by Peter Baker
As a result, Cheney played an outsized role in driving decisions in the early years of the administration, expertly employing a network of loyalists placed strategically throughout the government. When he ran into opposition, Cheney instituted controversial environmental, energy, and counterterrorism policies by circumventing the internal process. He pressed, and even badgered, an inexperienced president to go after Saddam Hussein in Iraq over any reservations Bush might have harbored. “Are you going to take care of this guy or not?” Cheney demanded impatiently at one of their private lunches.
For all that, Cheney was largely pushing on an open door, taking Bush where the president himself was already inclined to go. The president’s closest friends and advisers do not recall him ever complaining that Cheney had convinced him to do something he would not have done otherwise. “He never did anything in his time serving George W. that George W. didn’t either sanction or approve of,” said Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming and a close friend of Cheney’s. “So when people say that Cheney was running the show, that is bullshit.” General Richard Myers, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was on hand for some of the most critical moments, agreed. “This whole notion that the vice president was the puppet master I find laughable,” he said. “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.”
Even in the first term, Bush rebuffed Cheney on more than one occasion. While agreeing to confront Iraq, Bush refused to attack in the spring of 2002, when Cheney first pushed him to do so, nearly a year before the eventual invasion. He accepted Colin Powell’s recommendation to first seek UN support and rejected a plan to create a post-Hussein government led by Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi. By the second term, Bush had moved even further away from Cheney. Frustrated by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the crescendo of violence that greeted the “liberators,” unhappy to find the United States isolated from its allies, and eager for breakthroughs that would shape his legacy, Bush increasingly turned not to his vice president but to Condoleezza Rice, who as secretary of state supplanted Cheney as the president’s most influential lieutenant.
That’s not to say he was neutered. Cheney managed to preserve much of what he had started. But he was on defense more than offense in the second term, trying to fend off changes that he thought would weaken the country or unravel the policies he had brought to pass. “Perhaps my clout was diminished,” he conceded after leaving office. “That’s possible. I wouldn’t quarrel about that.” Indeed, by the time Bush and Cheney stepped out of the White House for the final time, they had disagreed on North Korea, gun rights, same-sex marriage, tax cuts, Guantánamo Bay, interrogation practices, surveillance policy, Iran, the auto industry bailout, climate change, the Lebanon War, Harriet Miers, Donald Rumsfeld, Middle East peace, Syria, Russia, and federal spending.
All of that came before the Scooter Libby pardon.
THE VICE PRESIDENT’S lobbying campaign started in earnest after the 2008 election that picked their successors. With the final weeks of the administration now at hand, Cheney decided he would invest whatever fading capital he had left in winning a pardon for his onetime right-hand man.
To Cheney, it was simple justice. Libby had been pursued by an unprincipled prosecutor bent on damaging the White House. Neither Libby nor anyone else had been charged with the leak that precipitated the investigation in the first place, and it turned out the special prosecutor had known virtually from the start that someone else had been the original source. The fact that the prosecutor kept investigating anyway made Cheney feel that he was the real target and Libby collateral damage. In the end, he felt, the charges against Libby were built on nothing more than a faulty memory. Libby had loyally served Cheney and Bush, and for that matter his country, only to be made into a criminal.
Cheney brought up the case incessantly. In eight years, he had never pushed Bush as hard on any other matter. Cheney raised it with Bush during a meeting before a Thanksgiving round of pardons, then again before a Christmas round. Bush told Cheney he would hold off more controversial pardons until near the end of their term, a comment the vice president took as an indication that Libby would be among them. But Bush never believed he had made any commitment, and he was skeptical of a pardon from the start. He had already commuted Libby’s prison sentence after it was handed down in 2007 so the former aide never had to spend a minute behind bars. But at the time, Fred Fielding had written a public statement for Bush saying he was not substituting his judgment for the jury’s on the question of guilt or innocence. How could he change his mind two years later?
That was the argument Cheney heard from Ed Gillespie, the presidential counselor and top political adviser who came to see the vice president one day to explain why he was advising Bush against a pardon. As with many in the White House, the Libby case had proved personally painful for Gillespie. He had been among the first to contribute to Libby’s legal defense fund. But given what Bush had said in commuting the sentence, Gillespie told Cheney he did not think the president should now grant a full pardon.
“On top of that, Mr. Vice President, the lawyers are not making the case for it,” Gillespie said. “We’ll be asked, did the lawyers recommend it? And if the lawyers didn’t, it’s going to be hard to justify for the president.”
Cheney said he thought Gillespie was wrong and shared his views about why the prosecution was illegitimate. The two agreed to disagree, and Gillespie got up and left after what he thought was the hardest thing he had had to do while in the White House.
THE CONTROVERSY THAT surrounded Cheney’s role invited a question that would mark his time in office: Had he changed? What happened to the sensible, moderate Republican people thought they knew? Brent Scowcroft, who had served as national security adviser to two Republican presidents, famously said he no longer recognized his friend. Others wondered whether the vice president had somehow been affected by his multiple heart attacks or by the trauma of September 11, 2001.
Perhaps so many thought he had changed because they mistook his low-key demeanor, friendships across party lines, and service for moderate presidents as indications that he was more moderate than he really was. The record suggests he was always more conservative than his reputation. In Gerald R. Ford’s White House, he was at odds with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. In Congress during the 1980s, he compiled one of the most conservative voting records; when the Washington Post referred to him as a moderate, Cheney instructed an aide to call for a correction. As defense secretary for George H. W. Bush, he was deeply suspicious of the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. After all this, Cheney scoffed at the notion that he was any different than he had been as a young man. “I didn’t change,” he said. “The world changed.”
Having participated in doomsday war-game scenarios in the 1980s mapping out the consequences of catastrophic attack, Cheney had long nursed dark views about the world’s dangers, views that seemed ratified on September 11. He spent the rest of his time in office consumed not with another September 11 but with a much worse scenario where terrorists would be armed with nuclear or chemical weapons instead of box cutters. By the end of his tenure, the country had largely forgotten its fears from the days after the World Trade Center fell, but Cheney had not. What happened on September 11 was a wrenching tragedy, but ultimately survivable for a nation; an attack with weapons of mass destruction could pose a much more existential threat. In that view, almost anything it took to protect the country seemed justified. While some Americans began thinking they had overreacted to September 11, Cheney lived in the shadowy world of intelligence reports that projected threats around every corner, the “dark side,” as he memorably put it. What was the moral cost of waterboarding three terrorists against the chance of a mushroom cloud in Manhattan?
If anything transformed, it was Cheney’s public person
a. “He went from the wise man, the Yoda character, to Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men,” said Adam Levine, who worked in the White House in the first term. Levine then channeled Cheney as the gravelly voiced Jack Nicholson playing the you-can’t-handle-the-truth colonel lecturing the lawyer played by Tom Cruise on a rough-and-tumble world: “ ‘You want me on that wall. Who is going to do it? You, Colin Powell? You, Condi Rice? I don’t have the time or inclination to explain myself to somebody who rises and sleeps under the blanket of freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.’ Cheney embodied that feeling of it—‘I don’t have to fucking explain to you what I am doing. I am saving the country, you asshole. I am saving lives. As much as you might hate me, you need me here.’ Bush was never like that.”
From the days after September 11 at least, it was Cheney who did not change. He remained focused unwaveringly on the threat he perceived. It was Bush who changed, not in his core beliefs or his general personality, but in his approach toward the same goals. By the latter half of his presidency, he had grown more confident in his own judgments and less dependent on his vice president. He was willing to compromise on his most controversial terror policies in order to build a bipartisan foundation that would outlast his administration. He was more interested in rebuilding alliances and trying diplomacy than in preemptive wars. Condoleezza Rice, the architect of the shift, said Bush viewed it not as a sharp pivot but as more of a natural evolution along a continuum following the necessarily aggressive actions of the first term. “We had broken a lot of china,” she reflected. “But at that point, you have to leave something in place. That is true with allies. It is true with the Middle East. It is true in putting together an international consensus on North Korea and international consensus on Iran. And I don’t think that is how the vice president saw it. I think he would have liked to have kept breaking china.”
Bush and Cheney headed into their final months in office resigned to their differences. Bush remained respectful of his number two and was rarely heard to utter a disparaging word, although there were occasions when he was known to roll his eyes at something Cheney did or said. Cheney seemed tired, perhaps physically spent after four heart attacks on his way to a fifth and politically spent after eight years in the trenches. When it came to one of the last major foreign policy decisions of the administration—what to do about a secret Syrian nuclear reactor—Cheney’s isolation was made plain when he urged an American air strike. “Does anyone here agree with the vice president?” Bush asked at the critical meeting. Not a single hand went up.
A few weeks before the inauguration, even as Cheney was lobbying Bush for the Libby pardon, Joshua Bolten invited all of his living predecessors as chief of staff to his West Wing office to meet with his successor, Rahm Emanuel. Thirteen of the sixteen men to have served in that unique role attended, including Cheney, who had been Ford’s top assistant. They went around one by one to offer advice.
When it came to Cheney, a devilish look crossed his face. “Whatever you do,” he said, pausing for effect, “make sure you’ve got the vice president under control.”
AS HE HEADED into his final days in the White House, it was clear to Bush that he did not exactly have his vice president under control. The president had decided he would not pardon Scooter Libby, and he now had to break the news to his estranged partner.
Bush welcomed Cheney into the small private dining room off the Oval Office for their final one-on-one lunch on January 15, culminating a tradition they had kept up for their entire time in office. Around this table, they had discussed some of the epic decisions of their tenure, war and peace, life and death. They had bonded over family talk, personal observations, and political gossip. But this lunch would go like none of the others before.
There would be no pardon for Libby, Bush announced to Cheney. It was a hard choice, but that was his decision.
“You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle,” Cheney snapped at the president, abandoning eight years of deference.
Bush was taken aback. It might have been the harshest thing Cheney had ever said to him, and in language designed to attack Bush’s self-identity, his sense of loyalty to his own troops in a time of war.
“The comment stung,” Bush wrote in his memoir. “In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this, or even close to it. I worried that the friendship we had built was about to be severely strained, at best.”
He had reason to worry. To Cheney, this was the final evidence that Bush had lost his will. The president who had been buffeted by critics for so long would not stand up for what was right and jeopardize the relatively positive media attention he was receiving for a smooth transition with Barack Obama, his successor. Perhaps it was even one last attempt to show who was actually in charge after all.
“Scooter was somebody, you know, he didn’t have to be there,” Cheney said years later. “He came to serve. He worked for me before at the Pentagon. He had done yeoman duty for us.” The conviction, he added, was a deep scar. “He has to live with that stigma for the rest of his life. That was wrong, and the president had it within his power to fix it, and he chose not to. It is obviously a place where we fundamentally disagree. He knows how I felt about it.” Cheney suggested the president did not want to take the heat. “I am sure it meant some criticism of him, but it was a huge disappointment for me.”
Wounded, the president wondered if he had made the right decision. Famed for never second-guessing himself, Bush began reconsidering. Maybe he should grant the pardon after all.
PART ONE
1
“One of you could be president”
George W. Bush had already dropped by to see three congressmen when he strode down the high-ceilinged corridor of the Cannon House Office Building to find the fourth on his list. It was June 17, 1987, and the son of the vice president was making the rounds to gather support for his father’s presidential campaign, or at least build goodwill with Republicans on Capitol Hill. His 3:30 p.m. appointment was with a low-key congressman from Wyoming named Dick Cheney.
This next-generation Bush was a tall, rangy man, handsome with an easy smile and a face that bore a striking resemblance to that of his famous father. Just a couple weeks shy of his forty-first birthday, he had moved his wife and twin daughters to Washington for the campaign, appointing himself “loyalty enforcer” to ensure a growing staff of political operatives was laboring on behalf of George H. W. Bush’s interests rather than their own.
Along the way, he was becoming a surrogate for his father and was surprised how much he enjoyed his new role. This family business had gotten into his blood. He had none of his father’s smoothness, though, and none of those polished New England sensibilities. Junior, as some called him, although he was not technically a junior, lived closer to the edge, the “Roman candle of the family,” as the campaign chronicler Richard Ben Cramer would call him, “the biggest and most jagged chip off the old block.”
By temperament, the man he was visiting was quite the opposite. Cheney, a former White House chief of staff now in his fifth term in Congress, was as quiet as Bush was voluble, as stoic as the younger man was expressive. He would say what he had to and then stop, perfectly comfortable with the silences that disquieted others. “He’s not necessarily what you would call the life of the party,” observed Dennis Hastert, who served with him in the House and went on to become Speaker. Cheney’s wife, Lynne, thought the way to understand him was to remember how much he loved fly-fishing, standing without a sound for hours casting for a bite—“not a sport for the impatient,” as she put it, and “definitely not a sport for chatterboxes.” He refused to go fishing with his friend Kenneth Adelman because “he talks too much.” At forty-six, Cheney had just been promoted to chairman of the House Republican Conference, the number-three position in the party leadership. He had his eye on someday becoming Speaker.
Neither man in the years to come would remember the first time they met, but it was likel
y this encounter in the summer before the Republican primaries. Never mind that Cheney had no intention of taking sides in the Republican contest featuring Bush’s father. To a congressman eyeing further moves up the leadership ladder, becoming a partisan for a presidential candidate would be “asking for grief I didn’t need,” as Cheney later put it. Indeed, his neutrality would cause a years-long rift with his good friend and mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, who had been contemplating his own run for president. But Cheney got along well with his guest that day. “He and Bush hit it off,” recalled Wayne Berman, the campaign’s congressional relations director who organized the meeting.
Berman would go on to become one of Washington’s premier lobbyists and Republican fund-raisers, as well as one of the few men close to both Bush and Cheney. He raised millions of dollars for them, promoted their campaigns, and hosted dinners for them at his house. His wife, Lea Berman, would work in the White House first for Cheney’s wife and then for Bush’s wife. But even Wayne Berman never imagined what would eventually come of the acquaintance that began in that courtesy call one summer afternoon. “Bush in those days was a really interesting guy,” he observed years later. “A little insecure, had a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Very skeptical of everything in Washington, something I think he retained. Skeptical of a lot of people around his dad.” As for Cheney, he was more comfortable with Washington yet also kept his distance. The only ones he truly relaxed around were his wife and two daughters. “Cheney has three confidantes, and all their last names are Cheney,” Berman noted. “One is related by marriage and two by blood.” He could be unguarded with friends, “but if he told you something and it leaked and he suspected you leaked it, you didn’t get a second chance. Finished.”