Vice

by Lou Dubose

  Fitton's conservative instincts led him to doubt that Cheney was looking at Iraqi oilfields in preparation for war. But Fitton is bothered by the fact that there is no way to know. "We don't know because we weren't given the context," he says. "We have no way of knowing what they were deliberating."

  Actually, there is some context. As Cheney and his task force studied maps of Iraq, administration officials were also calling in oil ministers from friendly Persian Gulf states surrounding Iraq. No one seemed to notice or report the facts and the context. While Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq, and the country's oil revenue was under U.N. control, the vice president of the United States, U.S. Department of Energy officials, and Persian Gulf oil ministers were discussing the disposition of the region's petroleum reserves. The names and dates of visits from Middle Eastern oil ministers were obtained through the NRDC requests in the FOIA lawsuit. The lists of meetings with Persian Gulf oil ministers, and the maps obtained by the NRDC, were all included in Department of Energy files released long after a federal judge ordered them turned over to the plaintiffs—and after Bush and Cheney started the war in Iraq.

  American vice presidents and presidents have studied Middle Eastern oil maps since before the Saud clan beat the Arabian Peninsula into one sovereign petroleum monarchy. And there were oilfield maps of other countries. The United Arab Emirates, for example. And Iran, which raises another huge set of issues. Earlier, as CEO of Dallas-based oilfield construction giant Halliburton, Cheney was making the argument that State Department sanctions keeping U.S. energy companies out of Iran and other state sponsors of terrorism were unfair to American business and should be lifted. The Iranians desperately wanted U.S. oilfield technology, and Cheney wanted to provide it. The Bush Doctrine, however, which would become more hardened after the September 11 attacks, would keep U.S. business interests out of Iran. Iran's maps were useful only within the context of a plan for regime change.

  The focus on the Iraqi oilfield maps on the eve of an unprovoked war suggests that preliminary war planning was under way in the first three months of the Bush-Cheney administration, well before the September 11 attacks that Cheney and Bush were to use as the justification for the invasion. In fact, those plans had already been developed by Paul Wolfowitz. First securing, then unlocking Iraqi oil could only serve the interests of the United States. There was, after all, euphoric prewar speculation in the business press about the positive effect Iraq's oil would have on world markets in the long run. And Assistant Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz predicted that rebuilding Iraq would be paid for by tapping into Iraqi oil reserves. Some things don't work out as planned.

  There is more the administration did not want made public.

  Small embarrassments, such as task force executive director Joseph Kelliher e-mailing natural gas lobbyist Dana Contratto to ask what he would do about natural gas policy "if you were king, or Il Duce."

  And a "fill-in-the-blanks" executive order drafted by the American Petroleum Institute, under a heading that read:

  Executive Order ——

  Energy Policy

  March ——, 2001

  On May 11, 2001, the draft became Executive Order 13211, which included, verbatim, the policy that American Petroleum Institute federal relations director Jim Ford spelled out, even if it was executed in May rather than March. Using the president as cover, Ford cut through government regulation and exempted certain industry acts from judicial review.

  There were larger issues. On March 1, Irl F. Engelhardt and Fred Palmer, the CEO and vice president of Peabody Energy, met with task force director Andrew Lundquist, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, and Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey. Peabody, the world's largest coal company, was preparing a stock offering. Coal policy recommendations in the task force report would influence the market's response to Peabody's IPO. On March 16, the task force released its report, hyping the use of coal. On March 21, Peabody went public, raising $420 million— $60 million more than analysts had predicted. The task force was, in effect, flogging a stock offering.

  There were other embarrassments.

  The EPA representative on the task force had blocked the recommendation of a procedure called hydraulic fracturing. 'Tracking" involves high-pressure injection of chemicals into gas formations to break up rock and move the gas to the wellhead. It also contaminates aquifers used for drinking water and irrigation. In response to EPA concerns, fracking was pulled from the draft version of the report. It was reinserted in the final report. Halliburton is the nation's leader in hydraulic fracturing.

  Many of the lobbyists and executives who made it to the task force table were major Bush-Cheney contributors, engaging in what looked like pay-to-play government. But the only "lobbyists" whose names and photographs the task force released to the press were representatives of environmental groups, all brought in on one day as a response to criticism that the environmental community was being shut out.

  Four years after the task force went out of business, the secrecy and dishonesty continued to dog the vice president and his corporate clients, as executives for the major oil companies all told a Senate committee that they had not attended or didn't recall attending task force meetings. But after a Secret Service visitors' log that included their names was leaked to The Washington Post, and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg announced that he was referring their testimony to the Justice Department, their memories improved so much that they amended their testimony.

  Yet the task force's most far-reaching policy change was coldly executed by Dick Cheney himself. In one bold move, the vice president killed the environmental centerpiece of George Bush's presidential campaign. Bush had repeatedly promised that if elected, he would cap emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the known causes of global warming. After he took office, he turned the campaign promise into policy. Bush directed his EPA administrator Christine Whitman to move toward the carbon caps. "George Bush was very clear during the course of the campaign that he believed in a multipollutant strategy, and that includes CO2," Whitman said on CNN's Crossfire. White House senior adviser Karl Rove, who was standing beside Bush when he made the C02 pledge at an Austin press conference in 1999, confirmed that the president was committed to reducing CO2 emissions. Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill was even more dramatic, observing that on "nuclear holocaust and global warming, there is no second chance."

  Bush stuck by his policy even as his fellow Texans in the House, Tom DeLay and Joe Barton, attacked it. At a Group of Eight summit of industrial nations in early March in Italy, EPA director Whitman repeated the president's position. But while Whitman was speaking in Trieste, the vice president was at work in Washington. On March 1, Cheney received a personal note, released through the Natural Resources Defense Council's FOIA suit, from lobbyist Haley Barbour: "Regarding Cheney Energy Policy & Co."

  "A moment of truth is arriving in the form of a decision whether this Administration's policy will be to regulate and/or tax C02 as a pollutant," Barbour wrote. "Demurring on the issue of whether the C02 idea is eco-extremism, we must ask, do environmental initiatives, which would greatly exacerbate the energy problems, trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years?"

  Cheney's response to Barbour was almost as quick and reflexive as his response to Ken Lay's call for help in California. Cheney received Barbour's memo on March 1. Bush had already announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto environmental accords, but Whitman was telling the press the president was still committed to a "multi-pollutant" bill that would cap CO2 emissions. On March 8, an angry and embarrassed Whitman showed up at the Treasury building for a breakfast meeting with Paul O'Neill. She had in hand a letter from four Republican senators—Chuck Hagel, Larry Craig, Jesse Helms, and Pat Roberts—regarding the Kyoto Accords and the regulation of carbon dioxide. The letter made it clear that the carbon caps were in serious trouble in the Senate and the Kyoto Accords were dead. The letter had been faxed to her from Hagel's office two day
s earlier.

  O'Neill was suspicious about the emphasis, the tone, and the language in the letter. It read like words "right out of Dick Cheney's mouth." They were. In the documents released to the NRDC is a copy of Chuck Hagel's floor speech on carbon dioxide caps, from the files of the Energy Department. Hagel was working in concert with Cheney, according to Suskind's book—and to a Senate committee source. The vice president was undermining and making a fool of Whitman. On March 13, Whitman arranged a private meeting with Bush to discuss carbon dioxide caps. She began by reminding him of the scientific evidence and of the international cooperation she had been working to build on environmental issues.

  Bush interrupted her. "Christie, I've already made my decision." He said he had written a letter to Hagel, agreeing to drop the carbon dioxide caps and withdraw from Kyoto. According to O'Neill's book with Ron Suskind, as Whitman left her Oval Office meeting with the president, one of the secretaries in the atrium said: "Mr. Vice President, here's the letter for Senator Hagel." Cheney picked up the letter and left to meet with Hagel on Capitol Hill, where Cheney made a speech to the Senate Republican Conference. The topic of the speech was the reversal of policy on CO2 emissions.

  O'Neill saw in the killing of Kyoto and the CO2 caps the same tactics Cheney had used when the two men served together under Presidents Nixon and Ford: "Quietly select an issue, counsel various participants, manufacture the exchange of seemingly impromptu letters or reports . . . then guide unfolding events toward the intended outcome."

  It was by O'Neill's observation a "clean kill," done in the style of Dick Cheney. No fingerprints. No accountability. Cheney collaborated with four senators who were working against White House policy, then persuaded the president to join them.

  A few fingerprints were later found when a federal judge ordered the release of the Barbour memo. And because Christine Whitman happened to be departing the White House as the vice president walked out, she saw the smoking gun in his hand.

  What occurred in early 2001—in the vice president's offices in the Executive Office Building and out of the public eye—is remarkable. In the place of an open process that might have considered sustainable and renewable energy (and conservation, which the vice president described as a "private virtue"), a government-sanctioned industry cabal drew up a plan for more oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power, with far fewer protections for the environment. A smaller cabal considered the oil reserves they could liberate in Iraq. The 163-page report the group produced was illustrated with color prints of wildlife and even fly fishermen. Among its one hundred recommendations were more refineries with fewer environmental restrictions, 1,300 to 1,900 new power plants, and more natural gas pipelines. "Reality is not 'Well, gee, we can conserve ourselves out, we don't have to produce any more,' " Cheney said after the report was released.

  The documents that Judicial Watch and the NRDC obtained are the only public record of a policy conducted behind what Fitton describes as disturbing secrecy. The secrecy in this case was essential. In four months of meetings in early 2001, industry interests created a national energy blueprint that could not bear the public embarrassment that would come with connecting each initiative to its industry sponsor. "There's nothing conservative about secrecy," says Fitton.

  When the names and affiliations of those who met with Cheney regarding energy policy are examined in the light of day, one thing becomes clear: The secrecy in this case was essential. It has become operational policy for a government colluding with powerful corporate sponsors. It's also a personal fetish of Dick Cheney. "I had one lawyer tell me the vice president is against all Freedom of Information Act requests," says Fitton. The lawyer was Shannen Coffin, who was co-counsel with Solicitor General Ted Olson when he defended Cheney against the GAO suit. When Scooter Libby resigned as Cheney's chief of staff, to be replaced by David Addington, it was Coffin who took Addington's place as legal counsel to the vice president.

  Unless Dick Cheney is the Republican nominee in 2008 and succeeds George W. Bush, this administration will move on and policy will change. The Congress will respond to the hot reality of global warming. The EPA will deal with the environmental hazards of fracking. Another president will begin to pick up the pieces of what remains in Iraq. Yet the structural changes Dick Cheney forced on the government will remain with us. The drastic reinterpretation of the Constitution and the new rules that govern the relationship between the executive and legislative branches will be hard to undo.

  Cheney had done far more than rewrite the constitutional guidelines that govern the balance of power between the two branches. He seized the power of Congress by what might be described as an act of adverse possession. Then he and his legal counsel, David Addington, went to court to create the case law that makes the new guidelines the legal precedent Bruce Fein describes as a gun held to the head of Congress.

  "It was a signal to the nation and certainly to everybody in this town that this is the way things are going to be done," Fitton says. "They refused to release the information and litigated this to the hilt. . . . It was a strong signal at the very beginning."

  For Cheney, the beginning was thirty years past—in the collapsing administration of Richard Nixon and the brief presidency of Gerald Ford. The present would be devoted to creating a vice presidency insulated from any accountability—from the Congress and even from the president with whom he shared executive power.

  TWO

  The Education of

  Richard B. Cheney

  On September 29, 1974, thirty-three-year-old Dick Cheney, still fit and with a full head of hair, was personally presented to President Gerald Ford as his new deputy chief of staff. Cheney would later describe it as the day he and Donald Rumsfeld "took over at the White House."

  "We moved in on a weekend and the president happened to be in the Oval Office on that Sunday," Cheney reminisced, before describing how Rumsfeld brought the commander in chief over to meet his new staffer.

  Cheney may have arrived in the West Wing by invitation of the forty-two-year-old Rumsfeld, Ford's new chief of staff, but over the course of the next two years, the apprentice would replace the master and become the youngest White House chief of staff in the history of the United States, the leader of a national presidential campaign, and a voice in the president's ear as the nation strove to recover from the madness of Richard Nixon. The path to understanding the most powerful vice presidency in American history begins with the education of Richard B. Cheney in the Ford White House.

  "No president in modern times had ever taken office in more challenging circumstances," Cheney has said about Ford. The echoes and in some cases the amplification of the issues surrounding Nixon's collapse and Ford's resulting tempestuous two-year term are everywhere to be found in the administration of George W. Bush: the dramatic expansion of executive power, the debates on wiretapping and the CIA, an obsession with secrecy, attacks on the media, leaking sensitive information to strike at bureaucratic opponents, and even the current disregard for environmental protection. A common thread through it all is Dick Cheney.

  Cheney's astonishing streak of professional luck began in 1968, when he won a fellowship from the American Political Science Association (APSA), which sent him to Washington, D.C., the place where he would spend most of his adult life. More important, it put him in the office of Wisconsin Republican congressman Bill Steiger, a strong supporter of the APSA fellowship program. Steiger was one of the giants of the House, according to congressional scholar Norman Ornstein: "He had a tremendous impact on policy even though he was a Republican in a Democratic Congress." In a move that would be unthinkable today, the congressman put his avidly curious student at a desk right inside his office, so Cheney could observe everything Steiger did.

  There are two versions of the story on how Cheney came to the attention of Donald Rumsfeld. A four-term Republican congressman from Illinois, Rumsfeld had resigned his seat in 1969 to accept a Nixon appointment to run the Office of Economic Opportunity, which ha
d been created by Lyndon Johnson to coordinate the war on poverty. Looking to get a running start, he sought advice from his friend and former colleague Steiger. The man-of-action version of what happened next has Cheney spying Rumsfeld's letter on Steiger's desk and then taking it upon himself to write a ten-page policy memo on running a federal agency. The memo so impressed Steiger that he passed it on to Rummy. A more plausible version has Steiger (who died in 1978) assigning Cheney the task of collecting information on the OEO for Rumsfeld. Whichever version is correct, Rumsfeld regarded Cheney's report so favorably that he hired him to be his executive assistant.

  The politically ambitious former fighter pilot had insisted that Nixon grant him the title of Assistant to the President, in addition to his OEO responsibilities. Cheney dutifully followed his new boss as he split his time: mornings and evenings at the White House and the rest of the day at the OEO. But Cheney was still on the second floor, where staff had offices, not where decisions were made. "I had an intellectual understanding of the range of things the president had to deal with—but I really didn't have an emotional feel for it until you sit here and see him—what he has to do in the course of a day," he said in a 1975 interview.

  Cheney's hopes of getting any closer were sidetracked when Nixon, who found Rumsfeld a tad too eager, sent him away to be ambassador to NATO. Rumsfeld offered a posting in Brussels to his faithful deputy Dick—who, after the OEO, had played the same role for Rumsfeld at the Cost of Living Council—but Cheney declined. Now with two daughters to support, he instead joined friends who ran a small institutional investment advisory firm called Bradley Woods and Company. Working at the firm allowed Cheney to stay in Washington, and available. He signed on as vice president at the company and spent most of the next eighteen months preparing research papers on Nixon's economic program and the energy business.