by Dick Cheney
Next to my desk was a small round table, where a lot of important decisions would be made during my time in office. At the end of every day, when we were all in town, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Don Atwood, deputy secretary of defense, and I would meet, often with our military assistants, to go over the key issues we were facing. Sometimes we’d kick out the aides, so it was just the three of us. This was where we did the heavy lifting.
As I settled in behind Pershing’s desk, Kathie Embody buzzed in to tell me that I was expected at a meeting in the White House residence later that morning. As the appointed hour approached, I got in the elevator to go down to the garage and pushed the wrong button, ending up in the basement of the Pentagon instead of in the garage. This would have been an easy mistake to remedy, except, as I discovered after I had gotten off and the doors had closed behind me, there was no button to call the elevator back to the basement. Someone had made a perfectly sensible security decision that people shouldn’t be able to ride from the basement straight into the secretary’s office, but what this meant for me was that the president of the United States was waiting, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to get to the garage and my limo.
I wandered around until I found some stairs headed up. At the top I could look through a glass window in a door out to where my limousine was parked and see a number of very upset aides running around, yelling, I was sure, “Where the hell’s the secretary?” I straightened my tie, walked out, and got in my limousine, acting like nothing was wrong. I was driven to the White House for my meeting with the president—and no one ever had the nerve to ask me where I’d been.
ONE OF THE FIRST things I did at the Pentagon was ask to see an organizational chart of the Department of Defense. When I received it, I unrolled it and watched it fall off both sides of the Pershing desk. I rolled it back up and never looked at it again. I decided then and there that if I spent time trying to reorganize the Pentagon, I wouldn’t get anything done.
I wanted to address questions of grand strategy. We couldn’t yet be sure of the end result of glasnost and perestroika, the “openness” and “restructuring” that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was advocating, but we needed to address the matter of what changes in the Soviet Union might mean for our force structure and our strategy, from what we would need to fight an all-out global nuclear war to how to defeat anyone trying to dominate a region of the world vital to us.
I also wanted to focus on the operational command of the forces, the wartime system. When you go to the Department of Defense, you don’t know if you’re going to have to use the force, but it’s something I wanted to be prepared for. Early on, I asked for the after-action reports from major uses of force since the end of the Vietnam War. They laid out our successes and failures in those previous engagements, and I spent time studying them. I’ve always been convinced that we don’t do enough during the transition to a new administration to prepare those coming in for the possible use of the force. We spend a lot of time briefing on the SIOP—the Single Integrated Operational Plan—for launching our nuclear weapons, but any president is much more likely to have to use conventional or special operations forces, and we do little to prepare them for that.
I also wanted to spend significant time on intelligence matters, which had been a special interest of mine since my time on the House Intelligence Committee. As secretary of defense, I was in charge of a larger portion of the government’s intelligence assets than the director of the CIA.
Finally, I had learned from long experience that nothing was more important than personnel. I could make the best possible policy decisions, but unless I had the people on board to execute those decisions, the policies wouldn’t succeed. When I took over the Pentagon, there were forty-four presidential-level appointments requiring Senate confirmation in DOD. Ultimately I put new people into thirty-nine of those positions.
Perhaps the single most important personnel decision I would make during my first six months was for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I began to think about it the first night I was secretary. I was well aware that if I made a mistake, I would have to live with it for two years and maybe four. Brent Scowcroft had already indicated his preference for reappointing Admiral Bill Crowe, who would be completing his second two-year term as chairman on October 1, 1989, but I wanted to make my own selection for the chairman’s job—a task that became easier when Crowe indicated to me that he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about serving another term.
I was leaning toward Colin Powell, whom I had met when I was on an Intelligence Committee trip in 1986. We had stopped in Germany, where Powell was commander of the U.S. Army’s V Corps. I subsequently had the opportunity to watch him work when he served as national security advisor in the aftermath of Iran-Contra at the end of the Reagan administration. I had been impressed enough with his abilities that I called him during the Reagan-Bush presidential transition and expressed the hope that we would have the opportunity to work together at some point in the future. I had no idea that that opportunity was just months away.
The weekend after the president had announced that I would be the secretary of defense, I paid a visit to an old friend, Frank Carlucci, who also happened to be my predecessor at the Pentagon. I sought Frank’s advice about running the department, and knowing that he had worked closely with Colin Powell during tours at Defense and the National Security Council, I also asked his opinion about Powell as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Carlucci was enthusiastic.
General Powell was at that time in command of U.S. Forces Command, or FORSCOM, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, a post he’d gone to after leaving his Reagan White House assignment. I didn’t have to make a decision right away, but I was increasingly attracted to the idea of him as chairman.
A crucial job I had to fill immediately was deputy secretary of defense, a post more important than most cabinet secretaries. Don Atwood of Michigan, formerly vice chairman of General Motors, had been slotted to be John Tower’s deputy, and the president asked me to look at him. It was the only time the president weighed in with a suggestion, and it was a good one. Don was sometimes frustrated at the way Washington worked, especially the relations between the Defense Department and the Congress. He told me once that “at least at General Motors the board of directors wanted us to succeed.” But Atwood brought great managerial strength to the Pentagon and got us through many of our toughest problems, from reform of the procurement system to the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, which devastated Florida and Louisiana in 1992.
I chose Paul Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense for policy. A former ambassador and assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, Paul had the ability to offer new perspectives on old problems. He was also persistent. On more than one occasion, I sent him on his way after I had rejected a piece of advice or a policy suggestion, only to find him back in my office a half hour later continuing to press his point—and he was often right to do so.
As general counsel for the department, I recruited Terry O’Donnell, an Air Force Academy graduate and Vietnam veteran, whose wisdom and discretion I had first seen when he was President Ford’s personal aide and I was deputy chief of staff. David Addington, a CIA-trained attorney with experience working at both the White House and on Capitol Hill, became my special assistant. Bright, completely discreet, and with tremendous personal integrity, Addington was an ideal choice.
Pete Williams, who had been press secretary in my congressional office, became assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. A Stanford graduate, Pete was from my hometown of Casper, Wyoming, where he had once been news director of KTWO television. He had the intellect and judgment to know what he could say to the press and what had to remain confidential. Others from my personal staff, including Dave Gribbin, Patty Howe, Jim Steen, Kim McKernan, and Kathie Embody, moved to the Pentagon with me.
WITHOUT QUESTION ONE OF the most significant posts is that of senior military assistant to the
secretary of defense. During my tenure, the military assistant was usually the first person I saw each morning when I arrived for work, and he accompanied me to many of my meetings throughout the day. Inside his office, right next to mine, there was a photograph on the wall taken during the Civil War that showed the military assistant’s supposed forebears. Called Horse Holders, the photo shows a number of junior officers holding the horses of Ulysses S. Grant’s commanders while they meet with the general. If the young men in that photograph were the predecessors of the military assistants I knew, they must have gone on to distinguished careers. My three military assistants all went on to become four-star officers. Admiral Bill Owens would serve as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Joe Lopez would command all U.S. naval forces in Europe, and General John Jumper would become air force chief of staff.
ON FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 1989, I held my first press conference. That morning a front-page story in the Washington Post reported that Air Force Chief of Staff, Larry Welch, had been negotiating directly with Congress about the future of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile systems. Specifically, the issue was whether we should continue to fund the MX missile system based in silos at Warren Air Force Base, outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. The alternative to the MX was a smaller, single-warhead system called the Midgetman. Both systems had benefits and drawbacks, and choosing between them—or coming up with a compromise—was a major strategic decision for the secretary of defense and ultimately the president to make.
When I took the podium that morning, I knew I would be asked about the Post story. It was the first question out of the gate. “Are we in fact close to a compromise on those two weapons systems?” a reporter asked. “I have as yet made no decision,” I answered. “To say that a compromise is near, I think would be premature.”
Then the second question: “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?”
I answered directly. “General Welch was freelancing. He was not speaking for the department. He was obviously up there on his own hook, so to speak.” Then I was asked whether I accepted this. “No, I’m not happy with it, frankly. I think it’s inappropriate for a uniformed officer to be in a position where he is in fact negotiating an arrangement. I have not had an opportunity yet to talk to him about it. I’ve been at the White House all morning. I will have the opportunity to discuss it with him and I will make known to him my displeasure. Everybody’s entitled to one mistake.”
My statement sent a clear message through the building about who was in charge. And that’s what I had intended. I found out later that Welch believed he had gotten approval to go ahead with the Hill talks from Will Taft, the department’s outgoing deputy secretary, who had been acting secretary until I was confirmed, and I came to regard Welch as a fine officer. But in the meantime I had signaled my intention to exercise control and authority over the Department of Defense.
I TOOK OFFICE EXACTLY thirty-nine days before I had to present my first defense budget to the Congress. Although I had inherited this first budget, I was determined to master it, knowing that being able to answer any and all questions about it was the best way to get off to a good start. Being knowledgeable about the budget during that first session with my former colleagues on the Hill helped set a tone for my long-term relations with the Congress.
For subsequent budgets, we established a unique arrangement for preparing the department’s requests. Typically cabinet and agency heads negotiate for their budgets with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but during my time at Defense, the president and I would sit down at the beginning of the process with Dick Darman, the director of OMB, and agree on an overall top line for Defense. This arrangement allowed Darman to get a fix on the largest discretionary item in the budget so that he’d know what was left for everyone else. It allowed me to avoid the give-and-take with OMB and know exactly how much I had to work with. As long as I stayed within that agreed-upon top line, I was free, with few exceptions, to put together the defense budget.
My strongest ally in the Congress was Democrat Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania, whom I’d gotten to know when we served together in the House. Murtha was chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and at the beginning of each legislative session, I would invite him over for breakfast in my office at the Pentagon. We would discuss which items were high priority for each of us and put together a back-of-the-envelope outline of a bill.
Murtha was a master legislator. Once he got behind a proposal, it usually got approved. One year he arranged to pass the defense appropriations bill worth many billions of dollars on a voice vote without amendment. At the end of each session, the bill enacted was very close to what we had agreed to back in January at the beginning of the process.
The years I’d spent as a member of Congress, most of the time as a member of the leadership, were invaluable in working on the issues important to the Defense Department during my tenure as secretary. The friendships developed over ten years were vital in everything we did on the Hill, from the annual appropriations and authorization, to winning the fight over the resolution to go to war to liberate Kuwait. But I don’t mean to suggest that all was always clear sailing with the Congress.
Every year, for example, I tried to kill the V-22 Osprey, a Marine Corps aircraft, but the Congress funded it. The Marines had decided before I became secretary that they needed something to replace their Vietnam-era helicopters. The problem was, instead of buying new helicopters, they decided they needed the Osprey, which would take off and land like a helicopter, but once airborne its rotors would swivel so it could fly like a conventional airplane. The requirement used to justify this project was that when landing under fire on an enemy-held beach, the Marines needed an aircraft that could move from ship to shore faster than a helicopter could manage.
There were several problems with this approach. The tilt-rotor technology was difficult to develop and the cost was at least double that of a conventional helicopter. By the time I arrived at the Pentagon, the project was significantly behind schedule.
I realized early on as secretary that I wasn’t likely to succeed in killing the Osprey, but I went ahead and knocked it out of my budget each year anyway. I figured that if the Congress was busy fighting to restore the Osprey, members wouldn’t have time to go after something I really cared about.
Years later, when I was vice president, I landed in Air Force Two at New River Marine Corps Air Station in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where a large contingent of V-22 Ospreys is based. As I disembarked from my aircraft, the Marines arranged for two of their Ospreys to do a flyover, very low and very slow, right over my head. I smiled at the gentle reminder that the United States Marine Corps had prevailed in the battle of the Osprey.
AS I WRITE THIS, looking back twenty years and more, it’s clear that 1989 was a turning point in modern history. The Cold War was ending, but the great historical change under way wasn’t so clear from the vantage point we had in March of that year. As I took office, there was a strong push from some in Congress urging us to make significant cuts in our defense budget. I was wary of cutting too deeply. Although we had seen initial signs of change in the Soviet Union, there was no denying that they still had thousands of missiles aimed at the United States. They had some six hundred thousand troops stationed in Eastern Europe. I felt strongly that it would be irresponsible to make deep cuts or changes to our strategic defense systems on the promise of change from the Soviets.
I was skeptical about whether Mikhail Gorbachev was the agent of change that many perceived him to be. When he had visited the United States in December 1987, Lynne and I were invited to the state dinner in his honor at the White House. I was seated on one side of First Lady Nancy Reagan and Gorbachev on the other, and I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions. Although he had begun making efforts t
o open up the Soviet Union’s economy, he still seemed to think that communism was a workable system. He also bristled when I asked him how he came to be general secretary of the Party. I told him that in our system the job of secretary of agriculture, which he had held, wasn’t normally a path to the presidency. He said he had been much more than an agriculture secretary and detailed his service in the Communist Party leadership structure. I came away from the evening thinking that he wasn’t as serious a reformer as some believed.
My view hadn’t changed by 1989. But the month after I took office, I learned an important lesson about the difference between sharing your view when you’re a member of Congress and sharing it when you’re secretary of defense. Appearing on CNN’s Evans & Novak, I said I believed Gorbachev’s efforts would “ultimately fail.” I hadn’t been off the air long when I got a call from Jim Baker telling me I was out of my lane, that my comments, now that I was a member of the administration, would have a direct impact on relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Jim was right. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Eight years later I was at a reception at Robert Mosbacher’s home in Houston when George H. W. Bush, a former president now, told me he had someone he wanted me to talk to. He took me by the arm and walked me into the dining room, where a lone person sat at the table—Mikhail Gorbachev. The president said he thought we should know each other better, seated me next to Gorbachev, and left. On that fall afternoon for a half hour or so, the two of us, with help from an interpreter, talked about the bygone days when we had been adversaries.