When he entered the White House, Cheney may not have planned to position himself to be Bush’s right-hand man, but his efforts in the early days of the administration essentially guaranteed that regardless of how the power centers developed, he would be an important player in the West Wing. Remembering from his days as chief of staff how poorly Vice President Rockefeller had been treated during the Ford Administration, Cheney had already started crafting a number of levers of influence with President Bush. In an interview, historian Ron Suskind captured Cheney’s efforts:
During the transition, you see Cheney essentially sort of mapping territory. Certain people like [Treasury Secretary] Paul O’Neill or [Secretary of State] Colin Powell are like, “What’s he doing?” Cheney was essentially creating the architecture in which George Bush would live as president…. Cheney would provide the framing and cosseting of Bush in terms of what Bush would have available to him.12
As the leader of Bush’s transition team, Cheney ensured the placement, throughout the government, of people he knew would be friendly not only to Bush, but also to himself. In a similar vein, Cheney organized the vice-presidential White House staff to mirror the presidential staff. For each one of Bush’s key White House advisers, Cheney had a counterpart on his staff who worked closely with the president’s team. And to guarantee their access to information and resources, Cheney made sure that his advisers were given the title of “assistant to the president,” the same as those on Bush’s team.
Cheney requested, and was granted, carte blanche access throughout the government, making him a sort of roving counselor, able to attend any meeting he pleased—including any meeting that the president attended.
Understanding more than most the importance of proximity to the Oval Office, Cheney made his West Wing suite his primary work space. Vice presidents traditionally had an expansive sequence of rooms overlooking the West Wing in the Old Executive Office Building next door. Cheney retained those offices, but they were not where he reported to work each morning.
From the very start, Cheney cultivated the expectation that he would not be a merely ceremonial vice president in the mold of Lyndon Johnson or Dan Quayle.13 He would be a key decision-maker, more like Al Gore or Walter Mondale.
Bush and Cheney may not have been close personally, but from the very beginning they functioned well as a team. Before 9/11, Bush made tax cuts and education reform the main priorities of his first term. He chose to handle education reform himself, given his experience working on such issues in Texas. To Cheney he gave the responsibility for crafting his major-tax-cut bill. Cheney was also made chairman of the president’s controversial Energy Task Force, which was charged with creating a national energy policy aimed at reducing America’s reliance on foreign oil. In characteristic Cheney fashion, the vice president kept the work of the task force so secret that Congress and the Government Accountability Office eventually had to sue the president for details of its proceedings.
Bush also made Cheney his enforcer. When the president decided that Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was not working out, he had Cheney deliver the message. According to O’Neill, he was meeting with his staff when he received an unexpected call from the vice president. Cheney told him, cryptically, that the president had decided to make a change in his economic team. After a brief pause, he added that O’Neill was the change. Then he concluded the call.
Bush also took the unprecedented step of giving Cheney sole responsibility for intelligence matters. During his interview for the PBS series Frontline, former Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman expressed surprise at Bush’s decision:
When Bob Graham became chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he went in a normal sort of courtesy visit to see Bush in the Oval Office. And some time during that first—and only—meeting, Bush told him, “Dick Cheney’s going to be your point of contact in the White House. He has the brief for intelligence.”14
Gellman was surprised to hear that the president would prefer not to take the lead on something as consequential and sensitive as intelligence matters. He could understand Bush might want to have Cheney’s considerable expertise in the room during briefings or discussions on intelligence, but to delegate responsibility for the whole portfolio seemed bizarre.
Cheney organized an impressive constellation of resources for himself in the West Wing that essentially guaranteed his status as a key player, but perhaps the greatest source of his power was his understanding of Bush.
Being the president’s right hand is about more than having access to the president or sharing his or her mission. As mentioned in other chapters, it is also about understanding the president’s thinking. In Cheney’s case, it was about fully sympathizing with the president’s reasoning for doing whatever it took to protect the nation. Cheney understood Bush’s need to have every tool available to him in the fight, and it became his mission to help Bush acquire those tools by any means.
Cheney was such a visible and active vice president that many in the media began to speculate that he was playing puppet master to Bush. David Frum, a White House speechwriter at the time, suggested that Cheney’s influence over the president was as invisible as it was powerful. He compared watching Cheney in the role of vice president to seeing “iron filings moving across a table. You knew there was a magnet under the table moving things, but you did not see the magnet.”15 In reality, however, Cheney was only doing what Bush would have done himself had he the time and experience to do so. At one time or another, Sherman Adams, Clark Clifford and Alexander Hamilton were all accused of leading the president around by the nose, but evidence shows that, in every case, it was a false assumption. Like Cheney, each of those right-hand men had been acting in concert with his president.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush and Cheney expressed two main goals: to pursue those responsible for the attacks and to prevent any future attacks. These efforts would require strengthening the presidency in ways not seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. The lengths to which Bush and Cheney were prepared to go to achieve their goals would inspire criticism even from many of the president’s closest advisers.
Many Americans were alarmed to read in the papers that Bush wanted to monitor and analyze their communications for reasons of national security. In addition, he wanted the authority to determine unilaterally the treatment of al Qaeda fighters captured on the battlefield, where they would be held and how they would be tried—even whether any hypothetical prisoners who were Americans would enjoy protections under US law or whether they would be regarded as stateless war criminals. Some of these powers Bush already possessed. The others would become a source of tension between him and Congress.
When their initial efforts to involve Congress in the decisions surrounding these controversial authorities did not have the desired outcome, Bush and Cheney decided they did not need congressional approval anyway. After all, this was a time of war. Cheney’s many years of high-level government experience had convinced him that in wartime the president possessed almost absolute power.16 He urged Bush to bypass Congress altogether and instead to work within the executive branch to secure the authorities he needed. The Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice became the vehicle Cheney used to get legal cover for all the new powers Bush would exercise. The OLC drafted legal opinions for the White House that effectively made it unnecessary for Bush to seek the advice or consent of anyone outside of the executive branch.
In one area in particular, Cheney knew he would have great difficulty winning congressional approval—the wiretapping of American citizens. He knew the government possessed the means to locate and prevent the growth of homegrown terrorist cells with the use of the National Security Agency, but he also knew it was illegal to record and analyze the domestic communications of Americans. The vice president’s office pressured the OLC to draft a memorandum granting the president the authority to use the NSA for this purpose, removing Congress from the process. The OLC complied,
by interpreting Article II, Section II, of the Constitution as granting the president, in times of war, special “plenary powers” that enabled him to act almost without limitation in order to ensure the security of the nation.17
As Bush and Cheney responded to each emerging challenge together, they developed a tight working rhythm. One particular incident involving Cheney’s lobbying of Bush to accept his recommendation for the treatment of enemy combatants illustrates their process and what each of them brought to the table.18
When Cheney wanted to create a military commission to try non-American combatants captured on the battlefield, he first approached Bush privately. Cheney thought that enemies of the state should not be permitted to access American courts, enjoy the protections of the Uniform Code of Military Justice or the benefits of the Geneva Convention. Cheney envisioned addressing this problem by creating a secret military court. After discussing the matter broadly with Bush, the vice president worked with OLC to draft a short memorandum describing how the commission might work. Later, during one of their weekly lunches, Cheney discussed his idea with Bush in greater detail. Observers remember Cheney arriving for his lunch with the president that day carrying a single sheet of paper and emerging afterward with that same sheet. Cheney had condensed the functions of the commission he envisioned into a short outline and presented the document to Bush for his review. After lunch, Cheney walked down the hall to his office and had the outline fleshed out into a four-page executive order that determined how all prisoners, including Americans, would be treated if they were designated “enemies of the State.” Cheney and Bush discussed this sweeping and highly controversial new authority alone, without advice from Rice or Powell or Rumsfeld. Just Bush and Cheney, sitting alone in the president’s private dining room.
When Cheney left that lunch with Bush, his thoughts were not about seeking out the president’s national security team for comment; he was focused on swiftly translating the outline into an official document before the president left for a weekend trip. Cheney worked only with his own lawyers on the document. The secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the national security adviser heard about it later, the same way most Americans did—from the news media. As Marine One landed on the lawn outside of the Oval Office, the final copy of the executive order was rushed to Bush for his signature. The president quickly reviewed the text, signed the document and left for the day. This is how Bush and Cheney functioned. Bush relied on his vice president to handle this very sensitive matter, and he valued his work so much that, though the effort should perhaps have included the participation of the other key members of the cabinet, Cheney was permitted to do an end-run around them. This incident might give credence to the notion that Cheney had Bush on a leash. But anyone who knew President Bush knew that he was not the type of person who could be easily finessed.
White House staffer Matthew Dowd once commented, “If you spend any time around President Bush, you quickly realize he’s not a guy who can be led around in that way, not at all.” General Richard Myers, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared Dowd’s view. “This whole notion that the vice president was the puppet master I find laughable. He was an active vice president because I think he was empowered, but he wasn’t a dominant factor. The alpha male in the White House was the president.”19
Despite Cheney’s considerable advantage of experience over Bush, he did not dictate to the president; he made recommendations. He saw his job as providing Bush with options. And since Bush wanted every legal authority available to him to pursue al Qaeda, Cheney worked to secure those authorities.
Cheney was chosen as right hand not only because his distinguished credentials compensated for Bush’s shortcomings or because of his nuanced understanding of the process and inner workings of the federal government; he was chosen because he and Bush were of a similar mind on most matters, including presidential power and leadership. Each man knew his place and performed his assigned role.
Unlike Cheney, others around Bush tried to steer him in directions he did not want to go. Powell and Rice, for example, pressed him repeatedly to be more mindful of US allies when he made decisions. What they failed to fully understand is that in the early period of the “war on terror,” Bush was genuinely willing to fight al Qaeda alone if necessary—he was not concerned about US allies such as Europe. He welcomed their support, but it was not Europeans who had elected him to protect their children at night.
The advisers who were successful with Bush were the ones like Cheney, who focused on executing his wishes instead of on guiding him down paths he did not want to follow. Pursuing al Qaeda would require more than a sophisticated manipulation of the levers of government. The person at Bush’s side would need to be truly committed to Bush’s vision. Bush wanted an aggressive use of all executive authorities available to him to fight al Qaeda. Cheney, as a committed right-hand man, devoted himself to delivering those powers.
III
Reconsidering the Vice President
Cheney’s tenure as Bush’s right hand, like all such relationships, eventually ran its course. As he grew more comfortable in his role as president, Bush came to rely less on Cheney and more on his other advisers—most notably Condoleezza Rice. The change in the Bush-Cheney partnership was gradual. Bush’s working style would play a role in creating some of the distance, but a series of significant actions on Cheney’s part, including his unwelcome pressuring of the president, may also have contributed.
A member of the boomer generation born after World War II, George Jr. had never experienced anything like 9/11. As he contemplated the extraordinary challenges ahead, he appreciated having someone of Cheney’s wisdom and experience to guide him. But as the crisis matured, Bush discovered that, in many ways, Cheney was just as in the dark as he was.
After an initial spike, Bush’s approval ratings began to decline sharply as Americans increasingly blamed him for pulling the country into a conflict with no end in sight. He grew to regret having been convinced by his vice president that invading Iraq would be a quick and relatively painless endeavor. Cheney, basing his recommendations on his own experience having led the fight against Iraq as US secretary of defense in the 1990s, insisted that stabilizing Iraq after Hussein’s removal would be swift and the Iraqi people grateful. He was wrong on both counts. Each time Cheney’s assertions were proven incorrect, Bush’s doubts about his vice president grew.
For Bush, who prided himself on his instincts and who had initially resisted when Cheney and others tried to convince him to target Saddam Hussein, the failure to find the much-publicized “weapons of mass destruction” after the invasion convinced him to put more faith in his own gut. Bush had agreed with Cheney’s assessment that intelligence reports seemed to indicate that Hussein had actively pursued weapons of mass destruction, but Cheney kept pushing Bush for action. He reminded the president that Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people. And although no clear corroborating evidence existed, Cheney was convinced that the Iraqi president had not followed through on his UN obligations and destroyed the country’s stockpiles of weapons. If he still had them, Cheney argued, what was to stop him from selling them to the highest bidder?
Further, although initially Bush agreed with Cheney that Hussein was a destabilizing force in the region and must be stopped, he would eventually regret letting himself be convinced that Hussein’s activities made him an immediate threat to the national security of the United States. Cheney insisted that, were Iraq destroyed, the US could establish in its place a friendlier government—an island of democracy in a tempestuous sea. Knowing little of regional history, Bush accepted Cheney’s recommendation. Later he would learn that Hussein was nowhere near the danger Cheney had made him out to be.
Cheney also convinced Bush that Iraq’s oil should be a source of concern and an additional reason to neutralize Hussein. He convinced Bush that the country’s proven reserves gave the Iraqi president the means to fund terrorist activi
ties around the world. Furthermore, oil wealth equipped Hussein with the resources to do harm to US economic security. At any time, Cheney argued, Hussein could use Iraq’s oil to apply pressure on international markets and, by extension, on the US economy. There was no immediate evidence that Hussein was planning such an act, but Cheney believed it was possible, and he urged Bush to act.
The cooling of the relationship between Bush and Cheney was not all Cheney’s fault. Bush’s working style made him an easy target for the kind of hyperbolic advice that Cheney and others were adept at providing. As a self-styled man of action, Bush appreciated the argument that, in the wake of 9/11, the world had to see that Americans would not permit such horrific acts to go unpunished. Cheney, and particularly CIA Director George Tenet, argued that someone had to pay. Given Hussein’s aggressive past behavior, he was a compelling target.
Bush also resonated to the argument that, visually, Iraq was a more attractive target than other countries that harbored terrorists. Unlike Afghanistan or Somalia, Cheney argued, Iraq possessed imposing physical structures that would present a striking image on American TV screens. Why send American pilots to flatten sand castles in Somalia, when the high-rises of Baghdad awaited just over the horizon?
Such arguments had weight with Bush when the hostilities were in the early days or while the war was going well, but as conditions on the ground worsened and bodies of American soldiers began streaming into Dover Air Force Base, Bush’s reservations about Cheney’s advice multiplied. By the beginning of his second term, as he drew closer to the end of his time in office, Bush started to consider his legacy. Did he really want to be remembered as the president who mired the nation in a decade-long war, bankrupted the country or isolated the American people from allies abroad? All of these scenarios were starting to look possible. Bush decided to change course, and, as a consequence, his relationship with Cheney changed.
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