Vice
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A similar process of discovery was under way at the National Security Agency (NSA). Around the time of Rumsfeld and Cheney's arrival at the White House, Attorney General Elliot Richardson learned that the NSA had been feeding information gleaned from its electronic surveillance operations to the FBI and the Secret Service. Richardson told General Lew Allen, Jr., director of the NSA, to knock it off because it could potentially be illegal, despite Allen's protestations that it was only information intercepted in the course of "foreign intelligence activities."
In July 1974, Ford elevated Schlesinger to secretary of defense, leaving the collection of misdeeds he had uncovered in the hands of Schlesinger's replacement, William Colby, a career agency official best known for overseeing a Vietnam War-era program called Phoenix, which involved the assassination of suspected North Vietnamese collaborators. Colby quietly briefed the Intelligence Committee chairmen in the Senate and Flouse about the family jewels before Congress voted to confirm him. Once confirmed, the new CIA director sent out a memo to all department heads with precise instructions on what was now permissible activity. And there the jewels lay, untíl Hersh's Christmas surprise.
Initially Cheney was only peripherally involved in the administration's response to the intelligence scandals, but that would change. The week Hersh's December 1974 story hit, one of Cheney's main tasks was coordinating the White House Christmas cards. A review of documents at the Ford Library in Ann Arbor reveals a host of small-bore duties Cheney handled in his first nine months as deputy, including remedying the dearth of salt shakers in the Residence, obtaining a new headrest for Mrs. Ford's helicopter seat, and dealing with requests for congressional visits to Camp David. On the latter, a request from Alaska senator Ted Stevens for a tour of the facility, Cheney, ever mindful of executive privilege, wrote Rumsfeld to "strongly" recommend against allowing Congress access to Camp David. First of all, it might tip off the public to the classified nature of some of the facilities at the compound. Second, "once we start Congressional tours at Camp David, we may end up with yet another series of issues about the prerequisites [sic] of the White House."
Amid the picayune staff work, Rumsfeld also asked Cheney to make political recommendations, including how to energize the conservative Republican base. Cheney identified a school voucher program in New Hampshire that needed money as "a very important project that we'd like to see funded" and advocated the extension of the Voting Rights Act to the entire country so the South wouldn't feel discriminated against. When Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of health, education, and welfare, proposed a tax increase to cover the deficit in the Social Security Trust Fund, Cheney persuaded him to drop the proposal.
But on May 25, 1975, with Chief of Staff Rumsfeld out of the country, The New York Times dropped another Hersh bombshell. It revealed that U.S. spy submarines were tapping into Soviet communication cables inside the USSR's three-mile territorial limit. Hersh admitted in the story that his sources gave him the information in the hope that it would move policy. They believed that the submarine program violated the spirit of detente and that using satellites to obtain the same information was less risky. Rumsfeld, traveling with the president in Europe, put Cheney in charge of devising an administration response to the story. Cheney's answer was as stunning as it was predictive of positions he would take when he had real power as George Bush's co-president.
Cheney called a meeting with Attorney General Edward Levi and White House counsel Philip Buchen to discuss options. Levi, a short man with a towering intellect, unimpeachable integrity, and a nonpartisan bent, served as a bridge between the Democratic Congress and Ford, winning the president's approval for intelligence reforms over the objections of executive absolutists like Cheney. "Ed Levi was a voice of wisdom and counsel," says Jack Marsh, a Ford senior adviser who worked on intelligence matters with Levi. "His contributions have never been appreciated."
In the case of Hersh's submarine exposé, it would be Levi, the designated adult, who would rein in Cheney. Faced with the possible leak of classified information, the thirty-four-year-old Cheney's first thoughts involved getting access to the home of a reporter. Among the options the three men explored, according to Cheney's handwritten notes, were grand jury indictments, threatening the Times with prosecution if they didn't stop reporting classified information, and obtaining a search warrant to "go after Hersh papers in his apt." They also discussed political considerations. "Will we get hit with violating the 1st amendment to the constitution?" Cheney wrote. Ultimately, Levi put the kibosh on searching Hersh's apartment. Since the leak did not endanger the Soviet eavesdropping, with Levi's prodding, the White House decided to do nothing rather than draw more attention to it.
Fast forward thirty years to the spring and summer of 2006. The New York Times has exposed details of the government's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program and its surveillance of banking transactions. The Bush administration responds by threatening a criminal investigation and launching a political smear campaign—to punish the newspaper. In June, Cheney takes the opportunity of a congressional fundraising lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City to lash out at the hometown daily. "Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made it harder to defend America against attack by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs," the vice president declares.
In Hersh's submarine expose, Cheney saw an opportunity to discourage congressional investigations into intelligence issues initially reported in the Times. Dealing with requests from the Senate (the Church Commission) and the House (eventually the Pike Committee) had become a daily preoccupation at the White House. "Congressional action on intelligence was like opening the door and a tsunami came through every day," remembers Marsh.
Cheney scribbled in his notes on Hersh's most recent scoop, "Can we take advantage of [the leak] to bolster our position on the Church committee investigation? To point out the need for limits on the scope of the investigation?"
One area in particular where the administration decided to fight Congress rather than cooperate has particular resonance today. On May 15, 1975, Church Committee lawyers approached the NSA for information about Project SHAMROCK, a program begun shortly after World War II under which U.S. communications companies including AT&T and Western Union gave access to the NSA to review practically all communications between the United States and foreign countries. Perhaps not coincidentally, the NSA shut the program down the very same day the Church Committee came calling. SHAMROCK had grown so large that in 1966, the NSA and CIA created a front company in New York City just to process the intercepts. At the program's peak, the agencies were reviewing more than 150,000 messages a month.
The Senate committee's investigation focused on the review of international cables. But the House was just getting started. Efforts by two different subcommittees to subpoena AT&T were rebuffed by the administration, which declared "the American Telephone and Telegraph Company was and is an agent of the United States acting under contract with the Executive Branch." A sweeping and aggressive investigation by New York liberal representative Bella Abzug's Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights resulted in increased pressure for a legislative remedy. (Abzug believed—correctly, it turned out—that NSA had continued SHAMROCK-like activities after terminating the program.)
Helping the administration resist Congress on issues ranging from FOIA to intelligence sharing was a whip-smart thirty-eight-year-old assistant attorney general named Antonin Scalia. Over the next two years, Cheney and Scalia would become friends and ideological kindred as they teamed up to defend executive privilege and minimize reform. In fact, when it came to wiretapping (ruled illegal recently by one court), Scalia was so valuable to the Ford administration that when his name surfaced in the spring of 1976 as a possible chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Ford's lawyer Philip Buchen urged the president to leave him at his post as the head of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel
. Buchen wrote that "it would be a severe loss . . . if Scalia were to be asked to leave his present position." He listed seven areas in which Scalia was heavily involved, most related to executive power. Buchen included as number three: "Constitutional issues involved in warrantless electronic surveillance of all types." Scalia's value to Cheney and to the advancement of the power of the presidency would increase exponentially after 1986, when he received his lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Even prior to the congressional hearings on SHAMROCK and wiretapping, Attorney General Levi had drafted a proposal for legislation regulating electronic surveillance and mail openings for foreign intelligence purposes. Levi envisioned a judicial warrant for such surveillance that would be overseen by a special court. Rumsfeld, Bush, Kissinger, and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft were unanimous on Levi's legislative proposal: They didn't like it. (Cheney would certainly have sided with this view, but as usual, left no fingerprints either way.) Among their many complaints summarized in a memo to the president from Buchen in February 1976 was that "the bill unnecessarily derogates from the inherent Constitutional authority of the President to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes." Ford lawyer Buchen then added: "(Note: The Attorney General totally disagrees with this argument.)"
In the same memo, Levi argued that the administration had no choice. "Certain committees of Congress will move ahead with their own proposals to control electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes, and only by submitting an Administration proposal can we effectively counter objectionable moves by Congress."
Ford ultimately agreed with Levi and accepted the idea of the legislation. But by that time, Congress and the White House had moved on to the 1976 election. When asked in 2006 about his position on this heated and high-level debate in the Ford administration, Cheney, the chief of staff at the time, professed not to remember Levi's proposal. It would be another president in 1978, Jimmy Carter, who would sign what would be known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). And a little less than thirty years later, Cheney would get another crack at FISA.
In the Ford administration, Cheney received his first experience in the major leagues of bureaucratic combat—the White House. It turned out he had a natural talent for it. Cheney's perch as chief of staff allowed him to eliminate his opponents stealthily, often without having to expose himself personally. He had a great teacher and ally in Donald Rumsfeld. Without doubt the biggest trophy Cheney and Rumsfeld put on their wall during this period was that of the head of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.
Cheney viewed Rockefeller as a political liability and an ideological adversary, and worked to ensure that he never had a role in the administration. Rockefeller, besides being enormously wealthy, had been an accomplished governor of New York and a standard bearer for the moderate wing of the Republican Party. Ford, who was more conservative than his vice president, seemed to want Rockefeller's stature more than his ideology.
Rumsfeld and Cheney loathed Rockefeller's New Deal–style activist vision of government and his partiality for balanced budgets over tax cuts. Cheney would later argue that Ford should have realized that Rockefeller was anathema to the conservative wing of the GOP, and that picking him strengthened the likelihood that California governor Ronald Reagan would challenge the president in the primary. "He should have thought of Reagan as vice president in the summer of 1974, if you are talking strictly in political terms," said Cheney in 1986 at a seminar held at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
Yet Ford wanted Rockefeller to have a role in his administration. He made the VP his chief domestic policy adviser, as chair of the Domestic Council, which shaped policy in areas such as health and education. The appointment created a conflict between Rockefeller and Rumsfeld, who with Cheney had persuaded Ford to veto large initiatives coming out of Congress. Cheney also warned Rumsfeld that if Rockefeller had too big a role in formulating domestic policy, he would be perceived as "the man responsible for drafting the agenda of 1976." He then went on to suggest that "the potential for conservative criticism can be reduced if it is made clear that his jurisdiction includes only domestic policy, and not economic or energy policy." This would eliminate Rockefeller's influence almost entirely, as economic and energy policy were the two main areas on which the administration would focus. Cheney might have been particularly protective of the energy portfolio because of his experience growing up in the oil town of Casper. When Rockefeller suggested a fund to support the development of alternative fuels, Cheney was quick to dismiss the idea. After Ford proposed a comprehensive energy package in 1975 that stressed conservation and limiting dependence on foreign oil, Cheney wrote memos to ensure that this was not misconstrued as an intent to reduce energy consumption.
Cheney did more than write memos to Ford. Working with Rumsfeld, Cheney took the vice president out of the White House policy process. When the vice president proposed an idea to Ford, the president would hand it off to Rumsfeld, and later Cheney, who would then ensure it died somewhere in the bureaucracy. "We built in a major institutional conflict with Nelson Rockefeller, a strong dynamic political leader in his own right," Cheney would later acknowledge. "The Vice President came to a point that he was absolutely convinced that Don Rumsfeld and I were out to scuttle whatever new initiatives he could come up with." Rockefeller was right about that.
"They were two little throat slitters," says a journalist who knew Cheney and Rumsfeld socially at the time.
Cheney would argue in 1977 that the staff structure, as he conceived it, involved "the give and take of ideas, and an idea that goes into that system has to get shot at by its enemies and its opponents—taking a man or woman who's vice-president of the United States and putting him into that has an impact. . . on the others in the process because they react to the vice-president very differently than they do to the director of the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] or their colleagues on the staff." There was no room for Rockefeller.
According to Cheney, his already strained relationship with the vice president hit bottom in September 1975, when Rockefeller opened the vice president's official residence in the old chief of naval operations' house on Observatory Hill. Ford had been its first occupant but hadn't had time to redecorate. Rockefeller finished the job, in part with his own money. "After it was all completed, renovated, furnished and so forth, he had a series of parties for virtually everybody in Washington," Cheney recalled. "He had all the press, congressmen, and administration over. Essentially, everyone in Washington over [government staff classification] GS-12 got invited to the vice president's residence—except me. I was never to attend a function there until Walter Mondale was vice president."
Ironically, Cheney would not only make the vice president's mansion his own home, he would adopt Nelson Rockefeller's operational model for the Bush vice presidency. "Cheney is now doing what he and Rumsfeld blocked Rockefeller from doing—influencing policy," marvels James Cannon, who came into the Ford administration with Rockefeller.
The final push toward irrelevance for Rockefeller occurred at the beginning of November 1975. Ford asked his vice president to withdraw his name for the 1976 reelection campaign and accept lame duck status. In what would become known as the Halloween Massacre, Ford also fired CIA director Bill Colby and Defense Secretary Schlesinger and stripped Secretary of State Kissinger of his dual position as National Security Advisor. Cheney would later say that firing the defense secretary might have been a mistake, but he never expressed any public regret over Colby. Many inside the administration, including Ford, felt that Colby had been too forthcoming with Congress and had laid bare too many CIA secrets.
The big winners of the massacre were Rumsfeld, Cheney, and George H. W. Bush. Rumsfeld finally received his cabinet position, as secretary of defense; Cheney, after only a year in the White House, became chief of staff; and Bush moved from China envoy to director of the CIA. Cheney
would admit years later that his was an improbable appointment. "If you were to have sent out a search team to look for a chief of staff when President Ford was trying to replace Don Rumsfeld in the fall of 1975, you would not have picked a thirty-four-year-old graduate school drop-out for the job," he said.
Even more remarkable than a relative youngster acting as White House chief of staff was one running a presidential primary and a general election campaign. Yet that is exactly what Cheney maneuvered himself into doing, ousting sitting campaign chairman Bo Callaway in the process. "Although he kept a low public profile, Cheney had accumulated as much control as some of the better-known chiefs of staff," wrote Press Secretary Ron Nessen in his book on the Ford administration. "Some reporters privately started calling him the Grand Teuton, a complex pun referring to his mountainous home state of Wyoming and the Germanic style of his predecessor in the Nixon Administration, H. R. Haldeman."
Cheney's control of the campaign would come under heavy criticism. Despite the new chief of staff's constant efforts to move Ford to the right, Reagan decided to challenge the sitting president in the GOP primary. When Cheney assumed the role of chief of staff, the campaign was already in disarray. In the months to come, an advisory group to the President Ford Committee (PFC), which included Senators Barry Goldwater and Bob Dole, grumbled about the inability of the White House "to manage the president politically." As chief of staff, Cheney controlled the president's schedule, allowing him to serve as de facto campaign manager. Party elders' complaints of his handling of that control would continue unabated, both publicly and privately, until the end. Cheney would admit "the 1976 campaign was in many respects a series of crises all the way from [the first primary in] New Hampshire in February of 1976 when we won by 1,300 votes to the convention in Kansas City with a lot of wins and losses in between, to the final outcome in November."