Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency Page 3

  The public record on David Addington, after three decades in Washington, turned up exactly one hearing in Congress, one grand jury transcript, and one on-the-record interview in print. The interview was largely unremarkable, save for its allusion to an intriguing moment in the early days of the vice-presidential search. As they designed the screening process, Addington recounted, he “joked that if Cheney did a good job on the search, Bush might ask him to be his running mate.” According to both men, Cheney “dismissed the comment with a laugh.”

  Acquaintances said Addington and Cheney shared a dry sense of humor, but neither was given to idle chat. Their wit tended more toward the topical than the trifling. One point of context for that exchange was a history they shared on the Cheney for President exploratory committee in 1994. Cheney abandoned his brief flirtation with the 1996 Republican nomination.

  For all the talk of desired qualities—judgment, experience, gravitas—the search for Bush’s running mate looked harder at vice than virtue. What unpleasant surprise awaited if this or that contender joined the ticket? Which predictable lines of attack? Where were the hidden defects, the offenses against valuable interest groups? Such are the preoccupations of any national campaign, protecting itself against risk. Cheney had been through the exercise before, when he helped Ford choose Robert Dole as Rockefeller’s replacement. Much later, he told his biographer that the 2000 screening bore out his “experience over the years…that you usually end up with the least worst option.” Dan Quayle, who once passed through the wringer himself and consulted with the Bush campaign from afar, compared the process to enactment of a law. “It’s a lot easier to kill legislation than pass legislation,” he said. “So it’s a lot easier to knock off V.P. candidates than to actually get one through the mill.”

  It was Addington who oversaw the disassembly of candidates, cataloging their blemishes and mounting them for inspection. Admirers and critics alike called him a paperwork prodigy, slashing through great volumes of text and carving out points of interest with uncanny speed. Bearded and barrel-chested and standing more than six feet tall, Addington was prone to strong opinions and a pugilistic tone in advancing them. After compiling the records on Keating, Alexander, Frist, Hagel, and the rest, Addington prepared a comprehensive memo on each. “That’s the way presidential and vice-presidential processes go,” Alexander said in a conversation in early 2008, as the Democratic and Republican fields were winnowed down to two contenders each. “We can see it going on right now. You take very good people and you begin to poke holes in them.”

  Two things stood out in retrospect about Cheney’s selection for the 2000 ticket, neither understood at the time.

  The hardest one to explain was that Bush—who put so much stock in his instinct for people, that knack for decoding a handshake or the quality of a gaze—did not interview a single candidate before he settled on Cheney. Bush was acquainted with most of them, to one degree or another. But those interactions came “in a very different context,” as Keating put it, in his case “on issues of importance to governors.” Bush never sat the contenders down, never laid eyes on them as they answered points of doubt, never heard out their worldviews or their visions of a White House partnership. Bush and Cheney concealed that omission by maintaining a false suspense in the weeks before the Republican convention began in Philadelphia on July 31. Timing the news for best advantage is routine in any political campaign. In this case the tactic did not so much postpone the news as rewrite it, promoting a tale of scrutiny by Bush that included personal interviews with top contenders.

  The calendar told the story. July 3 was the decisive day, when Bush asked Cheney to join the ticket and Cheney replied for the first time that he was willing. (Cheney told his biographer it was only then, in the sweltering heat of Bush’s back porch, that he reached the reluctant conclusion that the “least worst option” was himself.) Cheney told Bush he would decide how to divest from Halliburton and gather the required assurances from his doctors.

  For the next three weeks, campaign spinners fed news stories touting Ridge, Keating, and Danforth as front-runners. Only after the Independence Day weekend did Bush and Cheney begin to schedule interviews for a vacancy that no longer existed. Cheney phoned Ridge on July 5 to make one such appointment. The Pennsylvania governor replied instead that he no longer wished to be considered. Cheney asked him not to say so in public. Four days later, on July 9, CNN found Ridge in State College, Pennsylvania, where he was host of a summer gathering of fellow governors. Correspondent Gary Tuchman introduced Ridge as “the leader of an important swing state” and “a top-tier possibility” to join the ticket with Bush. “Are you nervous about waiting for this decision?” he asked. “No,” Ridge replied gamely. “I believe ultimately it’s a matter of trust, and let the chips fall where they may.”

  Two days after that, July 11, Cheney flew to Washington. On his public agenda was a meeting with Frist, in fact Cheney’s first substantial interview with a contender. Not disclosed, the same day, was Cheney’s appointment with his doctor to arrange a summary health report for Bush. On July 14, Bush conducted his own first audition—with New York governor George Pataki, who had filled out Cheney’s questionnaire. Campaign officials said Pataki was “in the mix.” Pataki did not dispute the report at the time. In truth, the New York governor chatted briefly with Bush “about their families, about politics and whatnot,” David Catalfamo, Pataki’s communications director, recalled recently. Bush “never brought up the issue of the vice presidency.”

  Back in Texas the next day, July 15, Bush disclosed for the first time to Hughes, Rove, and Allbaugh that Cheney was his man. (He heard out their best efforts as devil’s advocates, but none of them had access to Cheney’s files.) Three days after that, on July 18, Bush scheduled his second and last interview with a candidate, generating news coverage of a meeting with Danforth and his wife. Retired senator Alan Simpson, one of Cheney’s oldest political friends, said Cheney had recommended Danforth for the job and set up the meeting, saying “Here’s one for you. This guy’s great.” If Cheney told that to Simpson, it was not true. The deal was already done.

  Only after this final feint, on July 21, did Cheney register to vote in Wyoming, a fact he had to know would become public. The same day, satisfying a requirement of his contract with Halliburton, he notified the board of directors that he might be about to depart the job. On July 25, Bush announced his decision to face Al Gore in the general election with Cheney at his side. Neither Bush nor Cheney held a face-to-face interview for the job with Keating, Alexander, Ridge, Hagel, Kasich, Engler, or any of the other ersatz finalists.

  Some campaign officials disputed that, pointing to Bush’s late-June campaign stop in Wayne, Michigan, alongside Engler. Bush was quoted as saying Engler is “on the list,” adding, “What do you expect me to say? He’s standing right here.” Years later, Engler said Bush spent his downtime on a treadmill that day. The two men spoke for a few minutes about Michigan politics and their children—Bush’s twin girls, Engler’s triplets. As for becoming Bush’s running mate, “I never had that conversation,” Engler said.

  The precedent Bush and Cheney set, establishing a forum of two for the most sensitive deliberations, would follow them to Washington.

  Equally meaningful in light of events to come was Cheney’s deft avoidance of the scrutiny he had conducted on the other candidates. “He went down through everybody’s negatives,” Quayle recalled. “And everybody has negatives…. And nobody really vetted him on what his negatives were.” Gribbin, for example, was a trusted friend who maintained his own records of work with Cheney across the years. When the author asked him whether anyone requested that he produce those files, or review them, he replied, “No. Heaven and good grief, no.” Gribbin, who had full access to the other dossiers, added, “I don’t have knowledge of who vetted the vetter. I don’t know who vetted Cheney or what process they used. It was not something I was involved in or that anybody ever told me. At some point
there was a decision that all these names were going to be set aside, and they were going to select Cheney. It was a shock to me.”

  Cheney did not fill out his own questionnaire, a fact obscured in the days after Bush’s announcement. “Secretary Cheney told me he subjected himself to the same kind of scrutiny” as everyone else, campaign spokeswoman Karen Hughes said in a briefing for reporters. Hughes said Allbaugh scrutinized the record of Cheney’s service in the executive and legislative branches, while Bush himself—a man known even then for aversion to detail—inspected Cheney’s financial and medical history. Gradually it emerged that all this took place in the space of just over a week. The story left untold was that no one had access to Cheney’s tax or corporate records, and no one but his own doctor read a word of his medical files. Cheney, who had employed a man named James Steen for many years as a personal archivist, did not submit even his public speeches, interviews, testimony, and voting record to Allbaugh, who ostensibly was combing them for red flags.

  Dan Bartlett, then and later a top communications strategist for Bush, said the campaign was “utterly unprepared” for Cheney and that weeks after the announcement he was still scrambling to uncover basic facts about Bush’s running mate. “We were caught flat-footed,” unable to respond to Democratic attacks on Cheney’s voting record against Head Start, school lunch programs, and the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. “Literally our in-house research team, myself and others, were just poring through—I mean, boxes were kind of just dumped, there was no road map, there were no concise answers,” Bartlett said. “Like I said, we were on our heels.” A member of Halliburton’s public relations shop, designated by Cheney to answer corporate questions, proved unhelpful. When the campaign asked questions, Bartlett said, Halliburton replied that the records were in storage or “‘That lawyer doesn’t work for us anymore.’” Cheney set his heels against opening the books at Halliburton, saying “We’re not going to drag them in.” Bartlett went to Bush and said, “We’re getting our asses kicked in the media because we’re not prepared.”

  Cheney rode it out, and Bush went along. “To his standard he probably thinks he’s an open book,” Bartlett said. “To his standard—trust me. It really goes to this whole mind-set of how he entered this job. He entered this job less in his mind as a politician than as a public servant. He made his decision not to run for president in ’96, and I think he viewed this as ‘I was in private life, this guy has convinced me to come back, I’m going to help him, [but] I’m not going to completely tear my private life apart to do this.’ When it came to things that touched home, his thing was ‘I’m not going through that.’ I’m not saying it’s logical, I’m just saying that was the Cheney worldview.”

  And as for Cheney’s ailing heart? Hughes told reporters after the announcement that Bush had commissioned an independent review of his running mate’s medical fitness. Bush’s father, the former president, suggested a second opinion from Denton A. Cooley, a man of sterling authority. Cooley was founder of the Texas Heart Institute and recipient of a Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan. According to the Bush campaign, Cooley took his own careful look and vouched for Cheney’s health.

  That was not quite half true. Cooley thought he was doing the former president a quiet favor, and did not expect his involvement to be cited as an independent medical review. Reached at the soaring glass building named for him at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, he said Bush’s father asked him to sound out Cheney’s personal physician in Washington, Jonathan S. Reiner. Cooley did not know the man but found him open and persuasive. In a brief conversation, Cheney’s doctor offered a “personal assurance that his cardiac status was sound.” Cooley did not look at Cheney’s films, electrocardiac data, or any other records, nor did he make the wide-ranging medical inquiries conducted on the other candidates for Bush’s running mate.

  Four months later, Cooley saw the news that Cheney had been rushed to the hospital for insertion of a stent in a coronary artery. “It wasn’t a real surprise at all,” he said, because Cheney clearly had chronic heart problems. In retrospect, Cooley said, he had “some misgivings to pass on his condition” without examining Cheney or seeing the records for himself. On the other hand, he said, he is a surgeon, not a cardiologist. For a thorough review of Cheney’s health, another doctor would have been a better choice.

  As it happened, Keating had scheduled his own news conference on the day Bush announced that Cheney would join the 2000 ticket. Keating went ahead with the unveiling of his Oklahoma Capitol Dome, a big and popular project. That evening, he accepted an invitation to sing Cheney’s praises on television. “There are really only two people in public life in America, at least on our team, that certainly are stratospheric characters, and that’s Colin Powell and Dick Cheney,” he said on CNN’s Crossfire program. “The rest of us are down with the cumulus clouds. And when Dick Cheney was selected by George, I was enthusiastic about it. This guy has a distinguished record in the Congress, in the administration, he led the country, he certainly led the Department of Defense, was Colin Powell’s boss in the Persian Gulf War, did a great job. A matter of pride for all of us as Americans. He’s been an extraordinarily successful business guy. I was thrilled. I wasn’t disappointed at all, because I never thought I would get it.”

  There would be other fish to fry if Bush reached the White House. Bush liked familiar faces around him. Keating had served barbecue with the man at a high school on the Oklahoma-Texas border. By late November, Keating found himself in Palm Beach, counting chads with the other VIP volunteers as the Florida recount ground on. When the Supreme Court called the election for Bush, Keating was on everybody’s lips for a senior cabinet post. Newsweek said he “was on the supershort veep list and could be attorney general or FBI chief.”

  Cheney, who was running the transition, had other plans. The law—its interpretation, its enforcement—was critical to the exercise of White House power. As Cheney saw things, the attorney general, like every other member of the cabinet, ought to be subordinate to the president. There was only one executive authority in the Constitution. You might hardly know it from the way some attorneys general behaved. To Cheney’s way of thinking, independence and Justice Department experience might not be virtues. In any case, Cheney had another person in mind. John Ashcroft, the former Missouri senator, had just been defeated for reelection by a dead man. That was a rude way of saying it, but euphemism did not capture the chagrin. Ashcroft’s opponent, Democratic governor Mel Carnahan, had perished in a plane crash three weeks before election day, too late to have his name removed from the ballot. He won anyway. (Jean Carnahan, his wife, was appointed in his place.) Ashcroft would be grateful for the Justice post, and he would have a steep learning curve to climb. Ashcroft was accustomed, as well, to minding the party leadership. Or so went the thinking at the time. Later, Ashcroft would surprise the vice president on that point.

  Keating wanted the job, and he enjoyed vocal support. That needed watching. Not many constituencies mattered more than the Federalist Society, which had brought its influence to bear on government and legal education since its birth at the dawn of the Reagan revolution. “Most of the conservatives were backing either Keating or Ashcroft,” recalled Leonard Leo, the society’s executive vice president. “I and a number of other Catholics had kind of put our weight behind Governor Keating.” The Oklahoman’s track record in the Justice Department lent confidence that he would be not only conservative but effective. Still, as Leo added in an e-mail: “Frank Keating is a straight shooter. He doesn’t mince words. He would have believed in the unitary executive, but, as AG, certainly would have told the WH what he thought and would have pushed back when there were differences of opinion.” A conservative with comparable views said, “Maybe that’s not what they were looking for.”

  Keating’s incautious wit, which had drawn him into hot water before, may have sealed his fate. Shortly before election day 2000, someone asked Keating, a bit
naughtily, whether he planned a bid for the vacancy left by Cheney at Halliburton. “No,” Keating replied, smiling. “But I would like to chair the next selection committee.” Years later, a joke like that would become permissible. Cheney told it on himself in February of his final year in office. “My close association with the President goes back to the year 2000, when he asked me to lead the search for a vice presidential nominee,” he deadpanned. The friendly audience at the Omni Shoreham Hotel was laughing already. Cheney didn’t need the punch line, but he paused and then delivered it with nice comic timing: “That worked out pretty well.” The audience roared. The next month, a reporter asked Bush how he would advise John McCain to choose a running mate for 2008. “I’d tell him to be careful about who he names to be the head of the selection committee,” Bush cracked.

  Back in the fall of 2000, with the general election looking close, Keating’s jibe had some sting. It got back to Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters. “I was told that my friends in the new administration were not amused,” Keating said.

  Keating had risen with Newsweek, and Newsweek brought him down. The magazine’s investigative bulldog, Michael Isikoff, was fresh from a series of scoops in the long-running Clinton-Lewinsky impeachment scandal. Keating was celebrating the Oklahoma Sooners’ Orange Bowl victory in a cottage in the Florida Keys when he got word that Isikoff was looking for him. Now, that could not be anything good. Keating returned the call. Isikoff, as it turned out, had come across a fragment of Keating’s vice-presidential file.

  “We have information that the reason you weren’t selected as attorney general is because of these questionable gifts to your kids,” Isikoff said, as Keating recalled the conversation. “From the highest sources, I’ve heard that you didn’t disclose any of this.”