by Lou Dubose
"These [forms] are not easy to do," says a Republican who has participated in a vice presidential search. "It's a long, complicated process. It's everything: personal history, family health; but it's real heavy on financial. You can spend thousands on this with your CPA and lawyers."
"Dick Cheney knows more about me than my mother, father, and wife," Tennessee senator Bill Frist told the Post after filling out the questionnaire.
Keating gave Cheney three big indexed binders with an offer of boxes of supporting background material. While the search meandered on, the governor basked in the media exposure that the consideration brought him. As the candidates complied with Cheney's interrogatories, a steady drumbeat of newspaper stories and television chatter hashed and rehashed who was up and why that person would be best or not. Campaign officials shrugged and told reporters that the only two people in the know were Bush and Cheney. Communication Director Karen Hughes said Bush "leaves the room" when Cheney calls to report on how the search is progressing.
On July 3, Cheney visited Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, to give what campaign spokesman Ari Fleischer termed "an update." Bush and Cheney participated in the obligatory press conference before their meeting. The all-business Halliburton CEO carried a battered briefcase in which he had brought information from the questionnaires. "I'm running the process in advance to make sure we've done the kind of thorough scrub on these individuals in terms of their backgrounds both public and private that you would expect these days of a vice president," said Cheney.
After he accepted the nomination, he would subsequently describe to CNN's Larry King what happened later that day. "After lunch, [Bush] walked me out on the back porch and reiterated once again his desire to consider me as a potential candidate for the post," he related. "And I told him at that point that—in light of his desires and an obligation I felt, that I'd take a look at it; that I'd talk to my family about it, and see whether or not it was something that I could agree to."
It was official—at least between Bush and Cheney. They were still not ready to tell the public. Within a week, Cheney went to Washington, D.C, for a thorough medical exam by his doctors. He had to answer the same nagging question Bush's father had asked before choosing Cheney as secretary of defense. The man had survived three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery. He suffered from high cholesterol and gout and had been treated for skin cancer. Could he endure the rigors of a presidential campaign? Would he be able to serve? His doctors once again pronounced him ready to go.
On July 15, Bush and Cheney met with the "iron triangle" of Rove, Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh. Hughes would claim that it was the first time the group had talked through the ramifications of naming Cheney VP. The Halliburton CEO would manage to escape the scrubbing he required for the nominees under his review. According to Hughes, Allbaugh would vet Cheney's public record and, implausibly, Bush, a man notoriously averse to details, would look into Cheney's finances and personal life. (At one point, Hughes also claimed that Cheney had investigated himself.)
The most serious consideration was still Cheney's health. Before they announced, Bush and his father, who approved of the choice, wanted a second opinion. Bush family friend and cardiac surgeon Denton Cooley spoke with Cheney's doctors. Cooley, a heart transplant pioneer, agreed that Dick Cheney's heart was up to the task. Still, the search charade continued. During this period, Bush and Cheney had high-profile meetings with potential candidates, even flying a clueless Senator John Danforth to a private meeting in Chicago.
On Thursday, July 20, Bush publicly ruled out Florida senator Connie Mack and Colin Powell, who had long made it clear he wanted the State Department. When asked about Cheney, Bush paused, smiled, and then said: "I'm not going there." The next day Cheney boarded a Halliburton jet and flew to Wyoming to change his voter registration from Dallas to Jackson. (The Constitution precludes the Electoral College from voting for a vice president and president from the same state.) The same day, NBC's Lisa Myers broke the Wyoming news, thanks to a tip from her colleague Pete Williams, who had returned to the media after a stint as SecDef Cheney's spokesman. The story helped beat back a growing draft-McCain movement among influential Republicans that threatened the Bush-Cheney plans.
According to the campaign narrative, Bush called Cheney in Dallas at 6:22 A.M. on Monday morning with a formal offer. Lynne Cheney answered the phone, as the nominee (the one with the health problems) was exercising on his treadmill. Then the future president started to call the other candidates to break the news.
By the time Keating received Bush's call, he wasn't surprised or entirely disappointed. The Oklahoman still believed in Bush and believed in his ability to win. Keating had been the first governor to endorse his colleague from Texas. If the GOP took the White House, there would be cabinet posts to fill. He had served as Attorney General Meese's second in command at Justice during the Reagan administration and hoped to be appointed to the top job. Keating publicly praised Cheney and volunteered to serve in any way he could. "Whatever he wants me to do, I'll do it," he told The Washington Times, even if it was just "to serve iced tea at a reception somewhere."
For Keating, the other shoe didn't drop until December. By that time, the Bush-Cheney transition team needed an attorney general. Governor Keating planned to spend Christmas giving out presents to the members of the Oklahoma National Guard stationed in Kosovo. Before leaving, he called Cheney to say that while he was happy to continue as governor, he was available for attorney general. Cheney asked Keating for a refresher on something the Oklahoma governor had disclosed about money he had accepted from retired New York banker Jack Dreyfus. Keating proceeded to retell the story of how Dreyfus had contacted him while he was at the U.S. Justice Department in 1988 with an idea to use the widely prescribed anticonvulsant Dilantin to medicate federal prisoners. Keating had hooked up Dreyfus with a prison official. Nothing had come of the idea, but Keating and Dreyfus became friends. Two years later, Dreyfus started writing checks to the Keating family to help pay education costs for the children. Keating would describe the gifts as simply a friendly gesture from an incredibly wealthy man. The gifts eventually totaled $250,000, all publicly disclosed when legally required. Keating offered to send the filings from the various ethics offices that had cleared the gifts, but the terse vice president-elect didn't want them. Keating sent a note to Cheney explaining it all again anyway. On the way back from Kosovo, as his plane refueled in Iceland, Keating learned that Bush had picked John Ashcroft for AG.
In early January, Keating took a call from Newsweek's Michael Isikoff while in Florida for the college football national championship between the Oklahoma Sooners and Florida State. The reporter wanted to talk about Dreyfus. Isikoff's story of the compromising gifts spread quickly to newspapers in Oklahoma and Washington, as the governor tried in vain to defend himself. As the controversy grew, a furious Keating called to complain to White House chief of staff Andy Card, eliciting an apologetic return call from Bush, who confirmed that someone from the campaign had leaked the information. Keating never learned why. In his article, Isikoff focused on Keating's comments from 1999, when drug use allegations involving George W. Bush first surfaced. Keating, responding to a hypothetical question, said all candidates should "address issues about private conduct. . . . In today's world, every one of us who serves in public office needs to answer questions about conduct that is arguably criminal." The statements had apparently upset Bush. It was, Isikoff asserted, seen as an example of disloyalty.
One Republican political friend of Keating sees another motive. Karen Hughes had described Keating as the best surrogate the Bush campaign had. Keating was a star, a legitimate threat to Cheney in four years. Cheney had moved Nelson Rockefeller off Gerald Ford's ticket and watched the dump-Quayle movement in the last year of the presidency of Bush's father. "Thinking ahead to 2004, now Frank Keating would never be a threat to [Cheney]," says the longtime GOP consultant. "It's too bad that they had to ruin his career to do it." Oklaho
ma Democrats savaged Keating, and ultimately he would exhaust his savings to repay Dreyfus in order to put the issue to rest. After serving out his term, he left public life, accepting a position as the head of a Washington trade association. But he had been in the game long enough to know who was responsible for sidelining his political career. When he wrote his requisite check to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, Frank Keating omitted Dick Cheney's name.
Dick Cheney had at least six months to contemplate what it would be like to be George W. Bush's vice president before he publicly accepted the nomination. But he'd had years to observe the younger George Bush and understand his limitations. Cheney knew in a way few others do what it is like to work inside the Oval Office and what could be accomplished with that power. Plans across decades, spoken and unspoken, percolated in his brain. Maybe he had even sketched some of those ideas out previously with Bush. In his first media appearance as the nominee, on Larry King Live, the former Ford chief of staff articulated the importance of "that personal relationship you develop with the president."
"In recent administrations," said Cheney, "the vice president's role has taken on new meaning and new significance, but that's primarily because the job of the man on top is big enough that there's plenty of work to go around. And recent presidents have been willing to share that."
When he accepted the invitation to join the ticket, Cheney could indulge in thoughts of how he would redefine the vice presidency. According to some polls, Gore trailed Bush by as much as 16 percentage points. That would change with a Bush nosedive that started with the selection of Dick Cheney. The failure to properly vet and prepare for the announcement became apparent immediately. George, Laura, Lynne, and Dick flew to Casper for a formal announcement. It was supposed to be a victory lap of sorts, but at a pre-event press conference, George and Dick faced a barrage of questions about Cheney's congressional record, helpfully provided to reporters by Democratic operatives. "I am generally proud of my record in the House," Cheney hedged. "I'm sure, if I were to go back and look at the individual votes, I could probably find some that I might tweak and do a bit differently."
There were already plenty of people who were doing the looking for him. Within days, the Democratic National Committee had aired a television commercial defining Cheney as a right-wing extremist. "Cheney was one of only eight members of Congress to oppose the Clean Water Act; one of the few to vote against Head Start. He even voted against the school lunch program, against health insurance for people who lost their jobs," detailed the ad.
In fact, his congressional voting record was so far from the mainstream it might as well have been in another river valley. In a body of 43 5 members, Cheney often aligned himself on the losing side of landslides. His mind wasn't focused on individual votes as much as on control of the House. Cheney voted against a ban on armor-piercing bullets (one of only twenty-one to do so), against a ban on plastic guns that could escape detection by X-ray machines (one of four), against the Federal Employees Medical Leave Act (one of nine), and against the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act (one of sixteen).
In those early days of the campaign, when Cheney was confronted with these and other similar votes on television talk shows, he seemed flustered and defensive. After pointed questioning by Sam Donaldson, Cheney tartly replied, "Well, Sam, I'm sorry but I explained my vote. . . . I think the key question, again, if we come back to the trivial aspects of the debates that rage in Washington, is what we're going to do in the future."
In a campaign environment of sound bites and absolute positions, he couldn't explain the context of those votes satisfactorily. How could he make it understood that they occurred during a procedural war that he was waging against Tip O'Neill and Jim Wright? While most, if not all, of those votes stemmed from his actual beliefs, they were more than anything tactical statements of noncooperation with a leadership he despised. Since the truth wasn't an option, Cheney fell back on his calm and measured persona to draw a contrast between how he had voted a decade earlier and what viewers saw on television.
But the bad press continued. His tenure as a freewheeling CEO at Halliburton quickly became an issue as journalists wondered whose interests he really represented. Cheney had once advocated reducing the world's oil supplies so gasoline prices would rise, which in turn would spur exploration and result in more business for Halliburton. Under questioning from Tim Russert, Cheney allowed that $2-a-gallon gasoline might be too expensive for the average consumer. (By 2006, gas topped $3 a gallon in many places, and oil company profits soared.) CEO Cheney's penchant for badmouthing and otherwise trying to undermine international sanctions generated media clucking as well. While Cheney made halfhearted attempts to stay true to his belief that sanctions had failed in places like Cuba and Iran, he insisted that the policy he'd follow would be Bush's. His record raised additional issues. It came out that in the past five years, while living in Dallas, he had voted only twice in sixteen elections. Questions arose about conflicts of interest involving his executive compensation.
It was not until the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia that Cheney finally found his campaign métier: attack dog. Nobody could say nasty things and make them sound measured and matter-of-fact like Dick. In the coming weeks, the Bush campaign would have to go negative to recoup the lead it had lost after Cheney joined the ticket. They would imprison Gore inside a distorted caricature from which he could not escape. Cheney would take the lead in putting him there. It comes down to credibility, he would say. Gore "simply makes some things up out of whole cloth and repeats them over and over again until he's called on it." GOP campaign consultant Stuart Stevens explained it best: "We couldn't control whether or not Gore might suddenly wake up and latch onto a powerful, coherent message. But we could remind people why they didn't like Gore."
Cheney's convention speech on August 2 was a tour de force. Democrats counted twenty-two separate attacks. The speech included a rousing refrain of "It's time for them to go." The biggest applause line came after Cheney accused Clinton and Gore of "extend[ing] our military commitments while depleting our military power." He had led the troops as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. He vowed they would soon have a commander in chief they could respect. "I can promise them now, help is on the way," Cheney said to the cheers of delegates.
On election night, the Bush ticket and campaign advisers assembled at the governor's mansion in Austin to watch the returns. Bush senior's old confidant James Baker III joined them. For Bush it was an olive branch extended to a man he didn't particularly like. For Cheney it was déjà vu. Baker had been Ford's campaign manager in the other national election Cheney had quarterbacked, Ford v. Carter. That vote had been close enough to contemplate what to do if it came down to a contested election. With an even closer vote looming in 2000, this time the campaign would take no chances. They had a team of lawyers on standby, ready to contest the election if necessary. This one wasn't going to slip away. The evening dragged into the morning without a result. As Baker drove back to Houston, Bush called him and asked him to go to Florida to bring home their victory.
The day after the election, it was Cheney more than Bush who struck the tone and made a bold tactical move. He declared the Republican ticket the winner. They had won, and it behooved Gore to recognize that and move on. "I would simply add to what the governor says," Cheney told reporters at a press conference. "We look forward to getting this matter resolved as quickly as possible so we can get on with the important business of transition."
By that Friday, November 10, Cheney was planning the transition even as a recount proceeded in Florida and Bush hid at the ranch in Crawford. As the process dragged on, the soon-to-be-vice-president-elect took the lead in morning conference calls with Baker and Bush, demanding they give no quarter to the Gore team. Two days before Thanksgiving, with a victor still not proclaimed, Cheney woke up at 3:30 A.M. with a familiar sensation on the left side of his chest. He rousted Lynne, and with his S
ecret Service agents in tow, headed for the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital while medical staff received phone calls telling them to come in to work immediately.
Heart attack number four would come for the fifty-nine-year-old on the cusp of unprecedented power. Doctors found 90 percent of one of his arteries blocked and surgically installed a wire mesh stent to open up the passage. During his campaign checkup four months earlier—the one to determine whether he was healthy enough to withstand a presidential campaign and the rigors of the Oval Office—doctors had performed a stress test, but it appears they had not performed an angiogram, a more invasive procedure that can detect blockages in the arteries.
When Cheney left the hospital just two days after the attack, he was determined to make one thing clear: This setback would not deal him out of a return to the White House. Cheney's will and ambition were too strong for that, just as they had been back in Wyoming with the first heart attack during the first congressional campaign. But Cheney's heart attack this time was more severe than has previously been reported, according to a source knowledgeable about his case. The immediate care he received at the hospital—care not available to most Americans—probably saved his life.
He told reporters outside George Washington University Hospital that Bush had vetted his health before he joined the ticket. "Nothing has happened subsequent to that that changes their judgment with respect to my ability to be able to perform the responsibilities of that office," he insisted.