The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  Cheney’s past was comparatively easy. There was no revolvingdoor problem, few financial assets. He had lived in the same house for years and had been married only once. But after a large staff meeting on Saturday, March 11, Cheney privately told Kranowitz that he should know there were some “youthful indiscretions” that might come up. He had been arrested twice, he said, for drunk driving—both times more than 25 years ago, when he was in his early 20s. And he had been caught fishing out of season once and been fined.

  “The twenty-five-dollar fine was not the worst part,” Cheney said. “They took my fucking fish.”

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  COMING INTO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION so late, Cheney knew that he was months behind the curve. He needed to play some quick catch-up. So the next day, Sunday, March 12, he drove over to Frank Carlucci’s McLean home. It was Carlucci who, as Rumsfeld’s assistant at OEO, had hired Cheney for his first executive branch job in 1969. If Cheney were confirmed, he would for practical purposes be succeeding Carlucci, who had been notified that he had to leave his office by January 20, when Bush ordered all Reagan holdovers out. Carlucci was still annoyed.

  Carlucci said that Cheney should stay close to Bill Crowe, that Crowe would not steer him wrong.

  The next day Cheney went to the Pentagon to see Crowe.

  Right after they had sat down, Cheney said, “I understand you’re going to stay on.” Crowe’s second two-year term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was going to expire at the end of September, and Bush had asked him to remain for another term.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Crowe replied. There were personal considerations.

  Crowe wasn’t definite, but Cheney got the impression he wanted out.

  After nearly two months without a confirmed Secretary of Defense in the new administration, Crowe said he was looking forward to Cheney’s arrival. The department desperately needed a political leader.

  Crowe recommended that Cheney go ahead and begin to move into the Secretary’s office on the third floor. Confirmation looked assured.

  Rear Admiral William A. Owens, the military assistant to the Secretary, ought to be kept on, Crowe added. Owens, a nuclear submariner, was the best man Crowe had ever seen in that job. He knew how to stay in the background and he realized he was not Deputy Secretary.

  The quality of the military as a ready, well-equipped fighting organization was very high, Crowe said. And happily there was no immediate problem that Cheney had to concern himself with, no pressing crisis on the horizon. There were sensitive operations, war plans, contingency plans and procedures that he would want to be briefed on as soon as possible, but for the moment he could focus on getting confirmed and then on the upcoming budget battle with Congress, where his status as a former member would be really helpful.

  The next afternoon at 2 p.m., Cheney, wearing cowboy boots and a business suit, walked across a light green carpet to take his seat in a small, packed Senate hearing room before Nunn’s Armed Services Committee.

  “I, as you all know, am not here because I sought the position of secretary of defense,” Cheney told the senators. It was well known that Tower had actively pursued the job. “I am here because the President has asked me to undertake a very difficult assignment.”

  Senator John Warner of Virginia, the ranking committee Republican, asked Cheney about his military deferments during the Vietnam War.

  “Senator, I have never served in the military in uniform,” Cheney began. He explained that when he was in college he’d gotten a 2-S student draft deferment, and after his first daughter was born in 1966, a 3-A deferment that was granted to parents. “I basically always complied with the Selective Service System, did not serve, and would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called.”

  In three hours of questioning, Cheney referred frequently to his past work on intelligence and defense issues, but also admitted that he had to get up to speed in many areas.

  The next day Nunn and Warner reviewed the summary memo on the FBI’s background investigation of Cheney and then briefed the committee in closed executive session.

  “He got fined for fishing out of season,” Nunn reported. The two charges of driving while intoxicated were ancient. Nunn and Warner did not see them as impediments to confirmation. All the members agreed.

  Cheney joined the committee during the closed session. He said he thought it would be best to make public the old driving-while-intoxicated charges, but the committee said there was no need.

  At 9:30 the next morning, Nunn called the full committee of 20 to order in public session. The committee’s conclusion was that there was nothing in Cheney’s background that “would render him unfit to serve,” Nunn said. The remarks of the few senators who spoke were brief and enthusiastic. The sense of relief was palpable. The vote to confirm was 20 to 0.

  At 10:50 a.m. March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, Nunn took to the Senate floor. He said the committee had approved Cheney unanimously, “after careful and thorough consideration.” Nunn spoke quickly and matter-of-factly, dismissing any suggestion that he or the Armed Services Committee was rushing to judgment. Without even hinting that he was talking about the driving-while-intoxicated charges, which still remained confidential, Nunn said that he and Warner had found “a couple of items” in the FBI reports that had no bearing on the committee’s final positive decision, but which they had felt obligated to share in closed session with the other committee members.

  As senators filed in to pass judgment on Cheney, they saw a sign at each end of the long table in the Senate well that said LAST VOTE TODAY in red capital letters.

  The final tally was 92 to 0 to confirm.

  Within minutes Cheney received a call in his Republican Whip’s office. The caller identified himself as Rear Admiral Owens, the military assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Cheney thought to himself, “Admiral—I don’t need this now.” But Cheney knew that his new life was starting, and that he had to listen. Addressing Cheney as “sir,” Owens said he wanted to come right up to the Hill with Doc Cooke—David O. Cooke, the Pentagon’s director of administration and management—to swear Cheney into office. Cooke, 68, was known as the mayor of the Pentagon to the staff of more than 23,000, military and civilian, who worked there. A fixture of the defense bureaucracy, he oversaw the daily housekeeping of the Pentagon, from parking spaces to office space, and had sworn in the last seven secretaries.

  Cheney had wanted to be sworn in by the House Sergeant-at-Arms, as a final gesture to the institution he was leaving. But Cooke and Owens pressed him to continue the tradition.

  Cheney shrugged his shoulders and went along. He resigned his House seat, and with aides and his family crowded around, he took the oath.

  Cheney had asked his press secretary, Pete Williams, to be the new Pentagon spokesman, and Williams had accepted. After the swearing in, Cheney was going over to the Pentagon, and Williams intended to drive there separately. But David S. Addington, a Cheney aide and former CIA attorney who was now going to be Cheney’s special assistant in the Pentagon, told Williams to make sure he arrived at the Pentagon in the Cheney motorcade. You’ve got to be seen—this is important in Washington, Addington told Williams.

  “Be seen by whom?” Williams inquired.

  The people who work there, Addington said. It’s tremendously important that they see you as one of the people who are arriving with the new man. It will help you immeasurably in your job.

  So Williams, Addington, Dave Gribbin and Kathie Embody all piled into the Secretary’s limousine with the red light on top. Uniformed staff people as well as civilians and all kinds of hangers-on were waiting at the Pentagon door to observe and take note of the little entering parade.

  Up on the third floor, where the Secretary’s suite is located, a nameplate emblazoned Richard B. Cheney was already on the door. Williams thought, now there’s one thing we’re going to have to change. He’s not a “Richard B.” kind of guy. It would have
to be “Dick,” he thought, and made a mental note to have it changed.

  Inside the office, photos were taken, and Cheney looked pleased.

  Cheney had given some thought to reorganizing the Pentagon. Its multilayered, bureaucratic complexity was a conservative Republican’s nightmare of waste. But he soon decided that even if it were possible to rearrange the organizational boxes, to cut and streamline the place, it might not be worth the trouble.

  On Tuesday afternoon, March 21, thousands of civilians and military men and women streamed into the Pentagon’s internal courtyard for Cheney’s formal swearing in as the 17th Secretary of Defense. President Bush spoke first, delivering a stock speech about peace through strength, reform, teamwork and opportunity. Vague on the world situation Cheney’s Pentagon would face, the speech reflected the uncertainty of national security policy in the new administration.

  Cheney was then sworn in again, this time by federal appeals Judge Laurence H. Silberman.

  “It is a humbling experience to assume office,” Cheney began, reading from a prepared text, his voice bouncing off the building’s five inner walls.

  “To the men and women of America’s armed forces: I am honored to serve with you in the defense of freedom,” he said. Then, departing from the text, he added, “You, our uniformed men and women, are my number-one priority.”

  Afterwards, Williams told Cheney his emphasis on people had played well.

  Later that day, Cheney went to the White House to see Sununu and the personnel chief, Chase Untermeyer. Sununu—in public a strong opponent of racial and gender quotas—told Cheney the White House wanted 30 percent of the remaining top 42 jobs in the Defense Department to be filled by women or minorities.

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  CHENEY WENT TO WORK filling the key posts. He had already decided to keep one Tower holdover, Don Atwood, as Deputy Secretary. A competent, undynamic former General Motors executive, Atwood would be responsible for some of the nuts-and-bolts management of the Pentagon Building and budget.

  To run the talent hunt for the other jobs, Cheney brought in Steve Herbits, a 47-year-old Republican political operator who had served as special assistant to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

  Toward the end of the first week Cheney was in office, Herbits came in and presented a one-page diagnosis of each of the services and the kinds of civilians Cheney should appoint to run them.

  The Army, he’d written, was in deep trouble. It was going to take the biggest budget cuts over the next eight years, when perhaps four of its 16 divisions would be eliminated. For Secretary of the Army, Cheney should choose someone who could plan the cuts logically and then beat the shit out of the generals to implement them.

  Herbits said the Navy was run by tradition-bound admirals who were defiant of civilian authority and spoke a language outsiders didn’t understand. They had to find a secretary who understood the tradition and the language, but would not be captured by the admirals.

  The Air Force is totally out of control, Herbits’s diagnosis said. The chief of staff, General Larry Welch, was disdainful of civilians, and the whole service was cliquish.

  There was only one way to beat them: brains. They had to find a civilian secretary who knew the Air Force culture, weapon systems and habits. An inexperienced secretary would soon be coopted, giving the Air Force a representative in Cheney’s civilian circle, rather than Cheney a representative in the Air Force’s inner circle.

  Cheney already knew enough to be wary of the Air Force. The officers were a smooth lot, who made a great show of being helpful and responsive. Make a request and lots of colonels and generals would appear and talk to you until you had briefings and viewgraphs and neatly tabbed studies coming out your ears. Lots of motion, lots of paper flying around, lots of men in light blue uniforms and crisp shirts to answer any question. The Air Force seemed craftier than the other services, more familiar with Washington’s ways, more adept at throwing up a smoke screen. Like almost everyone in the Pentagon, they were selling, but Air Force salesmanship was more consistent and better packaged, as if the service spoke with one persuasive voice. You had to look hard to see exactly what was up. The senior Air Force officer corps was so unified and impenetrable, it was often called the “Blue Curtain.” Herbits and Cheney agreed it would be necessary not only to understand the Air Force, but to learn how to get around it, if necessary.

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  Air Force Chief Larry Welch had a chilly reputation not just inside the Pentagon, but all around Washington. He seemed to emerge with reluctance from the absolute order of his fourth-floor E-Ring office, where papers, pens, folders and documents were arranged in perfect stacks and rows. On the inside of his attaché case was a neatly aligned collection of a dozen black binder clips, at the ready to organize any unruly stack of papers that might come his way.

  From the moment Welch arrived at congressional hearings, his manner left no doubt about his low view of the messy legislative-media arena. But Welch realized he had to accept the congressional role in military issues. One such issue that he thought it was time to resolve was the decade-long debate over how to upgrade the Air Force’s land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

  The Bush White House had put off a decision for the time being, but in Congress a debate had been raging over whether the Air Force should go with the small missile known as the Midgetman or the larger one called the MX. Welch had spent time on the Hill talking to members about the options, and he knew the lay of the land.

  Before Cheney’s confirmation, Welch had gone to acting Secretary William Howard Taft IV, seeking permission to participate in the Hill debate. The Air Force couldn’t be silent on this, he told Taft. Congressmen were asking for the Air Force’s position, yet there was no clear administration policy for the service to push.

  Shall we fall off the wagon? Welch had asked Taft. It would be unwise to leave a vacuum. There was no telling what decision the Congress might reach without Air Force input. He would like to talk to the key members in the House and Senate.

  Taft told Welch he was right, and that he should go do it.

  Welch also had visited Scowcroft at the White House. Although the administration hadn’t decided what mix of MX and Midgetman it wanted, he told Scowcroft, the Air Force couldn’t let the issue lie in limbo. He needed to take the congressional pulse and lay out some options.

  Scowcroft said he didn’t have any trouble with some discussion and information sharing, but that ultimately it would be up to the White House, not the Air Force, to make a recommendation to Congress.

  Welch began visiting Hill offices.

  George Wilson, the Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, was familiar with the way the White House and the Pentagon often shopped ideas around in Congress before making decisions. He was told by some lawmakers that Welch was making the rounds with a compromise ICBM proposal.

  The night of March 23, Wilson called Welch, who confirmed he had been “pulsing the system.”

  A front-page story in the next morning’s Post, headlined “Air Force Acts to End ICBM Deadlock,” reported that Welch had suggested a compromise plan. Next to the story was a photo of Welch.

  Cheney read the story. It was his eighth day in office. He had heard several days earlier from the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, William L. Dickinson of Alabama, that Welch had been over trying to make a deal with Chairman Les Aspin.

  Since his time as White House chief of staff, Cheney had believed that strategic missiles were the President’s turf. It wasn’t so much the Secretary’s business that Welch was trying to do, it was the President’s business.

  Cheney was scheduled that day to give his maiden press conference as Secretary. Dan Howard, the holdover Pentagon spokesman, slated to be replaced by Pete Williams as soon as Williams was confirmed, came in to go over potential questions. Howard said that Cheney was sure to get a question on the Post story about Genera
l Welch’s pulsing mission on the Hill.

  “You’ve got two choices,” Howard said. “You can slide off it or come out swinging.”

  “My instinct is to cut him off at the knees,” Cheney responded.

  Howard said that normally he would not agree, but this situation called for strong action. The word from Taft’s office was that he had authorized Welch to seek information from the Congress, but not to negotiate. Welch will be pissed off, Howard said, but the damage can be repaired later.

  Cheney understood the symbolic importance of first impressions. In the earliest days of his presidency in the summer of 1974, Gerald Ford had been photographed toasting his own English muffin for breakfast. Widely publicized, the photo had set a tone of nonimperial simplicity that endured and boosted Ford’s popularity. Now Cheney knew he would be setting his own tone, not just publicly but in the suites and corridors of the Pentagon itself. Washington was watching his early moves. Just after his nomination, Evans and Novak had written in their column, “Cheney cannot soon seize control of the building.”

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  At noon, like thousands of others in the Pentagon, Welch settled down to watch the first public performance by the new Secretary, a press conference televised live over the Pentagon’s closed-circuit television system.

  The first question to Cheney was about talk of an ICBM compromise.

  “To say that a compromise is near, I think, would be premature,” Cheney replied.

  The second question was specifically about Welch.

  “Mr. Secretary,” a reporter asked, “General Welch, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, apparently has been up on the Hill working this program himself. Is that a change of policy for the Defense Department to have a service chief negotiate his own strategic system?”