President Clinton was a trailblazer. He not only permitted his wife to serve openly in a position of genuine power, but also was among the first presidents to allow his vice president a powerful and public role.
In past administrations, for a host of reasons, presidents regarded their vice presidents as competitors and denied them full entry into their inner circle. This was not the case with Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Gore agreed to share Clinton’s ticket with the understanding that he would play a leading role in the administration. At least in the beginning, they worked so closely together that their partnership made a lasting impact on the public’s perception of the relationship between presidents and their vice presidents. When, during George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney was promoted as Bush’s right hand, many Americans welcomed him in the role, perhaps in recognition of the successful partnership between Clinton and Vice President Gore.
Dick Cheney became the most powerful vice president in American history. His managerial, organizational, congressional and White House experience made him a formidable force in the executive mansion. Though he would become a controversial figure after 9/11, his gravitas, vast experience and accountability made him not only an invaluable assistant to President Bush, but also a welcome change from the long line of shadow men who preceded him.
RECONSIDERING THE VICE PRESIDENT
Starting in February 2001 and on at least five occasions leading up to the spring of that year, Vice President Cheney, one of Bush’s principal advisers on intelligence matters in the White House, was warned by national security staff that al Qaeda was a clear and present danger to the US. Though he was repeatedly encouraged to consider a military response against the growing terrorist organization, he chose to prioritize other matters. (George W. Bush Presidential Library)
Part I
I didn’t pick Dick Cheney because of Wyoming’s three electoral votes.1
—President George W. Bush
At 10:15 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, as the president of the United States cruised safely forty thousand feet above the US aboard Air Force One, watching looping news footage of a passenger plane flying into the Twin Towers, Vice President Cheney was issuing orders in the Presidential Operations Emergency Center deep beneath the White House. A military aide interrupted the vice president to inquire what to do about a suspicious passenger plane heading toward Washington that was suspected of being hijacked. Without skipping a beat, taking a breath, or consulting the president, Cheney ordered the plane shot down. The fact that he was not in the military chain of command and therefore lacked the constitutional authority to issue such an order did not seem to matter.
This chapter tells the story of the first months following 9/11, as President George W. Bush responded to the greatest national security crisis the country had experienced since Pearl Harbor. It is also the story of Dick Cheney’s highly controversial tenure as Bush’s right hand.
As the events of 9/11 unfolded, George Bush could not help but feel concerned about his performance. He was perhaps the least prepared president to face such a crisis in the history of American commanders in chief. His only significant foreign-affairs leadership experience up to that point had been at the head of a trade mission to China while governor of Texas, and his only military service was performed in the skies above Houston as a member of the Texas Air National Guard. He knew little of the inner workings of Washington, and his only executive experience as an elected official was holding perhaps the weakest governorship in the nation. Franklin Roosevelt had been president for almost eight years when the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor; Bush had been president for not even one.
In many ways, Dick Cheney was the opposite of George Bush. Unlike the president, almost from the beginning of his career he had held a series of consequential posts in the federal government. And while he had not personally worn the nation’s military uniform, he had served as secretary of defense during the first Gulf War. He understood Congress as a former high-ranking member of that body, and he understood the White House as a former chief of staff. On paper at least, Bush could not have picked a better person to serve at his side at such a challenging time. For critics of the Bush Administration, however, Cheney came to represent the dangers that can arise when a president allows an adviser too much power.
As Bush’s right hand, Cheney played a pivotal role in many of the controversial decisions that characterized the nation’s response to 9/11: his was a leading voice promoting what is now known to be a fictitious premise surrounding the call to unseat Iraqi president Saddam Hussein; Cheney pushed for the use of “robust interrogation” methods at secret CIA “black sites” abroad; it was Cheney’s idea to forbid terrorism suspects access to US courts; and Cheney was among the strongest advocates for the establishment of a detainee facility at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.
Even in the face of the vice president’s considerable experience, Bush had doubts about deferring so readily to Cheney’s leadership. But at the time, with questions swirling around the visibly unsteady new president, Cheney seemed to have all the answers. To the disappointment of many—including, eventually, the president—too many of the answers turned out to be wrong. After spending his first term giving his vice president a wide berth, Bush spent his second term marginalizing him.
I
Bush/Cheney 2000
Bush’s personal story has a familiar arc: The son of wealth and privilege wanders aimlessly through life for decades, indulging his whims and rarely applying himself to any channeled aspiration. He stumbles from one professional failure to the next, experiencing a couple of brushes with the law along the way, until he suddenly finds his footing. Where Bush’s story deviates from that well-known narrative is that he was able, in the span of a decade, to transform himself from a failed businessman and semi-professional alcoholic into a serious candidate for the presidency of the United States. What becomes clear in hindsight is that it was inevitable that he would become a national political figure. The events, influences and conditions in his life all pointed him in that direction. But he resisted as long as he could.
George Walker Bush, or George Jr. as he was often called, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1946. His father, George Herbert Walker Bush, who was studying at Yale at the time, was the second son in an old and noble American family.2 The Bush fortune, amassed in the 1920s by family patriarch Samuel Bush, would afford generations of Bushes access to the country’s finest schools and most exclusive clubs. It also financed the huge family compound on the southern coast of Maine overlooking the Atlantic where the growing Bush brood gathered each summer to count their blessings.
Samuel’s son Prescott would become a partner in the most prestigious investment bank on Wall Street and later US senator from Connecticut. His Senate seat would come in handy when grandson George Jr. decided to “swing for the fences” and apply for a place at Yale, where he had neither the grades nor the history of accomplishments to justify admission. His high school counselors advised him to consider a less competitive ZIP code, but George Jr. knew, even at his tender age, that such advice ignored his greatest asset.
His beliefs were confirmed as he opened his Yale acceptance letter that spring. Forever after, whenever he encountered a bump on the road of life, he would fall back on the family name.
In 1948, after graduating from college, George Sr. shuffled young George Jr. and wife Barbara off to Midland, Texas, where he hoped to find success in the oil business. He might have transitioned into finance, as so many other Bush family members had, but he wanted to make it on his own steam. At the time, oil prices were rising, and huge opportunities awaited those brave enough to try their hand at “wildcatting”—the highly risky field of oil exploration. His father’s adventurous spirit and appetite for risk would make a lasting impression on young George Jr.
In small-town Midland, the Bush family folded comfortably into the local community. George Jr. and his
siblings attended the public school, presented themselves scrubbed and oiled each Sunday at their neighborhood church and spent their Friday evenings with the rest of the crowd rooting for the local high school football team. The cowboy-boot-wearing, wise-cracking, swaggering “George W” who would someday become president was formed on the dust-strewn, rolling landscape of 1950s West Texas. Even after his father struck it rich and moved the family into a large home in an exclusive Houston suburb, young George clung stubbornly to his frontier sensibilities.
Because his father was away often, as the eldest of six, George was expected to help his mother with his younger brothers and sisters. He spent long periods alone with his mother, forming a deep bond with her. In course, he inherited her sarcastic nature, many of her mannerisms and her sharp tongue. In later years, George would fondly introduce himself at campaign events by saying that he inherited his father’s eyes, but he got his mother’s mouth. The bond between him and his mother grew tighter in the long, sad days they spent together after the death of his sister Robin from leukemia. George was eight at the time. After Robin’s death, when area boys asked him to come out to play after school, George would often beg off, saying he had to take care of his mother. Barbara would confess years later that young George helped keep her sane through that dark period.3
Robin’s death came as a complete shock to George. Biographers have speculated that her passing had a lasting effect on George’s personality—making him acutely aware at a young age of the fragility of life. It might also have influenced the pattern of reckless behavior he would exhibit in his early adult life.
For the most part, however, his was a relatively charmed childhood. He faced no significant personal challenges until he was sent off, at age fourteen, to an exclusive boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. Years later, Bush would pronounce his four years there as the hardest he had worked in his life before he ran for president.
George was poorly equipped for the academic rigors of Andover, and he struggled, but he was well liked and got on with the other boys. Being a Bush, he was of their world, but his West Texas strut and folksy manner set him apart. For much of his life, he would straddle the line between insider and outsider, leaning to one side or the other to suit his needs.
His difficulties as a student were not about intelligence. As he proved throughout his later life, he had the discipline and capacities to rise to demanding mental challenges. When he applied himself, he often succeeded; the problem was finding the will to buckle down and face the task. Although he could eventually count himself among the best educated presidents in American history, his lack of interest in his studies, beginning at Andover, would forever saddle him with a reputation as an intellectual lightweight.
To everyone’s surprise, George Jr. graduated and was accepted at Yale, where he promptly gave new meaning to the idiom “Gentleman C.” Despite his marginal academic performance and a reputation for overindulging in the ample diversions of campus life, he was tapped to join the prestigious Skull and Bones society. He would be the first to confess that his admittance was more in deference to his father and grandfather than to any individual achievement on his part. Bush’s years at Yale flowed over him like a rippling wave of Milwaukee’s finest. After graduation, he would never set foot on campus again until he was invited back as president to give the commencement speech. He was happy to reassure the graduates, as he acknowledged fellow attendee Vice President Cheney in the audience, that they too could rise from being a C student to become president. In his memoirs, Bush confesses that he accomplished little as a Yalie. After they handed him the diploma, he turned his back on the institution.
In the 1960s, while Bush was skipping class, halfway around the world other young men were dying in Vietnam. To avoid the draft, Bush used his family connections to acquire a coveted slot in the Texas Air National Guard, where he hoped to apply himself to the task of dutifully patrolling the “hostile skies” over Dallas. After a year of training, he settled into a life that looked little different than the one he had lived in New Haven. As long as he logged the requisite number of flight hours, he was free to do as he pleased. When he wasn’t in the cockpit, he was partying with friends. Bush would serve in the Guard with mixed reviews for five years, transferring briefly to serve in the Alabama Guard while he worked on a political campaign there. He would eventually resign his commission to accept a seat in the 1975 class of the Harvard Business School.
The Harvard admissions office seemed not to care that Bush had so little business experience. A Yale diploma and a father serving as US ambassador to the United Nations certainly must have helped move his application along. Nonetheless, the news that he had been accepted at Harvard was something of a shock to his family. After his lackluster undergraduate career and uneven achievement as a Guard pilot, the Bush family could not be faulted for underestimating young George, who, it was becoming clear, had a drinking problem.
True to form, Bush was far short of a stellar student at Harvard. According to his classmates, he would often show up to class in cowboy boots and a leather National Guard flight jacket, with a mouth full of tobacco juice. Some also noticed his tendency to overindulge at local bars. After graduation, Bush landed dozens of job interviews but received no offers. He went back to Texas broke and jobless, but he was not worried. As a Bush, he knew, he would be fine.
While Bush was trying to figure out his next steps after Harvard, the man who would one day help him make history was undergoing a transition of his own. In 1975, Dick Cheney, despite having been a resident of Washington, DC, for only six years, was enjoying an extraordinary run of success. He had arrived in the city on a political science fellowship, hoping to land a short-term job with a member of Congress before returning to Wisconsin to complete his PhD. Whether he worked for a Democrat or a Republican did not matter to Cheney at that point. He had not yet developed a firm political leaning. By the time he and Bush met in the mid-1980s, however, he would be a standard-bearer for the Republican Party—espousing a political philosophy so conservative that those on the left often compared him to Darth Vader.
The first son of an enlisted navy man, Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, four months before Pearl Harbor. His mother, Marjorie, and her family raised Dick Jr. while Dick Sr. was away during the war. When Dick Jr. was thirteen, his father moved the family to Casper, Wyoming, so he could take a job working for the US Department of Agriculture as a soil conservationist. Dick Sr. struggled to provide for his family on his small salary as a civil servant. He had hoped to take advantage of the GI Bill and attend college after the navy, but family commitments intervened.
The Cheney home was a modest one, even by Casper standards. The family car was an old Buick coupe without a rear seat, and Cheney and his younger brother had to fight over who got the better of two wooden boxes to sit in on long drives. In the summer, if Cheney’s mother could not pack food for family trips, she kept careful records of their purchases on the road, to stretch their limited funds. Not much has been written about Cheney’s relationship with his father. His official biographer, Stephen Hayes, struggled to show a close bond between them in his 2007 book, Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President. More is made of Cheney’s relationship with his mother.
If Cheney inherited his laid-back attitude from his father, he got his competitive streak from his mother. In the 1930s Marjorie Cheney had been a member of a nationally ranked women’s softball team called the Syracuse Bluebirds. As a boy, if Cheney wanted to play catch, he asked his mom.4 She was the one who taught Dick and his brother to hunt and inspired his lifelong love of fishing.
Dick was a good student, but he was a better athlete. His high school transcript reflects his stint as senior class president, but Cheney later described his campaign as more of an afterthought than the subject of any serious effort.5 Growing up in the 1950s, he liked to have as much fun as any boy his age. There were tongue-wrestling contests a
t the local make-out spot, where the occasional can of malt liquor was consumed. The problem drinker Cheney would become would not emerge until years later, after he was stripped of his scholarship by Yale administrators and asked to withdraw for poor academic performance.
Cheney had not planned on attending Yale. Like his captaincy of the football team and the class presidency, it sort of fell into his lap. Things had a habit of doing that for Cheney. To hear him tell it, he had not given much thought to college at all until a wealthy local man, and regional recruiter for the university, offered him a scholarship. The man had hoped to award it to Cheney’s girlfriend, Lynne Vincent, who was one of his favorite employees. However, since Yale did not admit women in those days, he did the next best thing and gave the seat to Cheney, the man he correctly thought would someday be Lynne’s husband.
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