by Lou Dubose
All the while, Cheney stayed close to Bob Michel, the minority leader Newt claimed was eager to accept the "crumbs the Democrats left on the table." (Michel was also the occasional golfing partner of Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill, Jr., which Newt's hardened partisans found intolerable.) It would take a while for Cheney to openly embrace Newt's bold tactics.
Cheney was, however, fully engaged in the Cold War as it played out in Central America. He joined the fight to fund the Contras as soon as the Sandinistas came to power. The partisan division in the House grew more acrimonious and personal, in particular after 1982, when an amendment by Massachusetts representative Ed Boland cut off covert military aid to the Contras. By 1985, the effects of the Boland Amendment were constraining the Contras (whose appalling human rights record made them harder to sell to the American public). The American-funded insurgent movement was a motley collective of former Somoza guard members, anti-Sandinista activists, unemployed Nicaraguans who preferred being paid as paramilitaries to "fishing turtle" or picking coffee, and a few genuine democratic reformers. The more marginalized the Contras became, the more dedicated Cheney was to their cause. His colleagues—congressmen such as Henry Hyde, known for his impassioned speaking, and Texan Dick Armey, a vitriolic and aggressive debater—got the attention. But Cheney was quietly persistent, whether speaking on the floor or negotiating with senators or conservative House members he believed could help restart the flow of money to the Contras.
Former congressman Edwards worked with Cheney in trying to build support for the Contras. Edwards says Cheney was a remarkable negotiator. "We spent hours, often late into the night [on Contra negotiations]," he says. "He was calculating and careful. I never saw Dick as anything but unflappable. . . . He never raised his voice. He was so taciturn. He never said much. He was always attentive, but you never knew what he was thinking." Cheney was also hardwired into the Reagan administration. "He was on the Intelligence Committee," Edwards says. "And he had that experience in the Ford administration. I'm not the kind of member who would get a call from the White House. But Dick was."
A Democrat who sat across the table from Cheney agrees, after a fashion. "He's good in negotiating," he says, "because in negotiating with him there's no negotiating. You would have this sense that he's listening intently. But he is an ideological person who was planning his rebuttal or reaction while he appeared to be listening to you. But he won't be moved. He was always anchored by his ideology. He was also anchored by his partisan position." There was also a sense, the Democrat concurs, that Cheney represented the Reagan administration's position, namely, that the defeat of the Contras on the floor of the United States House and Senate rather than on the battlefields of Nicaragua was the fault of cut-and-run Democrats willing to accept a Soviet beachhead in Central America. President Reagan warned of communist insurgents "a two-day drive from the Mexican border"—even if the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and the drive from McAllen, Texas, to Tapachula, Mexico, requires four days in a car, and probably a few more in a Cuban military convoy. For a cold warrior like Dick Cheney, the Democrats' obstruction of the president's hardline position in Nicaragua was deeply disturbing.
Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory described Speaker Tip O'Neill as a leader whose "carpet slipper rhetoric . . . causes more pragmatic Democrats to blush and the more militant to regard him as a hack." O'Neill was far too gregarious and appealing a public persona to be turned into the bête noire House Republicans needed. (He was also notoriously vindictive.) Yet O'Neill was in no way sympathetic with the Contra forces the Republicans celebrated as "freedom fighters." He was getting back-channel reports from his own unconventional intelligence network in Nicaragua: the Maryknoll Sisters. The Speaker's octogenarian aunt Ann was a founding member of the order, which does missionary work in Central America. She put him in contact with her sisters in Nicaragua, where O'Neill got a different account of the Contras. The pedestrian-level reports of bands of insurgents violating the human rights of the rural population they were supposed to be saving from communism disturbed O'Neill, and he became an impassioned opponent. In 1986, for example, he delivered a speech from the well of the House, then immediately cast his vote against a $200 million Contra aid package, a breach of House protocol, under which the Speaker votes only to break a tie. The Republicans were furious with O'Neill. But speaking with the authority of the Catholic Church, and doubled over with bonhomie, this big unmade bed of a man was an unsuitable enemy for Republicans looking to bring down the Democrats.
House Republicans got the break they were looking for when Jim Wright was elected Speaker after O'Neill retired in 1987. Wright was a hard-driving Texas populist, born poor in Fort Worth, decorated as a pilot in World War II, elected to the Texas House in 1947 and the U.S. House in 1954. Slight in physical stature, Wright was a powerful personality and intellect. Thirty-three years in the House made him a skilled legislative tactician. He was also a forceful leader and an old-school populist orator who on occasion would use the prerogatives of the chair to get his bills passed.
Wright's first term was a tour de force. He managed to get all thirteen appropriations bills passed, which no Speaker had achieved since 1954, thus avoiding the sloppy and perennial continuing resolutions that keep government in business. He enacted most of his domestic agenda, including a $12.8 billion tax increase intended to stanch the deficits Reagan had run up in two terms. In one session, in fact, Wright managed to fill the vacuum created by Ronald Reagan's lame-duck presidency. He also managed to enrage Republican House members, in particular Dick Cheney.
Cheney was justifiably angry when Wright broke precedent on one occasion, holding open and almost doubling the standard fifteen-minute voting period in order to give himself more time to muscle Texas Democrat Jim Chapman into changing his vote so a budget reconciliation bill could pass. Wright had already antagonized Republicans by sending the bill back to the Rules Committee to remove a provision that would have ensured its rejection, then adjourning and reconvening the House within a few minutes for a new legislative day because House rules prohibit considering bills under two different rules on the same day. His procedural two-step infuriated Dick Cheney and other Republicans, who would refer to the day as "Black Thursday."
"Jim Wright," Cheney told The National Journal's Richard Cohen, "is a heavy-handed son of a bitch." He told another reporter that he never believed he would "miss Tip O'Neill."
Cheney's profane public mugging of the constitutional officer third in the line of presidential succession was without precedent. It even shocked his colleagues in the Republican Conference, though many of them were making the same comments in private. They had reason to worry. Richard Cohen's recap of Wright's first session said a great deal about why a group of House Republicans led by Dick Cheney were convinced they had to destroy Jim Wright:
At a time when Members of Congress seem to move painfully slowly—or not at all—in addressing issues, Wright has often been well out front in trying to redirect the national agenda. As Speaker, his handling of such controversial issues as international trade and peace in Central America offers a dramatic change in congressional leadership.
Not only was Tip O'Neill's successor accelerating the pace of the House and passing bills that embarrassed Reagan, he was using his office to look for a way out of the foreign-policy dead end in Central America. Wright was a self-taught Latin Americanist who spoke Spanish, knew the players, and had traveled in the region. He joined Reagan in creating a peace process, which suddenly was referred to as Reagan-Wright.
Republicans, for the most, opposed the negotiations and intended to use their collapse to justify rearming and re-funding the Contras. After discussions were under way, Reagan's national security affairs assistant Colin Powell and assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams traveled to Central America to meet with leaders of four of the five nations involved in the process—all but Nicaragua. They urged the Central American presidents to take a public stance against
Nicaragua and thus undermine the peace talks.
Yet Wright kept pushing, working with Costa Rican president Oscar Arias (who would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts). Wright also told the hostile factions that his office door in Washington was open to all of them. In Cheney's view, the Speaker was encroaching on the power of the executive branch—a transgression Cheney found intolerable. Cheney had seen the powers of the presidency eroded after Watergate. Ronald Reagan was a vehicle to restore that power. Jim Wright was an obstruction. Wright's open-door policy provided Cheney the opportunity to begin a campaign that would end Wright's career.
In September 1988 a group of Nicaraguan Contra leaders showed up at Wright's office asking for help with prisoners the Sandinista government had detained during civil unrest. In an interview, Wright said he found it unusual that they showed up unannounced, but he cleared his schedule. He had already sent word to the CIA that agency operatives creating civil unrest and pushing the Sandinista government to overreach in Nicaragua were violating laws passed by Congress. So Wright informed the Contra delegation that they could no longer expect CIA agitators to work on their behalf.
"That got back to Cheney and Elliott Abrams, and they were furious," Wright says. The State Department moved the Contra delegation along to the offices of the right-wing Washington Times. There, they told the editorial staff what Wright had revealed to them—that the CIA was provoking civil unrest in Managua. A week later, Wright was blindsided by a Washington Times reporter who said that several sources told him Wright had leaked classified CIA activity in Nicaragua. Wright, in fact, had conveyed in a closed meeting with the Contra delegation nothing they didn't already know.
Dick Cheney demanded that Wright be investigated. The Speaker of the House had been set up by the State Department so that Cheney could take him down. Again Cheney focused his argument on leaking. Speaking as a member of the Intelligence Committee, he cited major "institutional questions that go to the integrity of the House, to the integrity of the oversight process in the area of intelligence, and to the operation of the Intelligence Committee."
Newsday investigative reporter Roy Gutman followed the story to Foggy Bottom, where he verified that a political appointee at the State Department had sent the Contra delegation to the Washington Times office with specific instructions to leak the CIA content of their conversation with Wright. Cheney seized the moment and the attention of the press. He and minority leader Bob Michel filed a complaint with the Ethics Committee and demanded an investigation by the Intelligence Committee. They claimed Wright had compromised U.S. intelligence operations.
In his office at the Texas Christian University library in Fort Worth, Wright, who had been Michel's host at a golf tournament several days before the minority leader filed his ethics complaint, still seems unable to come to terms with what was done to him. "I got no warning from them. I expected him—if not Cheney, then certainly Bob Michel—to say 'Jim, can you tell us about this? What does it involve?' I heard nothing from them, except that they were requesting an ethics investigation. It was the sort of thing I couldn't imagine Bob Michel doing. We had a good working relationship, and I held him in high regard."
Michel later apologized to Wright. He said Cheney had put so much pressure on him that he acquiesced and co-filed the ethics complaint. Cheney was not yet minority whip, so Michel put the imprimatur of the House leadership on the complaint against Wright.
The filing of the complaint in September 1988 began the end of Jim Wright's career. Cheney, who assumed he would soon become minority leader, was eliminating a powerful adversary, as he had moved Nelson Rockefeller out of the Ford administration. Newt Gingrich would pick up where Cheney left off. Over the course of the following year, Wright would be accused of defending Texas S&L owners as the industry collapsed. Ultimately, he would be drummed out of Congress because friends and supporters placed bulk orders for a book he had written, which came to be construed as undisclosed campaign contributions, and because it was alleged by the House Ethics Committee that he received an undisclosed gift in the form of two apartments made available for his use by a Dallas businessman.
Under pressure from his critics, Wright did not fight the charges but he resigned his seat in Congress on May 31, 1989, six weeks after a team of FBI agents had walked into his office and told him they were doing a background check on Dick Cheney. "I told them, 'Dick Cheney is a patriotic person who is devoted to the interests of the United States and will be completely dedicated to the president, in my opinion,' " Wright says. "That he would make a good secretary of defense." That same night, Jim and Betty Wright ran into Dick and Lynne Cheney at the Ford Theater.
"We walked in and Dick was there," says Wright. "He stood up and whispered in my ear, 'Thanks for the very nice response to the investigating committee.' "
FOUR
Covert Cover-up
On October 5, 1986, a Sandinista soldier fired a surface-to-air missile and ended Ronald Reagan's secret war in Nicaragua. The president and his covert warriors in the White House would have been better off if the entire crew of the CIA. transport shot down in southern Nicaragua had died. But a "cargo kicker" dropping supplies to the Contras ignored instructions and wore a parachute. As the plane crashed into the jungle, he floated down into the arms of Sandinista soldiers waiting on the ground. The following day, newspapers around the world featured photos of Eugene Hasenfus, a down-on-his-luck construction worker from Wisconsin who had found temporary work with CIA contractors.
Two weeks later, at a secret meeting of the House Intelligence Committee, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams tried to cover the administration's tracks. Wry and strident, Abrams was a self-declared former socialist who had embraced neoconservatism with a zealous intensity, even marrying the daughter of one of the movement's leading lights, Norman Podhoretz. In the meeting, Abrams and CIA officials assured committee members that the U.S. government was not involved in any way in supplying the Contras, according to a summary classified "Top Secret Veil." They had nothing to do with the Hasenfus trip. All U.S. officials had done was offer public encouragement, Abrams said. It was a brazen lie. The Democrats on the committee didn't believe a word of it, but the story was good enough for one of its Republican members, Dick Cheney.
"Mr. Cheney said he found our ignorance credible," read the summary written by the administration staffer taking notes that day in the secure committee room on the fourth floor of the Capitol dome.
For years Cheney had attempted to convince his colleagues that they should support Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America, but had met with mixed results at best. The Democratic Congress had been inconsistent in its support. So zealots like Abrams and Lt. Col. Oliver North took matters into their own hands. When Hasenfus went down, North, who stage-directed the Contra operation out of the National Security Council in the White House, was on his way to Frankfurt, West Germany. North was negotiating with a delegation from Iran—a country designated a supporter of international terrorism by the U.S. State Department—as part of an ongoing effort to exchange arms for U.S. hostages held by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas. He was selling missiles to a regime that had all but declared war on America. Hasenfus's capture forced the colonel to cut short his trip and return to Washington, D.C., as the administration, from President Reagan on down, went into full public denial mode. Cheney, an ardent cold warrior, was no exception.
On November 3, the Lebanese weekly Ash-Shiraa published a story about a secret trip to Tehran the previous May by former U.S. national security advisor Robert McFarlane. The U.S. media picked up the story and added new details to an emerging portrait of Keystone Kops diplomacy in which North gave the Iranians a Bible inscribed by Reagan and, to sweeten the deal, a chocolate cake. The Iranians had, in response, stalled. Hezbollah released a few hostages and then picked up a few more.
Debate began within the administration over how much to reveal to Congress and the public. At the urging of CIA director Bill Casey and
Vice Admiral John Poindexter, who had replaced McFarlane as national security advisor, the president agreed to downplay the extent of the administration's dealings with Iran. At the time, they believed that negotiations with Iran would continue. "Must say something because I'm being held out to dry," Reagan said, according to notes of an internal White House meeting on November 10.
The White House staff decided the president would speak to the nation and tell the American public that the talks with Iran had been about restoring normal relations rather than bartering for hostages. The day before Reagan's speech, he and other senior White House officials met with the four leaders of Congress in the White House Situation Room to give them a preview. House minority leader Bob Michel sent Cheney in his stead. At the meeting, Reagan fed the congressional leaders the same lies he would tell the American public the next night. In his address, he claimed that the weapons and spare parts shipped to Iran "could easily fit into a single cargo plane." In reality, there were more than a thousand missiles over several shipments.
Again, Cheney, the good soldier, tried to hold the line, telling The New York Times after the speech that he took "issue with describing the efforts as arms for hostages," and warning critics against "Monday-morning quarterbacking."
But disclosures quickly overtook denials. By the end of November, White House efforts to contain the story veered toward obstruction of justice. U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese conducted an "investigation" into the affair. The inquiry smacked of a cover-up, as Meese declined an FBI offer of assistance and failed to take notes of his interviews. During his probe, the attorney general discovered a memo drafted by North in early April 1986 that detailed how $12 million from the arms sales to Iran would be diverted to the Contras. The two strands of an illegal policy came together in that memo. Poindexter and North had missed the document during a frenzy of shredding and alterations of official records that had started in October. Among the documents they did destroy was a retroactive Presidential Finding from December 1985 that gave official authorization to the transfer of HAWK missile parts to Iran the previous November. The finding was never shared with Congress at the time, as required by law. On November 25, Poindexter resigned and the White House sent North back to the Marine Corps.