by Peter Baker
Against that backdrop, Cheney switched gears and agreed to head an energy policy task force. But he did not wait for its conclusions to undo what he saw as an ill-advised campaign pledge to fight climate change. Bush had promised to impose a cap on carbon emissions, but with the need for energy seemingly more pressing by the day, Cheney argued it was the wrong time to add to industry’s burden.
With a letter in hand from Senator Chuck Hagel and three other Republicans requesting the president’s position, Cheney went to Bush on the morning of March 13 and argued it was time to drop the carbon pledge and renounce the Kyoto climate change treaty signed by Clinton. Bush agreed and signed a letter Cheney had drafted responding to the senators. “I oppose the Kyoto Protocol,” the letter said, since the agreement did not cover rising economies like China and India, was “unfair and ineffective,” and would “cause serious harm to the U.S. economy.” It added that Bush did not believe that “government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a ‘pollutant’ under the Clean Air Act.”
Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto treaty was hardly a surprise—he had made that point during the campaign—and in some ways was not a fundamental change in American policy, since even Clinton had not submitted it for Senate ratification after senators of both parties voted 95 to 0 for a nonbinding resolution opposing such an agreement. But Bush’s letter made only passing mention of working with other countries to find alternatives to the flawed pact, and no one had prepared the allies for what was coming, feeding the impression of a go-it-alone attitude on the part of the new president. Just as significantly, the position on the carbon cap reversed a campaign promise that had the strong support of some members of his team.
Having sided with Cheney, Bush now had to explain his position to Christine Todd Whitman, his Environmental Protection Agency director. Whitman arrived at the Oval Office at 10:00 a.m. prepared to make the case for keeping the promise. As she sat down, she realized she was there not to make arguments but to be informed that the decision was already made.
As she left the Oval Office, Whitman ran into Cheney with his overcoat on. “Do you have it?” Cheney asked an aide, who handed him the Bush-signed letter. Cheney stuffed it in his pocket and headed out. Only later would she learn what was in the letter; Bush had not mentioned it. “That one was a done deal,” she concluded later. Bush probably did not tell her about the letter because “he felt he was cutting my legs out from under me, which he did pretty effectively.”
Cheney took the letter straight to Capitol Hill, hand delivering it to the weekly lunch of Republican senators. When he announced the president’s decision, the assembled senators broke out into cheers and shouted, “Hoo-rah!” One senator yelled triumphantly, “Somebody better tell Christie!”
Somebody had, of course, but not in time for her to do anything about it. Nor were Powell or Rice consulted ahead of time. Each of them was sent a copy of the letter just as Whitman was heading to the Oval Office, and both had similar reactions: there was nothing wrong with the policy necessarily, but the language was unnecessarily provocative. They should rewrite the letter to make clear the rejection of Kyoto was not a rejection of the issue altogether and emphasize that the United States was committed to finding ways of tackling climate change. “Slow this thing down until I get there,” Powell told Rice as he rushed to his car.
By the time she reached the Oval Office, it was too late. “But the letter is already gone,” Bush told her. “The vice president is taking it up to the Hill because he has a meeting up there. I thought you cleared the letter.”
Rice was taken aback. She had not cleared it.
Powell arrived a few minutes later.
“It’s gone,” Rice told him.
“What’s gone?” Powell asked.
“The letter.”
“Gone where?”
Rice explained that Cheney was delivering the letter.
Bush looked at Powell. “Well,” he said, “we wanted to get it up to the Hill to Hagel right away.”
“Well,” Powell responded, “you’re going to see the consequences of it.”
The consequences were more profound than Bush anticipated. Fairly or not, the decision would haunt him for years as he sought international help in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. “The way they did it was just flipping the bird to the rest of the world,” Whitman believed. What Bush did not understand was how invested many European and Asian allies felt in Kyoto. As Rice put it to her aides, “They had built this beautiful crystal sculpture, and we walked in and, ‘Oh, I am sorry, did I break something?’ ” Bush came to understand later. “While he was right on Kyoto, we were just wrong on the way we did it,” Stephen Hadley said. “We lived with that one; that is really where this ‘Bush unilateralism’ starts from.”
There was also the question of Cheney unilateralism. In an institution that cherished process, the vice president had achieved a major decision with little input from those who disagreed. Rice told Bush she was “appalled” the vice president had been allowed to take a letter to Congress on a significant international policy without the input of the national security adviser or secretary of state. “It wasn’t that the vice president was ‘running the country’ the way a lot of people say,” Whitman later observed, “but he certainly did have a lot of influence, and this may have been one of those where the president just decided it wasn’t worth the fight.”
Paul O’Neill, the Cheney friend serving as Treasury secretary and a supporter of more assertive action on climate change, commiserated with Whitman. He told her Hagel’s letter sounded as if it were written by Cheney himself and speculated that the vice president might even have asked Hagel to send it to provide an excuse to press Bush.
“We thought we knew Dick,” O’Neill later reflected. “But did we? About this time, people first started to ask—has Dick changed? Or did we just not know him before?”
MANY WOULD LOOK to Cheney’s repeated health scares as one possible cause of change. After his latest angioplasty, Cheney focused on his own mortality. More than most vice presidents, he had given a lot of thought to succession issues often called “continuity of government.” He had seen up close the ascension of a vice president to the Oval Office during the Nixon-Ford administration and participated in what-if Cold War exercises during the Reagan administration.
At Cheney’s request, David Addington did some studying and reported that the Constitution provided a mechanism to remove an incapacitated president but not an incapacitated vice president. So if Cheney were to fall into a coma, the nation would be stuck with a vice president it could not replace. Worse, should that happen and the president then died in office, the nation would be stuck with an incapacitated acting president. Or if the president were incapacitated, there would be no way to remove him because the Constitution required the assent of the vice president.
So on March 28, Cheney secretly signed a letter of resignation effective upon delivery to the secretary of state. At Addington’s recommendation, it included no conditions for taking effect, out of concern that could become fodder for disputes over meaning. So Cheney pulled out a piece of stationery emblazoned “The Vice President” and scrawled out a separate letter:
Dave Addington,
You are to present the attached document to President George W. Bush if the need ever arises.
Richard B. Cheney
The vice president then made clear to Addington that it would be up to Bush to submit the letter to the secretary of state. “This is not your decision to make,” Cheney told him. “This is not Lynne’s decision to make. The only thing you are to do, if I become incapacitated, is get this letter and give it to the president. It’s his decision, and his alone, whether he delivers it to the secretary of state.”
“Yes, Mr. Vice President,” said Addington, who inserted the letter into two manila envelopes and kept it in a desk drawer at home in case something happened at the White House. (As it happene
d, his home later burned down in a fire; Addington saved two things, a folder of family financial information and birth certificates and Cheney’s resignation letter.)
Cheney never discussed the contingent resignation with anyone other than Bush and Addington until he revealed it in his memoir after leaving office.
6
“Iron filings moving across a tabletop”
President Bush was at Camp David on Saturday, March 31, when Condoleezza Rice, who had joined him and the first lady for the weekend, notified him about 10:00 p.m. that an American spy plane had made an emergency landing on Chinese soil after a midair collision with one of Beijing’s jet fighters.
The navy’s EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane was gathering intelligence over the South China Sea seventy nautical miles off the coast when a Chinese pilot shadowing it got too close. The American four-engine turboprop plummeted thousands of feet before its pilot reasserted control and managed to land at a Chinese base on Hainan Island. Its crew of twenty-four destroyed as much sensitive equipment as they could before being detained. The Chinese F-8 fighter was sliced by a propeller on the American plane into two pieces; the pilot ejected and was missing and presumed dead. For a new president barely two months in office, it would be the first test on the international stage.
Bush resolved not to let the episode escalate. “He was not going to be jingoistic about it,” recalled Senator Judd Gregg, who was at Camp David that weekend. “That was the tone of the discussion: we’ve got to be firm, but we can’t let this blow up what should be a more positive relationship.” While making firm statements at first demanding release of the crew and plane, Bush avoided inflammatory language and turned the conflict largely over to Colin Powell. But his efforts were complicated for days as Chinese officials did not answer phones or return messages, in what Americans interpreted as internal disarray in Beijing.
The key to unlocking the crisis was a Chinese demand for an apology. On April 2, Bush discussed it with Powell, Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld in the Oval Office. Rice and Powell were open to some sort of statement, and Powell added that the State Department favored a suspension of the reconnaissance flights that had provoked the Chinese. Rumsfeld argued against any apology or suspension. The American crew did nothing wrong; the Chinese pilot caused the accident. Besides, he said, capitulating would only embolden the Chinese and make the United States look weak. Vice President Cheney agreed.
Over succeeding days, Bush inched closer to language satisfying the Chinese. On April 5, he said, “I regret that a Chinese pilot is missing,” but did not apologize for American actions. Three days later, Powell said “we’re sorry” about the death of the pilot, but added that “that can’t be seen as an apology accepting responsibility.” Rumsfeld privately mocked the discussions, at one point joking that Powell should say “pretty please.” Eventually, a middle ground was worked out, where the American ambassador would say in a letter that the United States was “very sorry” the Chinese pilot died and the American plane entered Chinese airspace and landed without verbal clearance but would not apologize or accept responsibility for the collision. The seven-paragraph letter was delivered on April 11 to the Chinese, who called it “a letter of apology” and released the crew.
The resolution disappointed Cheney and Rumsfeld, who felt the president’s language “was unfortunate” and “was in effect an apology.” It generated criticism from neoconservatives like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, who concluded that “they have won and we have lost.” It would take three more months to secure the return of the plane. The Chinese refused to allow it to be flown home and instead required American technicians to dismantle it and send it back in boxes. But Bush took pride in navigating the crisis without a bigger rupture, believing he had passed the commander-in-chief test; some advisers even assumed this would be seen as a signal foreign policy triumph during his bid for reelection in 2004, not realizing there were bigger tests to come.
AS THE PRESIDING officer of the Senate, the vice president typically had a ceremonial office in the Capitol and played a role in pushing legislation. But Cheney took it further than any of his predecessors. He secured permission to attend the weekly luncheon of Senate Republicans, something Democrats had rejected when Lyndon Johnson tried it after becoming vice president. And Cheney became the first vice president given an office on the House side of the Capitol, where he could monitor the lower chamber too. Bush made clear Cheney had his proxy. “When you’re talking to Dick Cheney, you’re talking to me,” the president told one Republican senator. “When Dick Cheney’s talking, it’s me talking.”
It fell to Cheney to put out fires. When Senator Trent Lott lobbied for a Mississippian to head the Tennessee Valley Authority, a White House aide made the mistake of telling him it was the president’s decision. “Yes,” Lott replied, “and I’m the majority leader of the Senate, and I can guarantee you that if I decide to hold it, he won’t be confirmed.” Word quickly reached Cheney, who called Lott to invite him to the Oval Office to see Bush. “We’re going with your guy,” the president told him.
Just as often, though, Cheney was the enforcer. “It was good news if the president called you,” recalled Dennis Hastert, the House Speaker. “It was bad news if the vice president called you.”
Cheney proved a useful intervener as well when the president’s political aides needed to recruit a candidate, or even discourage one. On April 18, Cheney called Tim Pawlenty, a Minnesota state lawmaker, just ninety minutes before he was scheduled to kick off a campaign for Senate. Karl Rove had determined that Norm Coleman, the mayor of St. Paul, would be a stronger challenger to Senator Paul Wellstone in 2002. “We’re asking you for the good of the overall effort to stand down,” Cheney said. Pawlenty backed off.
Cheney’s portfolio kept expanding. On May 8, Bush asked him to conduct a thorough review of homeland security, an area that had long interested the vice president. His experience with continuity-of-government exercises had convinced Cheney the country was ill-prepared for what he saw as the gathering threat of biological and chemical weapons. It was an issue that animated him like no other. Just days earlier, he had told an interviewer that the new national security paradigm in the post–Cold War era was “the threat of terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons.”
Cheney was also finalizing an energy report calling for expanded oil and gas production while reviving the nuclear power industry. But he was fighting on several fronts. Congress was demanding information about his energy task force, which had met extensively with executives and lobbyists for utilities and energy companies, including Enron, whose chief, Kenneth Lay, was a strong Bush supporter. But with Cheney’s blessing, David Addington had structured the task force to be exempt from freedom-of-information laws, and he delighted in rejecting requests from Democratic lawmakers and the General Accounting Office.
When Andrew Lundquist, the task force executive director, went to Cheney suggesting they hand over the information anyway because they had nothing to hide, he was sharply rebuffed. Others like Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett also argued for disclosure. For Cheney, this was the first test of reinvigorating the executive branch against what he saw as a quarter century of post-Watergate encroachment. If critics thought the energy report was too friendly to industry, they could judge its recommendations, he reasoned; they did not need to know everyone he spoke with.
When the issue was presented to Bush in the Oval Office, he listened, thought about it for a few seconds, and then sided with Cheney against the inquisitive lawmakers.
“Stiff ’em,” Bush said.
Cheney was also arguing with Hughes about the substance of the report itself. He was already under fire for a speech he gave in Toronto that seemed to denigrate the need to conserve energy. “Now, conservation is an important part of the total effort,” he had said. “But to speak exclusively of conser
vation is to duck the tough issues. Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for sound, comprehensive energy policy. We also have to produce more.” Hughes thought everyday Americans wanted solutions beyond production, and the two “battled over the energy policy page by page,” according to the speechwriter David Frum. When the report was issued on May 16, what would be remembered would be the controversy; the recommendations would languish without action for years. The personal virtue phrase “literally defined the next three years,” said Jim Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
For all that, these were relatively carefree days for a White House that did not realize what was to come. Bush was focused on issues like judicial selections, recognizing that an important legacy he would leave behind would be on the bench. Karl Rove personally participated in weekly review sessions in the Roosevelt Room to screen candidates, and Bush was so committed to picking like-minded nominees that he personally called everyone nominated even for district judgeships, usually not on a president’s radar screen. “It was a way of establishing a connection with his nominees and letting them know that he had personally chosen them,” said Brad Berenson, a White House lawyer involved in the process.
Bush still had the mirthful, mischievous streak of the campaign trail, though more cloaked in public. One day while reviewing nominations, aides from the counsel’s office brought up the candidacy of Strom Thurmond Jr., the twenty-eight-year-old namesake of the South Carolina senator, for U.S. attorney. An aide explained the young man’s background in the prosecutor’s office.