The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  The President did not respond.

  About an hour later Gray saw Tower in the White House. Tower had just come from breakfast with Baker and Scowcroft, who both advised him to stick in there.

  “Are you still of the same mind?” Gray asked.

  “No,” Tower replied. “I slept on it and the President wants me to hang in.”

  That same morning, Nunn went to the Senate TV gallery to answer reporters’ questions about the nomination. The most influential senator on Pentagon issues, Nunn had not yet announced his position. Asked about the alcohol issue, Nunn said, “It’s a matter of a person in the chain of command that has control over the arsenal of the United States of America, and it’s a very serious position as Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense has to, in my view, have clarity of thought at all times. There’s no such thing as an eight-hour day in that job. The young men and young women who defend our nation have to have people all the way up the chain of command that have entirely clear thought at all times.”

  On the evening of Thursday, February 23, Nunn’s committee voted 11 to 9, along straight party lines, to recommend that the Senate reject the Tower nomination.

  Across town at his official residence high up on Observatory Hill, Bush’s Vice President, Dan Quayle, a former U.S. senator from Indiana, had two visitors that night—his friends and fellow Republican conservatives Ken Adelman and Dick Cheney. Adelman, a cocky 42-year-old Shakespeare scholar, had headed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Reagan, and now wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column. In a recent column, he’d criticized Tower’s lack of discretion in his private life and argued that “private behavior is fair game for judging a public servant.”

  Dick Cheney had been President Ford’s White House chief of staff, and was now Wyoming’s sole member of the House of Representatives. Soft-spoken and serious, Cheney had an impeccably conservative voting record. He had risen from freshman congressman to House Republican Whip, the second-ranking party leader, in only ten years.

  Quayle blamed conservatives for abandoning the good fight on Tower. “Goddamn, we have got to get this man confirmed,” the Vice President said.

  “Don’t put me on the team to do it,” Adelman said. “It’s not my job.”

  “Tower’s down the tubes,” Cheney said flatly. “You’ve got to get someone to work with Congress.”

  Quayle blamed Nunn. It was a partisan power play by a very ambitious man.

  Cheney disagreed. Nunn was being pretty straight, he said. Cheney spoke admiringly of Nunn’s handling of the nomination so far, and of his ability to win a no-vote in a committee that Tower himself had once chaired. “Don’t blame Nunn.”

  On Thursday, March 9, the Senate rejected the Tower nomination, 53 to 47.

  Bush called Tower to say he thought his friend had fought the good fight and had demonstrated courage in the battle. His treatment had been unfair, the President said. Barbara Bush came on the line, echoing her husband. It was a warm, buck-him-up call. In his formal statement, Bush said: “The Senate made its determination. I respect its role in doing so, but I disagree with the outcome. . . . Now, however, we owe it to the American people to come together and move forward.”

  * * *

  4

  * * *

  THE AFTERNOON THE TOWER NOMINATION was voted down by the Senate, Dick Cheney received a call from White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, the 50-year-old former New Hampshire governor whom Bush had chosen over Craig Fuller to be his principal aide. Could Cheney come to the White House at 4 p.m.? Sununu wanted to talk about what to do now that Tower was going down in flames. Cheney said he could be there at five.

  Based on his own experience 14 years earlier as White House chief of staff, Cheney knew it was unlikely that the current chief of staff would be merely soliciting the opinion of the second-ranking House Republican in the heat of a nomination decision controlled by Senate Democrats. Something was up.

  Cheney, like all of political Washington, had been paying close attention to the Tower battle. The first dust-up of the new administration might be an indicator of how the next four years would unfold. He thought that the President had to bounce back fast; he should come up with a new candidate within 48 hours and then select a new topic “A” for Washington. Cheney was convinced that the attention span of the nation’s capital was about five minutes, and if Bush got out front on drugs or some foreign-policy initiative, the political and media world would quickly follow.

  As the newly elected number-two House Republican leader, Cheney worked in the shadow of Republican leader Representative Bob Michel of Illinois, who had adopted Cheney as a political son and heir apparent. Though Cheney was only 48, his eyeglasses, thinning hair, and calm and reasonable demeanor gave him an older, wiser look.

  With the party balance in the House so lopsided in favor of the Democrats, Republican leadership posts were frustrating. In previous years in the leadership, Cheney had learned that even senior administration Republicans couldn’t always be counted on to help. At times, he’d wanted Vice President Bush to carry some water for the House Republicans, but Bush wouldn’t do it if there was any chance it might jeopardize his own relationship with Reagan. Bush’s reticence had bothered Cheney, and he often complained privately about it.

  • • •

  At 5 p.m. Cheney arrived at his old, corner White House chief of staff’s office, now John Sununu’s. Scowcroft was also there. The three talked about Tower’s defeat, and about what should be done next.

  “If the President offered you the Secretary of Defense post, would you consider it?” Sununu asked.

  Cheney said he would.

  Scowcroft asked Cheney about his health.

  Although he was still in his forties, Cheney had had three heart attacks. The previous August, he had undergone a quadruple coronary bypass operation, a procedure in which four new passages for the flow of blood are grafted onto the heart to compensate for blocked arteries. Cheney said that he had elected to have the operation not because it was medically necessary but because he wanted to be able to continue backpacking and downhill skiing. His Washington doctor had given him a clean bill of health—his cholesterol level was way down and the medication he was taking had no side effects. He said his physician would supply records and a statement.

  They all agreed that Cheney should have a night to sleep on this. He needed to consult with his family.

  Scowcroft had been Gerald Ford’s national security adviser when Cheney was chief of staff. Running the daily obstacle course of White House business together, they had become close. Now Scowcroft was pushing hard for Cheney for Defense. He wanted a known commodity in the Pentagon.

  Jim Baker had already given his support to Cheney. He and Cheney had weathered the 1976 Ford campaign together, with Cheney supervising from the White House end as Baker managed the campaign itself. At the time, both had been new to national politics. Their friendship had survived Ford’s defeat.

  After the meeting, Sununu quietly asked White House counsel Gray to have the FBI do a quick background check on another prospective nominee for Secretary of Defense: John F. Lehman, Reagan’s aggressive and highly controversial Secretary of the Navy.

  Gray was dubious. The outspoken, 46-year-old Lehman had been in and out of government during his career, and might have a revolving-door problem. Worse, one of Lehman’s former Navy Department assistants was a key figure in the Justice Department’s “Ill Wind” investigation of fraud and corruption in the Pentagon procurement process. Nonetheless, Gray requested a check on Lehman.

  • • •

  Back at his House office, Room 104 of the old Cannon House office building, Cheney ran into his press secretary, Pete Williams. Williams, 37, a tall, outgoing former Wyoming television reporter, asked how it had gone at the White House. He did not know the purpose of the meeting.

  Okay, Cheney said. They were concerned about the Tower replacement.

  Cheney’s administrative assi
stant Patricia Howe later stuck her head in Cheney’s office. “Anything we should know about?”

  No.

  Cheney and his wife, Lynne, a Ph.D. in English literature who was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, went out for dinner that evening with friends from Wyoming to La Colline, a French restaurant four blocks north of the Capitol. Cheney felt he could not bring up the subject at dinner. Walking in the door of their McLean, Virginia, house after dinner, the Cheneys were greeted by their 19-year-old daughter, Mary, home from college on spring break, who said that Jim Baker had called.

  Cheney called Baker at once, and they had a long conversation. Baker said he was 100 percent behind the idea of Cheney as Defense Secretary, and urged him to take the job. After hanging up, Cheney sat down with Lynne, who had caught the drift of the call, and they talked it over.

  Cheney liked the House of Representatives. After the White House staff years, when his job and future had depended entirely on someone else’s political success, he enjoyed being his own man. He had been home only one full day during the last six months of the 1976 Ford campaign. Cheney also loved the personality of the House, its rough-and-tumble atmosphere and its history and traditions. In 1983, he and Lynne had co-authored an affectionate 226-page book about House Speakers from Henry Clay to Sam Rayburn, entitled Kings of the Hill.

  In his mind he ran through the advantages of the Defense job. He had decided previously that he would not go back to the executive branch unless one of two or three slots opened up. This was one. The Secretary of Defense mattered.

  The idea of working with Baker and Scowcroft carried great weight. In the Ford years, Cheney had seen how the national security process could get mired down in useless infighting and power plays. Here was a chance to work with people he knew, and possibly to get it right.

  He boiled the decision down to the short term. How did he want to spend his next four years? Did he want to work in the double shadow of the House job—with Bob Michel above him and the frustration of the Republicans’ minority status? Or did he want to be number one at Defense, in an executive branch run by his own party?

  Cheney realized that in the final analysis it wasn’t really a close call. He decided if the job was offered, he would accept.

  The next morning, after speaking to a group of newspaper editors over breakfast at the Willard Hotel, Cheney went up to his office on the Hill. He called in the staff to discuss the usual array of subjects important to Wyoming’s sole congressman—irrigation, weeds, pests, and the fires in Yellowstone National Park that summer. The American public had been left with the impression that the park had burned down, and Cheney was worried that tourism would die. He did not share with his staff the question that dominated his thoughts.

  A call came in from Sununu. The staff left the room so he could talk in private.

  Cheney told the chief of staff he wanted to go to the next step.

  Sununu said come to the White House about noon.

  When it came time to leave for the White House, he had the driver of his official Whip’s car go to the East Wing—the social and First Lady’s entrance—so he would not be noticed by the media people on alert for a new Defense play by the President.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, Gray had reported to Sununu that John Lehman would be a problem. Though there was no direct incriminating evidence against the former Navy Secretary, the Ill Wind investigation would poison the nomination.

  Sununu said Gray should have the FBI quietly check out Cheney.

  Cheney entered an office the President had set up in the second-floor residence. There was a large desk off to one side. On one wall was a painting of Lincoln meeting with Generals Grant and Sherman toward the end of the Civil War, entitled The Peacemakers. Bush sometimes referred to it in speeches.

  The two men talked about Defense, and the reforms that Bush thought were needed.

  After half an hour Sununu joined them.

  “If the President asked you to be Secretary of Defense,” Sununu asked, “would you accept?” This conditional offer protected the President from a turn-down.

  “Yes sir, I would,” Cheney replied.

  The three talked some more. The job was not formally offered.

  When Cheney arrived back at his office, the FBI had already been there, asking Kathie Embody, his executive assistant of 15 years, for names of people to contact for their background investigation. He had been there no more than a few minutes when Bush called.

  Let’s do it, Bush said.

  Okay, Mr. President.

  Bush said he wanted to announce it right away.

  At 4 p.m. Bush and Cheney appeared before reporters. It seemed to Cheney that Bush took great delight in springing his unexpected nominee on the press.

  • • •

  Pete Williams had been at a briefing on acid rain, a big issue in Wyoming. Since it was a nice Friday afternoon, he hoped to sneak out of work early. Arriving back at his office, however, he was amazed to find a large stack of phone messages, almost a full pad of them. Odd, he thought. What could be happening? The other staffers had to tell him three times before it sank in. He glanced up at his television set, which was tuned in to CNN. There was Bush with Cheney, the new Secretary of Defense-designate.

  About 5:30, Cheney returned to the office. Congratulations were barely out when FBI agents entered a few paces behind. Cheney took them into his office and closed the door.

  Williams finally got hold of Cheney, and the two of them sat down in a quiet corner.

  “Why have you done this?” Williams asked, his voice full of bafflement, perhaps tinged with mild resentment for being cut out. But Williams knew it was classic Cheney—he had been told not to mention it to anyone, so he hadn’t.

  “When the President of the United States looks at you . . .” Cheney began to answer.

  Williams thought to himself: oh come on, don’t give me this crap.

  Cheney continued on about the power of a presidential request, the honor of presidential service.

  Williams thought: the White House can’t razzle-dazzle you. You have been there as chief of staff, as a Republican leader. You can’t possibly hear the chorus of angels singing.

  Cheney said he wanted the administration to succeed and he was looking forward to working again with Scowcroft and Baker, who had said, “We need you.”

  Williams realized it was those two, the old ties, that had been decisive, much more than Bush.

  People would react to Cheney in two stages, Williams knew. Observing and listening to him, they first would say: here’s this nice, charming, fair player who seems to be moderate and doesn’t burst into flames over anything. Then they would look at his conservative voting record and his tendency to hang out with the rabid right-wing Republicans—the people Williams liked to call “the flesh-eating zombies”—and they would wonder. But Cheney was not conservative on many social issues. Overall, Williams thought his boss was a pragmatist, who weighed the evidence on each question, and usually came out conservative.

  The general feeling among Cheney’s staff was: What is he getting us into? What is he doing to our careers in order to promote his own? What has he decided about our futures?

  There were two staffers who were contemporaries of Cheney’s and who, like Williams, wanted an explanation. One was Alan Kranowitz, who’d been at Yale with Cheney, both in the class of 1963, when Cheney left because of poor grades.

  The other was David Gribbin. Gribbin, Cheney and both their wives had gone to Natrona County High School in Casper together. Gribbin had dedicated his own career to furthering Cheney’s. He was virtually in a state of shock.

  Why? Gribbin asked.

  “The President asked,” Cheney said. “How do you say no?” Apparently detecting the distress etched on the faces of his aides, Cheney added, “I thought about the decision. There is no looking back. Let’s go forward.”

  Cheney said that in light of the Tower fiasco he did not want the
White House to handle his Senate confirmation. Turning to Kranowitz, he asked, “Alan, will you handle my confirmation hearings?”

  Kranowitz agreed.

  • • •

  Even to his closest aides, Cheney was something of an enigma. If they asked him something specific, he generally would give an answer, but he was not one to relax and unburden himself to others. Talking about himself and his feelings did not come naturally. Pete Williams even had a name for the loose, unofficial group of people like himself who tried to better understand the inscrutable Cheney by following and closely analyzing his movements: “Cheney-watchers.”

  One of the subjects Cheney didn’t talk much about was his time at Yale. Kranowitz recalled that at some point during the first or second year Cheney took six months off to be a manual laborer and power-line worker back in Wyoming. He returned to New Haven, but by the end of sophomore year he was gone for good. Cheney would joke with staff about his academic problems, but he had never shared the full story about his lackluster academic career at Yale.

  He had received a bachelor’s degree in 1965 from the University of Wyoming, followed the next year by a master’s in political science. He and Lynne, whom he’d married in 1964, were both Ph.D. candidates at the University of Wisconsin in 1968 when Cheney won a one-year fellowship that brought him to Washington to work as a Capitol Hill staffer. While on the Hill, he was noticed by Donald Rumsfeld, director of Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), who had given him a job. When Ford named Rumsfeld his chief of staff in 1974, he brought Cheney to the White House as deputy, and Cheney’s career took off.

  • • •

  Kranowitz, who was going to pilot the nomination through the Senate, had to be sure he knew as much as he could about Cheney. A longtime Cheney-watcher, he knew all about his boss’s conservative record in Congress, and was familiar with Congressman Cheney’s pet issues. One was aid to the Nicaraguan contras, a cause Cheney cared deeply and emotionally about; he believed Nicaragua was another Cuba in the making, and that the Sandinista regime had to be dislodged from the hemisphere. Another passion was Soviet submarines, which he’d studied intensely as a member of the House Intelligence Committee.