Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Bush arrived at Yale that fall, following the footsteps of his father and his father’s father. His family had moved from Midland to Houston, where he attended the Kinkaid School, and then at fifteen he had gone off to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. “Andover was cold and distant and difficult,” he said later. Like Cheney, he was out of place academically and culturally. Writing a paper about Robin’s death, he looked up a synonym for “tears.” When he wrote that “lacerates” fell from his eyes, the teacher marked a big zero in red ink on the paper. So he threw himself into the study of people, becoming a cheerleader and forming a stickball league with himself as high commissioner. He called himself “Tweeds Bush,” a play off Boss Tweed, the nineteenth-century political boss, and gave teams names like Crotch Rots and Nads (as in “Go, Nads!”). Classmates called him “Lip” for his active mouth.

  Yale was much the same. With neither the academic nor the athletic gifts to match his father, Bush set about making friends, developing skills that would later prove critical to his rise. He knew the names of all fifty pledges to Delta Kappa Epsilon. But he was turned off by what he saw as the intellectual superiority around him. When his father launched his political career in Texas with a losing challenge to Senator Ralph Yarborough in 1964, George headed home for election night and cried at the result. Returning to Yale, he ran into William Sloane Coffin, the university chaplain. “I knew your father,” Coffin told him, “and your father lost to a better man.” Bush was crushed. As the Vietnam War heated up and the campus turned increasingly activist, Bush grew more alienated. “He was a guy out of water when he was at Yale,” Joe O’Neill said. “He felt uncomfortable as hell.”

  As with Cheney, Bush’s Yale days were better remembered for their extracurricular exploits. Lubricated by beer, he and his fraternity brothers were arrested for stealing a Christmas wreath from a local hotel, although disorderly conduct charges were dropped. When Yale beat Princeton at football, Bush led others onto the New Jersey field to tear down the goalpost. Police found him on the crossbar and put him into a cruiser, whereupon Yale friends started rocking the car, shouting, “Free Bush!” The officers ultimately let him go but ordered him never to return.

  While he was tapped for the Skull and Bones secret society like his father and grandfather, Bush was ambivalent; asked what he wanted his Bones name to be, he could not think of one, so he was dubbed “Temporary,” and it ended up sticking. A Bonesman was a “good man,” and for a lifetime that became Bush’s ultimate endorsement. Still, he was more at home at the Deke House, where he became president and forged a connection with other students. Once when a classmate believed to be gay walked by, someone made a mean remark. As Lanny Davis, later a prominent Democratic lawyer, recalled it, Bush told the wisecracker to knock it off. “Why don’t you try walking in his shoes and seeing how it feels?”

  Unlike Cheney, Bush graduated in 1968, albeit with a solid-C record. For decades, that would fuel questions about his intellect. “I went to school with him for six or seven years, and he’s a very smart guy,” said Jack Morrison, a fellow Andover and Yale graduate. “He’s not a philosopher. He’s not going to go to bed reading Plato at night. But he’s very smart.” Bush would long play off his reputation to lower expectations. When he returned to Yale in 2001 to deliver the commencement address, he joked about the experiences he and Cheney shared there. “If you graduate from Yale, you become president,” Bush told the crowd. “If you drop out, you get to be vice president.”

  THE YEARS AFTER Yale became what Bush would call his “nomadic” period. During summers and after graduation, he held a series of jobs without any real sense of where he was going; he worked on an oil rig off Louisiana, spent time on the trading floor of a stock brokerage, sold sporting goods at Sears, Roebuck, herded cows on a cattle ranch in Arizona, helped out on a couple of political campaigns, and mentored troubled young boys at a poverty program in Houston.

  The elder Bush had won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1966, and George W. felt pressure to live up to his standard. He joined the Texas Air National Guard to become a fighter pilot like his father, helped by the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, who called the National Guard commander on his behalf. But while the father fought in World War II, the son stayed stateside during Vietnam, and even then questions would arise about how often he reported to duty. “I would guess that probably he did have some desire to see if he could live up to his father’s—I would not say expectations because I don’t think his father ever put those types of expectations on him, but in his own mind live up to his own father’s achievements and record,” said Charlie Younger, his lifelong friend from Midland. Bush had broken off an engagement with a Houston woman during school and was now dating without much commitment. His father, while mounting a second losing Senate campaign in 1970 with George’s help on the campaign trail, even set him up on a date with Tricia Nixon. The younger Bush showed up nervously at the White House in a purple Gremlin to take out the president’s daughter. “We went to dinner,” he said afterward. “It wasn’t a very long date.”

  The subtle tension between father and son finally erupted around Christmas 1972 when George W. took his sixteen-year-old brother, Marvin, out drinking. Driving home, he smashed into a neighbor’s trash can and noisily dragged it down the block. His father sent Jeb to bring George to the study.

  “I hear you’re looking for me,” the inebriated young man snapped. “You want to go mano a mano right here?”

  Jeb tried to defuse the moment by telling his father that George had gotten into Harvard Business School.

  The elder Bush, caught off guard, asked if he would go.

  “No,” the son said. “I’m not going. I just did it to show you that I could.”

  Cheney at that point was in the middle of one of the most extraordinary rises to power in modern American history. After graduating from the University of Wyoming, he had an internship in the state legislature and then won an internship with Governor Warren Knowles of Wisconsin. He and Lynne drove their black 1965 Volkswagen Beetle to Madison, and Lynne enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to work on a doctorate, while Dick kept working on a master’s degree that he finished in June 1966. A month later their first daughter arrived, Elizabeth, who came to be called Liz. Cheney began work on a PhD, and he and Lynne planned a life as college professors. With fighting in Vietnam escalating, his academic work, marriage, and fatherhood helped secure him five deferments. “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service,” he explained blandly when the question came up later.

  Offered a fellowship in Washington in 1968, Cheney put aside his studies and headed to the capital, where at an orientation he saw an impressive Republican congressman named Donald Rumsfeld. He sought an interview that did not go well. “It was clear that we hadn’t hit it off,” Cheney said. “He thought I was some kind of airhead academic and I thought he was rather an arrogant young member of Congress. Probably we were both right.” Cheney went to work instead for another Republican congressman, William Steiger.

  The next year, as Cheney’s family grew with the birth of another daughter, Mary, Rumsfeld was tapped by President Richard Nixon to run the Office of Economic Opportunity overseeing the war on poverty. Cheney took it upon himself to write a twelve-page memo with suggestions. Rumsfeld summoned him back with equal brusqueness but a different outcome.

  “You,” Rumsfeld barked at Cheney, never looking up. “You’re congressional relations. Now get the hell out of here.”

  An FBI background check later turned up Cheney’s drunk-driving arrests, which he had disclosed. “But he stood by me,” Cheney said of Rumsfeld, “and I have never forgotten that.”

  It was the start of a decades-long relationship that would prove enormously significant for both men, and the country. Cheney stayed with Rumsfeld when he took over the inflation-fighting Cost of Living Council. Both jobs soured Cheney on government intervention in the economy, and the son of New Deal Demo
crats became a conservative Republican. But when Rumsfeld was sent to Europe as ambassador to NATO, Cheney went to work at Bradley Woods, a consulting firm. That did not last long. In August 1974, as Nixon was preparing to resign, Cheney picked up the phone and heard Rumsfeld’s secretary telling him to meet his old boss at the airport the next day. The new president, Gerald Ford, needed Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld needed Cheney.

  DESPITE HIS TESTY response to his father, Bush did go to Harvard Business School in the fall of 1973. “Here you are at the West Point of capitalism,” said the taxi driver who dropped him off. Like Yale, it proved aggravating for a Texas conservative, especially one whose father had become chairman of the Republican National Committee in the midst of the Watergate scandal. Two thousand people celebrated Nixon’s resignation with an impromptu flag-waving snake dance through Harvard Square. Bush had a “rotten time” at Harvard during Watergate, according to his aunt Nancy Ellis, who lived nearby and often hosted him when he escaped campus.

  Bush rebelled against Harvard. At the buttoned-down, exclusive New England school, he defiantly wore cowboy boots and his National Guard flight jacket while spitting tobacco into a cup during classes. He later described Harvard as “claustrophobic, intellectually and physically.” But it also provided what his mother called “structure.” In her view, it “was a great turning point for him.” And the first glimpses of his own ambition came through. When some students objected to an assignment to study paper flow in Senator Ted Kennedy’s office, the instructor told them not to count out politics: “One of you could be president one day.” Bush, in the back row, grinned, mischievously thrust his arms in the air, and flashed the Nixonian V-for-victory sign.

  What seemed farcical to Bush came closer to reality for his father. Taking over for Nixon, Gerald Ford considered George H. W. Bush and Rumsfeld for vice president, before settling instead on the former governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. Rumsfeld became chief of staff, and he tapped Cheney as his deputy. Just thirty-three years old, Cheney had never met the new president but now was helping him run the nation. “All I really had going for me was the good opinion of Don Rumsfeld,” Cheney said later. Ford was impressed, viewing the young man as a “pragmatic problem solver” who “worked eighteen-hour days” and was “absolutely loyal to me.” For all of his later reputation for militancy, Cheney was as sick of Vietnam as anyone else. As North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon for the final act of the conflict in April 1975, Ford flew to New Orleans to wash the country’s hands of it, declaring it “a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” The mood on Air Force One back to Washington was one of relief, even celebration. Cheney raised a glass and offered a pungent toast. “Fuck the war,” he declared.

  But a low-key, laid-back demeanor masked a strong conservative streak, often pitting him against moderates like Rockefeller and Henry Kis- singer. Cheney struck Robert Hartmann, the president’s longtime adviser, as “somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld or, for that matter, Genghis Khan.” A tough-minded anti-Communist and skeptic of détente, Cheney pushed Ford to meet with the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, only to lose to Kissinger’s don’t-rock-the-boat argument. Cheney had more success burying Rockefeller’s activist-government ideas. “He didn’t care much for me, because I was the roadblock to his doing what he wanted to do and thought ought to be done, because everything got filtered through me and he never liked the outcome of those policy debates,” Cheney said years later. He also thought a vice president should not participate in meetings of advisers because it would warp the discussion.

  Heading into a difficult election year with Ford facing a challenge from Ronald Reagan on the right, Cheney and Rumsfeld decided the White House had grown dysfunctional and drafted a blistering twenty-six-page memo urging Ford to stop speaking bureaucratically, “be presidential,” and “fire someone visably [sic].” To clear the way, they offered their own resignations. “The bulk of the problems,” they wrote, “involve Hartmann, the Vice President or Kissinger.” Hartmann “simply seems not to work well with other people,” Cheney and Rumsfeld wrote. Hartmann did not think much of them either, referring to them as “the Praetorians” and writing that Cheney’s “most distinguishing features were snake-cold eyes.” After repeated turf battles, Hartmann concluded, “I could never trust Dick Cheney.”

  Ford did not accept their resignations but shook up the team. He stripped Kissinger of his second title of national security adviser and gave the job to Brent Scowcroft. He forced out Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and the CIA director, William Colby, nominating George H. W. Bush to take over the spy agency, sending Rumsfeld to run the Pentagon, and promoting Cheney to chief of staff. To defend against Reagan, Cheney urged the president to dump Rockefeller from the ticket in 1976, and the vice president agreed to step aside.

  It was a pivotal moment that would reverberate a quarter century later when Bush’s son put together his own government. By sending the elder Bush to the CIA, Ford effectively took him out of the vice presidential sweepstakes in 1976 since Senate Democrats insisted the nominee forswear a candidacy in exchange for confirmation. The move drove a permanent wedge between Bush and Rumsfeld; Bush assumed Rumsfeld had orchestrated the appointment to sideline him, something Rumsfeld and Cheney would spend decades denying. Either way, the effect was to clear Rumsfeld’s path of rivals for vice president; Rockefeller and Bush were out of the picture.

  Now thirty-four, Cheney took over as the youngest White House chief of staff in history. “I knew that I could ask Cheney to step into Rumsfeld’s shoes and that the White House would function just as efficiently,” Ford wrote. Cheney took a modest profile, initially continuing to drive his old Volkswagen Beetle with a missing front fender to work instead of accepting the traditional car and driver. The Secret Service gave him the code name Backseat. But from the backseat, he wielded enormous influence and tackled the discipline problems he and Rumsfeld had identified. He was easygoing and “intelligent without displaying the arrogance and studied aloofness of Rumsfeld” and “doesn’t press his opinions on others, and particularly the president, as Rumsfeld did,” John J. Casserly, a White House speechwriter, recorded in his diary. Cheney had friendships with reporters, although he disdained the conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, whom he dubbed “Errors and No Facts.” He oversaw the campaign, leaning on a crafty Texas operative named James A. Baker III to wage a delegate-by-delegate battle staving off Reagan. Cheney, more in tune politically with the challenger, made a secret trip to Camp David in August 1976 to convince Ford to put Reagan on the ticket. But the scars of their primary contest were too deep.

  The battle went all the way to the convention, where Reagan forces extracted one last concession, a “morality in foreign policy” plank in the platform denouncing agreements with the Soviet Union—in effect, denouncing Ford’s own policies. Kissinger insisted on fighting it, but Cheney advised standing down. “We’re going to take a dive,” he told his fellow Ford aide Ron Nessen in a van bumping across Kansas City, where the convention was held. “Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do any good if you lose the nomination.” With Cheney and Baker’s leadership, Ford eked out victory with 1,187 delegates, to 1,070 for Reagan. But Cheney’s patron, Rumsfeld, had fallen off the list for running mate, and Ford picked a candidate he thought would help rally the divided party behind him, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. Rockefeller, nursing his wounds, called Cheney a “son of a bitch” when Dole was slated to be brought onstage before him.

  Weakened by the primary battle, Ford started the general election campaign far behind the Democrat Jimmy Carter. After Ford claimed during a debate that the Soviet Union did not dominate Eastern Europe, it fell to Cheney to force him to backtrack. He headed into the president’s cabin on Air Force One the next day, only to be rebuffed. So he enlisted the campaign adviser Stuart Spencer to return with him to the cabin. It took several statements to finally douse the furor. Still, Fo
rd closed the margin in the final days, and on election night the balloting remained close enough that he went to bed not knowing for sure that he had lost.

  The next morning, Cheney went over the numbers.

  “Gentlemen,” he proclaimed, “we have to hoist our flag—the white flag of surrender.”

  Shortly after 9:00 a.m., he delivered the verdict to Ford. “Mr. President, we lost,” he said.

  The result was close, but Ford rejected a recount, reasoning that since he lost the popular vote, “it would be very hard for me to govern if I won the presidency in the Electoral College through a recount,” as James Baker recalled it. Baker thought “he was right, of course,” never imagining he would go on to help another candidate who lost the popular vote win the presidency through the Electoral College.

  Ford called Carter. “Governor, my voice is gone, but I want to give you my congratulations,” he said. “Here’s Dick Cheney. He will read you my concession statement.”

  He handed the phone to Cheney.

  ON THE DAY Carter was sworn in, Cheney went to Andrews Air Force Base to see off Ford, then took his family to lunch at McDonald’s to talk about the future. They then went on a Bahamas vacation with Donald Rumsfeld and his family. After a dozen years away from Wyoming, Cheney decided to return home, hitching his old Volkswagen Beetle to a moving truck and heading west in June 1977.

  Cheney’s days in the Ford White House proved formative to his governing philosophy. In the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, he served at the nadir of the presidency, when Congress was chipping away at executive power through the War Powers Resolution and other legislation that altered the balance of power in American government. The Church Committee investigation into abuses by the CIA, he felt, undercut the nation’s premier spy agency. Bryce Harlow, a veteran of the Eisenhower White House and a colleague in Ford’s, warned Cheney about the need to protect the prerogatives of the executive. “One of the things he would say is, ‘Look, we have to make sure we leave this institution of the presidency with the same authorities and powers that the Constitution intended,’ ” Rumsfeld later recalled. “Once an executive acquiesces in something that infringes on that because it is politically expedient or is weak or the Congress is a quid pro quo for something, it doesn’t just affect your presidency; it affects the institution.” That, Rumsfeld said, made a lasting impression on him and Cheney. “I felt that way, and I know he felt that way,” Rumsfeld said. Cheney later told reporters as vice president, “A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the ’70s served to erode the authority, I think. The president needs to be effective, especially in a national security area.”