by Peter Baker
For Cheney, this was to be the end of his political career. He received a call from Tom Cruikshank, with whom he had gone fishing a few months earlier. Cruikshank, chief executive officer of Halliburton, was retiring. Would Cheney be interested in taking over the oil services giant? Cheney accepted and told a Wyoming newspaper that his political career was “over with.” Asked whether he might think about the vice presidency, he scoffed. It was, he said, a “cruddy job.”
Arriving in Dallas in the fall of 1995, he took over a $5.7 billion company with nearly sixty thousand employees, while Lynne became co-host of CNN’s Crossfire political show. For the first time in Cheney’s life, he was making big money, and when he flew back to Wyoming in the company jet, his friend Bill Thomson reminded him of his complaints about schlepping around the campaign trail. “I see you have solved your transportation problems,” Thomson told him. Cheney set out to expand business with the federal government and became an active voice opposing unilateral sanctions against countries like Iran, arguing that it made no sense to deprive American companies of business.
His biggest move at Halliburton grew out of a quail-hunting trip in January 1998 with Bill Bradford, chairman of Dresser Industries—the same company that Prescott Bush helped go public and that gave George H. W. Bush his start fifty years earlier. Out of their conversation, Halliburton bought Dresser for $7.7 billion, a merger that expanded the company. Only later would it seem questionable. The purchase came at the top of the market, with Halliburton paying a 16 percent premium; by the time the merger was complete, Cheney had to cut ten thousand jobs right away. Moreover, Dresser brought vast liability for past asbestos use that forced Halliburton to put part of the company into bankruptcy and pay out billions of dollars to victims. Still, it was a period of great growth; over the course of Cheney’s tenure, Halliburton would expand to an $11.9 billion giant.
Cheney now lived just up the highway from Bush, who had moved his collection of autographed baseball cards into the governor’s office and was proving to be an effective executive, pushing through his legislative program with the help of a bipartisan alliance he forged with Bob Bullock, the powerful Democratic lieutenant governor. Bullock was “an irascible, crazy old Texas politician,” as Sandy Kress, a Bush adviser, described him, but he took a fatherly liking to the governor. Bush courted Bullock and the Democratic House Speaker, Pete Laney, at weekly breakfasts and roamed the capitol popping his head into the offices of other lawmakers.
His irreverence worked. Once Bullock declared that he was on the opposite side of a bill. “Governor, on this I’m going to have to fuck you,” he said.
Bush got up from his chair and leaned over to plant a kiss on Bullock’s mouth. “If you are going to fuck me, you’ve at least got to kiss me first,” Bush said playfully.
Bullock proved to be such a close ally that he endorsed the Republican governor for reelection in 1998, even though he was godfather to the son of the Democratic nominee, Garry Mauro.
With Newt Gingrich the harsh-edged, shut-the-government face of the Republican Party in Washington, Bush stood out as a different kind of Republican, one trying not only to forge bipartisan alliances but to break out of the old paradigm of a seemingly heartless conservatism. He drew attention for disagreeing with Governor Pete Wilson’s attempts in California to limit public benefits for illegal immigrants, and he implemented policies intended to address social ills but through more conservative means. His willingness to buck party orthodoxy attracted the likes of Mark McKinnon, a Democratic media consultant who switched parties to work for Bush.
In February 1998, Bush visited a juvenile detention center in Marlin, Texas, and was surprised when a fifteen-year-old African American boy locked up for petty theft asked, “What do you think about us?” Bush, searching for an answer, said, “The state of Texas still loves you all. We haven’t given up on you. But we love you enough to punish you when you break the law.” He was still dwelling on the encounter the next day when a young political operative named David Kuo came down from Washington to talk about a job. “I didn’t have an answer,” Bush told Kuo. “I still don’t. I said something, but I don’t remember exactly what it was. But I have to have an answer to that. There has to be something done about the gap between the rich and the poor. There has to be something done about racial justice, economic justice, social justice.”
Bush told Kuo that day that he was not sure he wanted to run for president. “I just don’t know if I can spend the rest of my life in a security bubble,” he said. “I’ll never walk down a street alone. Never again.” It was a theme of his conversations that year. He told Karen Hughes, his communications director, “I’ll never again be able to just walk into Wal-Mart and buy fishing lures.” As Bush cruised to an easy victory over Mauro, becoming the first Texas governor to win a second consecutive term, the real drama was what he would do about national office. The Rangers were sold, and he received a check for $14.9 million, a healthy return on his $606,000 investment and enough for him to pursue his political dreams without financial worry. But his teenage daughters had no ambivalence about the notion: they were against it.
“I’m not going to run,” he told his friend Doug Wead one day.
“And why not?” Wead asked. “You are at the head of the pack.”
“Because of the girls,” he said. “They would be in college then and it would ruin their lives.”
“Did it ruin your life?”
Bush paused. “No,” he said. “It made my life.”
3
“The fire horse and the bell”
For George W. Bush, the idea of running for president in 2000 was both eminently logical and utterly far-fetched. While Americans disapproved of Bill Clinton’s character, they were content with the way he governed the country. In this interregnum following the Cold War, the United States was largely at peace, the emerging information age economy was generating jobs, wealth, and innovation, and the federal treasury was overflowing with surplus money for a change. The brief war in Kosovo had demonstrated America’s capacity to assert its will without a single American casualty. The warning signs of a gathering terrorist threat, manifested in attacks on American embassies, a military barracks, and a navy ship overseas, had done little to shake the public out of its satisfaction. Vice President Al Gore could run on that record.
And yet here was Bush, with just one term as governor of Texas and the same first and last names as the last president rejected by American voters, seriously eyeing a run for America’s highest office. He found himself leading polls for the nomination, albeit largely due to his familiar name. Every time he turned around, someone was telling him he could be president. “I feel like a cork in a raging river,” he said over dinner with a couple of reporters in October 1998.
It was intoxicating, and unlike Dick Cheney, who found the idea of hustling for the 1996 nomination too unpleasant, Bush enjoyed the feel of the campaign trail. Besides, the more he looked at the other possible candidates, the more he came to the conclusion that he was as good as, or better than, any of them. There were not many times in life, he told his cousin John Ellis, when the main thing standing between you and a presidential nomination was Steve Forbes, the nebbishy magazine publisher. Ellis was not so sure. He thought the timing was bad, that Al Gore would run the campaign his father did in 1988, and that even if Bush won, a recession was overdue and he would inherit it.
But there were other signs, ones that a deeply religious man would see and vest with great meaning. In January 1999, he sat in church in Austin preparing to take the oath for a second term as governor. The Reverend Mark Craig delivered a sermon on leadership, recalling that Moses was reluctant when called upon to lead his people but assumed the duty. “We have the opportunity, each and every one of us, to do the right thing, and for the right reason,” the pastor said. Barbara Bush leaned over and mouthed to her son, “He is talking to you.” Her son thought so too. “I feel as if God were talking directly to me,” he mentioned a
t a family gathering. It took Laura to temper his grandiosity. “I think that’s a bit of a stretch,” she told him. And other family members thought a presidential run seemed ludicrous. “Are you nuts?” his brother Marvin asked.
As he prepared his campaign, Bush had a core team from Texas centered on the so-called Iron Triangle of Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh, and Karl Rove. Hughes, tall and booming, was a former television reporter who became Bush’s communications guru and styled herself the voice of soccer moms and other everyday people. Allbaugh, six feet four and gruff with a military-style flattop haircut and a gift for bringing order to chaos, had come from Oklahoma to serve as chief of staff for the governor, who called him “Big Country.” First among equals, though, was Rove, with spectacles and round cheeks that gave him an owlish look. A longtime Republican consultant who had worked for Bush’s father, Rove had built a reputation as a latter-day Lee Atwater, a political genius with a touch of deviousness, a searching intellect, and manic energy, someone “who makes the Energizer Bunny seem lethargic,” as Hughes put it. Rove practically worshipped Bush, recalling his first impression: “Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma—you know, wow.”
From his father’s team, Bush enlisted people who could school him in foreign policy, starting with Condoleezza Rice, a former National Security Council aide who was now provost of Stanford University. A black minister’s daughter, she grew up in Bull Connor’s Birmingham and knew one of the girls killed in the 1963 bombing that galvanized the civil rights movement. But through bristling determination and a series of eager mentors, she trained as a Soviet scholar and concert pianist who endeared herself to President George H. W. Bush and later bonded with his son over workouts and sports talk. To educate him about the world, she assembled a group of experts she called the Vulcans, named for a statue in Birmingham. “I need your help,” Bush told them at their first meeting in Austin. “Not to become president. I will take care of that. But I need your help to be a good president.”
Bush also brought in people with no connection to his family past like Marvin Olasky, author of the influential book The Tragedy of American Compassion, and Sandy Kress, a former Dallas School Board president he had been working with on education reform. Olasky, a onetime Marxist who now argued that private organizations, particularly Christian churches, do a better job than government at tackling social ills, brought a group of policy wonks to see Bush in Austin in early 1999 for a three-hour briefing on poverty. “It was very much like a graduate school seminar,” Olasky remembered.
His father’s old crowd was a mixed blessing. Bush liked to joke that he “inherited half of his friends and all of his enemies.” But he knew he could not be seen as simply his father’s son. When Ron Kaufman, White House political director for the first president Bush, sent a fund-raising letter urging donors to “send an important signal about the strength of the Bush network,” Rove slapped him down—and then leaked it to the columnist Robert Novak. “Rove let me know that the boarding party had been repelled,” Novak said later, “and that Kaufman and the rest of the Bush Senior entourage would not be on the son’s ship.” The senior Bush entourage got the message. “We had to be the back-of-the-bus guys,” Kaufman recalled, “and we had to be onboard help but know our place, and we did that very effectively.”
Indeed, Bush seemed more interested in assuming the mantle of Ronald Reagan than that of George Bush. In April 1999, he went to the Palo Alto, California, home of George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state, for cookies and coffee with many of the former president’s circle. In Shultz’s living room, Bush impressed the elder statesmen of American conservatism with his talk of Social Security reform, the rise of India, and the need to control federal spending. He told them he wanted to achieve big things. Shultz gave him the blessing he was seeking, taking him aside and telling Bush that he had brought Reagan to the same spot in the same home in 1979 and given him the same message: run.
Two months later, he did. Bush kicked off his campaign on June 12, 1999, with a flight to Iowa filled with national journalists and skyrocketing anticipation. Well aware that he now had to justify that, Bush cheekily dubbed his inaugural foray the Great Expectations tour. As he boarded a chartered MD-80 just after sunrise, he came on the public address system. “This is your candidate speaking,” he started. “Please stow your expectations securely in the overhead bin as they may shift during the trip and they could fall and hurt someone—especially me.” The maiden voyage went so well that Karl Rove said over dinner one night that “the only thing we haven’t done well is to lower expectations.”
While keeping distance from his father’s crew, Bush wanted at least one person from the first Bush administration: Dick Cheney. He had served on a business advisory council for the Texas governor and had occasionally joined Rice’s foreign policy group. But Bush wanted more. In November, while Cheney and his wife, Lynne, hosted a benefit for Barbara Bush’s literacy campaign at their Dallas house, the governor took Cheney aside.
In Cheney’s library, Bush asked the former defense secretary to chair his presidential campaign.
Cheney said no. “Look, I’m really committed here at Halliburton,” he said. But if there was anything else he could do, he told Bush, just call. “I’m eager to do what I can to be helpful.”
IF BUSH STARTED out with well-defined thoughts about domestic policy, he was a virtual blank slate on foreign policy. But there were plenty of competing factions eager to claim him, including neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and more traditional Republicans like Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, all in Rice’s Vulcans.
When they sat down at one point in the spring of 1999 just as American-led NATO air strikes were driving Serbian forces out of Kosovo, Bush asked whether they would have advocated the original Balkans intervention in Bosnia. All but two supported it. The dissenters were Dov Zakheim, a former Pentagon official under Reagan, and Dick Cheney. Bush told them that “his heart was with the minority,” as Zakheim recalled it, “but his head told him it was the right thing to do.” And now that the United States was committed, he added, it had to complete the task.
Bush laid out his thinking about the nation’s armed forces in a speech at the Citadel military academy in South Carolina in September. It was a blueprint for a humbler, more restrained use of American power, a rejection of Clinton’s humanitarian interventionism and nation building, which Bush considered distractions from the mission of the military. “That mission is to deter wars—and that mission is to win wars when deterrence fails,” Bush told the cadets. “Sending our military on vague, aimless and endless deployments is the swift solvent of morale.” While disavowing an isolationist “retreat from the world,” Bush said he would be more “selective in the use of our military” to relieve “the tension on an overstretched military,” sentiments that would not survive long into his presidency. But Bush foresaw what would become the defining challenge of his time. “I will put a high priority on detecting and responding to terrorism on our soil. The federal government must take this threat seriously.”
Just as Clinton had sought to shift the Democratic Party away from its liberal, soft-on-crime, weak-on-defense, pro-welfare identity, Bush was now trying to redefine the Republican Party, sanding off the harsher edges of the Gingrich revolution. Instead of what Karen Hughes called “grinchy old Republican” promises to abolish the Department of Education and deport illegal immigrants, Bush advocated more federal intervention in schools to fight the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and more acceptance of the millions of undocumented workers. Hughes was a driving force behind this approach. An army brat born in Paris, she moved with her family to Texas, where she studied journalism at Southern Methodist University and then went into television news. Eventually, she became a political operative and went to work for Bush, bonding over their shared devotion to religion. She called his brand of politics “compassionate conservatism,” a term that
unbeknownst to her had actually been used for years by others, including Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God minister who befriended Bush while working as his father’s liaison to evangelicals, had popularized the phrase, which was adopted by Ron Kaufman for the elder Bush’s campaigns.
But no one had put the notion as front and center as George W. Bush. By branding his conservatism “compassionate,” he was summoning the Samaritan legacy of Christianity while signaling to secular voters a more humane ideology. Behind the slogan was the idea of pursuing liberal goals through conservative means. Bush would fight poverty with “armies of compassion” by using government resources to help churches, synagogues, and mosques do charity work. He would steer more money to schools to bridge the gap between rich and poor in exchange for accountability measured by standardized tests. Even his centerpiece domestic promise, a sweeping package of tax cuts with plenty of benefits for the wealthiest Americans such as eliminating the inheritance tax and reducing top marginal tax rates, also included ideas targeted at those with less means, like doubling the child tax credit and reducing the lowest tax bracket for the working poor. For conservative economists, such ideas made no sense because they would not trigger economic growth. “Somewhat different from many conservatives, certainly at the time, he asked a lot of questions about fairness and safety nets,” recalled Glenn Hubbard, who advised him on economics. “He’s a little bit of a hybrid.”