Vice (9 page)

Today, the Washakie, the best bear habitat in the lower forty-eight states, stands as a monument to Dick Cheney's
conservationist moment
. But perhaps not for long. Cheney's 2001 energy task force report calls for the opening of wilderness to oil and gas
exploration
. (That contradicts the legal definition of "wilderness," which precludes anything other than light recreational use and prohibits permanent structures.) Although Congress initially rejected the vice president's energy task force report in 2001, Cheney signed off on memos ordering
Bureau of Land Management
employees in the west to circumvent Congress by using rulemaking, rather than law, to open up wilderness areas to minerals extraction.

Consequently, drilling for oil and gas is now under way in natural areas protected since LBJ signed the Wilderness Act in 1964. Unless Cheney's policy is reversed, drilling rigs will ultimately find their way to the Washakie Wilderness Area that Cheney helped protect twenty years earlier.

As the sun rose over Managua the day before Dick Cheney took his oath of office as a freshman member of Congress,
Anastasio Somoza
Debayle began his daily workout: thirty-four laps around the track, ten sit-ups, then five miles on a stationary exercise bike, all under the watchful eyes of armed soldiers posted in towers surrounding the presidential residence.

As one of the most brutal dictators in the Americas finished his workout, he told
Washington Post
reporter
Karen De Young
that
Nicaragua
was under control. A day earlier, at a huge antigovernment demonstration, "only" seven people had been wounded by National Guard troops firing on the crowd—a number so insignificant, Somoza said, that it could be considered "a day without violence." This level of domestic tranquillity was achieved by a huge military presence in the city's slums, where youths described as terrorists were rounded up and jailed. Some of the kids So-rnoza's National Guard picked up were released. Some were later found dead. Some were never found.

Despite the physical vitality Anastasio Somoza strutted for the
Post
reporter, he was damaged goods. The United States had long propped up the
Somoza dynasty
. ("Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch," FDR famously said of Anastasio's father.) In response to an increase in the brutality that had kept the Somoza dynasty forty years in power, Jimmy Carter cut off all U.S. support. It was
foreign policy
conducted through the prism of human rights. By 1979 the State Department was working on Somoza's exit strategy. On June 7, the U.S. ambassador in Managua met with Somoza and told him to start packing. He fled to Miami in July 1979, abandoning his country to the leftist Sandinista Front.

The
Sandinistas
' rise to power in Nicaragua would have enormous consequences in Washington, creating a partisan struggle that would lead to the most serious constitutional crisis since Watergate. It would also define Dick
Cheney's career in
the House and provide him the opportunity to expand the power of the executive branch—at the expense of the legislative. In the House, Cheney would lead the fight to fund the guerrilla campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government—a regional application of his anti-Soviet policy. Then he would seize control of his party's effort to manage the constitutional crisis created by the
illegal funding of the Contras
, the anti-Sandinista insurgency. And as his House career came to an end, Cheney would find in the
Central American issues
that divided Congress the mechanism to overthrow Democratic Speaker
Jim Wright
.

Reagan's
1980 rout of
Jimmy Carter made bold partisans of housebroken House
Republican
s. After twenty-five years out of power, their moment arrived, and with it a growing sense that the beaten-down leaders of the Republican minority had been too accommodating. The moment was right for a radical conservative who understood the dynamics of institutional power, and Cheney had mastered bureaucratic infighting in the Ford administration. "If you look at his career, he loves power," says a former Democratic congressman. "He always seeks power. He's not uncomfortable exercising power. And he likes operating behind the curtain."

As Cheney acquired power in the House, it's not surprising that he remained behind the curtain. He directed his aide (and high school classmate)
David Gribben
to attend Gingrich's
Conservative Opportunity Society (COS)
meetings, where angry young reformers were planning Newt's
Revolution
. He also ordered Gribben to help the COS's organizational efforts—and, it's safe to assume, to keep a careful watch on what they were about. It wasn't a schedule conflict that kept Cheney from attending the meetings. The COS was Newt's group, whose members were taking far greater risks than the more accommodating Wednesday Groupers. With the great risks came the prospect of great failure.

The COSers were using tactics never before seen in the House. Aware that
C-SPAN
televised House proceedings as long as a member was on the floor, they began scheduling "special orders" speeches at the end of the day, when the chamber was empty and C-SPAN's cameras were at their disposal. By seizing the night, Gingrich's young Turks found an audience of millions who would watch their attacks on the Democrats, unaware that the speakers were addressing an empty chamber. They also began to create parliamentary barricades that both interfered with and revealed the Democrats' control of the legislative process. Once it became evident that Gingrich was succeeding, Cheney brought the COS discussions into his House Policy Committee—expanding Newt's institutional reach from a half dozen to the thirty members of the Policy Committee.

All the while, Cheney stayed close to Bob Michel, the minority leader Newt claimed was eager to accept the "crumbs the Democrats left on the table." (Michel was also the occasional golfing partner of Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill, Jr., which Newt's hardened partisans found intolerable.) It would take a while for Cheney to openly embrace Newt's bold tactics.

Cheney was, however, fully engaged in the Cold War as it played out in Central America. He joined the fight to fund the Contras as soon as the Sandinistas came to power. The partisan division in the House grew more acrimonious and personal, in particular after 1982, when an amendment by Massachusetts representative
Ed Boland
cut off covert military aid to the Contras. By 1985, the effects of the
Boland Amendment
were constraining the Contras (whose appalling human rights record made them harder to sell to the American public). The American-funded insurgent movement was a motley collective of former Somoza guard members, anti-Sandinista activists, unemployed Nicaraguans who preferred being paid as paramilitaries to "fishing turtle" or picking coffee, and a few genuine democratic reformers. The more marginalized the Contras became, the more dedicated Cheney was to their cause. His colleagues—congressmen such as
Henry Hyde
, known for his impassioned speaking, and Texan
Dick Armey
, a vitriolic and aggressive debater—got the attention. But Cheney was quietly persistent, whether speaking on the floor or negotiating with senators or conservative House members he believed could help restart the flow of money to the Contras.

Former congressman Edwards worked with
Cheney in
trying to build support for the Contras. Edwards says Cheney was a remarkable negotiator. "We spent hours, often late into the night [on Contra negotiations]," he says. "He was calculating and careful. I never saw Dick as anything but unflappable. . . . He never raised his voice. He was so taciturn. He never said much. He was always attentive, but you never knew what he was thinking." Cheney was also hardwired into the
Reagan administration
. "He was on the Intelligence Committee," Edwards says. "And he had that experience in the Ford administration. I'm not the kind of member who would get a call from the White House. But Dick was."

A Democrat who sat across the table from Cheney agrees, after a fashion. "He's good in negotiating," he says, "because in negotiating with him there's no negotiating. You would have this sense that he's listening intently. But he is an ideological person who was planning his rebuttal or reaction while he appeared to be listening to you. But he won't be moved. He was always anchored by his ideology. He was also anchored by his partisan position." There was also a sense, the Democrat concurs, that Cheney represented the Reagan administration's position, namely, that the defeat of the Contras on the floor of the United States House and Senate rather than on the battlefields of Nicaragua was the fault of cut-and-run Democrats willing to accept a Soviet beachhead in Central America. President Reagan warned of communist insurgents "a two-day drive from the Mexican border"—even if the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and the drive from McAllen, Texas, to Tapachula, Mexico, requires four days in a car, and probably a few more in a Cuban military convoy. For a cold warrior like Dick Cheney, the Democrats' obstruction of the president's hardline position in Nicaragua was deeply disturbing.

Washington Post
columnist Mary McGrory described Speaker Tip O'Neill as a leader whose "carpet slipper rhetoric . . . causes more pragmatic Democrats to blush and the more militant to regard him as a hack." O'Neill was far too gregarious and appealing a public persona to be turned into the bête noire House Republicans needed. (He was also notoriously vindictive.) Yet O'Neill was in no way sympathetic with the Contra forces the Republicans celebrated as "freedom fighters." He was getting back-channel reports from his own unconventional intelligence network in Nicaragua: the
Maryknoll Sisters
. The Speaker's octogenarian aunt Ann was a founding member of the order, which does missionary work in Central America. She put him in contact with her sisters in Nicaragua, where O'Neill got a different account of the Contras. The pedestrian-level reports of bands of insurgents violating the human rights of the rural population they were supposed to be saving from
communism
disturbed O'Neill, and he became an impassioned opponent. In 1986, for example, he delivered a speech from the well of the House, then immediately cast his vote against a $200 million Contra aid package, a breach of House protocol, under which the Speaker votes only to break a tie. The Republicans were furious with O'Neill. But speaking with the authority of the
Catholic Church
, and doubled over with bonhomie, this big unmade bed of a man was an unsuitable enemy for Republicans looking to bring down the Democrats.

House Republicans got the break they were looking for when Jim Wright was elected Speaker after O'Neill retired in 1987. Wright was a hard-driving Texas populist, born poor in Fort Worth, decorated as a pilot in World War II, elected to the Texas House in 1947 and the U.S. House in 1954. Slight in physical stature, Wright was a powerful personality and intellect. Thirty-three years in the House made him a skilled legislative tactician. He was also a forceful leader and an old-school populist orator who on occasion would use the prerogatives of the chair to get his bills passed.

Wright's first term was a tour de force. He managed to get all thirteen appropriations bills passed, which no Speaker had achieved since 1954, thus avoiding the sloppy and perennial continuing resolutions that keep government in business. He enacted most of his domestic agenda, including a $12.8 billion tax increase intended to stanch the deficits Reagan had run up in two terms. In one session, in fact, Wright managed to fill the vacuum created by Ronald Reagan's lame-duck presidency. He also managed to enrage Republican House members, in particular Dick Cheney.

Cheney was justifiably angry when Wright broke precedent on one occasion, holding open and almost doubling the standard fifteen-minute voting period in order to give himself more time to muscle Texas Democrat
Jim Chapman
into changing his vote so a budget reconciliation bill could pass. Wright had already antagonized Republicans by sending the bill back to the Rules Committee to remove a provision that would have ensured its rejection, then adjourning and reconvening the House within a few minutes for a new legislative day because House rules prohibit considering bills under two different rules on the same day. His procedural two-step infuriated Dick Cheney and other Republicans, who would refer to the day as "Black Thursday."

"
Jim Wright
," Cheney told
The National Journal's
Richard Cohen
, "is a heavy-handed son of a bitch." He told another reporter that he never believed he would "miss Tip O'Neill."

Cheney's profane public mugging of the constitutional officer third in the line of presidential succession was without precedent. It even shocked his colleagues in the Republican Conference, though many of them were making the same comments in private. They had reason to worry. Richard Cohen's recap of Wright's first session said a great deal about why a group of House Republicans led by Dick Cheney were convinced they had to destroy Jim Wright:

At a time when Members of Congress seem to move painfully slowly—or not at all—in addressing issues, Wright has often been well out front in trying to redirect the national agenda. As Speaker, his handling of such controversial issues as international trade and peace in Central America offers a dramatic change in congressional leadership.

Not only was Tip O'Neill's successor accelerating the pace of the House and passing bills that embarrassed Reagan, he was using his office to look for a way out of the foreign-policy dead end in Central America. Wright was a self-taught Latin Americanist who spoke Spanish, knew the players, and had traveled in the region. He joined Reagan in creating a peace process, which suddenly was referred to as Reagan-Wright.

Republicans, for the most, opposed the negotiations and intended to use their collapse to justify rearming
and re-funding the Contras
. After discussions were under way, Reagan's national security affairs assistant Colin Powell and assistant secretary of state
Elliott Abrams
traveled to Central America to meet with leaders of four of the five nations involved in the process—all but Nicaragua. They urged the Central American presidents to take a public stance against Nicaragua and thus undermine the peace talks.