Vice

by Lou Dubose

  On August 8, 1974, the night Richard Nixon went on nationwide television to announce his resignation effective the following day, Cheney received a call from Brussels. Rumsfeld's secretary wanted to know if he could meet the ambassador's flight at Dulles airport the following afternoon. Cheney knew that if his patron had a place in the new administration, so did he. The younger man had impressed Rumsfeld with his work ethic, intelligence, and loyalty. Before going to the airport, Cheney—removed from the political fallout—watched Nixon's emotional departure. When Rumsfeld disembarked, a White House messenger met him with a letter from Ford. It asked him to come straight to the White House to lead the change in administrations. At about 2:00 P.M., two hours after Ford was sworn in and declared that "our long national nightmare is over," the two men rode into town. Rumsfeld asked Cheney to take a leave from work and help with the transition.

  The transition team attempted to meld what was left of Nixon's administration and Ford's staff. Some on the Ford side, like his longtime aide and speechwriter Robert Hartmann, argued that by design, the Nixon people retained control. "The Nixon-to-Ford transition was superbly planned," Hartmann wrote in his book Palace Politics. "It was not a failure. It just never happened." Cheney remembered that Ford allowed them to make staff changes on the domestic side but not in the foreign policy arena. When it came to national security, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger ruled. "We lived with these conflicting objectives," Cheney recalled. "We had to emphasize continuity, on one hand, and change on the other."

  Their work on the transition lasted ten days, and then Rumsfeld went back to NATO and Cheney returned to Bradley Woods. About two weeks later, on September 8, Ford took the most fateful step of his presidency. He pardoned Richard Nixon, before the ex-president could be indicted. A week later, Rumsfeld called Cheney in Florida, where he was on business. He asked Cheney to meet him in D.C. that weekend. On Saturday, Rumsfeld confided to his protégé that he had a private meeting with the president scheduled for the next day. He believed that Ford would offer him the chief of staff position. If that turned out to be the case, would Cheney be his deputy? Cheney told him he could wrap up his affairs at Bradley Woods within two weeks.

  Rumsfeld and Cheney worked out a deal that benefited them both. Cheney would be Rumsfeld's surrogate. When Rumsfeld went on trips alone or with the president, Cheney would make the decisions at the White House and operate as if he were chief of staff. The young man would also have his own opportunities to take presidential trips as chief of staff. This way, Cheney would get plenty of face time with the president. Rumsfeld would later claim that the arrangement allowed the top staff to "lead relatively normal lives." Cheney didn't want a normal life; he wanted to live, eat, and breathe the White House. Most important for the political futures of both men, their understanding allowed Rumsfeld to train a loyal successor so that if Ford shook up his cabinet, Rummy could slide into a cabinet position without a hitch. When that time came, Cheney opted not to continue Rumsfeld's deputy system.

  President Ford—universally acknowledged as a friendly, genial, and trusting man—held Rumsfeld in such high regard that he apparently accepted the presence of the inexperienced Cheney without question. "I was always amazed that he was so amenable to having such a relatively young stranger—I think I was thirty-three at the time—come in and all of a sudden become part of his inner operation," Cheney recalled.

  Cheney would describe the qualities he admired in Ford in a speech in 1986. Today, the description casts Ford as a sort of anti-George W. Bush. "He was a man who was able to sit down and listen to debates. He never cut off an individual's access because that person disagreed with him. He relished the give and take of political dialogue. I think that's very important," Cheney said. "His knowledge and grasp of government and political issues was just enormous."

  Cheney made the most of his access. He is widely acknowledged to have participated in every major administration decision. When Cheney became chief of staff, his contribution moved from the periphery to the center, but his input was often hidden. He would be the one to gather up everyone's views and carry them into the Oval Office as an honest broker, not an advocate. If he had an opinion, Cheney would deliver it orally to the president. He learned how to operate this way from Rumsfeld: Never write anything down if you can avoid it. "Both these guys were crafty," remembers James Cannon, who served in the Ford administration alongside Cheney and Rumsfeld. "You never spotted their fingerprints."

  Cheney has reprised the role of private counselor to the president in the Bush administration. It's an arrangement that allows him to avoid exposing his positions to scrutiny and thus criticism. The secrecy Cheney created for himself in the Ford administration continues to this day. It appears that before leaving the White House in January 1977, he took many of his papers with him, instead of donating them to the Ford Library as most other officials did.

  Cheney would argue years after the fact that Ford's pardon of Nixon was the correct decision, just poorly timed. It contributed to a Democratic landslide in the 1974 midterm election. The Republicans lost more than forty seats, ushering in a historic reform Congress that changed the balance of power in Washington. "Almost immediately after the president came to power, as a result of the election in November of 1974, we found ourselves outnumbered about two to one in both the House and the Senate," recalled Cheney. "I thought [the pardon] should have been delayed until after the 1974 elections because I think it did cost us seats. If you say that that is a political judgment, it's true, but then, the presidency is a political office. If we had had twenty or thirty more House Republicans during the two years of the Ford presidency, we would have been in much better shape than we were from a legislative standpoint." Even back then, there was no distinction between politics and governing for Cheney.

  Dick Cheney was about to learn firsthand the restrictions an emboldened Congress, in this case a veto-proof Congress, can impose on a president. He would spend the rest of his career working to restore the Nixon vision of an all-powerful executive, by undoing the Watergate reforms that came out of the activist Congresses of the early seventies. "You've got Cheney sitting there at the time that Congress is taking on the imperial presidency," observes Nixon lawyer John Dean in an interview from his home in California, "and apparently it was a trauma he never got over."

  In response to the pardon, the Senate passed a resolution by a vote of 55 to 24 urging the president not to issue any more pardons "until the judiciary process has run its full course." The House introduced well over a dozen bills and resolutions calling for formal inquiries into Ford's pardon. The Monday after Rumsfeld and Cheney "took over" the White House, Ford stunned congressional leaders by agreeing to testify before the House Judiciary Committee to explain why he had pardoned Richard Nixon. "It was only the second time in history that the president had ever done that," Cheney noted in a 1986 interview, citing Abraham Lincoln as the other president. (Lincoln had testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 1862 over the matter of the leak of his annual message to the New York Herald. But Cheney was wrong: both George Washington and Woodrow Wilson had also testified to Congress, although the latter had legislators come to the White House.) Ford's staff, particularly departing chief of staff Al Haig, begged him to reconsider. The image of Ford, hat in hand, testifying before Congress offered startling evidence of how weak the executive had become. Dick Cheney would never forget it.

  Cheney would describe this period as "a series of institutional confrontations" that "led repeatedly to efforts on the part of the Congress to impose limitations and restrictions on the president. . . . The main concern in the Congress often seemed to be to find ways to restrict presidential power so that future presidents would not abuse power the way Lyndon Johnson had allegedly abused power in Vietnam or Richard Nixon had abused presidential power in the Watergate affair."

  Cheney particularly objected to the War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973, which restricted t
he president's ability to send U.S. troops into combat without congressional approval. Since leaving the Ford administration, Cheney has counseled two Bush presidents that they didn't need the consent of Congress to attack Iraq, arguing that war-making is the prerogative of the commander in chief. But war powers would be just the beginning of congressional reforms that would last a little more than a decade and cover everything from intelligence to clean water and government in the sunshine.

  Cheney exerted his influence to push Ford away from some of the groundbreaking environmental regulations passed during Nixon's presidency. Searching for a reason Ford had refused to enforce the Clean Air Act for new coal-fired power plants, Russell E. Train, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time, saw Cheney's handiwork. "It seemed likely that Dick Cheney was responsible for the way the White House dealt with the matter," Train wrote in his 2003 book, Politics, Pollution, and Pandas. (A quarter of a century later, states were lining up to sue the Bush-Cheney administration for its refusal to impose Clean Air Act standards on coal-fired power plants.)

  A battle over the Freedom of Information Act was one of Cheney's first big policy fights under Ford. Although the law was passed in 1966, congressional hearings in the early seventies revealed that FOIA, designed to make government records accessible to the public, wasn't working. Agencies took too long to produce documents, charged exorbitant fees for searching and copying, and forced too many requesters to go to court to procure them. Watergate taught the Congress and the public that it was incumbent upon them to watchdog the federal government. It would be a lesson forgotten by the time the Bush administration, under Cheney's guidance, dramatically curtailed the public's right to obtain government information.

  In January of 1974, Pennsylvania Democratic representative William Moorhead and New York Republican representative Frank Horton sponsored amendments designed to improve FOIA's effectiveness by expanding the definition of who was covered and imposing time frames for how quickly agencies had to comply to requests for information, as well as to litigation, if a requester sued to overturn a denial. By the time Ford took office, the amendments had reached a Senate-House conference committee, meaning that the bill was nearing final passage. The CIA, Defense, Treasury, Civil Service, and Ford's staff all urged a veto. As did Cheney. What particularly bothered them was a provision that allowed for a judicial review of what the government was allowed to keep secret. It was an unacceptable check on the executive branch. Efforts at compromise failed to appease the administration. On October 17, 1974, after Congress passed the legislation over the president's objections, Ford vetoed the FOIA amendments.

  In the three and a half months of his presidency leading up to the FOIA veto, Ford had vetoed thirteen bills. Congress had overridden only one. On November 20, the House and then the Senate the following day voted to override Ford's veto of the FOIA amendments.

  Nearly thirty years later, in 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a directive to federal agencies that encouraged them to deny requests for documents under FOIA. Cheney had put in place a cabinet that would share his obsession with secrecy. As for his own activities, he would give new meaning to Al Gore's claim that there was "no controlling legal authority" over the Office of the Vice President. Exploiting a loophole in the Constitution, which places the vice president as the presiding officer of the Senate, Cheney's lawyer David Addington has argued that the OVP is not an "agency of the executive branch," but instead a creature of Congress, and thus is not required to disclose information under FOIA. (Congress is exempt from the disclosure rule.) Yet the OVP is not covered under Senate ethics rules either, so Cheney refuses to reveal detailed information about the OVP's operations, such as a breakdown of its budget, staff duties, and activities such as travel on corporate jets. While the 2003 Ashcroft directive mandated that federal agencies provide the number of documents they've classified, Cheney's office has declined to do so.

  Cheney's hypocritical relationship to unofficial government disclosures— he has an extreme aversion to leaking of information by others, but is willing to leak himself if it suits his purpose—dates to the Ford administration, which leaked more than the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. In a National Security Council meeting held in the cabinet room a week after Rumsfeld and Cheney arrived, Ford fumed about the number of classified documents appearing on the front pages of newspapers. "I've been told that The New York Times has so much classified material, they don't know where to store it," groused the president. "This is unforgivable."

  With Rumsfeld's prompting, Ford admitted that the problem was a managerial one. He asked his department heads to stop the leaks at the source before a reluctant FBI had to get involved. But in reality, the trouble began with Ford. His hybrid administration was at war with itself, and he seemed incapable, or perhaps unwilling, to stop it. More often than not, leaks in the administration were designed to embarrass one side or the other in a constant gamesmanship for control.

  Some observers believe that Ford tacitly encouraged the factionalism in order to control outsized members of his administration, especially Henry Kissinger. The former House minority leader, whom Nixon had appointed to replace a disgraced Spiro Agnew, knew that despite his long service on the House Committee on Intelligence, the world believed he had little foreign policy experience. In the beginning, he relied on Kissinger to assure other nations that there would be continuity. But as Ford became more confident, and Kissinger too solicitous to Russia for the Republican right's taste, leaks that undermined the secretary of state increased.

  Both Rumsfeld and Cheney believed Kissinger was too soft on the Soviets, too quick to make concessions in order to preserve detente. A July 8, 1975, memo from Cheney to Rumsfeld, initialed by the president, illustrates the conflict. It also demonstrates how a young deputy chief of staff with no foreign policy experience had no reservations about going after an institution like Kissinger. The secretary of state had advised Ford not to meet with Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a foe of detente, for fear of upsetting talks with the Soviets. Cheney disagreed. "Seeing [Solzhenitsyn] is a nice counter-balance to all of the publicity and coverage that's given to meetings between American Presidents and Soviet Leaders," wrote the thirty-four-year-old Cheney. "Meetings with Soviet Leaders are very important, but it is also important that we not contribute any more to the illusion that all of a sudden we're bosom-buddies with the Russians."

  In the memo, Cheney also advised that the discussion about a Solzhenitsyn visit should be held "with a very small group, so that we don't have the kind of leaks we did last time."

  Presidential speechwriter Hartmann, who admits that he leaked himself, credits Rumsfeld with a mastery of the "calculated leak." "Rumsfeld would only personally leak the stories that reflected positively on him," Hartmann recalls. He left the negative leaks designed to damage and attack opponents to his deputy. "Cheney was the abominable No-man," jokes Hartmann in an interview at his home in Bethesda.

  Cheney also found novel ways to use the media to attack his administration rivals. New Republic columnist John Osborne recalled that during a flight from Peking to Jakarta, Cheney, at that point chief of staff, stood silently by as Press Secretary Ron Nessen openly challenged the press corps on Air Force One for being too lenient on Kissinger. "Cheney never uttered a word of disapproval of Nessen's conduct, then or later," Osborne noted.

  Former Nixon counselor John Dean believes that when the inexperienced Cheney became chief of staff, much of the leaking—everything from anonymous snipes about who was up or down to policy disputes played out in public—involved staffers who were "pissed and disgruntled" at the young man. "The people I knew who were still there were very disenchanted with Cheney," he says. "They felt he was in way over his head."

  Nearly thirty years later, Cheney would apply the lessons he learned about leaking during the Ford administration to attack Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson.

  Leaking of Ford administration secrets would lead to a nat
ional intelligence crisis and a wiretapping scandal that brought with it congressional investigations and reform that Dick Cheney strenuously opposed—to no avail. On December 22, 1974, journalist Seymour Hersh offered up a Christmas gift to Ford as the president departed to spend the holiday in Vail. Hersh, who would later report on the darker recesses of the Bush administration during the Iraq War, had discovered some of the federal government's most sensitive institutional secrets. Hersh's front-page story in The New York Times reported that the CIA had maintained intelligence files, put together over decades, on at least ten thousand Americans in the United States. Hersh had ferreted out what was known to a select few in the government as "the family jewels," described in the Times as "dozens of other illegal activities by members of the CIA inside the United States, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail."

  The story began to find its way to the surface when Nixon named James Schlesinger CIA director in early February 1973. Within three months, Schlesinger discovered that the closets in his agency were brimming with "skeletons," each tucked away in its own compartment, as department heads had reported only to then CIA director Richard Helms. On May 8, 1973, Schlesinger sent a memo to all CIA employees ordering them to report any activities, current or past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of the agency. By the end of the month he had assembled an ugly picture, including explosive revelations of CIA participation in assassination attempts against foreign leaders. But there was much more. The CIA had wiretapped and physically surveilled a number of reporters, including the current Fox News anchor, Brit Hume, who then worked for investigative reporter Jack Anderson. Between 1953 and 1973, CIA staff had opened American mail destined for Russia and China. It had also monitored peace groups and conducted psychological studies using psychoactive drugs on unwitting subjects.