by Dick Cheney
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To the men and women of the United States Armed Forces, defenders of liberty, sustainers of freedom
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Prologue: Yes, We Are Exceptional
PART ONE: THE AMERICAN CENTURY
ONE For the Good of All Mankind
TWO Freedom Victorious
THREE Dawn of the Age of Terror
PART TWO: THE ERA OF OBAMA
The Apology Tour
FOUR Ending Wars
FIVE Appeasing Adversaries
SIX Disarming America
PART THREE: WHAT MUST BE DONE
SEVEN Restoring American Power
Epilogue: The Last, Best Hope of Earth
Acknowledgments
About Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney
Notes
Index
It is up to us in our time to choose, and choose wisely, between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom, and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.
—PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN, MARCH 23, 1983
PROLOGUE
Yes, We Are Exceptional
And now let us indulge an honest exultation in the conviction of the benefit which the example of our country has produced and is likely to produce on human freedom and human happiness. And let us endeavor to comprehend in all its magnitude and to feel in all its importance the part assigned to us in the great drama of human affairs.
—DANIEL WEBSTER, DEDICATION OF BUNKER HILL MONUMENT, 1825
Less than fifty years after our founding, the benefit of America’s example for the world was evident. Yet Daniel Webster could not have begun to imagine the true magnitude of the role we would play “in the great drama of human affairs.” We have guaranteed freedom, security, and peace for a larger share of humanity than has any other nation in all of history. There is no other like us. There never has been. We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known.
Born of the revolutionary ideal that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” we were, first, an example of freedom’s possibilities. During World War II, we became freedom’s defender; at the end of the Cold War, the world’s sole superpower. We did not seek the position. It is ours because of our ideals and our power, and the power of our ideals. In the words of British historian Andrew Roberts, “In the debate over whether America was born great, achieved greatness, or had greatness thrust upon her, the only possible conclusion must be: all three.”
We are, as constitutional scholar Walter Berns put it, “the one essential country.” It isn’t just our involvement in world events that has been essential for the triumph of freedom. It is our leadership. No other nation, international body, or community of nations can do what we do. For the better part of a century, security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military, economic, political, and diplomatic might. For the most part, until the administration of Barack Obama, we delivered.
Since Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed us the “Arsenal of Democracy” in 1940, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have understood the indispensable nature of American power. Presidents from Truman to Nixon, from Kennedy to Reagan have known that America’s strength must be safeguarded, her supremacy maintained. In the 1940s, American power and leadership were essential to victory in World War II and the liberation of millions from the grip of fascism. In the Cold War, American strength and supremacy were key in liberating Eastern Europe, defeating Soviet totalitarianism, and ensuring the survival of freedom. In this century, our leadership and our might will once again be required for the defeat of militant Islam and the preservation of our security and liberty in the face of threats from other dedicated adversaries. Yet despite the explosive spread of terrorist ideology and organizations, the establishment of an ISIS caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and increasing threats from Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia, President Obama has departed from the bipartisan tradition going back seventy-five years of maintaining America’s global supremacy and leadership.
He has abandoned Iraq, leaving a vacuum being filled by our enemies. He says he will do the same in Afghanistan. He has made dangerous cuts to America’s conventional forces and reduced our nuclear arsenal in the misguided belief this will convince rogue nations to do the same. He has recalibrated America’s foreign policy to avoid causing offense in Tehran. He has been so desperate to conclude a nuclear agreement Iran’s leaders have no intention of honoring, that he has repeatedly misled the American people and granted dangerous concession after dangerous concession. He is gambling America’s security on the veracity of the mullahs in Tehran. He is unconcerned with maintaining American supremacy because it is inconsistent with his worldview. “No world order,” he tells us, “that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”
President Obama has diminished American power and retreated from the field of battle, fueling rising threats against our nation. He has pursued a foreign policy built on appeasing our adversaries, abandoning our allies, and apologizing for America. “A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does,” wrote Jean-François Revel, “will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.” For President Obama, it goes beyond lacking the “energy and conviction” to defend us. He has dedicated his presidency to restraining us, limiting our power, and diminishing us.
The touchstone of his ideology—that America is to blame and her power must be restrained—requires a willful blindness about what America has done in the world. It is fundamentally counterfactual. When President Obama’s ideology has come crashing up against reality, America’s security has suffered.
Don’t worry, he tells us. Despite the carnage militant Islam is spreading across the Middle East, filling the vacuum left by President Obama’s retreat, everything will be okay because our enemies are on the wrong side of history. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” he recites, “but ultimately it bends toward justice,” as though no action is required. The truth is America’s enemies are on the wrong side of morality and justice, but they will be on the wrong side of history only if we put them there.
There is good news. Just as one president has left a path of destruction in his wake, one president can rescue us. The right person in the Oval Office can restore America’s strength and our alliances, renew our power and leadership, defeat our enemies, and keep us safe. It will not be easy. There are difficult decisions to be made and very little time.
We have faced grave challenges before, and the right leaders have brought us through. As Charles Krauthammer has observed:
It is one of the enduring mysteries of American history, so near providential as to give the most hardened atheist pause—that it should have produced, at every hinge point, great men who matched the moment. A roiling, revolutionary British colony gives birth to the greatest cohort of political thinkers ever: Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin and Jay. The crisis of the 19th century brings forth Lincoln; the 20th, FDR.
We are living at another hinge point of history and require a president equal to this moment. We must choose wisely.
As citizens, we also have a duty to protect our ideals and our freedoms by safeguarding our history. We must e
nsure that our children know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender.
Our children should know about the boys of Pointe du Hoc and Doolittle’s Raiders, the Battles of Midway and Iwo Jima. They should learn about the courage of the young Americans who fought the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge and the Japanese on Okinawa. They should learn why America was right to end the war by dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and about the fundamental decency of a nation that established the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They need to know about the horror of the Holocaust, and what it means to promise “never again.”
They should know that once there was an empire so evil and bereft of truth it had to build a wall to keep its citizens in, and that the free world, led by America, defeated it. They need to know about the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, the courage of the first responders, and the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. They should understand what kind of world militant Islam will create if we don’t defeat it.
They should learn about great men like George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. We must teach them what it took to prevail over evil in the twentieth century and what it will take in the twenty-first. We must make sure they understand that it is the brave men and women of the United States armed forces who defend our freedom and secure it for millions of others as well.
Our children need to know that they are citizens of the most powerful, good, and honorable nation in the history of mankind, the exceptional nation. Ordinary Americans have done heroic things to guarantee her survival. America’s future, and the future of freedom for all the world, now depends on us. Speaking at Omaha Beach on the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, President Reagan put it this way: “We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”
Dick Cheney
Liz Cheney
May 2015
Wilson, Wyoming
PART ONE
The American Century
ONE
For the Good of All Mankind
You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare. You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. . . . You have made history, great history, for the good of all mankind.
—GENERAL MARSHALL LETTER TO GENERAL EISENHOWER, MAY 7, 1945
On the president’s plain wooden desk were half a dozen microphones, two newly sharpened pencils, a note pad, and a pack of Camels. A small audience, including actor Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard; the president’s mother, Sara Roosevelt; Secretary of State Cordell Hull; and other cabinet members, had gathered. It was the sixteenth fireside chat of FDR’s presidency, December 29, 1940. The mood was somber and the room was hot as the president arrived. “My friends,” he began, “this is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security.”
Most of Europe had fallen to Hitler. Britain stood alone. Without America’s aid, she might not survive. Recalling the economic crisis of 1933, Roosevelt said the same “courage and realism” would be required to face the rising threat to America’s security. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock,” Roosevelt said, “has our American civilization been in such danger as now.” Declaring his intent to keep the nation out of “a last-ditch war,” Roosevelt went on to describe why the security of the United States depended upon the defense of Great Britain:
They ask for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters, which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure.
Referring to those who argued for appeasement, Roosevelt pointed to the experience of the past two years, and said it had proven that negotiations with Hitler were futile:
No nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.
To do what was required, America must discard “business as usual” and turn its full productive power toward producing the armaments needed for the defense of freedom. No strikes or lockouts, no concern about postwar surplus plant capacity or the desire for luxury goods must be allowed to stop America doing what the world required. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us, this is an emergency as serious as war itself.”
Roosevelt’s determination to mobilize the nation was crucial to the success of the effort he knew we needed to mount. It had not been an easy or clear path getting to this point. The American people were war-weary and isolationist sentiment was strong. In the aftermath of World War I we had demobilized and retreated behind our oceans, hoping, as George Washington had advised, to avoid entangling our “peace and prosperity” in the fortunes of Europe. While we were turned inward, Adolf Hitler began his Blitzkrieg.
ON THE EVENING OF Thursday, August 31, 1939, General George C. Marshall dined at the home of Supreme Court justice Harlan Stone. Marshall was to be sworn in the next morning as Army chief of staff. The dinner guests gathered in the elegant brick home at 2340 Wyoming Avenue in Washington, D.C., during a time when one grim report from Europe followed another. Eighteen months earlier Hitler had annexed Austria. Thirteen months earlier he had taken the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Six months after that, despite the promises he’d made to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich, Hitler sent his troops into Prague and took all of Czechoslovakia. Just eight days before the Stones’ dinner party, the Nazis had signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact alleviated Hitler’s concern that he would have to fight on two fronts and allowed him to turn his attention to Poland.
During dinner, Marshall was called to the telephone. Hitler’s troops were massing on the Polish border. Hours later, as Marshall slept in Quarters One at Fort Myer, the second call came. It was 3:00 A.M. German planes were bombing Warsaw. Turning to his wife, Marshall said, “It has come.” Then he dressed and headed for his office in the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue.
Three miles to the east, across the Potomac River, another call had come in. America’s ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, had a message for President Roosevelt from the ambassador to Poland, Anthony Biddle. The German invasion had begun. “Well, Bill,” the president responded to Bullitt on hearing the news, “it has come at last. God bless us all.” Then he reached for a pencil and paper and made these notes of the call:
The President received word at 2:50 am by telephone from Ambass. Biddle through Ambass. Bullitt that Germany has invaded Poland and that four cities are being bombed. The Pres. directed that all Navy ships and Army commands be notified by radio at once.
In bed
3:05 am
Sept 1, ’39
FDR
The Germans had assembled a massive force of sixty divisions, more than 1.5 million troops, for the invasion of Poland. Thousands of tanks and armored cars poured across the Polish frontier as German planes bombed cities, roads, railroads, munitions depots, and columns of fleeing refugees. Warsaw fell on September 27. The last Polish force was defeated on October 6. The Poles had been able to hold out against Hitler’s onslaught for only a few weeks—and Poland’s army was significantly larger and better equipped than the United States Army of 1939.
When George Marshall became Army chief of staff, America’s army was slightly smaller than Romania’s. Demobilization in the aftermath of World War I, fueled in part by strong isolationist sentiment, had ensured America’s standing army was insufficient in size, skills, equipment, and resources to adequately d
efend the nation. In the summer of 1939 there were only approximately 174,000 enlisted men in the Army. Not a single infantry division was near its combat strength and there were no armored divisions. There were 1,175 planes. Those who were lucky were training with 1903 Springfield rifles. Other units, lacking resources to purchase actual weapons, studied blueprints and drilled with wooden machine guns. Speaking to a joint meeting of the American Military Institute and the American Historical Association at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, December 28, 1939, General Marshall announced that the Army was “probably less than 25% ready for immediate action.”
Building and equipping a force capable of defending the nation would require money and time. Marshall wanted the American public to understand that expenditures on defense could not be delayed. In an interview in the New York Times in May 1939, he listed the items the Army needed most urgently. This included “planes, semi-automatic rifles, light machine guns, modernized artillery, anti-tank cannons, heavy-caliber guns,” and gunpowder. “Every one of these items,” Marshall said, “requires a year or longer to produce. A billion dollars the day the war is declared will not buy ten cents’ worth of such material for quick delivery.”
The situation had not improved much when, five months later, at dawn on May 10, 1940, Hitler launched an assault into Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, heading for France. The next morning, Saturday, May 11, General Marshall arrived for a meeting in the office of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Morgenthau knew additional resources were needed for defense and he was frustrated that requests for funding were arriving on the president’s desk in a one-off fashion. He wanted to see the big picture and knew Marshall was the man to draw it for him.