Vice

by Lou Dubose

  Cheney also found a social niche in the institution, in the legendary hall parties House members threw after hours in the House office buildings on Independence Avenue. Though it doesn't fit the public persona of the staid vice president, Dick Cheney was a guy who enjoyed a rowdy evening in the halls of whichever office building was designated for a Friday night hall party. Food and liquor materialized from members' offices for gatherings that would go on until early morning. "It was good fun," says a former staffer who was a hall party regular. "And Dick Cheney was fun. He was funny and witty, just like the rest of the guys, but maybe better. There were a bunch, Jerry Lewis, Jack Kemp." Asked if wives attended, the former staffer says: "Women, yes; wives, none that I remember." The hall parties took place at a time before the press began reporting on the personal lives or moral transgressions of public figures.

  Asked if the Democrats had similar parties, she said, "None that you would want to go to. The Democrats were boring liberals. Dick was one of the guys. It's hard to imagine him there now." Sometimes, she says, the parties spilled over into the following day and moved out onto Chesapeake Bay, where a few members had large fishing boats that would be lashed together to form floating party barges.

  The hall parties are not a slice of congressional history in which you would expect to find Dick Cheney. In any event, with the class of '94, and the arrival of the Southern Christian Republicans, the fun was over. Or at least, it was taken out of the halls.

  In the House, Dick Cheney quickly found one policy issue that absorbed much of his energy. In Gerald Ford's White House, he had opposed Kissinger's engagement with the Soviet Union and his politics of detente. When Ronald Reagan was elected, Cheney was immediately drawn to the new president's overheated version of the Cold War—in particular, Reagan's pursuit of missile technology.

  In the context of the grim logic of mutually assured destruction, the theory behind the MX (missile-experimental) made some sense. MAD was the understanding that if either of the two nuclear superpowers attacked the other with nuclear weapons, a mutually destructive holocaust would ensue. The U.S. military was shifting away from Strangelovian bombers circling the globe awaiting orders to obliterate Russian cities in the event of a Soviet attack. The new defense strategy would rely more heavily on intercontinental ballistic missiles. A weakness in the missile-based defense was the possibility that the Soviets might first target and destroy American missiles, diminishing the mutual part of the assured destruction. Enter the MX. First proposed in 1971 by the Strategic Air Command, it represented a new kind of destructive force. With the capability to travel more than four thousand miles, an MX rocket carried ten reentry vehicles that could spread out over three hundred miles. Each of these ten projectiles was armed with a three-hundred-kiloton warhead, twenty-five times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. To prevent the Soviets from knowing where the missiles were, they would be mobile, trucked around interstate highways, loaded onto rail cars, or even submerged in lakes.

  Ranchers were galvanized in opposition to the MX supermissile. The MX was a seventy-one-foot-long canister that weighed 190,000 pounds, so missile-emplacement holes were a big piece of the debate, considering there would be at least four thousand and perhaps as many as five thousand. The idea of dragging four hundred missiles out of the ground at night to move them around in what critics called a "missile shell game" worried residents of the western states where the missiles would be based. It worried the Soviets, who—like the Americans—depended on satellites to count land-based missiles to ensure the other side wasn't cheating on its agreed limit. For most of his one term in the White House, Jimmy Carter struggled with the issue. In June 1979, just in time for Ronald Reagan to use the issue against him, Carter called for two hundred MX missiles and forty-six hundred soft shelters in Utah and Nevada. Once elected, Reagan proposed placing the missiles in superhardened silo clusters. Deemed tactically stupid, this idea quickly died in Congress. Reagan appointed a commission chaired by Brent Scowcroft to find a way to make the MX work. One of its members was Donald Rumsfeld. Their recommendations included a hundred MX missiles placed in existing Minuteman missile silos in Wyoming. Smaller, single-warhead rockets called Midgetmen would complement the MX. Reagan, who taunted the Soviet Union as "the Evil Empire," greeted the report enthusiastically and dubbed the MX the "Peacekeeper."

  Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill opposed the missile program. The "evil" is in the White House, O'Neill said: "When you mention the peacekeeper, the president thinks it's a missile. That's not what the Lord meant." The Speaker believed that Christ's Sermon on the Mount was the greatest political speech ever made, but Cheney didn't buy O'Neill's pacifist theology. He accused the Speaker of sullying the dignity of his office. "Such comments poison national politics," Cheney said.

  John Perry Barlow was one of many Americans who agreed with O'Neill and objected to "Doomsday on the Range." He saw the missiles as a move away from MAD and toward a first-strike policy. The missiles would be vulnerable in the silos, and so to avoid being wiped out they would be fired first, or placed on computer-triggered "launch-on-warning" systems. It created the Nightmare Scenario: A computer error ends civilization.

  Barlow traveled to Washington to work against the MX. "I must have lobbied more than one hundred members of Congress on this, and Dick was the only one who knew more about it than I did," he recalls. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied Barlow to one meeting with Cheney. McGrory sat listening to the intense debate. As she and Barlow left the meeting, McGrory said, "I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I've ever seen up here." It was a sobering assessment. McGrory had covered Washington since the Depression. Yet there was something disturbing about a young member of Congress as hardened and cold as the concrete silos in which the MX missiles would be buried— and unwilling to concede a single point.

  "I felt we were really arguing about the fate of the world," says Barlow. Cheney and Barlow engaged in a protracted debate that ranged from the philosophical to technically arcane questions about "circular error probable to 'MIRV' decoys." "Cheney believes the world is an inherently dangerous place," says Barlow, "and he sees the rest of the world as . . . populated by four-year-olds with automatic weapons."

  Throughout his career in Congress, Cheney was an unyielding opponent of detente, or of any engagement with the Soviet Union. A missile launched in the Soviet Union would reach Wyoming in twenty minutes, Cheney said. So in addition to the MX, he wanted the Midget-man, with its single warhead, placed above Minuteman missiles already in silos in Wyoming. The Minuteman-shuffle argument was chilling. Upon launch of the Soviet missiles, all-terrain vehicles would have twenty-two minutes to drive the Midgetman missiles to secure launch sites away from the targeted silos. It was all based on a Rand Corporation study Cheney cited, justifying the necessity of an eclectic and constantly growing nuclear arsenal.

  With Reagan in the White House, Cheney was an obvious pick for a congressional delegation trip to Moscow, where the cold warrior from Wyoming could look the enemy in the eye. Minority leader Bob Michel would appoint Cheney to several "codels," but a 1983 Moscow trip on which Cheney was the ranking Republican illustrated just how extreme Cheney's position was. Because he was "ranking," Cheney was invited to meet with Soviet marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the deputy chief of the Soviet general staff. New York Democrat Thomas Downey was also invited to the meeting, at which Akhromeyev stunned the two congressmen by suggesting the Russians would consider reopening discussions of mutual weapons cuts in Europe and a one-year ban on testing the ten-warhead SS24 ballistic missile—in exchange for an American ban on testing the MX.

  No member of Congress had traveled to Moscow since 1979, when U.S.-Soviet relations became strained because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. On a trip that represented a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, Downey saw Akhromeyev's comments as a clear signal that the Soviets wanted to move ahead with strategic arms talks. In press accounts at the time, he quoted Akhro
meyev saying, "If such a proposal is put forth, it would be considered at the negotiations."

  Cheney wouldn't hear it. "Cheney did not want to allow the Russians to appear to be in any way reasonable," Downey says. "He doesn't believe in negotiations. He's completely rigid, states his position, and concedes nothing. There could be no negotiations when his position was: It's my way or the highway." Cheney said Akhromeyev had made no such offer.

  Downey and Cheney were friends who disagreed on just about everything. Downey recalls asking Cheney what he expected of the Soviets. "I said, 'You can't expect them to accept all our terms? You can't expect them to surrender?' "

  "He said, 'Yeah, yes I can.' "

  Downey recalled one moment with Cheney in Moscow that he found particularly sobering. "It was a spectacular night and we walked over to Red Square. There were just the two of us and I asked him what he was thinking.

  "He said, 'I think we're standing at Ground Zero.' "

  There, on a cold clear night in Moscow, after a day spent in the company of Russian officials, Dick Cheney believed he was standing on the very spot over which one of the three-hundred-kiloton warheads buried in a silo in the American west might one day be detonated.

  While Barlow was a persistent opponent of the MX in the early eighties, after the collapse of the Soviet Union he has no longer been as certain. Congress gave Reagan only fifty MX missiles, but his administration's weapons drive started an arms race that included an unworkable space-based defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars. Cheney was one of its most enthusiastic proponents in Congress. The Soviet Union's attempt to match the American military buildup contributed to its demise. "He believed that this would scare the Soviet Union into capitulating, and in a sense that and SDI did," Barlow said. "Under the frenzy of spending to keep up they actually rolled over." Barlow is not alone in this view. There is, in fact, a valid argument made by many defense analysts that Ronald Reagan spent the Soviet Union into ruin. Dick Cheney was always eager to buy into another weapons system. "An ICBM perennial," is how one former member of the House described Cheney, whose fight to keep the missile program alive spanned his career in Congress. His advocacy was a complete success. The president got his missiles. The Soviets got word that the United States had the money for a sustained arms race. And the MX's most vocal proponent in Congress got a jobs program for his constituents in Wyoming.

  There was in Dick Cheney's early career in Congress a fleeting moment of the western conservationism. In the early eighties, the nation's eighty-million-acre wilderness system was under tremendous pressure from oil and gas interests. Ronald Reagan's interior secretary James Watt was eager to accommodate them. Before he joined the cabinet, Watt worked for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a front group for industry, where he represented miners, oil and gas interests, and cattlemen working to limit environmental protections. One of many wilderness areas Interior Secretary Watt intended to open up for drilling was Wyoming's Washakie Wilderness. Situated on the edge of Yellowstone National Park, the Washakie is a remote mix of poplar and conifer stands, pristine mountain lakes, river valleys, and streams filled with native cutthroat trout. Initially, Cheney was prepared to go along with Watt and Wyoming's two Republican senators and open the Washakie to drilling.

  Then Cheney received more than a thousand letters from constituents, all opposed to opening up even a small section of the Washakie to energy companies. Cheney had filed his own bill, lowering the level of protection for the Washakie. And from his seat on the House Interior Affairs Committee, he spoke with some authority, particularly regarding a designated wilderness area in his home state. After hearing from his constituents, he struck a compromise with Interior Affairs chair Morris Udall. "There is a general feeling in my state that much as we would like the economic benefits from the energy resources in the Washakie, we'd like even more to save a few acres and declare them off-limits: Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and the wilderness areas around the parks, which account for less than 8 percent of the state," Cheney said. "Wilderness areas should be the last places we look for energy." The result of Cheney's compromise was the creation of 883,000 acres of protected wilderness in Wyoming. "He was instrumental in hammering out a compromise in what would become the Wyoming Wilderness Act," says Barlow. The late Mo Udall, a pro-wilderness Democrat, also said the road to compromise was through Dick Cheney, and he gave Cheney credit for making the compromise possible.

  Today, the Washakie, the best bear habitat in the lower forty-eight states, stands as a monument to Dick Cheney's conservationist moment. But perhaps not for long. Cheney's 2001 energy task force report calls for the opening of wilderness to oil and gas exploration. (That contradicts the legal definition of "wilderness," which precludes anything other than light recreational use and prohibits permanent structures.) Although Congress initially rejected the vice president's energy task force report in 2001, Cheney signed off on memos ordering Bureau of Land Management employees in the west to circumvent Congress by using rulemaking, rather than law, to open up wilderness areas to minerals extraction.

  Consequently, drilling for oil and gas is now under way in natural areas protected since LBJ signed the Wilderness Act in 1964. Unless Cheney's policy is reversed, drilling rigs will ultimately find their way to the Washakie Wilderness Area that Cheney helped protect twenty years earlier.

  As the sun rose over Managua the day before Dick Cheney took his oath of office as a freshman member of Congress, Anastasio Somoza Debayle began his daily workout: thirty-four laps around the track, ten sit-ups, then five miles on a stationary exercise bike, all under the watchful eyes of armed soldiers posted in towers surrounding the presidential residence.

  As one of the most brutal dictators in the Americas finished his workout, he told Washington Post reporter Karen De Young that Nicaragua was under control. A day earlier, at a huge antigovernment demonstration, "only" seven people had been wounded by National Guard troops firing on the crowd—a number so insignificant, Somoza said, that it could be considered "a day without violence." This level of domestic tranquillity was achieved by a huge military presence in the city's slums, where youths described as terrorists were rounded up and jailed. Some of the kids So-rnoza's National Guard picked up were released. Some were later found dead. Some were never found.

  Despite the physical vitality Anastasio Somoza strutted for the Post reporter, he was damaged goods. The United States had long propped up the Somoza dynasty. ("Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch," FDR famously said of Anastasio's father.) In response to an increase in the brutality that had kept the Somoza dynasty forty years in power, Jimmy Carter cut off all U.S. support. It was foreign policy conducted through the prism of human rights. By 1979 the State Department was working on Somoza's exit strategy. On June 7, the U.S. ambassador in Managua met with Somoza and told him to start packing. He fled to Miami in July 1979, abandoning his country to the leftist Sandinista Front.

  The Sandinistas' rise to power in Nicaragua would have enormous consequences in Washington, creating a partisan struggle that would lead to the most serious constitutional crisis since Watergate. It would also define Dick Cheney's career in the House and provide him the opportunity to expand the power of the executive branch—at the expense of the legislative. In the House, Cheney would lead the fight to fund the guerrilla campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government—a regional application of his anti-Soviet policy. Then he would seize control of his party's effort to manage the constitutional crisis created by the illegal funding of the Contras, the anti-Sandinista insurgency. And as his House career came to an end, Cheney would find in the Central American issues that divided Congress the mechanism to overthrow Democratic Speaker Jim Wright.

  Reagan's 1980 rout of Jimmy Carter made bold partisans of housebroken House Republicans. After twenty-five years out of power, their moment arrived, and with it a growing sense that the beaten-down leaders of the Republican minority h
ad been too accommodating. The moment was right for a radical conservative who understood the dynamics of institutional power, and Cheney had mastered bureaucratic infighting in the Ford administration. "If you look at his career, he loves power," says a former Democratic congressman. "He always seeks power. He's not uncomfortable exercising power. And he likes operating behind the curtain."

  As Cheney acquired power in the House, it's not surprising that he remained behind the curtain. He directed his aide (and high school classmate) David Gribben to attend Gingrich's Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) meetings, where angry young reformers were planning Newt's Revolution. He also ordered Gribben to help the COS's organizational efforts—and, it's safe to assume, to keep a careful watch on what they were about. It wasn't a schedule conflict that kept Cheney from attending the meetings. The COS was Newt's group, whose members were taking far greater risks than the more accommodating Wednesday Groupers. With the great risks came the prospect of great failure.

  The COSers were using tactics never before seen in the House. Aware that C-SPAN televised House proceedings as long as a member was on the floor, they began scheduling "special orders" speeches at the end of the day, when the chamber was empty and C-SPAN's cameras were at their disposal. By seizing the night, Gingrich's young Turks found an audience of millions who would watch their attacks on the Democrats, unaware that the speakers were addressing an empty chamber. They also began to create parliamentary barricades that both interfered with and revealed the Democrats' control of the legislative process. Once it became evident that Gingrich was succeeding, Cheney brought the COS discussions into his House Policy Committee—expanding Newt's institutional reach from a half dozen to the thirty members of the Policy Committee.