Vice (5 page)

A battle over the Freedom of Information Act was one of Cheney's first big policy fights under Ford. Although the law was passed in 1966, congressional hearings in the early seventies revealed that FOIA, designed to make government records accessible to the public, wasn't working. Agencies took too long to produce documents, charged exorbitant fees for searching and copying, and forced too many requesters to go to court to procure them. Watergate taught the Congress and the public that it was incumbent upon them to watchdog the federal government. It would be a lesson forgotten by the time the Bush administration, under Cheney's guidance, dramatically curtailed the public's right to obtain government information.

In January of 1974, Pennsylvania Democratic representative
William Moorhead
and New York Republican representative
Frank Horton
sponsored
amendments
designed to improve FOIA's effectiveness by expanding the definition of who was covered and imposing time frames for how quickly agencies had to comply to requests for information, as well as to litigation, if a requester sued to overturn a denial. By the time Ford took office, the amendments had reached a Senate-House conference committee, meaning that the bill was nearing final passage. The CIA, Defense, Treasury, Civil Service, and Ford's staff all urged a veto. As did Cheney. What particularly bothered them was a provision that allowed for a judicial review of what the government was allowed to keep secret. It was an unacceptable check on the executive branch. Efforts at compromise failed to appease the administration. On October 17, 1974, after Congress passed the legislation over the president's objections, Ford vetoed the FOIA amendments.

In the three and a half months of his presidency leading up to the FOIA veto, Ford had vetoed thirteen bills. Congress had overridden only one. On November 20, the House and then the Senate the following day voted to override Ford's veto of the FOIA amendments.

Nearly thirty years later, in 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a directive to federal agencies that encouraged them to deny requests for documents under FOIA. Cheney had put in place a cabinet that would share his obsession with secrecy. As for his own activities, he would give new meaning to Al Gore's claim that there was "no controlling legal authority" over the Office of the Vice President. Exploiting a loophole in the Constitution, which places the vice president as the presiding officer of the Senate, Cheney's lawyer David Addington has argued that the OVP is not an "agency of the executive branch," but instead a creature of Congress, and thus is not required to disclose information under FOIA. (Congress is exempt from the disclosure rule.) Yet the OVP is not covered under Senate ethics rules either, so Cheney refuses to reveal detailed information about the OVP's operations, such as a breakdown of its budget, staff duties, and activities such as travel on corporate jets. While the 2003 Ashcroft directive mandated that federal agencies provide the number of documents they've classified, Cheney's office has declined to do so.

Cheney's hypocritical relationship to unofficial government disclosures— he has an extreme aversion to leaking of information by others, but is willing to leak himself if it suits his purpose—dates to the
Ford administration
, which leaked more than the
Titanic
after it hit the iceberg. In a
National Security Council
meeting held in the cabinet room a week after Rumsfeld and Cheney arrived, Ford fumed about the number of classified documents appearing on the front pages of newspapers. "I've been told that
The New York Times
has so much classified material, they don't know where to store it," groused the president. "This is unforgivable."

With Rumsfeld's prompting, Ford admitted that the problem was a managerial one. He asked his department heads to stop the
leaks
at the source before a reluctant
FBI
had to get involved. But in reality, the trouble began with Ford. His hybrid administration was at war with itself, and he seemed incapable, or perhaps unwilling, to stop it. More often than not,
leaks
in the administration were designed to embarrass one side or the other in a constant gamesmanship for control.

Some observers believe that Ford tacitly encouraged the factionalism in order to control outsized members of his administration, especially Henry Kissinger. The former House minority leader, whom Nixon had appointed to replace a disgraced
Spiro Agnew
, knew that despite his long service on the House Committee on Intelligence, the world believed he had little foreign policy experience. In the beginning, he relied on Kissinger to assure other nations that there would be continuity. But as Ford became more confident, and Kissinger too solicitous to Russia for the Republican right's taste, leaks that undermined the secretary of state increased.

Both Rumsfeld and Cheney believed Kissinger was too soft on the Soviets, too quick to make concessions in order to preserve
detente
. A July 8, 1975, memo from Cheney to Rumsfeld, initialed by the president, illustrates the conflict. It also demonstrates how a young deputy chief of staff with no foreign policy experience had no reservations about going after an institution like Kissinger. The secretary of state had advised Ford not to meet with Soviet dissident
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
, a foe of detente, for fear of upsetting talks with the Soviets. Cheney disagreed. "Seeing [Solzhenitsyn] is a nice counter-balance to all of the publicity and coverage that's given to meetings between American Presidents and Soviet Leaders," wrote the thirty-four-year-old Cheney. "Meetings with Soviet Leaders are very important, but it is also important that we not contribute any more to the illusion that all of a sudden we're bosom-buddies with the Russians."

In the memo, Cheney also advised that the discussion about a Solzhenitsyn visit should be held "with a very small group, so that we don't have the kind of leaks we did last time."

Presidential speechwriter Hartmann, who admits that he leaked himself, credits Rumsfeld with a mastery of the "calculated leak." "Rumsfeld would only personally leak the stories that reflected positively on him," Hartmann recalls. He left the negative leaks designed to damage and attack opponents to his deputy. "Cheney was the abominable No-man," jokes Hartmann in an interview at his home in Bethesda.

Cheney also found novel ways to use the media to attack his administration rivals.
New Republic
columnist
John Osborne
recalled that during a flight from Peking to Jakarta, Cheney, at that point chief of staff, stood silently by as Press Secretary
Ron Nessen
openly challenged the press corps on
Air Force One
for being too lenient on Kissinger. "Cheney never uttered a word of disapproval of Nessen's conduct, then or later," Osborne noted.

Former Nixon counselor John Dean believes that when the inexperienced Cheney became chief of staff, much of the leaking—everything from anonymous snipes about who was up or down to policy disputes played out in public—involved staffers who were "pissed and disgruntled" at the young man. "The people I knew who were still there were very disenchanted with Cheney," he says. "They felt he was in way over his head."

Nearly thirty years later, Cheney would apply the lessons he learned about leaking during the
Ford administration
to attack
Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson
.

Leaking of Ford administration secrets would lead to a national
intelligence crisis and a wiretapping scandal
that brought with it congressional investigations and reform that Dick Cheney strenuously opposed—to no avail. On December 22, 1974, journalist
Seymour Hersh
offered up a Christmas gift to Ford as the president departed to spend the holiday in Vail. Hersh, who would later report on the darker recesses of the Bush administration during the Iraq War, had discovered some of the federal government's most sensitive institutional secrets. Hersh's front-page story in
The New York Times
reported that the CIA had maintained intelligence files, put together over decades, on at least ten thousand Americans in the United States. Hersh had ferreted out what was known to a select few in the government as "the family jewels," described in the
Times
as "dozens of other illegal activities by members of the CIA inside the United States, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail."

The story began to find its way to the surface when Nixon named
James Schlesinger
CIA director in early February 1973. Within three months, Schlesinger discovered that the closets in his agency were brimming with "skeletons," each tucked away in its own compartment, as department heads had reported only to then CIA director
Richard Helms
. On May 8, 1973, Schlesinger sent a memo to all CIA employees ordering them to report any activities, current or past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of the agency. By the end of the month he had assembled an ugly picture, including explosive revelations of CIA participation in assassination attempts against foreign leaders. But there was much more. The
CIA had wiretapped
and physically surveilled a number of reporters, including the current Fox News anchor,
Brit Hume
, who then worked for investigative reporter
Jack Anderson
. Between 1953 and 1973, CIA staff had opened American mail destined for Russia and China. It had also monitored peace groups and conducted psychological studies using psychoactive drugs on unwitting subjects.

A similar process of discovery was under way at the
National Security Agency (NSA)
. Around the time of Rumsfeld and Cheney's arrival at the White House, Attorney General
Elliot Richardson
learned that the NSA had been feeding information gleaned from its electronic surveillance operations to the FBI and the Secret Service. Richardson told General
Lew Allen, Jr.
, director of the NSA, to knock it off because it could potentially be illegal, despite Allen's protestations that it was only information intercepted in the course of "foreign intelligence activities."

In July 1974, Ford elevated Schlesinger to secretary of defense, leaving the collection of misdeeds he had uncovered in the hands of Schlesinger's replacement,
William Colby
, a career agency official best known for overseeing a
Vietnam War
-era program called
Phoenix
, which involved the assassination of suspected North Vietnamese collaborators. Colby quietly briefed the Intelligence Committee chairmen in the Senate and Flouse about the family jewels before Congress voted to confirm him. Once confirmed, the new CIA director sent out a memo to all department heads with precise instructions on what was now permissible activity. And there the jewels lay, untíl Hersh's Christmas surprise.

Initially Cheney was only peripherally involved in the administration's response to the intelligence scandals, but that would change. The week Hersh's December 1974 story hit, one of Cheney's main tasks was coordinating the White House
Christmas cards
. A review of documents at the Ford Library in Ann Arbor reveals a host of small-bore duties Cheney handled in his first nine months as deputy, including remedying the dearth of salt shakers in the Residence, obtaining a new headrest for
Mrs. Ford's
helicopter seat, and dealing with requests for congressional visits to
Camp David
. On the latter, a request from Alaska senator
Ted Stevens
for a tour of the facility, Cheney, ever mindful of executive privilege, wrote Rumsfeld to "strongly" recommend against allowing Congress access to Camp David. First of all, it might tip off the public to the classified nature of some of the facilities at the compound. Second, "once we start Congressional tours at Camp David, we may end up with yet another series of issues about the prerequisites
[sic]
of the White House."

Amid the picayune staff work, Rumsfeld also asked Cheney to make political recommendations, including how to energize the conservative Republican base. Cheney identified a
school voucher
program in New Hampshire that needed money as "a very important project that we'd like to see funded" and advocated the extension of the Voting Rights Act to the entire country so the South wouldn't feel discriminated against. When
Caspar Weinberger
, then secretary of health, education, and welfare, proposed a tax increase to cover the deficit in the
Social Security Trust Fund
, Cheney persuaded him to drop the proposal.

But on May 25, 1975, with Chief of Staff Rumsfeld out of the country,
The New York Times
dropped another Hersh bombshell. It revealed that U.S. spy submarines were tapping into Soviet communication cables inside the USSR's three-mile territorial limit. Hersh admitted in the story that his sources gave him the information in the hope that it would move policy. They believed that the submarine program violated the spirit of detente and that using satellites to obtain the same information was less risky. Rumsfeld, traveling with the president in Europe, put Cheney in charge of devising an administration response to the story. Cheney's answer was as stunning as it was predictive of positions he would take when he had real power as George Bush's co-president.

Cheney called a meeting with Attorney General
Edward Levi
and White House counsel
Philip Buchen
to discuss options. Levi, a short man with a towering intellect, unimpeachable integrity, and a nonpartisan bent, served as a bridge between the Democratic Congress and Ford, winning the president's approval for intelligence reforms over the objections of executive absolutists like Cheney. "Ed Levi was a voice of wisdom and counsel," says
Jack Marsh
, a Ford senior adviser who worked on intelligence matters with Levi. "His contributions have never been appreciated."

In the case of Hersh's submarine exposé, it would be Levi, the designated adult, who would rein in Cheney. Faced with the possible leak of classified information, the thirty-four-year-old Cheney's first thoughts involved getting access to the home of a reporter. Among the options the three men explored, according to Cheney's handwritten notes, were grand jury indictments, threatening the
Times
with prosecution if they didn't stop reporting classified information, and obtaining a search warrant to "go after Hersh papers in his apt." They also discussed political considerations. "Will we get hit with violating the 1
^st
amendment to the constitution?" Cheney wrote. Ultimately, Levi put the kibosh on searching Hersh's apartment. Since the leak did not endanger the Soviet eavesdropping, with Levi's prodding, the White House decided to do nothing rather than draw more attention to it.