Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency Read online

  “What?” Keating said. “The only reason you know about it, Mike, is because I disclosed it, and the only person who had the information is Dick Cheney.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you how I got this, but what’s your answer?”

  And so Keating explained his history with Dreyfus. Isikoff’s story did him no favors. The Oklahoma governor, Newsweek wrote, lacked the “skeleton-free closet” that Bush demanded of his nominees. “The man who wanted to be the country’s top cop quietly took cash gifts totaling about $250,000—largely unreported but legal—from one of his top political fundraisers,” Isikoff wrote. In fact, as the story acknowledged, Keating had reported the gifts and cleared them with federal ethics officers. But the gifts had not become public knowledge in Oklahoma, which has no such disclosure requirement. The Newsweek story touched off an explosion in Keating’s home state. The legislature launched an investigation. Scores of local stories spoke of Keating’s abandonment even by his great friend George W. Bush. To stanch the bleeding, Keating decided to return all the money to Dreyfus, “a terrible burden on me financially.” By the time reporters examined the federal ethics rulings, the biggest man in Oklahoma was political roadkill, crushed under wheels he never heard coming. No one caught a clear view of the driver.

  There was a clue, Keating recalled. In December or early January, he said, long after the campaign returned his disclosure files, Cheney had phoned from transition headquarters. Refresh my memory, he asked, about those college gifts from your friend?

  “It obviously came from Dick Cheney or one of his people,” Keating said, referring to the Newsweek piece. “To say that it was chickenshit, excuse the expression, is an understatement. It was gratuitous, and it was petty, and it appeared vindictive to me, and it was utterly beneath the dignity of a person of Cheney’s achievement…. I mean, Dick Cheney coming into my life has been like a black cloud.”

  A fellow governor, John Engler—a Bush supporter from day one of the campaign—said he had reluctantly come to agree with Keating. “There’s only one way that it could have emerged,” he said. “I’ve always felt it was somebody other than Cheney himself, but Cheney as impresario of the process—someone in that process breached the confidentiality that had been promised.”

  The story did not go unnoticed in Washington. Keating made no public accusation—not until his interview for this book—but he hinted at his suspicion among friends. The rumor spread, and Keating thereby did the vice president a favor he did not intend. He propagated the message, educational and just deniable enough: Don’t cross Cheney. The town was full of important people who had handed the vice president their most personal files—John Kasich, the House Budget Committee chairman; Tom Ridge, the future secretary of homeland security; Bill Frist, the future Senate majority leader; John Danforth, the future UN ambassador; Jon Kyl, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee and the subcommittee on taxation; Chuck Hagel, a senator inclined to cast dissenting votes on some of the Bush administration’s more controversial requests. “Dick Cheney knows more about me than my mother, father, and wife,” Frist told the Washington Post. Not, he added, that he was complaining or anything.

  Keating’s bright future fell behind him. He phoned the White House, asked to speak to the president. It fell to Andrew Card, the new chief of staff, to return the call. Card absorbed Keating’s rage with soothing words of surprise and concern, assuring him of the president’s highest regard. “The president and I had an excellent relationship as governors,” Keating said, from his postpolitical perch as an insurance lobbyist. “And of course when this issue occurred, then the doors were closed and the lights were turned off, and I never talked to him again.”

  Chapter Two

  A DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDING

  Dick Cheney picked himself up from an armchair in his Four Seasons suite on San Jacinto Boulevard. As dawn approached on November 8, 2000, election night had given way to burlesque. The cable news began to hint of an ugly brawl in Florida. Cheney, exhausted, walked the few steps to his bedroom, leaving old friends and aides to keep vigil at the living room TV. By the time he awoke, it was war. James A. Baker III, one of half a dozen Republican Party lions who spent the night with Cheney in Austin, soon decamped to take command of the troops in Tallahassee. The official tally had George Bush ahead by 537 votes out of more than 5.9 million cast. For the next thirty-six days the two sides fought the recount precinct by precinct, chad by hanging chad, until Bush persuaded the Supreme Court to halt it for good. By then the greater part of the GOP talent pool—senators and governors, cabinet secretaries emeriti and aspiring—had enlisted one way or another in the Battle of Florida.

  Not Cheney. The recount had generals enough. After napping a few hours, he joined Bush at the governor’s mansion on Eleventh and Colorado, a mile north. Cheney had another mission in mind. Assume we win, he told Bush. There will be thousands of jobs to fill, not only in the cabinet but across the upper ranks of the federal government. Without appointments in waiting, Bush would limp out of the gate as president. And the Florida recount might take a week, a month, no way to tell.

  Somebody had to start assembling a team to take control at noon on January 20, 2001. Cheney volunteered. This was exactly the kind of inside job that Bush had in mind for his running mate. He appointed Cheney on the spot as chairman of the shadow transition for a presidency that might or might not come to be.

  With no official winner and thus no government office space, Cheney set up operations at 6613 Madison McLean Drive in the affluent Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia. He and Lynne had bought the three-bedroom town house in the Reagan years, when she chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities and he was climbing the GOP leadership in Congress. Now their round kitchen table became the nerve center of a government in waiting.

  Three cell phones formed a makeshift switchboard for Cheney—his own, his daughter Liz’s, and the one assigned to Brian V. McCormack, the “body man” who kept Cheney supplied and connected wherever he went. A rotating cast of aides fielded telephone calls, beginning with the trio who had run the vice-presidential screening the summer before: Liz Cheney, counsel David Addington, and troubleshooter David Gribbin. Joining them from time to time were Mary Cheney, the younger daughter, and senior visitors from the Bush campaign. Cheney did much of the work alone. He had extensive networks in Washington, beginning with a database of his own former aides. The kitchen television, volume down, tracked developments in Florida—usually Fox News, sometimes the Don Imus show on MSNBC. Jim Baker, the former secretary of state and treasury and political operator par excellence, called with updates from behind the scenes. But Cheney focused steadily on the four years ahead. Referring to Florida, McCormack said Cheney’s view was that “we need to prepare in the event this war comes out in our favor.”

  Those were turbulent weeks, all adrenaline and foreboding. Nobody could say how it all would end—who would be president, how we would know, whether a fractured electorate could unite. Could anyone even guarantee there would be a president when Bill Clinton walked out the door? Julianna Glover, Cheney’s newly arrived press secretary, observed that Cheney “had a calming effect” on Bush and the staff. “When things got especially tumultuous his decision was to get more involved.”

  Amid so many anomalies, it was easy to miss the peculiarity of what Cheney was doing in McLean. Vice presidents do not run transition teams. They do not hire cabinet chiefs and assistant directors and deputy assistant secretaries. A vice president breaks tie Senate votes and tries to keep on breathing in case the president happens to stop. In ordinary times the White House chief of staff, or someone else with real authority, looks for a delicate way to box the fellow in. Cheney had done exactly that with Nelson Rockefeller.

  At an academic conference in 1986 he described the headaches.

  “The problem when you try to put a vice president in roles, you’re always trying to fit him somehow in staff operations inside the White House,” he said. “And th
e fact of the matter is you’ve got a different set of criteria for selecting a vice president than you do staff. And by virtue of the fact that he is a constitutional officer, that he isn’t subject to the same kinds of—”

  Cheney stopped and rewound the sentence. Point was, even the president could not fire the vice.

  “—that it’s a different relationship, that other staff people often-times will defer to him as vice president, rather than treat him as a staff person and argue and debate with him and so forth. There are just some very basic fundamental problems there in trying to make that work.”

  From his new perspective, Cheney saw things differently. If vice-presidential autonomy was a problem, it was no longer his. John Marsh, one of Cheney’s closest associates since their work in side-by-side offices in the Ford White House, said his “major concern, one of them was, and I agree, that there needs to be a greater and more effective role for the Vice President.” Cheney now “holds the view, as do I…that everything should run through his office. You’ll notice that he’s never said it. But he’s demonstrated it by action, by the accretion of power.”

  It is true that Cheney does not speak in those terms in public. Not, at least, about the vice presidency. But just before reaching that office, he gave a precise taxonomy of power in the White House. At a Washington conference in October 2000, Cheney described James Baker’s division of labor with Edwin Meese when Baker was White House chief of staff and Meese was counselor to Ronald Reagan. “So, Jim had laid down on one side of the piece of paper things like personnel, process, schedule, speech writing, legislative relations,” Cheney said. “That was his side of the chart. On the other side of the chart were all the policy areas that Ed Meese was responsible for. I wanted Jim’s side of the ledger! He knew exactly what he was doing when he went in and he was an effective chief of staff, because those were the items that he had that let him control and preside over the White House.”

  As vice president, Cheney would dip into each of those bailiwicks, and more.

  “Once he’s taken a position, I think that’s it,” Baker said in an interview. “He has been pretty damn good at accumulating power, extraordinarily effective and adept at exercising power.”

  In one-on-one talks with Bush, according to accounts Bush gave his senior aides afterward, Cheney was explicit about his conception of the vice presidency. Before agreeing to join the Republican ticket, in the pivotal conversation on the back porch in Crawford over Independence Day weekend, Cheney made clear he was not interested in the traditional portfolio of political fund-raisers and ceremonial trips. “He said from the outset, ‘If I’m going to do this I’m going to do this differently…. I’m not going to be the guy going to funerals. I want to be a real partner in helping you make decisions with regard to domestic and foreign policy,’” recalled Dan Bartlett, who served as counselor to Bush in Austin and for most of two terms in the White House. That negotiation, Bartlett said, had already been sealed by July.

  So here Cheney was at his kitchen table in November, populating the federal government. In those crucial six weeks before the Supreme Court called the election on December 12, he was by any measure the dominant force in creating the Bush administration to be.

  He did not steal the role or sneak up on it. He asked for it openly, and Bush said yes. Nor was it unknown for an incoming vice president to suggest a friend or two for the cabinet. Al Gore sponsored Les Aspin for Defense and Carole Browner for the Environmental Protection Agency. But Cheney’s commanding role on major appointments was without precedent.

  Cheney lived by the Reagan-era slogan “personnel is policy,” a battle cry for conservatives who regarded the permanent bureaucracy with unease. It started before Reagan, if Lynne Cheney’s novel is any reflection of his views. Her fictional president “made a mental check list of what he should be worrying about. It was all people, he realized.”

  Cheney told associates that the career civil service, resistant to change and invested in years of liberal excess, would be no friend of George W. Bush. The president, he said, would need a cadre of tough-minded enforcers to carry out his agenda. McCormack, his twenty-six-year-old personal aide, said Cheney spent those days in the kitchen making up lists on a lined yellow pad and sounding out potential nominees. He began with the four power posts: State, Treasury, Justice, and Defense. Cheney recruited candidates, preinter-viewed them, and escorted them for Bush’s approval in Austin. All promises, of necessity, were provisional. But Cheney behaved as if there were no doubt that he and Bush were headed for the White House. “He was moving forward with ‘How do we prepare to govern?’” McCormack recalled. By the time the young aide arrived each morning, usually by 6:30, “the cell phones were going. He had his lists. The guy never stopped.” One day, the Secret Service detail stopped McCormack on his way in.

  “Is he okay?” one agent asked. “Because the light went on at 4:30 in the morning.”

  “He was probably reading,” McCormack replied.

  There is no way to understand what happened when Bush took office without a brief tour of how his government came to be. For the State Department, Bush had already set his sights on Colin Powell. Cheney had handpicked Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ten years earlier, elevating him over more-senior generals. Their relationship, forged in the crucible of the Persian Gulf War, was correct and professional but not warm. Cheney suspected the man of too much fondness for his own press clips, a cardinal defect by Cheney’s lights. Still, Cheney believed Bush could make good use of Powell’s popularity. And if it came to a policy struggle, according to aides, Cheney seemed to have a pugilist’s confidence that Powell would be the one to hit the canvas. In late November, Cheney escorted the third-most-admired man in America to Bush’s dusty east Texas ranch to seal the deal. Later, Cheney would see to it that allies, including his daughter Liz, found influential posts in Powell’s State Department. “You could help yourself a lot,” he told Powell in December, by finding a senior job for John R. Bolton, a vocal advocate of unilateral U.S. intervention against “rogue regimes.”

  On the day of Powell’s coming out, December 16, 2000, he appeared with Bush at a news conference that reinforced Cheney’s determination to limit his authority. Powell made the mistake of giving a bravura tour of the global horizon, at length, with an expressionless Cheney and a fidgeting president-elect standing behind him. Bush pursed his lips and glanced from side to side as the minutes passed. Powell spoke fluently about a broad range of foreign policy issues—and strayed, as well, into military affairs. He would need a counter-weight, according to Cheney’s aides, and the vice president–elect had just the man for the job.

  Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s mentor since the Nixon administration and probably his closest friend, got the nod for defense secretary. That came in the face of a pointed reminder from Jim Baker of Rumsfeld’s toxic history with George H. W. Bush, whose political ambitions Rumsfeld tried to crush in the 1970s. “All I’m going to say to you is, you know what he did to your daddy,” Baker told the younger Bush. Cheney brought Bush one other option, former senator Daniel Coats, but Coats was ambivalent about the job and had no executive experience. Rumsfeld was a force of nature. He appealed to Bush’s fondness for “transformation,” “game changers,” big ideas. It was not a hard choice, as Cheney framed it.

  To fill the Treasury job, Cheney would hear of no one but Paul O’Neill, a Ford administration comrade who had since turned the once-sleepy Alcoa company into a leviathan. O’Neill was competent, conservative, and deferential to the president’s prerogatives, a quality that augured well for Cheney’s plans to centralize economic policy in the White House. For attorney general, Cheney tapped John Ashcroft, who had just suffered his humiliating reelection defeat and was all the more grateful for a face-saving exit from the Senate. Spencer Abraham, too, had just lost his Senate seat. Abraham impressed Cheney in the first Bush administration as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Quayle. Cheney placed him at Energy, a dep
artment that Abraham had proposed to abolish. Cheney also hired Christine Todd Whitman, who once worked for him in Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity, to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Robert Zoellick, Jim Baker’s right-hand man at State and Treasury in the 1990s, was Cheney’s pick for U.S. trade representative.

  Cheney took care to defer to Bush, leaving the final yea or nay on each prospective nominee to the man at the top of the ticket. Bush ratified each choice.

  Cheney had a westerner’s gut hostility to regulation, and he asked a like-minded friend from his House days, former congressman Robert Smith, to identify candidates for Interior and Agriculture. Cheney was looking for “the aggressive establishment of another philosophy of government,” Smith recalled. He wanted nominees who would bring “accountability, finally, that the government wasn’t there to put people out of business.” For Interior, Cheney settled on Gale Norton, who spent much of her legal career representing oil, lumber, and mining interests. She was an advocate of “market-oriented, property rights–based, locally controlled” decisions on the environment. For Agriculture it was Ann Veneman, a former number two in that department who went on to work for a trade group funded by agribusiness giants Nestlé, Kraft, and Archer Daniels Midland.

  The cabinet mattered, but Cheney did not stop there. Second-and third-ranking officials could be vital allies. He sponsored Sean O’Keefe, his old Pentagon comptroller and Navy secretary, for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget—among the least glamorous and most powerful of positions. The OMB not only allocated every dollar spent by the federal government, but spoke for the executive branch, thumbs-up or thumbs-down, on legislation pending before Congress.

  Stephen J. Hadley, who landed the deputy national security adviser job under Condoleezza Rice, was another of Cheney’s “Defense Dogs,” an informal group of Pentagon alumni. The Dogs held reunions now and then—soft drinks at the Army-Navy Club, in deference to pack leader David Gribbin, a Mormon. Like a lot of Cheney’s employees, then and since, Hadley admired the man and found him unnerving in roughly equal measure. One day at the Pentagon, where Hadley served as an assistant secretary in the early 1990s, he emerged from Cheney’s office and ran into Gribbin. Once again he had briefed his boss and received little more than an inscrutable nod in return.