by John W. Dean
Frist was in a serious motorcycle accident during his high school years. While he said this brush with death punctured some of his “sense of self-importance,” the accident also somewhat strangely resulted in “a romantic patina to an aloofness that had been growing in me since earliest childhood.” He was building what he calls a “Great Wall” between himself and his peers, “emotional brick by emotional brick.” His Great Wall runs throughout his narrative, and he explained that only later did he “come to believe that every man who wants to lead builds such a wall, though few of them talk about it.” Frist reported that by the time he headed to Princeton for his undergraduate studies, his “wall was almost complete. Few of my early acquaintances dared or cared to scale it, and I languished behind it without many close friends.”[61]
As is often the case with authoritarians, politics caught Frist’s attention during his college years; he would graduate from Princeton in 1974. He spent the summer of 1972 in Washington as an intern in the office of Democratic congressman Joe Evins, the senior member of the Tennessee delegation. Evins advised Frist that if he planned to go into politics he should start with a career outside of the political world. Frist even cast his romantic life in terms of dominance. “Imagining myself a leader,” and a Ulysses no less, he wrote that when heading off to Harvard Medical School, “I possibly wanted a Penelope back home waiting for me.” He found her, proposed, and dumped her just days before the wedding.
At medical school Frist had his Great Wall fully erected and was determined to outdo himself: “I realized that instead of molding doctors, medical school was in the business of stripping human beings of everything but the raw, almost insane, ambition you must have to simply get through.” This, he confessed, is when an infamous incident occurred that Frist explained was the result of his temporarily losing sight of the big picture. What he described, however, is actually typical of a dominator playing the game his way and then justifying his own conduct. Frist had taken time off from his regular coursework to study cardiac physiology through laboratory work. He spent “days and nights on end in the lab, taking hearts out of cats, dissecting each heart,” and studying and recording the effects of various medicines on the hearts. With six weeks to go to complete his project, Frist ran out of cats. “Desperate, obsessed with my work, I visited the various animal shelters in the Boston suburbs, collecting cats, taking them home, treating them as pets for a few days, then carting them off to the lab to die in the interest of science…. It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do, and I was totally schizoid about the entire matter…. I was going a little crazy.”[62]
Frist was likely not going crazy; rather, he was manipulating to succeed. Lying to people who run animal shelters—not to mention misleading the poor animals, who, as Ron Rosenbaum wrote in the New York Observer, had just come off “mean-street” unaware that they were headed for execution—was cruel. Rosenbaum checked the General Laws of Massachusetts, and clearly Frist, a serial cat killer, could have been prosecuted for cruelty to animals.[63] No doubt Frist committed fraud in obtaining the animals as well. This issue arose during the 1994 Senate campaign, and one of Frist’s professional campaign consultants conceded that the revelation was a bullet they had dodged. “Thank God he wasn’t experimenting with dogs,” the consultant observed, because “that would have killed him in coon-hunting Tennessee.”[64]
When Bill Frist was first elected he promised Tennessee voters that he would limit himself to two terms. With his second term ending in 2006, and having made it clear that he would not run for the Senate again, it appears Frist may be ready to attempt to fulfill the promise of Mr. John’s angel. But he faces a serious problem, for like many social dominators in the political arena, he was tempted to overreach and was caught. Frist owns stock in the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), a corporation his father founded and his brother built. When Frist arrived in the Senate he placed his shares in a blind trust, meaning he theoretically did not know how the trustee was handling his investment, thereby insulating himself from any conflict of interest in voting as a senator. Publicly, Frist has told conflicting stories about whether he tracked the status of this trust.[65] It is clear he did, however, because on June 13, 2005, a month before the company issued its second-quarter earnings—which would fail to meet the estimates of Wall Street analysts—Frist sold his shares in the company. At the time Frist unloaded his holdings they were selling at their highest value in years, between $57.21 and $58.60. When the earnings report was issued, the stock’s price dropped almost $5.00.[66] Anyone who had a major holding in the company, as Frist did, would have made a great deal of money by selling the shares before the bad news was made public—millions of dollars. (Martha Stewart, meanwhile, went to jail for her deception about receiving insider information that made her a few thousand.) Frist claims he did nothing wrong, but both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York are investigating to determine whether he acted on inside information about the company on which his brother Tom now serves as a member of the board of directors and of which Tom was once chairman.[67] But as threatening as this investigation might be to Frist’s bid for the presidency, even more troublesome will be his record as Senate majority leader, where his leadership skills have been tested.
“Most Capitol Hill observers now regard Frist as ‘the weakest majority leader in perhaps 50 years,’” said Charles Cook, the editor of a nonpartisan political report, in an interview with Bloomberg News. Cook, who has one of the best records for predicting political contests, said he did not think that Frist “has a snowball’s chance in hell” of getting the GOP nomination. If Frist’s standing with his peers suffered, he also damaged his image as a clear-thinking man of medicine when he pandered to the religious right during the debate over Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman being kept alive by a feeding tube in a Florida hospital. After viewing videos prepared by a group supporting federal intervention to halt the withdrawal of life-support measures, Frist reported—as Dr. Frist—that Terri Schiavo was “not somebody in a persistent vegetative state.” Both the House and Senate passed a law granting a federal court jurisdiction in the case, and President Bush flew back to Washington to sign the emergency measure. The federal judge, however, agreed with the state judges who had reviewed, and rereviewed, all the expert testimony, and had refused to intervene. The court battle to keep Schiavo on life support eventually ended with her death, and an autopsy showed that she had been blind and that her brain had atrophied severely. Dr. Frist’s behavior in the incident was quite remarkable, given the simple message he had delivered to the Senate in his maiden speech on January 11, 1995, when he first came to Washington. “As a recently elected citizen-legislator, I carry a very distinct advantage: closeness to the people,” Frist explained. He had listened to people’s thoughts and concerns, and he shared them with his colleagues: “Get the federal government off our backs…. The arrogance of Washington is stifling us, and we are capable of making our own decisions.”[68]
The Authoritarian Vice Presidency: Evil Is Not Excluded
Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history. His power comes from his knowledge of how Washington really works, and it far exceeds that of the man he ostensibly works for. Unlike Bush, Cheney relishes the minutiae of government policy and process, and he has surrounded himself with a staff that is stronger and far more competent than the president’s personal staff. Unlike prior vice presidents, Cheney and his people have often taken the lead on issues, with the White House staff falling in line. Cheney has long been a behind-the-scenes operator, for he was badly burned by the news media during his tenure as White House chief of staff. His ego does not need the spotlight, and his dark view of the world and life is, in any case, better suited to working behind closed doors.
Notwithstanding Cheney’s claims that the powers of the presidency are insufficient to fight terrorism, the office has enormous inherent p
owers. And when it does not, the president traditionally goes to Congress to petition for whatever additional power is needed; no Congress is going to deny any president essential powers to protect the nation. Cheney, it seems, had been traumatized as Ford’s chief of staff when the Congress began dismantling Nixon’s imperial presidency. “In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate,” Cheney told the Wall Street Journal, “there was a concerted effort to place limits and restrictions on presidential authority…the decisions that were aimed at the time at trying to avoid a repeat of things like Vietnam or…Watergate.” For most people adopting such measures would be considered good government; Cheney believes otherwise. “I thought they were misguided then, and have believed that given the world that we live in, that the president needs to have unimpaired executive authority.”[69] He has repeated that line time after time, without ever explaining exactly why the post-Watergate measures were misguided, or why efforts by Congress to prevent another Vietnam, which took some fifty thousand American lives for no good purpose, were faulty. Since Cheney has been vice president he has never been interviewed by a reporter inclined (or permitted) to ask the hard questions, so Cheney has never had to explain himself. The man he works for looks only at the politics of any given matter, and does not have the depth of knowledge to challenge his vice president. Cheney’s relationships with his staff and his informal advisers in and out of government are ones in which the vice president poses the questions, and he is never required to give answers. When Cheney speaks publicly—which is not often—he pontificates, or dictates.
It is true that Dick Cheney has served at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. He held positions in both the Nixon (and got out before Watergate) and Ford White Houses. He spent over a decade on Capitol Hill, first as a congressional aide, and later as a congressman from Wyoming who worked his way up the House GOP leadership ladder, before being named to a cabinet post, as Secretary of Defense (under Bush I). It is an exceptional government career. Cheney did not become the youngest White House chief of staff by accident; he did not become the number-two leader of the House Republicans because of his mild manner; and he did not serve as both chairman of the board and chief operating officer of the Halliburton Corporation because of his good looks. Cheney is an authoritarian dominator. He studies the landscape, and then figures out how to get the ground he wants for himself. He has demonstrated remarkable ability in making it to the top, most recently by selecting himself as vice president of the United States. What is always overlooked with Dick Cheney is how he performs when he arrives in his various jobs. The answer is, in truth, not very well. Cheney is surely proof of the “Peter Principle” (that people in a hierarchy eventually rise to their level of incompetence).
Josh Marshall,[*] writing in the Washington Monthly, was the first journalist to observe this fact about Cheney; the piece was titled “Vice Grip: Dick Cheney is a man of principles. Disastrous Principles.”[70] Marshall had discovered that Cheney has made one serious mistake after another as vice president, although “in the Washington collective mind,” he has the reputation of a “sober, reliable, skilled inside player.” Marshall found that the facts belie Cheney’s reputation, and he has made a consistent string of “mistakes—on energy policy, homeland security, corporate reform.” Since Marshall wrote his piece this list of serious errors has only grown. Marshall attributed Cheney’s ineptness to a career that has largely isolated him from the real world. As Marshall described it, Cheney is part of the “hierarchical, old economy style of management [that] couldn’t be more different from the loose, nonhierarchical style of, say, high-tech corporations or the Clinton White House, with all their open debate, concern with the interests of ‘stake-holders,’ manic focus on pleasing customers (or voters), and constant reassessment of plans and principles. The latter style, while often sloppy and seemingly juvenile, tends to produce pretty smart policy. The former style, while appearing so adult and competent, often produces stupid policy.” Marshall is also describing the distinction between a nonauthoritarian White House and an authoritarian operation.
An examination of Cheney’s career reveals that it is marked by upward mobility and downward performance. For example, the best thing Cheney did for Halliburton as chairman and CEO was to step down and help them get no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq and federal help with their asbestos claims liability; Cheney’s attempt to run for president failed at the conception stage; he was undistinguished as Secretary of Defense, and many believe he was actually disappointed when the cold war ended on his watch, and not by his doing; his years in Congress have left a voting record that any fair-minded person would be ashamed of; and he was way over his head as Ford’s chief of staff, which resulted in the remaining Nixon staff’s appreciating how good Haldeman had been in the job; and, of course, he helped Ford lose his bid to become an elected president in the race against Jimmy Carter.
Bad judgment is Dick Cheney’s trademark. It was not George Bush who came up with the idea of imposing blanket secrecy on the executive branch when he and Cheney took over. It was not George Bush who conceived of the horrible—and in some cases actually evil—policies that typify this authoritarian presidency, such as detaining “enemy combatants” with no due process and contrary to international law. It was not George Bush who had the idea of using torture during interrogations, and removing restraints on the National Security Agency from collecting intelligence on Americans. These were policies developed by Cheney and his staff, and sold to the president, and then imposed on many who subsequently objected to this authoritarian lawlessness. It was Cheney and his mentor, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who convinced Bush to go to war in Iraq, which is proving to be a protracted calamity. As Colin Powell’s former top aide, Laurence Wilkinson, rather bluntly puts it: In 2002 Cheney must have believed that Iraq was a spawning ground for terrorists, “otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.”[71] Colonel Wilkinson, it appears, has a rather solid take on the vice president’s thinking, for there is no evidence that Cheney believed—or had any basis for such a belief—that Iraq was a spawning ground for terrorism—before we made it into one.
The issue of Dick Cheney’s judgment must be raised because he is the catalyst, architect, and chief proponent of Bush’s authoritarian policies. In fact, Cheney’s authoritarian vice presidency has simply swallowed the president, and Cheney sought to take the office way beyond even Nixon’s imperial presidency, which they had accomplished by the end of the first term.[*]Insidiously, Cheney and his staff are proceeding with strategic moves, largely out of sight, that are undertaken regularly to accomplish his goal, and often at the political expense of the president, which creates periodic, but growing, rifts between the men. These include things like ramming through the White House a presidential signing statement regarding a new law. Rather than vetoing legislation when it arrives at the White House, the White House (read: Cheney and his staff) issues a brief statement giving its interpretation of the new law as it relates to presidential powers. These statements are consistently different from the clear intent of Congress, so Bush and Cheney have, in effect, told Congress to go to hell on the few occasions when the Republican Congress has stood up to the White House. Typical was its response when Senator John McCain (R-AZ) sought to end the use of torture by Americans when interrogating putative terrorists.
George Bush has repeatedly insisted, “We do not torture.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has repeatedly claimed that the United States does not engage in “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” And CIA director Porter Goss affirms that his agency “does not do torture. Torture does not work.” But no one believes the Bush administration on this issue, and for good reason. When the so-called torture memos prepared by the Department of Justice were leaked—after the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib had surfaced—they revealed that the White House had managed to get the Justice Department to virtually define away torture. As the Economist commented, the words of the Bush administ
ration officials on torture count “for little when the administration has argued, first, that during time of war, the president can make just about anything legal, and, second, that the UN Convention Against Torture does not apply to interrogations of foreign terrorist suspects outside the United States.” Similarly, Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam and took pride in the belief that his country would never resort to using such measures, did not believe the Bush administration. In 2004 Congress passed a bipartisan amendment to the defense authorization bill, reaffirming that detainees in U.S. custody could not be subject to torture or cruel treatment as those terms have been previously defined by the U.S. government. “But since last year’s DOD bill,” Senator McCain informed his colleagues, “a strange legal determination was made that the prohibition in the Convention Against Torture against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment does not legally apply to foreigners held outside the United States.” Or, as the senator put it more bluntly, “They can apparently be treated inhumanely.” The Bush/Cheney administration’s reading of the law was pure expediency. Judge Abe Sofaer, who negotiated the torture convention, wrote an op-ed explaining that there was never any intention to limit the torture agreement to American soil. McCain had a powerful case for why his amendments were needed.