grant him the title of Assistant to the President, in addition to his OEO responsibilities. Cheney dutifully followed his new boss as he split his time: mornings and evenings at the White House and the rest of the day at the OEO. But Cheney was still on the second floor, where staff had offices, not where decisions were made. "I had an intellectual understanding of the range of things the president had to deal with—but I really didn't have an emotional feel for it until you sit here and see him—what he has to do in the course of a day," he said in a 1975 interview.

Cheney's hopes of getting any closer were sidetracked when Nixon, who found Rumsfeld a tad too eager, sent him away to be
ambassador to NATO
. Rumsfeld offered a posting in Brussels to his faithful deputy Dick—who, after the OEO, had played the same role for Rumsfeld at the
Cost of Living Council
—but Cheney declined. Now with two
daughters
to support, he instead joined friends who ran a small institutional investment advisory firm called
Bradley Woods and Company
. Working at the firm allowed Cheney to stay in Washington, and available. He signed on as vice president at the company and spent most of the next eighteen months preparing research papers on Nixon's economic program and the energy business.

On August 8, 1974, the night Richard Nixon went on nationwide television to announce his
resignation
effective the following day, Cheney received a call from Brussels. Rumsfeld's secretary wanted to know if he could meet the ambassador's flight at Dulles airport the following afternoon. Cheney knew that if his patron had a place in the new administration, so did he. The younger man had impressed Rumsfeld with his work ethic, intelligence, and loyalty. Before going to the airport, Cheney—removed from the political fallout—watched Nixon's emotional departure. When Rumsfeld disembarked, a White House messenger met him with a letter from Ford. It asked him to come straight to the White House to lead the change in administrations. At about 2:00 P.M., two hours after Ford was sworn in and declared that "our long national nightmare is over," the two men rode into town. Rumsfeld asked Cheney to take a leave from work and help with the transition.

The transition team attempted to meld what was left of Nixon's administration and Ford's staff. Some on the Ford side, like his longtime aide and speechwriter
Robert Hartmann
, argued that by design, the Nixon people retained control. "The
Nixon-to-Ford transition
was superbly planned," Hartmann wrote in his book
Palace Politics.
"It was not a failure. It just never happened." Cheney remembered that Ford allowed them to make staff changes on the domestic side but not in the
foreign policy
arena. When it came to national security, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
Henry Kissinger
ruled. "We lived with these conflicting objectives," Cheney recalled. "We had to emphasize continuity, on one hand, and change on the other."

Their work on the transition lasted ten days, and then Rumsfeld went back to NATO and Cheney returned to Bradley Woods. About two weeks later, on September 8, Ford took the most fateful step of his presidency. He
pardoned Richard Nixon
, before the ex-president could be indicted. A week later, Rumsfeld called Cheney in Florida, where he was on business. He asked Cheney to meet him in D.C. that weekend. On Saturday, Rumsfeld confided to his protégé that he had a private meeting with the president scheduled for the next day. He believed that Ford would offer him the chief of staff position. If that turned out to be the case, would Cheney be his deputy? Cheney told him he could wrap up his affairs at Bradley Woods within two weeks.

Rumsfeld and Cheney worked out a deal that benefited them both. Cheney would be Rumsfeld's surrogate. When Rumsfeld went on trips alone or with the president, Cheney would make the decisions at the White House and operate as if he were chief of staff. The young man would also have his own opportunities to take presidential trips as chief of staff. This way, Cheney would get plenty of face time with the president. Rumsfeld would later claim that the arrangement allowed the top staff to "lead relatively normal lives." Cheney didn't want a normal life; he wanted to live, eat, and breathe the White House. Most important for the political futures of both men, their understanding allowed Rumsfeld to train a loyal successor so that if Ford shook up his cabinet, Rummy could slide into a cabinet position without a hitch. When that time came, Cheney opted not to continue Rumsfeld's deputy system.

President Ford—universally acknowledged as a friendly, genial, and trusting man—held Rumsfeld in such high regard that he apparently accepted the presence of the inexperienced Cheney without question. "I was always amazed that he was so amenable to having such a relatively young stranger—I think I was thirty-three at the time—come in and all of a sudden become part of his inner operation," Cheney recalled.

Cheney would describe the qualities he admired in Ford in a speech in 1986. Today, the description casts Ford as a sort of anti-George W. Bush. "He was a man who was able to sit down and listen to debates. He never cut off an individual's access because that person disagreed with him. He relished the give and take of political dialogue. I think that's very important," Cheney said. "His knowledge and grasp of government and political issues was just enormous."

Cheney made the most of his access. He is widely acknowledged to have participated in every major administration decision. When Cheney became chief of staff, his contribution moved from the periphery to the center, but his input was often hidden. He would be the one to gather up everyone's views and carry them into the Oval Office as an honest broker, not an advocate. If he had an opinion, Cheney would deliver it orally to the president. He learned how to operate this way from Rumsfeld: Never write anything down if you can avoid it. "Both these guys were crafty," remembers
James Cannon
, who served in the
Ford administration
alongside
Cheney and
Rumsfeld. "You never spotted their fingerprints."

Cheney has reprised the role of private counselor to the president in the Bush administration. It's an arrangement that allows him to avoid exposing his positions to scrutiny and thus criticism. The secrecy Cheney created for himself in the Ford administration continues to this day. It appears that before leaving the White House in January 1977, he took many of his papers with him, instead of donating them to the
Ford Library
as most other officials did.

Cheney would argue years after the fact that Ford's
pardon of
Nixon was the correct decision, just poorly timed. It contributed to a Democratic landslide in the 1974 midterm election. The Republicans lost more than forty seats, ushering in a historic reform Congress that changed the balance of power in Washington. "Almost immediately after the president came to power, as a result of the election in November of 1974, we found ourselves outnumbered about two to one in both the House and the Senate," recalled Cheney. "I thought [the pardon] should have been delayed until after the
1974 elections
because I think it did cost us seats. If you say that that is a political judgment, it's true, but then, the presidency is a political office. If we had had twenty or thirty more House Republicans during the two years of the Ford presidency, we would have been in much better shape than we were from a legislative standpoint." Even back then, there was no distinction between politics and governing for Cheney.

Dick Cheney was about to learn firsthand the restrictions an emboldened Congress, in this case a veto-proof Congress, can impose on a president. He would spend the rest of his career working to restore the Nixon vision of an all-powerful executive, by undoing the
Watergate
reforms that came out of the activist Congresses of the early seventies. "You've got Cheney sitting there at the time that Congress is taking on the imperial presidency," observes Nixon lawyer
John Dean
in an interview from his home in California, "and apparently it was a trauma he never got over."

In response to the pardon, the Senate passed a resolution by a vote of 55 to 24 urging the president not to issue any more pardons "until the judiciary process has run its full course." The House introduced well over a dozen bills and resolutions calling for formal inquiries into Ford's pardon. The Monday after Rumsfeld and Cheney "took over" the White House, Ford stunned congressional leaders by agreeing to testify before the
House Judiciary Committee
to explain why he had pardoned Richard Nixon. "It was only the second time in history that the president had ever done that," Cheney noted in a 1986 interview, citing
Abraham Lincoln
as the other president. (Lincoln had testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 1862 over the matter of the leak of his annual message to the
New York Herald.
But Cheney was wrong: both
George Washington
and
Woodrow Wilson
had also testified to Congress, although the latter had legislators come to the White House.) Ford's staff, particularly departing chief of staff
Al Haig
, begged him to reconsider. The image of Ford, hat in hand, testifying before Congress offered startling evidence of how weak the executive had become. Dick Cheney would never forget it.

Cheney would describe this period as "a series of institutional confrontations" that "led repeatedly to efforts on the part of the Congress to impose limitations and restrictions on the president. . . . The main concern in the Congress often seemed to be to find ways to restrict presidential power so that future presidents would not abuse power the way Lyndon Johnson had allegedly abused power in Vietnam or Richard Nixon had abused presidential power in the Watergate affair."

Cheney particularly objected to the
War Powers Resolution
, passed in 1973, which restricted the president's ability to send U.S. troops into combat without congressional approval. Since leaving the Ford administration, Cheney has counseled two Bush presidents that they didn't need the consent of Congress to attack Iraq, arguing that war-making is the prerogative of the commander in chief. But war powers would be just the beginning of congressional reforms that would last a little more than a decade and cover everything from intelligence to clean water and government in the sunshine.

Cheney exerted his influence to push
Ford
away from some of the groundbreaking
environmental
regulations passed during Nixon's presidency. Searching for a reason Ford had refused to enforce the
Clean Air Act
for new coal-fired power plants,
Russell E. Train
, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time, saw Cheney's handiwork. "It seemed likely that Dick Cheney was responsible for the way the White House dealt with the matter," Train wrote in his 2003 book,
Politics, Pollution, and Pandas.
(A quarter of a century later, states were lining up to sue the
Bush-Cheney
administration for its refusal to impose Clean Air Act standards on coal-fired power plants.)