Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency Read online

  Another distinguishing feature of Cheney’s review was its expansion of the usual scope of inquiry. Cheney asked about the military service records, the criminal histories, and other intimate details of parents, children, siblings, spouses, and in-laws as well as the vice-presidential contenders themselves. He asked about not only professional sanctions and allegations of malpractice but also “misconduct in school”; not only whether the candidate had been charged with a crime but also whether he had been identified as a suspect or witness; not only about recorded civil judgments and admissions of wrongdoing but also about no-fault settlements and cases sealed by a court.

  A catchall question near the end asked each contender to specify in writing—it was just as bald as this—any event or proclivity that might leave him “vulnerable to blackmail or coercion.”

  To guard against omissions, Cheney ensured he had a free hand to tap directly into sources of information that are ordinarily guarded by privacy law. The vetting forms required each candidate to sign a notarized authorization for “Richard B. Cheney or…any person designated by him” to obtain from hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies “without limitation, any medical records” covering “any time period.” Candidates were obliged to sign a similar form permitting the Internal Revenue Service to release their tax returns and schedules, and another for credit reports. They were further asked to request, on Cheney’s behalf, the contents of their FBI files. One of the forms conferred on Cheney and his team, along with anyone who answered their questions, a blanket waiver of “any liability with regard to seeking, furnishing or use of” the confidential information. No expiration date was specified.

  Cheney hired lawyers at Latham & Watkins to sift the thousands of pages thus produced on each of the candidates. The supervising partner was Philip J. Perry, Liz Cheney’s husband.

  On June 8, after two weeks of labor, Keating delivered an eight-inch stack of documents, spilling out of triple-hinged binders that proved unequal to the mass.

  “Dear Dick,” he wrote. “I enclose responses to the questionnaire, with supporting material. The Freedom of Information request to the FBI has been transmitted and I will forward the resulting material as soon as I receive it.”

  Arrayed for Cheney’s inspection were photographs, Social Security numbers, education and employment histories of his wife, Catherine; his daughter, Carrie, then twenty-six; and sons Kelly and Chip, respectively twenty-four and twenty years old. Keating listed each address since 1962 and each job since 1969. As requested, he attached copies of every speech and every article he had written; interviews and transcripts of testimony; every published story in his files about the ups and downs and controversies of his career. He enumerated assets of $2,587,208.41, breaking down twenty-seven investments to the penny. (Most were mutual funds from Fidelity, Templeton, Janus, Vanguard, and T. Rowe Price.)

  Keating’s medical summary described a man of normal weight and robust health, based on annual physicals and his doctor’s assessment of diagnostic tests. He took no prescription drug but Lipitor, which controlled a tendency to high cholesterol. He worked fifteen-hour days without ill effect. An ordinary candidate screening would have stopped about there. Keating’s submission, as specified by Cheney, attached scores of pages more—examination records, electrocardiograms, a scheduled sigmoidoscopy, laboratory results. The files said Keating’s neck and shoulder made it hard to sleep comfortably sometimes; an orthopedist saw signs of wear and tear that might be early arthritis. He recommended ibuprofen and cleared Keating to resume a daily three-mile run. The governor confessed to his doctors that he drank too much coffee, eight to ten cups a day, and did not eat as well as he ought to on the road. He took Geritol. He had a forty-one-inch chest and thirty-four-inch waist. His blood pressure, at 150/90, would bear watching. There was a sick visit on October 26, 1998, when Keating complained of sore throat, fever, and fatigue. (He had been self-medicating, the doctor noted, with hot tea and honey.) An unfortunate meal of catfish in 1996 left him nauseated and weak. Another exam turned up a slight enlargement of Keating’s prostate, but the standard assay for cancer-related antigens found nothing untoward. Elsewhere the files recorded the usual indignities of the human animal under modern medicine, from the shape of Keating’s testicles to the sphincter tone observed in rectal exams. As a physical specimen, Keating stood altogether naked before Cheney’s team.

  These were not the disclosures that Keating came to regret. Nor did he have trouble with the small points in his file that might open a national candidate to attack—draft deferments during the Vietnam War and tempests over ill-chosen words that inspired opponents to dub him “Governor Pop-off.” Keating ascribed the latter to his “sense of humor—a saving grace in life, if occasionally a liability in politics.”

  What brought him low, in the bitter aftermath of his screening by Cheney, were the answers at tabs 69 and 73. The first asked about any potential question of ethics, regardless of merit. The second sought information on any other matter, whether part of the public record or not, that might embarrass the campaign.

  Keating decided, in what he called “an abundance of caution,” to describe a history of gifts to his family from an eccentric New York philanthropist. Keating had met Jack Dreyfus, founder of the eponymous mutual funds, in late 1988. Keating was then the third-ranking Justice Department official in the waning days of the Reagan administration. Dreyfus had suffered depression as a young man and made a spectacular recovery after taking the prescription drug Dilantin, which is government approved primarily for seizure disorders. He became convinced that Dilantin was a miracle medicine, capable of curing ailments across a broad medical landscape, from car sickness to Tourette’s syndrome. Dreyfus had no known financial interest in Dilantin or the company that makes it, but he wrote two books and sank much of his fortune into a foundation to tell its story. When the two men met, Dreyfus bent Keating’s ear on a proposal to promote the rehabilitation of criminals by distributing Dilantin in federal prisons. Keating deflected Dreyfus to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which lacked enthusiasm. When Keating left government, he turned down an offer to join the Dreyfus foundation, but the two men became friends nonetheless. “Somebody who thinks celery is a miracle fruit, you know, a lot of people might say, ‘This guy’s strange,’” Keating said. “But Jack is a wonderful guy.”

  By the spring of 1990, Keating was back in government as general counsel to Jack Kemp’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. One evening over dinner Dreyfus announced that he was a wealthy man, could do as he liked, and wanted to pay the college costs of Keating’s three children. A jaw-dropping temptation, no doubt. Keating, the G-man turned prosecutor, succumbed. After all, he reasoned, there was no question of personal corruption—nothing Dreyfus wanted in return, and nothing Keating could do for the man, anyway, in the Housing Department. Those rationales would come to seem naive, even vaguely untoward, in a man who had built his career on uprightness. But he decided to treat the matter as a narrow question of law: Was he allowed to accept the money or not?

  Government documents back Keating’s recollection that he asked for a ruling from the Housing Department’s ethics staff. The lawyers had no objection so long as Keating declared the gifts on standard annual disclosure forms and recused himself from any future government business affecting his friend. Gary Davis, general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, seconded the departmental opinion, finding that the gifts were neither prohibited nor improper in appearance. It is undisputed that Keating reported them every year during his federal employment. Even so, Keating decided that Cheney ought to know.

  “What did you do that for?” demanded Catherine Keating, his wife, when he told her what he had written in the Cheney questionnaire. A note of grievance came through seven years later, as Keating recounted the story by telephone. A woman’s voice, soft but insistent, became audible in the background. Keating laughed ruefully and said, “As a matter of fact my Cathy is standing here,” reminding him
that she “and my chief of staff and everybody was saying, ‘Why would you put this down? Because it’s not what they’re after.’” The governor believed he was as square as they come, but asked himself, “You know, could an issue be raised? Possibly so.” And with the vice presidency at stake, he ought to be “purely Caesar’s wife.”

  How Cheney counseled Bush as the weeks went by, and by what subtle shifts he crossed the line from adviser to running mate, are questions likely to frustrate categorical answer. Too much of the action took place without witnesses, on the back porch of the big house on Bush’s Crawford ranch or in telephone calls that, according to aides, Bush would leave the room to take. But some of Cheney’s advice, then and later, did make its way to Bush’s confidants, because the Texas governor was not half as committed as Cheney to silence. Sometimes Bush’s inner circle could see the boss reframing the older man’s observations as his own, adding new thoughts and new turns of phrase to his lexicon.

  As First Son, Bush had witnessed tensions between his father’s White House staff and the hard-charging operators who looked out for the political future of Vice President Quayle. Cheney reinforced the lesson that ambition in a vice president leads inexorably to conflict with the man in the Oval Office, especially as the next election nears. Anyone could see it happening that summer between Bill Clinton and Al Gore, he said. Cheney told Bush how much Gerald Ford, a man accustomed to leadership, hated his brief tenure as Richard Nixon’s number two. He recounted inside stories of his own subsequent battles, as Ford’s White House chief of staff, with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. (Cheney helped persuade Ford to throw Rockefeller off the ticket in 1976.) Bush, for sure, wanted none of that kind of nonsense. He sought a trustworthy adviser, conversant in the ways of Washington—but most of all loyal, content to remain back-stage. What Bush seemed to picture, the author Jacob Weisberg has proposed, was the constitutional equivalent of his wife, Laura.

  Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, an old friend, chatted with Cheney about the vice-presidential search that summer. Cheney ran down the wish list—a person capable of commanding the presidency should need arise, yet satisfied to wait quietly in the wings; a confidant of sound judgment with experience in foreign affairs, in Congress, or in the corridors of the executive branch. Greenspan was struck by Cheney’s poker face. In a few economical phrases, the man had just sketched as neat a self-portrait as Greenspan could imagine. Was it possible that Cheney did not know it? Cheney appeared to be organizing a nationwide search for himself. If so, Greenspan said privately, he approved. Greenspan had worked with or for every president since 1968. Only Nixon and Clinton—an odd couple, Greenspan allowed—matched Cheney’s intellect. None was his equal at turning a strategic goal into operational plans.

  Critics who cast Cheney as Svengali, luring Bush into a choice that was not his own, tend to slight the plentiful evidence that Bush took an early shine to his father’s secretary of defense. By both men’s accounts, confirmed by aides who bear no love for Cheney, Bush made the first approach. At a dinner in November 1999, he asked the Halliburton CEO to chair his national campaign. Then, in March 2000, Bush dispatched Allbaugh, his chief of staff, to sound out Cheney’s interest in being considered for running mate. In an interview with his authorized biographer, Cheney said he declined both overtures. “It was a firm no,” he said of his reply to Allbaugh. Bush depicted himself as a suitor who slowly broke down Cheney’s resistance. “It became apparent to me that Cheney was the kind of guy that would be a good fit for a two-term governor from Texas who, while he had a pretty good political pedigree, didn’t have a lot of what they call ‘Washington experience,’” he said. Bush’s biographer, who likewise spoke to both men, said the president emphasized the virtue of a partner “whose own political ambitions would not supersede his loyalty to Bush.”

  And yet the story is not so simple, because ambition’s link to disloyalty was exactly what Cheney impressed upon Bush with his parables of Rockefeller and Ford. In that context, Cheney’s denial of interest—the very act of spurning a shot at the ticket—proclaimed him as a man who posed no threat. Bush made clear, in his most revealing interview, how much that appealed to him. “He’s a thoughtful guy, he has the respect of the people around the table, and what he said made sense,” Bush said. “And plus, he didn’t want it.” There was a logic in that, from Bush’s point of view. Even so, equating ambition with latent mutiny pointed Bush toward an unusual idea: that he ought to choose a running mate who had no particular interest in reaching the White House. Historically, that was anomalous. Beginning with its first two occupants, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the vice presidency was at once the most frustrating job in government and the surest route to the top. Former vice presidents accounted for fully one-third of all presidents by the year 2000; still more had sought or won their party nominations. If that was not a good thing, as Cheney intimated, then candidates for Bush’s ticket acquired a hint of suspicion the moment they agreed to apply. Most of them, unlike Cheney, were in their political primes, young enough to think of elections to come.

  No one but Cheney can say for sure when he began to see a vice president in the mirror. By agreeing to manage the search, however, Cheney did something he does as well as anyone in Washington. He placed himself in the only vantage point that could show him how much time he had left to decide. Had Bush displayed signs of settling on someone else, Cheney would have been the first to know.

  What Cheney did not choose to do, more than what he did, offers the strongest evidence of an intention to keep his options open. Cheney is among the most careful of men with words, and every experienced executive knows how to say no with finality. In politics the classic formula was William Tecumseh Sherman’s in 1884: “If drafted I will not run; if nominated I will not accept; if elected I will not serve.” Florida’s Connie Mack offered an updated model in 2000, saying he would never speak to Cheney again if Cheney placed him on the list. Cheney, by contrast, took no unequivocal stand. When Bush announced at a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio, that Cheney would lead the search for a running mate—that was April 24, 2000, three weeks after Cheney actually began—the first point Bush added was that the role did not rule out Cheney’s own selection. Some weeks later, Colin Powell asked for and obtained a public announcement from Bush that he did not wish to be, and would not be, a candidate for the job. Cheney never did that. He therefore left a future president at risk of the embarrassment that comes with extending still another invitation and receiving still another rebuff. Such a breach of protocol would have been gratuitous had Cheney been determined to refuse.

  Close inspection of the record, bolstered by recent interviews with senior figures in the Bush campaign, shows that Cheney in fact advanced no commanding reason to keep him off the ticket. Every objection was either curable or framed in terms that Bush might easily think unimportant, even ignoble. The official story, in accounts the two men gave in 2000 and more recently to their authorized biographers, describes the Twelfth Amendment as a thorny problem, with Cheney pointing out more than once that the Constitution does not permit a president and vice president from the same state. (As chairman of the Dallas-based Halliburton, Cheney lived in Texas.) When the time came, he plucked that thorn with a day trip to register to vote at his second home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Cheney told Bush, moreover, that he had been arrested twice in the 1960s for driving under the influence of alcohol. The nominee, with a DUI of his own, could hardly be expected to blanch. Much the same went for Cheney’s argument that his oil-industry background might prove controversial, another point in common. As a son of Wyoming, whose paltry three electoral votes were reliably Republican anyway, Cheney said he had nothing to offer Bush in battleground states. But Bush had already declared himself indifferent, in his choice of running mate, to short-term electoral advantage. Cheney protested that he was happy in private life. That may have been the flimsiest excuse, the converse of the usual evasion of departing officials who talk about leaving
their jobs for more time with the family.

  On its face, Cheney’s strongest argument against himself was a history of heart disease. The way he put it was circumscribed. Cheney did not profess concern that running for vice president might damage his health or pose a risk to his life. Bush would have had little choice but to accept a firm refusal on those grounds. Cheney portrayed his heart, instead, as a threat to Bush’s political health, protection of which was properly for the nominee to decide. Cheney explained that he had not suffered a cardiac event for twelve years, and that his present health was good. In one of the few such meetings attended by the campaign’s inner circle, Cheney said “he was active and vigorous,” Karen Hughes recalled, “and ran a big worldwide business.” He warned that if he should suffer chest pains, he would have to go to a hospital for an exam. The potential problem was the “impact it might have on the campaign,” not on Cheney’s fitness for office. When asked whether his heart would impede his service as vice president, Cheney told the group he “didn’t think it would, since he had run an international business and been through lots of stress and intensity as secretary of defense during the Gulf War,” according to Hughes. Cheney was advising Bush to worry about himself, not Cheney—and about appearances, not reality. Bush had to decide, by that rubric, whether he had the spine to stand up to an empty political attack.