In My Time

by Dick Cheney

I must give Gorbachev credit. He could have done as his predecessors did and used force to preserve the U.S.S.R. The fact that he did not is enough to make him one of the twentieth century’s historic figures.

  ONE OF THE FIRST challenges on my watch as defense secretary was a problem we had inherited from the Reagan administration—Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega. America had significant interests at stake in Panama. Although President Carter had signed the treaty turning over control of the Panama Canal to the government of Panama, the turnover would not take effect until 1999. In March 1989, America was still in charge, and protecting the rights of transit through the canal was our responsibility. We also had twelve thousand American troops stationed in Panama, and I was responsible for their welfare.

  Noriega was a thug, guilty of a long string of outrageous actions, and he was under indictment by federal grand juries in Florida for money laundering and drug trafficking. In early May 1989, when Noriega’s preferred candidates were defeated at the ballot box by presidential candidate Guillermo Endara and others, Noriega threw out the results of the election and sent his “dignity battalions” into the streets to bloody the opposition. Newscasts in the United States carried footage of one of the opposition’s vice presidential candidates, Guillermo “Billy” Ford, trying to flee along a street in Panama City as he was beaten by Noriega’s goons.

  We weren’t prepared at this point for a major military action in Panama, but we needed to generate options for the president. The Panama Canal was a strategic asset, there were American lives at stake, and President Bush wanted to make clear that our country’s patience was running thin.

  Our plan was to send a clear message by deploying an additional three thousand U.S. troops into Panama, but we ran into an obstacle in the person of our commanding general, Fred Woerner, who headed up Southern Command. He basically told us no thanks when we informed him we’d be sending reinforcements. His response was the same when we told him we would be sending some of our special operations forces into Panama to be ready in case we needed them. Not necessary, he said. Having a general who wouldn’t accept reinforcements was clearly a problem.

  After a conversation with Brent Scowcroft, I realized Woerner was going to have to be replaced. At about the same time my old friend Jack Marsh invited me for lunch. Jack was now the secretary of the army, a job he loved and was terrific at. He was a very effective back channel for me a number of times when I was secretary of defense. Marsh knew I would be looking for a replacement soon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Crowe. “Have you thought about Max Thurman?” he asked. Thurman was currently serving as commanding general of the Training and Doctrine Command, getting ready to retire in two months. Although he wasn’t well-known outside the army, he was a legend inside it. He was a bachelor, married to the army, really. He’d been heavily involved in creating our all-volunteer force. And he got things done. If you gave Max an assignment, he might break a lot of china along the way, but he would deliver. He carried the well-earned nickname Maxatollah.

  I was intrigued and asked Marsh to set up a session where I could talk with Thurman face-to-face. A few weeks later, he joined us for lunch in Marsh’s office, and he didn’t disappoint. As secretary, I had run into plenty of general officers who told me what they thought I wanted to hear and, frankly, that wasn’t very helpful. Thurman was something completely different. A combination of being near retirement and having a tell-it-straight personality made him direct and forceful. I appreciated it. As I sat in Jack’s office eating my lunch and listening to Thurman, I thought to myself, here is the kind of guy we need in Panama.

  Before we could offer him the job I would have to retire Woerner. Telling people they have to go is never pleasant, and firing a four-star general is not something that is done every day. But we had no choice. I knew from experience that it was more responsible and more honorable to move quickly to make a change when it was clear things weren’t working out. And I knew I owed it to General Woerner to deliver the news directly and in person. I asked my military aide, Admiral Bill Owens, to have Woerner make the trip to Washington.

  A few days later Woerner and Admiral Crowe took seats at the round table in my office. Looking General Woerner in the eye, I told him, “General, the president has decided to make a change.” He wanted to know why. I told him it wasn’t personal, it was just time for a change. Though he was not pleased with the decision, he understood it was final and handled it with grace and dignity. On July 20 I announced that General Fred Woerner would be retiring and the new CINC, or commander in chief, for Southern Command would be General Max Thurman.

  BY THIS TIME, THE summer of 1989, I had pretty well decided that I wanted General Colin Powell to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a job unique in the U.S. military. The chairman is not only the senior uniformed officer but also the key link to the civilian leadership, providing military advice to the secretary of defense, the National Security Council, and the president. For most of the post–World War II period, the chairman offered only military advice that all the members of the Joint Chiefs concurred in. Unless there was a consensus among the chiefs of the services, the chairman’s hands were tied.

  All of that changed with the enactment of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which emphasized the importance of “jointness” (as opposed to service-centered advocacy) among the services and made the chairman the principal military advisor, freeing him from the constraint of offering only the consensus views of the chiefs. I had cosponsored the legislation in the House, believing it provided badly needed reforms.

  Goldwater-Nichols also took the chiefs out of the chain of command. The air force and army chiefs as well as the Marine commandant and the chief of naval operations would no longer command forces when they were deployed. They were responsible for recruiting, training, and equipping the force, but not for using it in combat. That role was reserved for the CINCs, the commanders in the field. The secretary of defense may, at his option, send military orders to the field through the chairman, which I chose to do.

  The chairman about to be appointed would be the first to serve his entire tenure in the consequential position that Goldwater-Nichols had created, and I wanted to make certain that the man I picked was not a “political” general, someone who’d had his head turned by the rarefied atmosphere of the White House. I needed to know that General Powell was happy to be back commanding troops and satisfied with the idea of serving out the rest of his career in uniform. To find out if that was the case, I made a stop at FORSCOM headquarters at Fort McPherson and visited with Powell face-to-face. I came away impressed, my mind made up to recommend him to the president.

  I knew Scowcroft had some hesitation about Powell, based, I thought, on Powell’s having been the national security advisor to President Reagan. Brent wasn’t enthusiastic about having a chairman of the Joint Chiefs who knew as much as he did about running the National Security Council and advising the president, but I thought his reluctance could be overcome.

  President Bush had worked closely with Powell when he was vice president and Powell was national security advisor, and I knew he was a fan. But I was also aware that the president was worried about jumping Powell, a brand-new four-star, over fourteen others in order to put him in the military’s top job. Picking him would certainly ruffle some feathers, and when I made the case to the president that Powell was the man for the job, I said I would handle any blowback from those we passed over.

  The president backed my decision about Powell and agreed to nominate him. On October 1, 1989, after confirmation by the Senate, Colin Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I knew we would have important work to do together. I believed we would be a good team. And for our time together at the Pentagon, we were.

  __________

  ON HIS FIRST DAY on the job, General Powell woke me early in the morning with news that we were getting reports a coup might be about to get under way in Panama. We monitored the situation through th
e day, and I left the next morning to take my Soviet counterpart, General Dmitri Yazov, on a tour of Gettysburg National Military Park. On a previous visit to the Soviet Union, my hosts had taken me to see the mass graves from the siege of Leningrad; Hitler’s troops had failed to capture the city, but more than a million Russians had died. I thought I would reciprocate for the tour the Soviets had given me by taking their official party to the site of one of the most important battles in American history. We got an expert from the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and loaded the delegation on a bus to tour the sites of the key events in the famous battle.

  On the bus ride through the military park, I sat in the front row next to Yazov, a big, beefy guy, who had been chosen for his post by Gorbachev—and who would within two years be in jail for attempting a coup on the Soviet leader. We were well into our tour when my cell phone rang. Since this was 1989, the cell phone was bigger than a brick and my military aide carried it in his briefcase. Admiral Owens answered the call, leaned over the seat, and said, “Mr. Secretary, General Powell is on the phone, and he says he needs to speak with you.” Reaching behind me, I took the phone, put it to my ear, and listened as General Powell told me it looked like the coup in Panama had begun. When the call was finished and I handed the phone back to Admiral Owens, I noticed that General Yazov was clearly curious—not so much about the content of my call, but about my phone. Apparently mobile technology was still pretty rare in the Soviet Union.

  For our new national security team, this was a first test. How would we operate in a crisis? Would we be able to generate options for the president and a timely response? In this case, with hindsight, I would have to say we did not perform as well as we might have.

  The first question for us was whether this was a legitimate coup. Our reporting was spotty, and we did not want to fall into some kind of trap Noriega might be setting, trying to get us to take the first step militarily only to find out later there hadn’t been a coup. On the other hand, if the coup was real and American aid to the plotters could help unseat Noriega, intervening on the side of the plotters would be worth considering.

  By around one in the afternoon, we had developed a list of options to recommend to the president, ranging from what to do if the coup plotters brought Noriega to an American base to the possibility of using U.S. forces to extract Noriega. By 2:30 p.m. the coup had failed. Reports were that Noriega, outsmarting his captors, was able to reestablish his control over the situation and kill the coup leader. Shortly after that Noriega went on TV to denounce the coup plotters and the United States. Within the week we were being criticized by Democrats and Republicans in Congress for failing to take advantage of the situation.

  While I don’t believe the United States would have benefited by siding with the coup plotters more openly in this instance, the truth is, we didn’t move fast enough to make a decision. It was made for us by events on the ground. We learned from this experience that we needed a better system in place to stay on top of fast-moving developments and to get good intelligence that we could act on. These were lessons we put to good use a few months later when we invaded Panama.

  AS WE MONITORED EVENTS in Panama throughout the fall of 1989, we were also dealing with a potential coup in the Philippines. On November 30 we started getting reports that rebels opposed to the rule of Corazon Aquino had seized air bases belonging to the Filipino government. We also received a request from President Aquino for the United States to use the F-4 Phantom jets stationed at Clark Air Force Base to bomb the rebel positions. I did not believe we should agree to this—nor did General Powell. For one thing, President Aquino made it clear that she would publicly deny having made the request. Asking the United States to bomb Filipino citizens, even if they were rebels, would not go over well inside her own country. But we were committed to defending the government of the Philippines and needed to come up with a show of strength to discourage the rebels.

  As the crisis was coming to a head, President Bush, Jim Baker, and Brent Scowcroft made an evening departure for a summit meeting in Malta with Mikhail Gorbachev. Later that night, Vice President Dan Quayle convened a meeting of members of the National Security Council in the Situation Room at the White House. I stayed home in McLean, Virginia, where I had secure communications that enabled me to talk directly to Powell, who was in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, and to Air Force One. When Powell briefed me on the response to the Philippine situation that he and the Pentagon planners proposed—to put up a combat air patrol of American-flown aircraft over Manila—I called Air Force One directly. When I learned that the president agreed with the proposed response, I called Powell with the order to get the operation started. The plan was the right one. It worked to keep Aquino in power without our ever firing a shot.

  While our communications ability allowed us to do things our predecessors could not have dreamed of, we also ran into glitches from time to time. During my conversations with Powell the night of the Philippines crisis, he expressed extreme frustration at being unable, despite all the fancy equipment in the National Military Command Center, to talk to Filipino defense officials. The solution, as he described it to me in colorful terms as it was happening, was to have the floor of the command center ripped up and a regular phone line brought in so he could dial out to the Philippines.

  AFTER NORIEGA PUT DOWN the coup attempt in October, we took steps to be better prepared for the next crisis—and it wasn’t long in coming. On December 15, the Panamanian legislature declared that Panama was at war with the United States, and the next day members of the Panamanian Defense Force, or PDF, shot and killed an unarmed United States Marine lieutenant, Robert Paz, when the car he was in took off in panic after being surrounded at a checkpoint. An American naval officer and his wife, witnesses to the shooting, were taken into custody by the PDF, harassed, threatened, and the husband beaten.

  At ten the next morning, Sunday, December 17, I called a meeting in my office to review our options. General Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Dave Addington, Pete Williams, and Admiral Owens were there, as well as General Tom Kelly, the smart, straight-shooting officer who was director of operations for the joint staff. I went around the table to give each man a chance to be heard. General Powell was particularly eloquent on the consequences of Noriega’s PDF killing an American soldier in cold blood. This was not the kind of thing we could let go unanswered.

  That afternoon, when we took our recommendations to the president, Christmas celebrations in the White House were in full swing. I made my way through hallways decked out for the season to the private elevator that goes up to the second-floor residence, where Generals Powell and Kelly briefed the president on our overall war plan, then called “Operation Blue Spoon,” and described its objective—taking down Noriega and the PDF and restoring the democratically elected government of Panama. All around the room there was support for taking action, and at the end of the meeting President Bush gave us the order—“Do it.”

  Back at the Pentagon later that day, General Kelly and his deputy then, Admiral Joe Lopez, discussed the formal name of the operation. “Blue Spoon” just didn’t seem right, a little too frivolous. The two batted around some options until Lopez said, “How about ‘Just Cause’?” And the operation was named.

  The next day was spent on a final check of plans that had been set in place weeks earlier. I knew as a student of history that in even the most successful military operations there are failures, but I also knew that it was the responsibility of those of us in command at the Pentagon to do as much as we could to plan for eventualities and minimize error. Civilian leaders also have to walk a fine line. You have a legal obligation to make certain the military is doing its job, that it assembles a force and puts together a plan to achieve the objective it has been given. But it’s important not to cross into Lyndon Johnson territory, where civilian leadership picks bombing targets from the White House.

  PANAMA WAS THE FIRST military operation where I h
ad to decide how to handle the reporters who wanted to cover operations. I understood the press had a job to do, but I felt it was important that they not interfere with the job I had to do. In any military operation, the press will push for the maximum coverage possible, but we had to be aware, particularly in light of technology that now made instant reporting from the field increasingly possible, that their coverage could jeopardize the security of our operation.

  For Panama, we used a pool system, which basically meant that certain reporters were selected to be on call at a given time. They would be the ones to go if something came up during their watch. We sent the pool to Panama, but they became frustrated when they got there and found themselves under the control of General Thurman. I understood the frustration, but we couldn’t divert assets we needed to fight the battle to the task of escorting journalists, so they had to cool their heels for a while.

  In addition there were a few reporters who had gotten down to Panama on their own, not as part of the pool system. When the fighting started, one group hid out in the basement of the Marriott hotel. They placed frantic calls to their home offices in New York, which were in turn putting tremendous pressure on the White House. There were thirty-five thousand American civilians in Panama, but the journalists at the Marriott became the center of attention, and finally Brent called and told us we had no choice. The president wanted us to rescue them. The problem wasn’t only their superiors in New York calling in, but other reporters focusing on the stranded journalists. They were making it seem as though the military operation, which was generally going well, was somehow not succeeding.

  We sent units from the 82nd Airborne to the Marriott, and they successfully freed the journalists as well as others who were there. But three American soldiers were wounded in the rescue, and a Spanish photographer covering the operation was killed.

  Many at the Pentagon had a deep distrust of the media that was in part left over from Vietnam. There was a view—which I shared—that unduly negative reporting had helped sour public opinion on that war. The Tet Offensive, for example, was presented as a devastating blow to our side, when, in fact, we dealt out punishing losses to the North Vietnamese. Operation Just Cause deepened my conviction that the press ought not be the final arbiter of whether we have won or lost a war. When it came time for Desert Storm, I would try to be sure that we had maximum opportunity to communicate directly with the American people—without going through the filter of the press.