by Dick Cheney
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, was in 2001 selling nuclear weapons technology and equipment to rogue states like Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was Khan’s biggest customer.
And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, terrorists had learned two dangerous lessons from America’s weak response to previous attacks—on our embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, in Somalia, on the World Trade Center in 1993, on the military training facilities in Riyadh and at the Khobar Towers housing complex, on our embassies in East Africa, and on the U.S.S. Cole. First, terrorists came to believe they could strike with impunity, that the U.S. response was likely to be inconsequential. Second, they learned that if they did attack U.S. assets or personnel, we might well change our policy or withdraw.
By 2004 the world looked very different. The attacks of 9/11 had changed everything. We had strengthened our homeland defense, including improvements to our defenses against biological weapons, and created the Department of Homeland Security. We had also gone after the terrorists’ financial networks, improved our intelligence capabilities, and gone on the offense, implementing the Bush Doctrine.
We had driven the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, killing or capturing hundreds of al Qaeda fighters. Osama bin Laden and his deputies were on the run, hampering al Qaeda’s ability to plan attacks against the United States. A new government had been established in Afghanistan, a constitution had been written, and presidential elections would be held in the fall of 2004. Violence levels were down, the military was making progress, Afghan security forces were growing, and we were working closely with Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government. Afghanistan seemed on a positive trajectory.
In Pakistan President Musharraf had signed up with the United States after 9/11 and was providing significant support for our operations in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis had helped us capture or kill hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan, including the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
In Iraq Saddam Hussein was no longer in power. His sons were dead. He was in jail. We had established an interim government, transferred sovereignty, and begun training Iraqi security forces so they could take on increasing responsibility. Though much hard work remained, the world was clearly safer with Saddam gone.
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi watched the U.S. action in Afghanistan and preparations for Iraq and decided he didn’t want to be next. As we launched into Iraq, we received a message that Qaddafi might be willing to give up his nuclear program. Senior U.S. intelligence officials worked with British counterparts to conduct nine months of negotiations with the Libyans. Then, six days after Saddam was captured, Qaddafi announced he would turn over all his WMD materials. His centrifuges, uranium hexafluoride, weapon design, and associated materials were shipped to the United States. Libya was out of the nuclear business as a direct result of U.S. action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Pakistan, again due to tremendous work by our intelligence professionals, A. Q. Khan had also been put out of business. We had taken down his network. On February 4, 2004, he’d gone on Pakistani TV and confessed to his illegal nuclear proliferation activities. He was under house arrest, and we had stopped one of the world’s worst proliferators of nuclear weapons technology.
Finally, terrorists around the world now understood that the United States would strike at those who intended us harm. We had done all these things—and kept the American people safe from another attack.
ON MAY 10, 2004, President Bush and I went to the Pentagon to view photos that had recently been made public, as well as some that hadn’t been released, of American soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The photos were deeply disturbing. The behavior recorded in them was cruel and disgraceful and certainly not reflective of U.S. policy. Secretary Rumsfeld had testified in front of the Senate and House armed services committees a few days before our visit to the Pentagon. He apologized, took full responsibility, and promised a complete investigation. He had also tried to resign on May 5. He believed someone had to be held accountable, and since the behavior had occurred on his watch, he offered the president his letter of resignation. The president hadn’t accepted it.
As our May 10 Pentagon meeting came to a close, Don asked to see the president alone, and as President Bush told me when we got back to the White House, Don tried to resign for the second time, saying this time his mind was made up. The president asked me to talk to him, to explain how much we needed him, and to convince him to stay.
The next day, Tuesday, after the weekly Republican Senate Policy Lunch at the Capitol, I headed to the Pentagon to talk to Don. As my motorcade crossed the Potomac, I thought back thirty years to the day in 1975 when Jerry Ford had directed me to contact Rumsfeld to persuade him to accept the job of secretary of defense. How could I have ever imagined that five presidents later, I would be urging him not to resign from that office—which in the interim I had held myself?
I took a seat at the small round table around which I’d held nightly senior staff sessions when I was secretary. Don was by the standing desk he kept near the window. I told him I understood why he had submitted his letter of resignation, but that he was wrong on this one. We were in the midst of a war against a very tough and determined enemy, and his departure would undermine our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. I told him that I believed his resignation would do serious, perhaps irreparable, harm and asked him to reconsider. In the end, he agreed to stay.
Ultimately those responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib were reprimanded, relieved of duty, and, where appropriate, prosecuted. There were a dozen independent investigations conducted of detainee policy on Rumsfeld’s watch, and none found any evidence that abuse was either ordered, authorized, or condoned by military authorities or senior officials at the Department of Defense. One of my greatest regrets about Abu Ghraib is the focus it put on a relatively small group whose actions were in such marked contrast to the deep and enduring commitment to duty and honor that I have observed time and again in the men and women of America’s military. The wanton abuse committed by those few soldiers did lasting damage to America’s image, but they do not represent our country or the men and women who defend it.
MY FIRST MAJOR POLITICAL speech of the 2004 campaign was at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Mrs. Reagan could not have been more gracious, the audience was friendly, and the day before I made the speech, Senator John Kerry had provided me with some very good material. Asked about his vote against an $87 billion bill to provide material support to our troops, he replied, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” I quoted the line, and it brought down the house—as it would every time I used it.
I wasn’t on the road in 2004 as much as in 2000, since now I had a fulltime job, but when I did campaign, it was a family affair. Lynne traveled with me, and our daughter Mary, who was in charge of my campaign, was almost always with us. Liz, who had her fourth child and our first grandson, Philip, in July, didn’t do much traveling during the summer, but managed my preparation for the vice presidential candidates’ debate.
With my first grandson, Philip, at the vice president’s residence in the spring of 2006. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
We frequently took our three granddaughters on the road. Kate, who was ten, threw out the first baseball for the Altoona Curve, a minor-league baseball team in Pennsylvania; Grace, four, rode at the front of the bus on bus tours and shouted “Four more years!” into a microphone; and Elizabeth, seven, dressed up as the Grim Reaper for Halloween.
In my West Wing office, with granddaughter, Grace Perry in her Nationals cheerleading uniform, getting ready for Opening Day, 2007. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
Giving grandson Sam a ride on the vice presidential helicopter, Marine II, with Mary and Heather. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
At our campaign stops that day, we introduced her as John Kerry’s
health plan.
One place I spoke was at Cabela’s, a large sporting goods store, in East Grand Forks, Minnesota. We held a town hall meeting in front of a large array of stuffed mountain sheep, and, best of all, I got to do some shopping afterward. I later found out that great as the event was, we were in the wrong location. The Bush-Cheney campaign higher-ups had wanted us to hit the Fargo media market, which covers northwest Minnesota, but a snafu in logistics sent us to the Grand Forks media market—and Cabela’s—instead. But I thoroughly enjoyed the stop, and I’m not sure anyone at campaign headquarters ever figured out that we’d done the event eighty miles away from where we were supposed to—or if they did, they never said anything to me about it.
As I got ready to debate the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, I got my old debate prep team back together, with then Congressman Rob Portman of Ohio again serving as my sparring partner.
With Rob Portman, who played Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in my vice presidential debate preparation sessions in 2000 and 2004, watching video of John Edwards at our house in Wyoming, summer 2004. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
All the buildup around Edwards and his skill as a trial lawyer led me to expect a formidable opponent when we met on October 5, 2004, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. I came away from our session that evening feeling he hadn’t done much to prepare for the most important event either of us would participate in during the 2004 campaign.
There was one subject on which he had clearly done some planning. A little over halfway through the debate, moderator Gwen Ifill asked us about the president’s proposal for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages. Edwards opened his answer this way: “Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It’s a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children.” I was furious with his response. What gave him the right to make pronouncements about my family? But you never want to let the other guy get under your skin, so I kept my anger in check. When Ifill asked me if I’d like to respond, I said, “Well, Gwen, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.” “That’s it?” Gwen said. “That’s it,” I said.
My favorite line of attack on Edwards was to call him “Senator Gone,” which is what his hometown newspaper had dubbed him since he was so frequently absent from the Senate. I further observed:
In my capacity as vice president, I am president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.
I later found out that I had crossed paths with Edwards once before, at a prayer breakfast in downtown D.C. in 2001. But our meeting clearly hadn’t left much of an impression and didn’t take the edge off my charge: This guy was a less than serious senator.
I enjoyed listening to the after-debate commentary. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who usually turns red in the face and starts shouting at the mere mention of my name, paid me a compliment, describing the debate between Cheney and Edwards as the howitzer versus the water pistol. Mike Barnicle of the Boston Herald was also kind. The only thing that surprised him, he said, was “that at the end of the debate, at the end of ninety minutes, Dick Cheney did not turn to John Edwards and say, ‘By the way, give me the car keys too.’”
At the presidential debate a week later, moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS asked John Kerry, “Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?” Kerry answered, “We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.”
Now it was obvious that there was a concerted effort by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to remind viewers that my daughter Mary was gay, to bring her into the debate and into the campaign. I don’t recall another instance of a candidate for the presidency attempting to use the child of an opponent for political gain. Later that evening, when Fox’s Chris Wallace asked Kerry’s campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, about the remark, she replied that my daughter was “fair game.”
Lynne was furious. She hadn’t been scheduled to speak at the post-debate rally we were attending, but she took the podium anyway, and let John Kerry have it. “The only thing I can conclude,” she said, “is that he is not a good man. I’m speaking as a mom. What a cheap and tawdry political trick.” She was exactly right, and I told the crowd I sure was glad she was on our side.
Most of America reacted the same way we had. It didn’t matter where you came down on the issue of gay marriage or whether you identified yourself as a Republican or Democrat. Seeing a candidate for president be so obviously opportunistic did not inspire feelings of confidence. In fact, it had quite the opposite effect, and the Bush-Cheney campaign got a bump in the polls. We all started referring to it as the “Mary Cheney bounce.”
We ended the campaign with a huge swing that took us to Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, Hawaii, Colorado, Nevada, and finally to Jackson, Wyoming, on November 1, where an airport hangar full of friends greeted us. The next morning Lynne and I voted at the fire station near our home in Jackson and headed back to Washington, D.C. The exit polls were bad; so bad, in fact, that I knew they were wrong. I was sure we were going to win.
On the campaign trail with Lynne in 2004 (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
We didn’t have our victory celebration that night, but the next afternoon instead, in the auditorium of the Reagan Building. Screaming Bush-Cheney supporters were hanging over railings and maybe even from the rafters. We had won 51 percent of the popular vote to Kerry’s and Edwards’s 48 percent and 286 electoral votes to their 251. Wednesday, November 3, 2004, was a very nice day.
Being sworn in for the second time as vice president of the United States, January 20, 2005, with Lynne, Liz and Mary. My good friend, Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert administered the oath of office. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
AS WE GOT READY for the second term, it was clear the president wanted to make big changes in personnel. Although I tended to get involved in personnel matters with less frequency than I had at the beginning of our time in office, I felt strongly that major change was needed in the national security team. Getting a new secretary of state was a top priority.
Like the president I had believed that Colin Powell would be an effective secretary of state. I had long admired his talents and had personally selected him for appointment by George H. W. Bush to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was superb in that job. But it was not the same when he was at the State Department. I was particularly disappointed in the way he handled policy differences. Time and again I heard that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. Indeed, I continue to hear it today. But never once in any meeting did I hear him voice objection. It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government. I’d been sorry in 1992 when Bill Clinton’s election brought an end to my working relationship with Powell at the Pentagon, but when President Bush, after his reelection in 2004, accepted Powell’s resignation, I thought it was for the best.
IN DECEMBER 2004 LYNNE and I traveled to Afghanistan for the inauguration of Hamid Karzai, the nation’s first democratically elected president.
With Hamid Karzai in Kabul, Afghanistan for his inauguration as Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
Before the ceremony, we had breakfast with U.S. troops stationed at Bagram Air Base, outside Kabul. When I spoke to the men and women who were gathered, I reflected on the fact that we were meeting that morning in a nation
that had just held the first free elections in its five-thousand-year history:
Just eight months earlier the United Nations hoped that six and a half million Afghans would register to vote. The number turned out to be more than 10 million, and on election day, they showed up at twenty-two thousand polling stations across the country. Near one of these stations, a coalition officer told of seeing a line of people two miles long, all walking down a road on their way to the polls. He spoke of old people walking and being ferried in goat carts, amputees on crutches, droves of people moving toward the polling booths, and then, late in the evening, aged adults running to beat the deadline to get in line in order to vote.
It was a time of great promise and hopefulness in Afghanistan, and I thanked the American soldiers and airmen at Bagram for the enormous part they had played in defending America and securing freedom for the Afghan people.
A few hours later, Lynne and I arrived at Afghanistan’s presidential palace, which still bore the marks of the years of fighting the Afghans had lived through. President Karzai and I met to discuss the ongoing military operations and his work to set up a new government. At our press conference immediately afterward, he made clear his gratitude to the American people:
Whatever we have achieved in Afghanistan—the peace, the election, the reconstruction, the life that the Afghans are living today in peace, the children going to school, the businesses, the fact that Afghanistan is a respected member of the international community—is from the help that the United States of America gave us. Without that help, Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists—destroyed, poverty-stricken, and without its children going to school or getting an education. We are very, very grateful, to put it in simple words that we know, to the people of the United States of America for bringing us this day.