Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency Read online

  This was a variation of Cheney’s message, in the summer just past, about the disadvantages of an ambitious running mate. True to his implicit promise, Cheney seldom let slip any public hint of disagreement with Bush.

  In a can’t-make-this-up moment in the second term, Cheney said his favorite movie was Red River, an epic power struggle between a rancher and the right-hand man who displaces him. But Cheney, unlike Montgomery Clift, offered no challenge to his John Wayne. He simply took care of business that the boss was too busy to attend to himself.

  Matalin and others liked to blur the line, but “no ambition” and “no agenda” were not quite the same thing. Cheney “gave himself permission not to run for president,” as one old friend put it, but he had strong views in abundance on the course his country should take. If anything, Cheney’s awareness of reaching the end of the line spurred his pursuit of policy goals that had eluded him before. Not only would this be his last chance, but Cheney was more impervious than ever to public opinion.

  Through the next eight years, the vice president fell loyally in line behind Bush’s decisions, whether or not he approved. But the first MBA president soon emerged as a manager who left a great deal to his subordinates, and who allowed disputes among his advisers to fester for months and years. The vice president–elect believed vital national interests were at stake. Until and unless Bush settled an argument, Cheney felt free—and even obliged—to use every advantage of his office to prevail.

  That is why Cheney raised the status of his aides and inserted them into West Wing policy roles. The vice president was equipping his lieutenants to fight above their weight. Cheney was Number Two, but his office would bear no sign of secondary importance. In meetings of the president’s cabinet-rank foreign policy advisers, “Scooter would be with Condi” and the other principals, said William Kristol, who was chief of staff to Dan Quayle in the first Bush administration. “His deputy attended the deputies meetings. Everyone is up a step from my day.”

  In late December 2000, Joshua Bolten sat down with Scooter Libby. He wanted to know what kind of job the vice president–elect had in mind. It was an odd question on its face, but prescient. The Constitution specified no executive duties for a vice president, and each administration invented the job anew. Bolten, who learned his way around the White House under Bush’s father, had moved to London in the Clinton years and made a lot of money at Goldman Sachs. Now he was returning as deputy White House chief of staff, looking to establish some kind of order.

  “I remember at the outset, during the transition, thinking, ‘What do vice presidents do?’” Bolten recalled. “And so Scooter Libby had some thoughts, and we looked at what other vice presidents do.”

  Bolten noticed a pattern. Vice presidents did not govern, exactly, but kept an eye on how the rest of the government worked. They advised the president as the president saw fit. Sometimes they had niche projects, like Gore’s focus on the environment. They chaired commissions and laid out proposals for reform. “Quayle had the ‘Council on Competitiveness,’” Bolten said. “Gore was ‘Reinventing Government.’ So we looked at portfolios that we thought might be appropriate for the vice president, but that was more staff-driven than anything else, because we were adopting the old template.”

  Somebody—probably Libby, maybe Andy Card—briefed Cheney on what they had in mind.

  “The vice president,” Bolten said drily, “didn’t particularly warm to that.”

  Word came back that Cheney would engage in “whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in,” Bolten said. And Bush backed him up. “The president made it clear from the outset that the vice president is welcome at every table and at every meeting,” said Bolten, speaking in 2006 after succeeding Andy Card as chief of staff. “That’s just a standing rule. I don’t know if that’s been true of other vice presidents. Probably mostly has, as a formal matter. But it’s been true as a practical matter and as a real matter of atmosphere here at the White House.”

  Which was not to say that Cheney “put an oar in,” a favorite expression, on everything. Bush came to office with big plans for education reform and “faith-based initiatives” to enlist religious groups in providing social services. Cheney had voted in Congress against establishing a Department of Education and was skeptical of federal intervention in local schools. He resolutely avoided discussions of faith. Social issues had seldom engaged him, and concern for his daughter Mary’s privacy led Cheney to avoid the subject of gay and lesbian rights. Some social conservatives blamed “Cheney’s influence,” on the other hand, for Bush’s failure to push a federal ban on gay marriage. Jan LaRue, chief counsel of the Concerned Women for America, took note that Lynne Cheney once wrote a novel “celebrating lesbian lifestyles.”

  According to Matalin, Cheney arrived in office with a “preordained policy portfolio” that spanned “the economic issues, the security issues—even before 9/11 we had homeland security—and the energy issues.” There was a lull in the conversation as Matalin searched for the right word. “The iron issues, I don’t know what else to call them. The steely issues.” Apart from those, “we had the go-to guy on the Hill” because of Cheney’s Senate duties and experience in the House.

  That was a remarkable list: war and peace, the economy, natural resources, and negotiations with Congress. Nor was Matalin’s description complete. It omitted, among other things, a preeminent role for Cheney in nominations and appointments, which did not stop with the transition. Cheney’s brief, all in all, encompassed most of the core concerns of any president.

  White House aides quickly tired of the cartoon that Cheney was the president in all but name. He was not. Whenever Bush chose to be, he was exactly the Decider he proclaimed. But Bush’s style of leadership, said Bradford Berenson, an associate White House counsel in the first term, involved “guiding the ship of state from high up on the mast. It seemed to me that the vice president was more willing to get down in the wheelhouse below the decks.” Cheney, he said, “has probably tasted from the cup of presidential power more than any other vice president in modern history. But remember, if the president and the vice president disagree, the president gets to decide.”

  Nothing engaged Cheney more than worst-case scenarios. “Whatever stuff was scariest, the vice president was directly grappling with it,” Berenson said.

  Cheney gave an early public hint that he would take a strong hand on the economy as well. On NBC’s Meet the Press on December 3, 2000, Cheney said, “We may well be on the front edge of a recession here.” High-ranking officials seldom cast economic gloom for fear their words may help fulfill themselves. Cheney’s prediction, which proved accurate, served two purposes. It laid the groundwork to blame Bill Clinton for bad news that might emerge on Bush’s watch. More important, it set the stage for tax cuts of the type, scale, and timing that Cheney had in mind.

  Early on, Libby floated the idea that Cheney would chair meetings of Bush’s foreign policy team. When the president attends, that gathering is called the National Security Council. When he does not, it is called the Principals Committee and includes the attorney general, the director of central intelligence (a title that later changed), and the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury. By decades of tradition, Principals Committee meetings were chaired by the national security adviser. That agenda-setting and coordination role, in fact, was half the job. Rice was alarmed. Hadley, who knew Cheney better than Rice did, made the approach.

  “Mr. Vice President, a number of people are saying you want to chair the Principals Committee,” Hadley said. “That doesn’t sound like you to me, Mr. Vice President.”

  Cheney disclaimed the idea, to Hadley’s relief. Then he reframed it.

  “I want to participate, obviously. Be heard.”

  When Hadley told that anecdote in early 2007, he offered it, unsolicited, in rebuttal to what he described as a common Cheney myth. “A lot of vice presidents, if they had their own agenda and wanted to be the ‘presid
ent for foreign affairs,’ would make a different decision,” Hadley said. “He didn’t want to be the ‘president of foreign affairs.’ He wanted to be an adviser to the president and to help the president get the best information.”

  That was a puzzling statement. There were not, in fact, a lot of vice presidents who could have tried to grab the helm of the Principals Committee. No other vice president had even attended those meetings, as a rule, since the committee’s creation in 1947. Cheney would join nearly every one, filling the first chair on the right in the Situation Room or patching in by video link from out of town. In the years to come, scores of major policy choices were cued up at that table or died there. Rice, and later Hadley, chaired the meetings, but they did so as peers of the other participants. When Cheney entered the room, everyone stood. After each meeting, Rice briefed Bush. But so did Cheney, often separately and alone.

  Richard Haass, who would quit his post as the State Department’s director of policy planning after many defeats by the vice president and his allies, said Cheney’s methods gave him “three bites at the apple” on every decision. “There’s the one with the president, when they’re alone. That’s the most interesting one, and we know the least about it. There’s his participation in the Principals Committee meetings. And there’s the staff role, from the deputies on down.”

  As White House chief of staff in the 1970s, Cheney drew what he called “staffing loops” to establish attendance at key policy meetings and “who sees paper before it goes in” to the president. Bolten’s question for Libby in December amounted to asking where Cheney and his staff would appear on that kind of map. The answer turned out to include a lot of venues in which vice presidents were seldom seen.

  Vice presidents traditionally joined the president at “policy time,” if the president so desired. Cheney intended to get involved sooner, long before the moment of decision. By “reaching down,” a term that recurs often in interviews with his aides, Cheney set himself up to shift the course of events while deferring to Bush’s prerogatives at the top. Cheney would exert a quiet dominance over meetings in which advisers framed their goals, narrowed options, and decided when—or whether—to bring them to the president. Cheney’s presence unavoidably changed the tone, and often the outcome.

  There was a regular Wednesday lunch of the president’s economic team in the Ward Room, a dark-paneled adjunct to the White House mess where Navy stewards served amid nautical decor. This, too, was virgin territory for a vice president. Most administrations had something like it, a regular occasion to float ideas—frankly and informally—in private. It was as casual as this kind of gathering could be: no aides, no prepared agenda, no PowerPoint slides. Now it was blocked out weekly as a vice-presidential event. Cheney joined the treasury, labor, and commerce secretaries, the budget director, and other top advisers as they previewed policy initiatives and hashed out differences.

  Cheney probed hard and displayed a depth of technical knowledge that impressed the professional economists. He came prepared and usually had a strong point of view. Bolten said Cheney cast himself as an exponent of conservative “first principles,” which made him “a pretty vigorous voice for holding the line on spending and for holding the line on tax cuts.”

  It required a healthy dose of boldness for anyone at the table to press a disagreement very far. Cheney became “a big time-saver for us in that he takes off the table a lot of things that he knows are going to go nowhere,” said Ed Lazear, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers. Lazear, who ordinarily carried himself with the confidence of a man at the pinnacle of his profession, said he could not name a time when “I have thought I was right and that the vice president was wrong.” Sometimes, he said, “I might fight for ten minutes or so, and you know, kind of try to argue it out with him. He’s a very open guy…. He tries to avoid using his position to cut off conversation. But it’s clear, by the time we’ve talked something through, I agree with him. He’s persuaded me. I can’t think of a case where he hasn’t persuaded me.”

  Thus was formed a consensus, far more often than not.

  Cheney also decided to join the National Economic Council, which coordinates day-to-day policy in the White House. Lawrence Lindsey, who chaired that panel in the first two years, said its members tried to reach consensus and served as honest brokers for the president if differences remained. Cheney had a somewhat different role: “He’d form his own judgments and bring those to the president.” By the time Cheney had Bush’s ear, he was intimately familiar with opposing views.

  Nearly every Tuesday, just before noon, Cheney’s six-car motorcade carried him sixteen blocks southeast on Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. The vice president strode through the Ohio Clock corridor and into a members-only passage between a bust of Richard Nixon and a portrait of the nineteenth-century secessionist (and vice president) John C. Calhoun. There Cheney joined Senate Republicans at their weekly caucus, the only regular forum in which the senators gathered as a group behind closed doors. Lyndon Johnson, the last vice president who tried to attend his party’s Senate caucus, found himself barred at the door. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield lined up the votes to exclude him back then, describing Johnson’s request as an affront to Senate autonomy. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican, said the same question was raised in Cheney’s case, with different results. “He’s very pointed in his defense,” Specter said, “saying he’s the president of the Senate and he’s paid by the Senate.”

  The effect of Cheney’s presence in the caucus itself was hard to measure, though it certainly raised the stakes of speaking out. In the White House, Cheney’s privileged access to the senators made him Bush’s principal source of information about what would and would not work on Capitol Hill. Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican, said, “It’s not always easy to speak directly with the president about an idea or concern, and sometimes you want to kind of filter them through the ear of a wise man like the vice president.”

  Shortly after Cheney took his oath of office on January 20, 2001, Dan Quayle paid him a courtesy call in the West Wing. Government officials of a certain rank have the privilege of borrowing from the National Gallery. Cheney had chosen portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first and second vice presidents. He called them “Number One” and “Number Two.”

  Quayle, Number Forty-four, brought advice from one vice president to another. Cheney had a right to know what he was in for. Hundreds of thousands of miles in the air, to begin with. Quayle had flown to forty-seven countries for George H. W. Bush. Something like a full year, a quarter of his term, overseas. At home, there was the space committee and the competitiveness council. Good to have projects like that.

  Cheney listened politely. Quayle felt as though he could not quite connect.

  “Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fund-raising,” Quayle repeated. “I mean, this is what vice presidents do. We’ve all done it. You go back and look at what I did, or what Gore did.”

  Cheney did that thing he does with one raised eyebrow, a smile on just the left side of his face.

  “I have a different understanding with the president,” he said.

  “Well, did you get that directly from Bush?”

  “Yes.”

  Quayle drew him out as best he could. The conversation took a while.

  “Look, you know Cheney,” Quayle recalled, recounting the story from a Park Avenue suite at Cerberus Global Investments. “He doesn’t say a lot. He wasn’t going into it.” Even so, a fairly clear picture emerged. “He had the understanding with President Bush that he would be—I’m just going to use the word ‘surrogate chief of staff.’ He didn’t want to do that much international travel. He wanted to be there all the time. And this was the deal he had.”

  Quayle stopped, shook his head. “He just said he had a different understanding about how it was going to function. And he did.”

  The t
wo men had a history that made Cheney’s words all the more remarkable to Quayle. On November 30, 1989, the first President Bush had been airborne for Malta, headed to a meeting with the Soviet premier, when a coup attempt broke out in the Philippines. Quayle rushed to the Situation Room and convened a meeting of the National Security Council. In person and by teleconference, Quayle pulled together the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the attorney general, the White House counsel, and the highest-ranking officials in town from State and CIA. Cheney was secretary of defense. He refused to attend. There was no such thing as an NSC meeting without the president, Cheney said. As Quayle chaired the Situation Room debate, Cheney bypassed it with a stream of calls to Air Force One and to Colin Powell at the Pentagon. Powell, Cheney’s direct subordinate, had to keep on ducking away from the video link with Quayle.

  “I could see every now and then that Colin would put it on mute and I’d see him pick up the phone,” Quayle recalled. Finally, Quayle phoned Cheney to inform him that Bush had approved his plan to launch fighters over the Philippine capital in support of the lawful government. Cheney replied that he would have to hear that order from the president himself. The following week, the defense secretary asked to see Bush one on one. Cheney “thought the vice president had overstepped his bounds,” Quayle said. “He wanted to make sure the president understood that he was in the chain of command and I was not.”

  As he sat with Cheney in the West Wing in 2001, Quayle was reminded of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. They were bitter rivals, but when Reagan clinched the GOP nomination in 1980 he tried to recruit Ford for a “dream ticket” to unite the party. Cheney took part in the talks. At a conference in 2000, Cheney recalled intense negotiations on how to expand the vice presidency enough to lure a former commander in chief. Ford “made a number of requests in terms of his influence over the budget, personnel, foreign policy, et cetera,” Cheney said. “I can remember sitting in a session with Bill Casey, who later became CIA director. Bill had a list of items that in fact the Reagan people were prepared to discuss. They went a long way toward trying to accommodate President Ford.”