Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency Read online

  “You know, Cheney somehow intimidates me,” Hadley told Gribbin. “He’s not trying to intimidate me, but when I’m sitting there briefing him, I’m talking a little fast and my voice is a little high.”

  Gribbin, who described that encounter, said Cheney “doesn’t lavish praise. It’s not the way he leads. Nevertheless I have heard him say of Hadley, ‘He’s a good hand.’”

  In the policy fields that Cheney cared about, he found places for allies even deeper in the bureaucracy. He did it gently, by way of suggestions, not commands, to those who did the hiring. Most of the government’s work, Cheney knew, never reached the altitude of Senate-confirmed appointees. Reliable people in midlevel posts would have the last word on numberless decisions about where to spend or not spend money, whom to regulate, how to enforce. Thus did Paul Hoffman, the former state director of Cheney’s congressional office in Casper, Wyoming, become deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife. That position, which oversees the listing and delisting of endangered species, went to Hoffman after Cheney “penned a short letter” on his behalf, Hoffman said.

  “What he knows as well as anyone is you can’t run all of government from the seat of the vice president’s office,” Hoffman said. “You cannot insert yourself into every branch and agency. His genius is”—here Hoffman laughed modestly—“with the exception of me, he picks brilliant people, he builds networks and puts the right people in the right places, and then trusts them to make well-informed decisions that comport with his overall vision.”

  Gribbin spoke of Cheney’s “web of contacts—it’s the people he knows, and the people they know.”

  The web had its limits. It did not include most of the Friends of George from the Republican Governors Association. Bush had cast himself as a Washington outsider and promised to bring outside talent with him. John Engler of Michigan, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, Marc Racicot of Montana, Frank Keating of Oklahoma, George Pataki of New York—all of them were touted as top prospects. When the dust cleared in January, none of them had found a place in the cabinet.

  Cheney’s first two hires were for his own staff. The men he appointed, possessed of far more experience and force of will than their counterparts on Bush’s staff, would have outsized influence on the course of events to come.

  David Addington, Cheney’s longtime lawyer and a ferocious advocate of presidential authority, was the obvious choice as counsel to the vice president. He had a prodigious capacity for work and a résumé that taught him how the change of a sentence in the right place could shift the nation’s path. At forty-three, he had already served as staff attorney to three House committees, assistant general counsel of the CIA, a deputy assistant to the president under Ronald Reagan, and general counsel of Cheney’s Pentagon. The son of an Army general, Addington had aspired to a military career but dropped out of the Naval Academy as a freshman. He was a gun enthusiast and liked to join Cheney on hunting trips. In several jobs, he had served as Cheney’s enforcer in the bureaucracy.

  “Addington was brutally effective and efficient at that,” Gribbin said. “Gatekeepers like that who are remarkably talented also have a capacity to bend things in their direction,” though Gribbin said he never saw Addington do so for personal advantage.

  There was nothing of the cynic in Addington, none of the expedience that often comes with power. Addington displayed an immoderate zeal for principle in matters great and small. Colleagues came to expect eccentric bursts of passion, including a campaign to forbid the personal use of frequent-flier miles earned on government business.

  The new leader of Cheney’s retinue was I. Lewis Libby, fifty, a compact man of angular features confined under taut control. He, too, had served under Cheney at the Defense Department, but he did not reach the innermost circle. A late arrival to the presidential campaign, Libby soon made himself indispensable as “Cheney’s Cheney,” the consummate operator and adviser. Libby oversaw months of preparation for Cheney’s most important campaign event, the vice-presidential debate. Warm and charming among friends, Libby hewed to a punctilious formality at work. He probed deeply and spoke with precision, revealing little. In photographs, smiling or not, he compressed his lips. Allies and rivals described Libby as an implacable negotiator, gifted, like his boss, in the uses of silence and an unbroken gaze.

  With all this came an incongruous nickname, “Scooter,” acquired in infancy. Pete Williams, who brought a mischievous streak to his work as Cheney’s chief spokesman at the Pentagon in the early 1990s, once heard a puzzled general ask, “Who is ‘Skippy’?” Delighted at the misfire, Williams allowed himself to repeat it around the building. One day Libby summoned Williams to his office, sat him down, and closed the door. “My name is Scooter,” he said, locking eyes. “Not ‘Skippy.’”

  At Yale, years before, Libby had studied political science under Paul Wolfowitz, then followed him on an ideological exodus from their liberal Jewish roots. As an undergraduate, Libby was vice president of the campus Democrats, a young man who could call the roll of all seventy-nine original episodes of Star Trek. (Some of those old episode titles, in light of Libby’s subsequent path, invite double takes now: “Journey to Babel,” “Balance of Terror,” “A Private Little War,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “The Enemy Within.”) Like Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives, Libby grew disenchanted with the government’s expansion at home but more inclined to endorse a muscular role abroad. Wolfowitz left academic life for the State Department in 1972, and Libby joined him in 1981. Eight years after that, Cheney appointed Wolfowitz undersecretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon’s third-ranking job. Libby signed on as principal deputy. The two men were among the few to dissent in 1991, when George H. W. Bush cut short the Persian Gulf War without toppling Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

  Libby had a literary bent and a dark imagination, romantic and violent. Off and on for more than twenty years, he wrote a novel set in turn-of-the-century Japan amid a smallpox outbreak and intimations of war. In The Apprentice, a nameless youth bears witness to murder, stumbles upon a wooden box of unknown but urgent import, and is tortured with hot coals and tongs for a secret he does not possess. Silent, lethal men appear and disappear in a snow-blinded landscape, carrying out intrigues in service of…the reader learns not what.

  “What great truth would you know?” scoffs a member of the mysterious elite toward the end of the novel, when the youth looks for answers about his ordeal. “What would make a difference for you? At stake were the plans for war with the Russe or the emperor’s secret goals in Manchuria. There was a list of conspirators that threatened the lords of the land, or a list of the lords of the land who are conspirators. You helped us keep from others the lay of our defenses. Or our offenses. They are all nothing to you.”

  “They meant something to you,” the youth replies.

  “Yes, to us. Much.”

  Friends and colleagues said Libby identified with strong men who labor in the shadows to protect a public that grasps little of their work. He alluded to that frame of mind in 2002, three months after The Apprentice came out in paperback and less than a year before the invasion of Iraq. When Wolfowitz recruited him to government, Libby recalled, he happened to be reading A Man Called Intrepid, the rousing account of a British spy’s secret exploits against the Nazis. The central character, sometimes cited as a model for the fictional James Bond, led a life of purpose and excitement that Libby could not hope to find in a Philadelphia law firm. That realization, he said, drew him to Washington.

  In November 2000, Cheney asked Libby to become his national security adviser. That was a canny move in light of Libby’s history with Condi Rice, the Stanford University provost who was likely to take the corresponding job for Bush. Rice had been a director on the National Security Council staff under Bush’s father. To outsiders that sounds like a powerful post, but directors live on the bottom rung of the White House ladder, below senior directors, deputy assistants to the president, and—most exalte
d—assistants to the president. Libby’s job at the Defense Department, in the same period, made him Rice’s senior when they met in interagency debates. Steve Hadley, the mild-mannered lawyer who would become Rice’s deputy, had served beneath Libby at Defense.

  Libby did not accept Cheney’s offer, not at first. He played a gambit that Cheney might have tried in his place. Libby proposed to hold two jobs—chief of staff and national security adviser. That would give him command of every employee in the office of the vice president, or OVP, and a portfolio that spanned domestic as well as foreign affairs. It was an audacious bid, but Cheney saw something he liked. Libby got what he asked for, and more. Cheney arranged for Libby, whom Bush knew only slightly, to hold a third title as assistant to the president. Like so many apparent technicalities to come, this meant something.

  The presidential appointment placed Libby atop two separate and parallel hierarchies in the White House. He would work for Cheney, but also outrank nearly everyone who worked for Bush in the Executive Office of the President. Among his few peers would be Rice, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, and political adviser Karl Rove. No one save Cheney and Bush themselves were his superiors. Like every assistant to the president, Libby would see and have the right to challenge any speech, legislation, or executive order before it reached the Oval Office. No reciprocal right came with Card’s job, or Rove’s, when documents flowed to or from the vice president.

  Two weeks into the Florida recount, on November 22, Cheney awoke in the night with a radiating pain in his chest and shoulder. The Secret Service sped him through nearly deserted streets, arriving at 4:30 a.m. in the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital.

  The votes were all cast, if not all counted, but as a matter of electoral politics Cheney’s ailing heart was unwelcome news. A weakened candidate would not change the arithmetic in Florida, but the Bush campaign feared the episode could tip the subtle psychology of national acceptance. Bush would arrive at the White House, if at all, with the slenderest of mandates. He could ill afford any intimation of frailty. Campaign strategists held a conference call and settled on a plan: they would manage the news to dampen its shock, then rapidly rebuild Cheney’s image of strength and calm.

  Bush came out early that morning, announcing in Austin that Cheney had gone to the hospital “as a precautionary measure.” Bush added, “He had no heart attack. I’m pleased to report that.” Soon after, Cheney’s doctors gave a matter-of-fact account of Cheney’s treatment. They told reporters they had used a balloon on a catheter to open the patient’s blocked coronary artery, then inserted a stent—a tiny coil, resembling a Slinky—to shore up the arterial walls. What all that obscured, and what the doctors did not mention, was that Cheney in fact had suffered a heart attack, his fourth since the age of thirty-seven. Several hours passed, and the story had been defined as a minor event, before Dr. Alan Wasserman returned to the cameras with news that there was “a very slight heart attack.”

  In chronic coronary disease, damage to the heart muscle is cumulative. Cheney appeared to rebound quickly, but the public had no way to judge his underlying health. He declined, then and after, to release the results of diagnostic tests.

  That night, at a few minutes past nine, CNN’s Larry King Live prepared to showcase a debate between lawyers from the Gore and Bush campaigns. By then the Florida recount was tangled in twenty-two county lawsuits and had reached the state supreme court. The lawyers were just getting started when a producer transmitted something into Larry King’s ear.

  “Let me interrupt—let me hold you right there,” King told the lawyers. “Dick Cheney from his hospital bed at George Washington University Hospital is joining us. How are you feeling, Dick?”

  “Well, I feel pretty good, Larry.”

  Not for nothing was the avuncular King the television host of choice for politicians and celebrities in trouble.

  “Well, you sound great,” he declared.

  “Well, it’s—you’ve been through this procedure yourself, I’m sure,” Cheney said. They had spoken once, off camera, of their respective adventures in coronary care.

  “Yes,” King agreed.

  “But no, I feel good and everything’s looking good. We did a stent today. But everything’s fine, and the catheterization looked good, so I should be out of here in a day or two.”

  “How about the stress?” King asked.

  “Well, I—frankly, it may sound hard to believe, but I have not found this last couple of weeks as stressful, for example, as, say, the Gulf War.”

  Did Cheney have any doubt he could do the job if elected?

  “No doubt about my serving,” Cheney said.

  Settled that.

  By the next day, Thanksgiving, Cheney’s reassuring tones were accounted a public relations coup. Colin Powell’s wife, Alma, delivered a roast turkey and trimmings to Cheney’s hospital room. Cheney sat half upright in bed with the TV remote, surfing through channels for news from Florida. The family set up tables, brought out the bird and the cranberry sauce, and invited Cheney’s Secret Service detail to sit down. It was “a regular Thanksgiving feast, except for the fact that you’re sitting in a sterile room,” recalled McCormack, his personal aide.

  A few days after leaving the hospital, Cheney transferred operations to a privately funded office suite at 1616 Anderson Road, a six-minute drive from his town house in McLean. The election was still up for grabs in court, but Cheney declared the transition formally open for business. He gave out official-sounding titles, such as director of congressional relations. Applicants for presidential appointments were directed to forms at www.bushcheneytransition.com. The General Services Administration still declined to release federal transition funds, Cheney said, but “my job is to get an organization stood up, and I’ve got a job to do, and I’ll let others worry about the degree of cooperation we have or haven’t received.”

  Bush remained at his Crawford ranch.

  Three doors greeted visitors to the transition office. The one on the left said “Mr. Rove.” The middle one said “Mr. Libby.” The door on the right said “Secretary Cheney.”

  Ron Christie, a Republican congressional aide, arrived on January 9, 2001, nearly a month after the final election result. Scooter Libby had recruited him for Cheney’s domestic policy staff, and now it was time to meet the vice president–elect. “There was nothing on his desk,” Christie said. “Nothing. Nothing.” Cheney stood, shook hands, and proceeded to tell the young man the story of his own life.

  “You grew up in California,” Cheney said. “Went to Haverford. Worked for John Kasich.”

  Cheney kept going.

  Where was the file? Christie asked himself. Under the desk?

  Cheney was not putting on a show. This was how he worked. He read a great deal and remembered what he read. When he talked with someone he wanted to learn something new.

  The television was on. Cheney was expecting something. Pretty soon it came.

  “I want to watch this,” he said, turning away from Christie.

  The picture cut to Linda Chavez, Bush’s designee to run the Labor Department. She was not one of Cheney’s picks, and she was in trouble. For three days Chavez had tried to defend her payments to an undocumented immigrant who once lived with her, offering domestic help in return. Chavez called the money “emergency assistance,” not a breach of employment law, but the controversy refused to die.

  Now she had called a press conference and the cable news carried it live. Chavez scolded reporters for making too much of the story. She deplored the “game of search-and-destroy” aimed at “good people out there who want to serve their government.” But in the circumstances, she said, “I have asked President Bush to withdraw my name for secretary of labor.” No one instructed her to pull out, she said late the same night, “but I’ve also been around this town long enough to know that when nobody is calling you and saying ‘Hang in there,’ that that isn’t a great signal either.”

  C
heney turned away from the screen.

  “What do you think?” he asked Christie.

  “It’s the start of a new administration, and if someone is a distraction, that’s a problem,” Christie said.

  “Right answer,” Cheney said.

  Christie got the job. At thirty, he would soon find himself participating as a peer in daily meetings of the president’s Domestic Policy Council. Nancy Dorn, who became Cheney’s chief lobbyist on the Hill, would function as coequal to Nick Calio, who spoke for the president. In gatherings at the White House counsel’s office, Addington would not only attend but routinely dominate the conversation. None of this remotely resembled the ways of White Houses past.

  Some of Cheney’s staffers followed the Libby precedent, acquiring presidential as well as vice-presidential appointments. Mary Matalin, who became Cheney’s counselor, had the same rank—and office space—as her West Wing counterparts, Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett. Stephen E. Schmidt, another Cheney counselor, likewise wore a second hat as deputy assistant to the president.

  Cheney aides often emphasized that they worked in tandem with the main White House staff, on behalf of a single client. Matalin, for example, said Cheney chose a structure that was “not separate and contributing, but integrated with the West Wing in ways I know were a radical departure from previous White Houses.” There was no competition, she said. “It wasn’t, ‘Here’s Cheney’s view’ and ‘Let’s overlay it on Bush’s view,’ and add red and blue and come out with purple. It wasn’t like that.” In the first days of the administration, Cheney’s office offered rare access to a newsmagazine to emphasize that Cheney had no agenda of his own because he did not see himself as “a future presidential candidate” and was not “tending the gardens of politics” on his own behalf.