by Lou Dubose
The assault on Panama bore all the signature marks for which Dick Cheney would become known. Willingness to exercise broad executive authority, low regard for the role of Congress in foreign policy, high tolerance for non-American civilian casualties, and near-absolute secrecy. The assault, in which fifteen Americans died, was a technical success, even if it involved the conquest of a small country already occupied by thirteen thousand American troops. Cheney allowed only reporters based in the United States to cover the war, so he could slow the credentialing process and thus slow the coverage, although there were fully credentialed bilingual American reporters on the ground in Panama. The result was sporadic coverage of the "war," in which hostilities lasted only a few days. Critics of the invasion, including the Catholic Church in Panama, insist that far more Panamanians died than the two hundred civilians listed in official American reports. The Catholic Church, no great friend of Noriega, said deaths numbered in the thousands. The use of the Stealth bomber in an attack in which the resistance was so feeble that only fifty Panamanian soldiers died was something of an embarrassment. More embarrassing was the fact that the 100-million-dollar bomber was far off target when it dropped its bombs. (Cheney was furious when he learned the Air Force had kept him in the dark about the Stealth's failure.) The operation took a while to achieve its objective, the capture of General Manuel Noriega. The Panamanian dictator eluded the army and took sanctuary in the offices of the papal nuncio. Rather than violate the sanctity of a church that was also a diplomatic mission, U.S. forces surrounded the nuncio's residence and played high-decibel rock music until Noriega and his host could endure it no longer and he surrendered to American forces.
"Operation Just Cause" in Panama was a dress rehearsal for the larger military adventure to follow, when Iraq's president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. From the moment intelligence reports indicated that Saddam Hussein's troops appeared to be preparing to invade Kuwait, Cheney was at the center of the military campaign known as Desert Storm. The first Gulf War was Dick Cheney's war as much as it was George Bush's war. It began with yet another Iran-Contra connection. Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar had moved $25 million from the Saudis to the Contras, working with CIA director William Casey. He was also a friend of the Bush family. Powell had misgivings about Bandar; Cheney had none.
It was Bandar who initially informed Bush that Hussein's behavior had the Saudis worried. And it was Bandar with whom Bush negotiated, sending Cheney to Saudi Arabia on a critical diplomatic mission to persuade the Saudis to accept U.S. ground forces. Before the ground war in Iraq started in late February 1991, Cheney had flown to Riyadh four times. Yet on the road to the Gulf War, Cheney was cautious. Not as cautious as Powell, but not overeager to push the country into war. The story line for the American public was that Hussein had invaded a sovereign nation. The concern within the administration was that Hussein had designs on the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.
Cheney was practical. Given the alternatives of attacking Hussein or deploying a force to defend Saudi Arabian oil, he argued that it was better to avoid a direct confrontation with Hussein's million-man army. He was critical of Bush's personal attacks on Hussein, complaining to Brent Scow-croft that the overheated rhetoric was putting the lives of American soldiers at risk. And he cautioned Bush against ordering American sailors to board Iraqi tankers to signal the beginning of a blockade.
Cheney's August 1991 trip to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Fahd was critical to the success of a large mission to deter the Iraqis. Cheney, accompanied by Paul Wolfowitz and General Norman Schwarzkopf, imposed the American plan upon the reluctant and difficult king. There would be no caps on the size of the American force deployed in Saudi Arabia. Nor would there be any fixed date by which troops would depart. They would remain "until justice is achieved," Cheney told Fahd, adding that they would leave when the king asked them to leave. Cheney used classified satellite intelligence to convince the king of Hussein's intentions, and went to great lengths to emphasize the gravity of Iraqi troops amassed on his border and the impossibility of a U.S. mission to stop Hussein once he moved into Saudi Arabia. Fahd, the custodian of the two holiest sites of Islam, was being asked to accept the presence of troops from the country that was Israel's financial and military underwriter. Cheney wouldn't allow him time to think it over.
Once the decision was made to go to war, Cheney turned his attention to the generals who would do the fighting. "He looked at the war plan and was appalled by its lack of creativity and tore it to pieces," says a former defense aide on Sam Nunn's staff. Cheney spent days with Colin Powell, poring over war plans, pushing Powell, and leaning on the generals doing the planning. He personally got on the phone with, and in the faces of, the generals who were drawing up the war plans. "He wasn't a micromanager like McNamara," says one of the generals involved in the planning. "And he wasn't arrogant like Rumsfeld. He wanted this one done right." Cheney joined Powell in arguing for the "enhanced option"—adding a hundred thousand more troops to the American contingent in Saudi Arabia, bringing troop strength to half a million. It was his moment to end the country's Vietnam War syndrome. "The military is finished in this society if we screw this up," he told Prince Bandar.
Cheney and Powell agreed on most issues regarding the war. But they had one fundamental disagreement regarding weapons. As they were flying back from the Persian Gulf in the run-up to the war, Powell pulled out a report he had ordered his staff to complete. It was a proposal to retire the Army's tactical nuclear weapons arsenal. The copy of the report Powell handed Cheney as the two men flew home from Saudi Arabia was covered with critical marginalia, all in the hand of David Addington. Addington and Wolfowitz had strong objections to giving up nuclear weapons that Powell said were inaccurate, expensive to maintain, and irrelevant in a modern arsenal of sophisticated conventional weapons. Cheney dismissed Powell, saying "not one of my civilian advisers supports you." Powell would prevail—after a Gulf War in which the Army's tactical nuclear weapons were not necessary. In September 2002, President Bush overruled Cheney and implemented Powell's recommendations.
In the Gulf War, Cheney saw a limited role for Congress, just as he had in the Panama operation. Despite the fact that going to war with Iraq would be a larger undertaking than the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Cheney argued that the president did not need the consent of Congress. He seemed more understanding of King Fahd's polling the royal family and calling Arab leaders than he was of Bush's willingness to go to Congress for consent. He told Bob Woodward that after meeting with his House colleagues, he remembered that four months before Pearl Harbor, the House had approved an extension of the Selective Service System by only one vote. Bush took his case to Congress. The Senate voted 52 to 47, the House 250 to 183, to approve the "all means necessary" resolution.
The Gulf War began with thirty-eight days of intense bombing of Iraqi positions in Kuwait—and strategic sites in Baghdad and across Iraq. In the first forty-eight hours of the war, 2,107 combat missions dropped more than five thousand tons of bombs on Baghdad, nearly twice the amount Allied forces dropped on Dresden in 1945. The bombing plan was similar to what was laid out for reporters four months earlier, by an Air Force chief of staff Cheney fired for his loose talk. "The cutting edge would be downtown Baghdad," Air Force general Michael Dugan said. Dugan also told a Washington Post reporter that he had been informed by Israeli intelligence that Hussein would be devastated by an attack on his family and his mistress. The September 16 Post story ran under the headline "U.S. to Rely on Air Power if War Erupts." The follow-up story on September 18 required a headline and a subhead. "Candor Cost Top Airman His Job; Dugan Discussed 'Things We Never Talk About,' Cheney Says." Cheney's firing of Dugan, who coincidentally had replaced General Larry Welch, was another demonstration of what Wilkerson described as Cheney's "real ability to administrate, to make a decision, to be an executive." No member of the Joint Chiefs had been fired since 1948. But Dugan had talked to the press, described a plan of attack, a
nd revealed that Israeli intelligence was involved in a war his boss had just sold to King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
Cheney's firing of Dugan was bloodless and fast. He didn't even bother to interrupt President Bush's tennis game at Camp David to tell him the Air Force chief of staff was going to be canned.
News stories and various sources describe Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell as a near-perfect tandem at the Pentagon. The SecDef who had avoided the draft and the general whose life had been defined by the Army set aside their differences over Iran-Contra and conducted the most successful U.S. military operation since World War II. After thirty-eight days of bombing, the ground campaign lasted four days and resulted in only 137 American fatalities.
The war that brought the two men together would also divide them. Cheney was already thinking about a run for the presidency in 1996. And while he was averse to the press, working to limit media coverage of the war and firing a four-star general for talking to reporters, he was not averse to hagiography when he could find it. The details he revealed to a Time magazine team read like a storyboard for a campaign video: never losing a night's sleep over a difficult decision; packing his own bag to fly to Saudi Arabia; bringing along his cowboy boots and lucky beige zippered jacket; and connecting with the troops once he was on the ground. David Hume Kennedy's campaign boudoir photography complemented what was probably the most glowing portrait of a cabinet minister done since newsweeklies went from black-and-white to color. Cheney was taking full advantage of the Gulf War success to write his campaign biography. But then, as now, he lacked Powell's charisma and telegenic qualities.
A general who worked at the Pentagon says he witnessed the public moment he believes caused the Cheney-Powell divorce: the "Salute to the Men and Women of the Desert Storm Campaign" at the Washington Hilton in April two months after hostilities in Iraq ended. Congressman Jack Murtha insisted on bringing in a large number of enlisted men. "There were E-ls to E-4s with their girlfriends dressed to the nines running all over the hotel. Everyone made speeches. The event broke up and those kids mobbed Powell. They couldn't get enough of him. Cheney was definitely not mobbed. The TV moved to Powell and left Cheney with a few people talking to him. Cheney looked over there and saw a rival he could not match."
There had been talk of a Cheney-Powell ticket in 1992. But as the pundits and the public sized up the two men, talk began to shift to a Powell-Cheney ticket. On the day Dick Cheney left the Pentagon to return to private life, he didn't even bother to stop by Powell's office to say goodbye, says Wilkerson. "There was no farewell. Powell never knew he departed and all of a sudden he's still the chairman and Cheney's gone."
SIX
Lawless CEO: The Halliburton Years
In the first and only vice presidential debate of the 2000 campaign, newly retired captain of industry Dick Cheney faced off against Connecticut Democratic senator Joe Lieberman. Astoundingly, there was not one mention of Halliburton in their debate. The closest they got to discussing the company Cheney had run from 1995 to just days before joining the Bush campaign in the summer of 2000 involved a question about partisanship. Cheney used his answer to burnish a myth that largely exists to this day. In it, he stars as the triumphant CEO, a self-reliant insider-turned-outsider who competently and ethically grew his company while increasing shareholder value.
While politically useful, it happens to be a lie.
"I've been out of Washington for the last eight years and spent the last five years running a company [sic] global concern. And I've been out in the private sector building a business, hiring people, creating jobs," said Cheney. "I've got a different perspective on Washington than I had when I was there in the past."
If the former executive had chosen Lieberman himself, he couldn't have picked a more clueless opponent to debate than the senator from Connecticut, who has proven himself an enemy of corporate reform and an ally of Lynne Cheney in the culture war. Lieberman not only failed to challenge the business bona fides of his rival for the vice presidency, he helped expand the myth. Attempting to make the case that America was better off after eight years of Clinton-Gore, Lieberman dryly noted that Cheney was certainly better off. In other words, he was the very picture of the successful CEO.
Cheney retorted: "I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to do with it."
It was a whopper of a falsehood—and one more that Lieberman failed to dispute.
The Gore-Lieberman campaign had tried to make an issue of Cheney's compensation from Halliburton. Despite retiring early, Cheney was reported by The New York Times to have received a severance package worth more than $20 million, and during his time at the company, total compensation of well over $10 million. In reality, he had received a total of $45 million. Not bad for a guy who was earning about $144,000 a year when he left the Defense Department in 1993. Before that, he had served in Congress making even less, calling his government service "a pauper's oath."
In 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney declared his net worth for the previous year could be as high as $94.6 million. Not all, but most, of that income came from Halliburton. Even deep into his second term in the Bush White House, as Halliburton raked in billion-dollar federal contracts, Cheney received compensation and held stock in the company. In his first five years in office, the vice president earned almost a million dollars in deferred salary from Halliburton. He promised to donate millions more in stock options to charity, but as late as the spring of 2006, Cheney had still not exercised fifty thousand Halliburton stock options worth almost $4 million at the time. His staggering executive compensation cannot be fully appreciated without a full examination of his tenure at Halliburton, a company that has spent the years after his departure extricating itself from its former CEO's mismanagement and potentially actionable decisions. Even the pro-business Fortune magazine concluded in 2005 that Halliburton had suffered under Cheney's "poor leadership."
The true achievement of Dick Cheney, CEO—other than his personal enrichment—is that he somehow managed to keep a lid on an exceedingly messy Halliburton legacy long enough to get elected and reelected to the White House. Some of it was just dumb luck. Some of it was his former company covering for him. Tellingly, a full six years after he left the company, at least one grand jury is still looking into Halliburton activities from that period.
Exactly how a man with no experience in running a multinational energy services company won the job leading Halliburton is itself shrouded in myth. The oft-told story involves a five-day fishing trip on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick in 1995. By then Cheney knew that his dreams of running for president were not to be. In 1994, he had gone so far as to set up an exploratory committee headed by his former Pentagon aide David Addington, but a nationwide speaking tour that year had failed to generate much interest. By year's end Cheney had more than likely seen the polling by his old Ford administration friend Bob Teeter showing that among Republican primary voters, Cheney trailed Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, Colin Powell, and, in all but one poll, Dan Quayle.
According to the New Brunswick fish tale, one night as Cheney slumbered back at the lodge, the corporate executives on the trip started to talk about the ongoing search for a Halliburton CEO. Among the executives was Halliburton chairman Tom Cruikshank, who had been leading the search. Cheney had wowed the chairman with stories of managing the Pentagon, and in July 1994, Cruikshank had donated a thousand dollars to the former defense secretary's presidential exploratory campaign. Out of the blue, someone suggested that Dick might make a good Halliburton CEO. And once again, with no discernible effort, Cheney, in the right place at the right time, had landed himself a new position of power.
Why a former secretary of defense would be attractive to the Halliburton board is fairly easy to see. Since the 1960s, Halliburton and its affiliate, now known as Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR, have been a cornerstone of the military-industrial complex. Not only would a Chene
y-led Halliburton benefit from government money, the company would depend on it. In just one example of many, in the five years prior to Cheney's arrival at Halliburton, the company received $100 million in government-backed loans from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a federal credit agency that lends money to promote American exports. During Cheney's five-year tenure at the company, it would receive $1.5 billion.
Halliburton didn't begin life suckling at the public teat. Erle Halliburton had founded his company among the roughnecks in the Oklahoma oilfields back in 1919. He perfected a way to use concrete to secure wells and helped revolutionize oil production. By dint of hard work, self-sacrifice, and relentless promotion, the Tennessee native transformed his Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company into a multi-million-dollar success story. While early financing from oil companies helped him grow, Erle avoided government money, after failure to win a public service contract soured him on Washington politicians and their pay-to-play lobbyists. The company branched into other oilpatch services and went public in 1948. In 1957 Erle died. Shortly thereafter, the company rechristened itself Halliburton. Faced with the imperative of constant growth in a cyclical industry of booms and busts, Halliburton found what looked like a solution in 1963. It proposed a merger with a Texas construction company then called Brown & Root.
Brothers Herman and George Brown had used seed money from brother-in-law Dan Root to found their company the same year Erle Halliburton founded his. But unlike Halliburton, Brown & Root thrived on federal contracts. After years of early struggles, the Brown brothers had lucked into a big public works project to build a dam on Texas's Colorado River near Austin. But they needed political muscle in order to see it to completion. The brothers turned to a young, ambitious Texas Hill Country congressman named Lyndon Baines Johnson. After LBJ proved himself able to deliver, the Browns paid to help the Texas pol steal a U.S. Senate race against Coke Stevenson in 1948. (After a campaign fueled by illegal contributions, Johnson won the primary election by eighty-seven votes when an extra ballot box in anything-goes South Texas mysteriously appeared several days later. LBJ's primary victory assured his election in then-solidly Democratic Texas.) For the next thirty years, LBJ and George and Herman Root would work so closely together that Johnson would become known as the senator from Brown & Root. The relationship floated along on a river of campaign cash—sometimes delivered in suitcases—and in exchange, the politician ensured an endless supply of big public works projects.