Partner to Power

by K. Ward Cummings

  Cheney never seemed to find his place at Yale. He made friends and enjoyed campus life, but he struggled academically. After a difficult first year, he was not surprised when over summer break he received a notice that his scholarship had been revoked. He was welcome to return in the fall, but he would have to pay his own way. Cheney labored over the decision of whether to return. Though Yale tuition would be a hardship for the family, he felt a special burden to continue his studies for their sake. For the son of a man who had to abandon his own dreams of attending college, a chance at an Ivy League diploma was hard to pass up.

  Sadly, Cheney’s return trip to New Haven yielded the same result, and he received another letter. This time it was suggested that he take some time off to consider whether Yale was the right fit for him. He spent a semester laying cables for a Wyoming power company, drinking beer with friends and saving his money for one last try. He returned to New Haven in the spring semester, brimming with new confidence and commitment, but the result was the same. The next letter brought Cheney’s academic career at Yale to an end.

  Depressed and disappointed, he spent his days laying power cables, and his nights of drinking grew rowdy enough to land him in jail on more than one occasion. Hoping to arrest a developing pattern of bad behavior in the man she hoped to someday marry, Lynne delivered Cheney an ultimatum. Whatever she said to him that day was strong enough to motivate him to pull himself together. He committed himself to Lynne and to finishing his degree at the University of Wyoming. After graduation, they married and moved to Wisconsin, where Cheney was admitted to a PhD program and where Lynne also studied. They were on the way to settling into quiet lives as college professors when Cheney received word that he had been awarded a fellowship in Washington. His decision to accept would permanently alter the course of both their lives.

  Two important developments occurred for the Cheneys that would have an impact not just on their lives, but also on the life of George W. Bush. First, Cheney got a job working for a Republican congressman who would eventually introduce him to his friend, Congressman Donald Rumsfeld. Second, six months later, when Cheney had the opportunity, he chose not to accept a job working for Senator Edward Kennedy; had he done so, given that he had yet to determine his political identity, he might have become a Democrat. Instead, he ended up working for conservative Rumsfeld, who had recently left his seat in Congress to head the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon White House.

  The OEO had been created by President Lyndon Johnson as a part of his Great Society initiative, but Richard Nixon came into office determined to dismantle it. It was Rumsfeld’s task as its new director to work his way out of a job by destroying the agency from within. Cheney was brought to Rumsfeld’s attention as someone who had the skills and the discipline to aid him in the task. Years later, Cheney would pronounce Rumsfeld the most difficult boss he ever knew: He was insulting, terse and demanding. He had a habit of sending reams of memos—“snowflakes”—to employees in which he criticized their work and even their personal character. Rumsfeld was a hard-driving, mean-spirited taskmaster. They could not have known it at the time, of course, but in a few short years he and Cheney would be the closest of partners, occupying the upper echelon of Washington power. Rumsfeld would be White House chief of staff, and the thirty-three-year-old Cheney would be his deputy.

  After Harvard Business School, Bush decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and try his hand at the oil business. He had a rough start at first, squatting in a friend’s alley apartment and mooching off members of the country club, but he was slowly able to make a little money buying and selling oil leases. Taking another page out of his father’s book, he would eventually schedule a trip back east to ask friends and family for funds to start his own drilling company. He named the company Arbusto, Spanish for “bush.” Years later, during his run for Congress, his opponent could always get an easy laugh at campaign stops by referring to the failed company as “Are-bust-o.”

  He moved into an apartment building in Houston popular with young singles and started making the rounds. His future wife, Laura, lived in the same complex, but they never met. As a local public school teacher, Laura Welch could hardly be expected to keep Bush’s bachelor’s hours. By the time they did meet, they were both in their thirties and ready to settle down. They went out for dinner and, though their personalities contrasted—he was restless and impatient, she was calm and passive—they knew they were right for each other. Within months, they were married and Bush was running for Congress.

  To his friends and family, it was a surprise that Bush would enter politics. But in retrospect, all the signs were there. Bush had been working on campaigns since he was a boy, first in support of his father and later in support of others. He had transferred to the Alabama National Guard just so he could help run a Senate campaign there. Campaigning was in his blood, and he had the perfect temperament for the profession. He was folksy, naturally friendly and approachable. He was well educated, handsome and politically connected. Most of all, as a Bush, he could tap into huge pools of campaign funds. Despite having never run for office before, he won his congressional primary easily and lost the general by only six and a half thousand votes. A solid first effort.

  Over the next ten years, Bush would grow increasingly involved in politics. When his father ran for president in 1988, George Jr. moved Laura and the kids to Washington so he could work alongside his father’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater. They became close friends, and Atwater gave Bush valuable insights into the mechanics of campaigning. Bush would use what he learned to run four victorious campaigns of his own—for Texas governor in the 1990s and for president in the 2000s.

  While Bush was building his political career in Texas, Cheney was a thousand miles away, busily attending to the coattails of Donald Rumsfeld. After the Office of Economic Opportunity, Nixon appointed Rumsfeld director of the Cost of Living Council, and Rumsfeld took Cheney along. When Nixon won reelection, Rumsfeld was appointed ambassador to NATO. He invited Cheney to join him in Brussels, but, this time, not wanting to disrupt the routine of his young family, Cheney declined. It would not be long before their paths reconnected.

  When Nixon resigned in the aftermath of Watergate, incoming president Gerald Ford recalled Rumsfeld from Brussels to direct the transition team. Cheney was asked to pick Rumsfeld up from the airport on his arrival in Washington, and by the time the two arrived at Rumsfeld’s door, Cheney had been offered a spot on the team.

  The leap for Rumsfeld to White House chief of staff was an easy one. When Ford asked, Rumsfeld accepted on the condition that Dick Cheney be made his deputy.

  Spending so much time with Rumsfeld in Washington not only influenced Cheney’s career, but also shaped his political ideology. It was under Rumsfeld’s tutelage that he came to believe that government was the source of, not the solution to, most people’s problems. At Rumsfeld’s side at the OEO and CLC, Cheney came to share Rumsfeld’s view about how inefficient government could be. “The entire experience created strong feelings that I have to this day about the government trying to interfere in the economy—it moved me pretty radically in the free-market direction, the importance of limited government.”6

  Rumsfeld also helped teach Cheney the art of bureaucratic knife fighting. One of the reasons President Ford had brought Rumsfeld aboard was to ease out the Nixon holdovers. Soon after his arrival, Rumsfeld started with the domestic-policy staffers. Ford wanted to hold off on firing the foreign-affairs staffers, for fear that it might have consequences for international relations, but as the 1976 presidential primaries approached, Ford decided he needed to appease the ultraconservatives in his party and move more aggressively against unwanted senior foreign-policy staff. Over the course of a week, Ford replaced his vice president, defense secretary, CIA director and national security adviser, in a string of mass firings dubbed by the press the “Halloween Massacre.” Only Secretary of State Henry Kissinger survived. Under Nixon, Kissinger had hel
d the dual posts of secretary of state and national security adviser. Ford kept Kissinger at the State Department but stripped him of his NSC portfolio. Instead, he assigned this sensitive White House post to someone he considered to be his own man, Brent Scowcroft. The CIA directorship was given to his friend George H. W. Bush, Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defense and Cheney was promoted to become the youngest White House chief of staff in history.

  It is inconceivable that President Ford would have made such significant changes without Rumsfeld’s recommendation and the help of his sharp elbows. Vice President Rockefeller certainly had his suspicions about Rumsfeld’s involvement. He once told Ford that he thought Rumsfeld’s decision-making at the time seemed geared toward making the environment more hospitable to his own ascendency. Pushing out Rockefeller, getting his own man placed as chief of staff and marginalizing Bush at the CIA would open up opportunities for Rumsfeld down the line—in case he wanted to get on the presidential ticket. Dick Cheney sat center stage as all of this played out. (The lessons he learned would come in handy when, during the first Bush Administration, he sat over at the Pentagon and struggled for primacy with Secretary of State James Baker. By the time he sat at George Jr.’s side in the Oval Office a decade later, Cheney had certainly honed his skills as a bureaucratic in-fighter.)

  Another event that would have far-reaching consequences for Cheney involved Congress’s systematic weakening of the office of the presidency in response to what had been seen as executive overreach by President Nixon. As President Ford issued multiple executive orders in an attempt to reclaim powers stripped from him by a Congress angry about Nixon’s abuse of office, Cheney developed strong views about the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, views that would inform his decision-making for decades.

  President Ford’s 1976 loss to Jimmy Carter separated Rumsfeld and Cheney again. Rumsfeld turned his thoughts to greener pastures, and Cheney became a successful Wyoming congressman. He completed five terms, rising to the office of Minority Whip, before leaving to serve as secretary of defense to George Sr.

  It might be a stretch to suggest that Cheney was ideologically transformed by his association with Rumsfeld, but he was certainly heavily influenced. If Cheney’s personality combined his father’s laid-back style with his mother’s competitive drive, Rumsfeld should be credited for bringing his competitive side to dominate. If recent biographical sketches of him are to be believed, the young Cheney would have been happy simply to have married Lynne and been a college professor. Working with Rumsfeld seemed to bring out Cheney’s intensity. The Cheney that Rumsfeld helped create worked six days a week, fueled by pots of strong black coffee and cartons of Marlboro Reds. He was sensitive to people’s feelings, but he also was a killer when he needed to be. He was ambitious, but not ostentatiously so. He was discreet, loyal, good with details and calm under pressure—just the sort of person one might look to in a crisis.

  George W. Bush first met Cheney during a visit to the office of the then Wyoming congressman in 1987. In advance of the Republican primaries, Bush was doing the rounds on Capitol Hill, seeking support for George Sr.’s presidential bid. Cheney was a rising star in the House of Representatives at the time and avoided expressing open support for Bush’s father, for fear of offending the other candidates in the race. He and George Jr. would cross paths again when Cheney was named defense secretary in 1989. When George Jr. ran for governor, Cheney was happy to write him a check, but the pair did not actually start working together until Bush was planning his own run for the presidency in 1999 and tapped Cheney to be his vice president.

  If Cheney is to be believed, he did not want the job. He told Bush that there were many reasons his candidacy would not help the Bush ticket. He and Bush both lived in Texas, and the Constitution forbade the presidential and vice presidential candidates from being from the same state. Even if Cheney changed his residency back to Wyoming, the state only had three electoral votes, which was hardly anything to get excited about. Cheney also cited his run-ins with the law as a youth, his dismissal from Yale, his heart attacks and the fact that he had a homosexual daughter as reasons Bush might want to inquire elsewhere. Bush accepted Cheney’s reservations and instead asked him to lead his search committee for a vice president.

  Biographers have speculated that Cheney accepted the job of Bush’s headhunter because he had changed his mind about running and saw the opportunity to oversee the selection process as a way to shape the outcome to his advantage.7 Only Cheney knows the truth, but if it was an act, then he certainly put on a good show. A number of extraordinary candidates were assembled and thoroughly interviewed, including Senators Lamar Alexander, John Danforth, Bill Frist, Chuck Hagel, Congressman John Kasich and Governors John Engler and Tom Ridge. Cheney also considered Senator Connie Mack of Florida but quickly moved on when the senator threatened to never speak to him again if his name appeared on the list.

  The tax returns, health records and personal information of each candidate was gathered into binders for Bush to review. Cheney took a leave of absence as CEO of Halliburton, where he had gone to work after leaving his post as secretary of defense, to lead a team consisting of his daughter Liz and David Addington, one of Cheney’s former DoD lawyers. Cheney and his wife flew down to Texas on a hot summer day to have lunch with Bush and Laura so that he and Bush could discuss the candidates privately. After reviewing the binders, Bush asked Cheney to reconsider his offer to run with him. This time, Cheney accepted.

  For Bush, what made Cheney an ideal candidate was the fact that he seemed not to want the job to begin with. There were downsides to selecting Cheney, but to Bush’s mind they were minor. Cheney’s history of drinking and his failing out of Yale were both matters to which Bush could relate personally. Cheney’s health history was serious, but neither Cheney nor Bush was overly concerned about it. A key deciding factor for Bush ended up being the issue of loyalty.8 As Bush reviewed the list of candidates, he could see that they were all superior public figures, but he worried that he might have to compete with them while in the office. Because Cheney had no aspiration to be president, Bush was convinced that he would be the most loyal.

  A final selling point for Bush was that Cheney possessed the qualities and skills that seemed to match his own personal deficiencies as a candidate. If a crisis ever arose during his presidency, Bush knew he could rely on Cheney’s loyalty and experience. Of course, Bush was fully confident that he had the tools to be an effective president, but he must have figured it wouldn’t hurt to have someone like Cheney on hand if things suddenly went sideways.

  II

  The Prince of Darkness

  When the US was attacked on 9/11, Bush must have imagined that he had the perfect person to be at his side, but even with Cheney’s gold-plated resume, it was not a foregone conclusion that he would play the role of right hand to the president during the crisis. Bush had assembled a gifted team of advisers, and he might have chosen any one of them instead.

  Bush might easily have tapped his close friend and national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to be his right-hand woman. They worked, exercised and even vacationed together. Other than Laura, Rice may have been the president’s closest friend in the White House. And, having worked for the National Security Council for George Sr., Rice had the requisite background in foreign affairs. But even with her experience, Bush knew that Rice did not compare to Cheney at stirring the heavy tectonic plates of government. And, though Rice was not new to government service, tactically she was no Henry Kissinger.

  Later, long after George W. Bush had left the White House, George Sr. shared with his son the disappointment he had felt about Rice as an adviser.9 As the elder Bush recalled, Rice had not been much of a bureaucratic warrior in comparison to Rumsfeld, George Jr.’s secretary of defense; Cheney, his vice president; or Powell, his secretary of state. They were masters of the rapier arts, with decades of bloody government battles behind them and the scars to show for i
t. The more conciliatory Rice was completely out of her depth in their company.

  In light of Rice’s inadequacies, Cheney eventually emerged as the best partner to power out of Bush’s senior staff. Despite their strengths, having Rumsfeld or Powell serve as right-hand man was out of the question. As a result of the long, slow-burning conflict between Rumsfeld and Bush’s own father—George Sr. long suspected that Rumsfeld had exiled him to the CIA during the Ford Administration to prevent him from emerging as a viable candidate for the vice presidency when Ford ran for election in 1976—Bush’s relationship with Rumsfeld was strained. And though Powell, a man with a stellar reputation in Washington, would have been a masterful right hand, he and Bush were not close; also, importantly, Powell did not share Bush’s philosophy about how to pursue al Qaeda.10 Chief of Staff Andrew Card was well placed to be an effective right hand, but he was generally regarded as too nice. So, that left Cheney. Only he had the strategic relationships, the political reputation, the deep bureaucratic experience and the pugilistic skills to effectively serve the president in the challenges ahead.

  Although they worked together closely, the relationship between Bush and his vice president was not a seamless one. Describing their friendship, Bush once said of Cheney, “We run in separate circles. Dick goes home to his family, and I go home to mine. I wouldn’t call him a very social person. I’m certainly not a very social person either. So we don’t spend a lot time socially together.”11 But Bush had tremendous respect for Cheney and viewed him as a mentor of sorts. Their respectful, often formal professional relationship worked well for them both. And, importantly, their partnership was aided by a shared determination to do whatever was necessary to avenge the victims of 9/11.