"US News" cover is the old "Evil Genius behind the Throne" story.
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Man Behind The Curtain
Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in history. Is that good?
Disputed Intelligence on 9/11
By Kenneth T. Walsh
On July 25, 2000, George W. Bush sat in an upstairs room of the governor's mansion in Austin watching Dick Cheney navigate his first television interview as the Republican vice presidential nominee. "Just mark my words," an admiring Bush gushed to an aide. "There will be a crisis in my administration, and Dick Cheney is exactly the man you want at your side in a crisis."
Over the past three difficult years, Richard Bruce Cheney has lived up to all of Bush's expectations. Not only has he served as Bush's right-hand man through the lesser tribulations of the presidency, but he has also been his most important counselor after the 9/11 attacks and during the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq. "He is the president's closest, most trusted confidential adviser, and he's also the president's closest and most trusted agent, the person who the president asks to take on various tough assignments," says a senior White House official. "It really is remarkable. I think there has never been a vice president who, [except for] a moment of physical incapacity of a president, has served as broadly and given such a strong assist to a president as Cheney. . . . Most of the relationship is hidden from public view because it is the relationship of a quiet subordinate to a superior."
"Skewed view." Today, however, Cheney is under fire as never before. His appearance last month on Meet the Press, in which he again linked Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks, drew stinging criticism, and even President Bush felt compelled to "clarify" Cheney's remarks. Last week, Cheney was touched by the furor over the leaked name of a CIA operative that has sparked a criminal investigation by the Justice Department (story, Page 18). Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, told CNBC that Bush "has that main responsibility to see this through and see it through quickly, and that would include, if I was president, sitting down with my vice president and asking what he knows about it."
The finger-pointing has intensified because of growing disaffection with the administration's Iraq policy, especially the escalating casualties and financial costs. "The whole Iraq situation was filtered through Cheney, and he gave the president a very skewed view," says a former adviser to Bush's father who remains in close contact with officials in the current administration. A senior White House aide concedes that Cheney often makes policy recommendations based on worst-case scenarios.
The problem, according to some Republican insiders, is that Cheney reinforces the president's conservative instincts, pulling him to the right at a time when voters seem more interested in a centrist approach. A senior adviser to a former Republican president adds: "Cheney is not always right, but he's always certain. He and his allies thought they were invincible, that this would be the American century, that we could reshape the world any way we wanted to. Welcome to the real world."
Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who helped strengthen the modern vice presidency under Jimmy Carter, told U.S. News: "Cheney is very able, and he's spent a lot of years in government. . . . Bush has had none of that, and he doesn't seem to be energetically serious about mastering the central subjects. . . . If Bush is not filling those knowledge voids, somebody has to fill the vacuum"--and that appears to be Cheney.
For his part, Cheney remains resolute and serene. If anything, his private views are even more pointed than those he expresses publicly. He tells aides that throughout the 20th century, the United States used its power sparingly to promote freedom. But now, he argues, the onset of an organized, global movement of anti-American terrorists has forced a change. "The era of optional war is over," he says, because terrorists who can hurt the United States and its allies will do so if they can, and only the United States has the power to stop them.
The vice president wants to keep America on offense, arguing that even if 99 percent of the terrorists are killed or taken out of action, the remaining 1 percent can do great harm. This, he says, requires unprecedented vigilance, patience, and aggressiveness. He told an aide that the war on terrorism must be "unconventional" and "asymmetrical" and added: " It's not like anything we've ever done. But if not us, who?"
"Mattress mice." Cheney doesn't care about polls or media criticism, confidants say. In private, he makes fun of the anonymous sources who criticize him in the media as "mattress mice" and tells friends that it isn't his job to curry favor with anyone except Bush, even if his public reputation suffers.
If he sees a negative story on TV, such as recent reports questioning the progress of reconstruction of Iraq, he often laughs and asks, "Why do they think that?" He believes he has the essential facts, many of them classified, and says the Iraq policy is working.
That kind of certitude unsettles even some in the administration, including officials at the State Department, who see the world in shades of gray rather than in Cheney's stark vision of black and white. "Very little gets through to him that is dissonant or not in agreement with the views he already holds," says a U.S. official. "He's in the old ivory tower." Some of his colleagues say he is obsessed with finding ways to avoid another terrorist attack. They point to a recent episode when Cheney visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and received a briefing on smallpox and its potential toll if used in an attack. "Weeks later, he was still talking about it," says one official. "Even after people pointed out difficulties, including the cost and the repercussions [of using a smallpox vaccine nationwide, such as people dying from it], he was still insisting on it." In the end, the plan for a massive anti-smallpox program was scrapped.
Cheney also remains committed to the Iraqi National Congress and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, as agents for positive change, though U.S. officials have concluded that much of the intelligence Chalabi provided to Washington was bogus. Within the past few weeks, Cheney told Secretary of State Colin Powell that the United States wouldn't be having so many problems in Iraq if Chalabi had been put in charge.
In his public comments, Cheney argues that the "defining moment" for the administration was Sept. 11, 2001. "It was, without question, a real watershed," he argued last month at a Republican fundraising luncheon in Dallas. It was, administration insiders say, also a watershed for Cheney. Today he is convinced that America's enemies are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction and, if successful, "will launch attacks that are far more deadly than anything we have seen up to today."
Cheney isn't waiting. "We need a strategy that puts us on offense," he says, " . . . a strategy that allows us to destroy the terrorists before they launch another attack on the United States."
Ideology. Such rhetoric worries even former advisers to Bush's father, who served with Cheney when he was defense secretary and desperately want the second Bush administration to succeed. "I love Dick Cheney as a person, but one of the problems for George W. Bush is that Dick is his vice president," says a former senior official in George H. W. Bush's administration. "When hard-line advice is filtered through Dick to the president, it always seems to make sense. When he explains it to you, everything seems reasonable and authoritative. But Cheney has an ideological side. Look at his voting record in Congress."
That record is more conservative than most Americans might realize. As U.S. representative from Wyoming from 1979-89, he voted against a seven-day waiting period for handgun purchases, reauthorization of the 1972 Clean Water Act, and a bill to ban the production of binary chemical weapons. In 1986, he voted against imposing economic sanctions on the then racist regime in South Africa. He opposed requiring employers to give workers 60 days' notice of any plant shutdown or significant layoff, and he voted in 1987 to cut discretionary federal spending by 21 percent across the board.
Some Cheney loyalists say the vice president's influence is "overhyped." They say the vice president has little influence over many parts of Bush's agenda, such as education reform and his "faith-based" initiative to encourage religious groups to do charitable works. And White House officials argue that the sniping at Cheney won't last. "Criticism of people in the administration ebbs and flows," says a senior Bush adviser.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told U.S. News: "The president has such tremendous confidence in the vice president. . . . He knows that the vice president understands the role of the president and is never trying to be the president. So it's not a situation where the vice president comes in with a big foot and somebody has to step on it."
On most days, Cheney talks to the president at least once, and often numerous times, as Bush's ubercounselor. They have lunch every Thursday; no one attends except the two of them--and both are pleased as can be that not a single one of their discussions has ever leaked to the media. Says former Cheney aide Dave Gribben: "There is no one who is more discreet on the planet than Dick Cheney." White House officials say that's because Cheney isn't interested in running for president himself and has no interest in self-promotion--a rarity among vice presidents.
Odd couple. Another area where Bush values Cheney is in congressional relations. House Speaker Dennis Hastert says Bush often sends Cheney to Capitol Hill as a "troubleshooter," to bridge differences between Republicans in the House and Senate.
Why does Bush trust Cheney so completely? Because of his deep loyalty. "Vice President Cheney's only client is the president," a senior White House official says. And since he doesn't want to be president himself, Cheney is "not competing" with anyone and can focus completely on Bush's agenda. "If the president and the vice president come to disparate conclusions on any given issue, Cheney salutes smartly and moves on," says Cheney confidant Mary Matalin. Just as important, Bush and Cheney share a corporate approach to leadership. They delegate. They don't agonize over decisions. They value secrecy. And they aren't interested in impossible dreams or lost causes. Says Gribben, who attended high school with Cheney in Casper, Wyo., and served as his adviser both in government and the private sector: "He doesn't waste time on things that can't get done." Bush admires Cheney's no-nonsense ways.
Yet in some ways they are an odd couple, with Bush playing Oscar to Cheney's Felix. "They're not best buddies, but they have great respect for each other," says a senior administration official. Cheney is reserved. Bush is gregarious. Cheney, a pudgy 62-year-old who suffers from a serious heart ailment, would never strike the public as an athlete (although he once was). Bush, a 57-year-old jogger, is a fitness buff. Cheney keeps the TV news switched on all day, mostly watching the Fox network. Bush disdains TV news.
Cheney also has an intellectual bent that Bush seems to abjure. When Cheney was defense secretary, Gribben recalls, he hosted regular Saturday morning meetings in his Pentagon suite to discuss issues he wanted to know more about, at one point organizing a "rolling graduate class on Russia," according to one participant. As vice president, he has done the same thing at his official residence on the Naval Observatory grounds, bringing in experts like Fouad Ajami and Michael Beschloss to learn more about the Mideast, terrorism, and other issues.
Most significantly, it was Cheney, a favorite of Bush's father (whom he served as defense secretary), to whom Bush turned after the terrorist attacks two years ago. "He was Bush's go-to man on the ground on September 11," says a senior official who accompanied Bush aboard Air Force One that day. Calling on a secure phone, Bush talked first to Cheney, back in Washington, to coordinate the emergency response. For the rest of that day they were on the phone discussing everything from whether the president should return immediately to the White House (he didn't, to protect his safety, at Cheney's insistence) to whether to authorize the shoot-down of commercial airliners if they appeared to be threatening more targets (Bush gave the go-ahead, again on Cheney's recommendation).
Such reliance, evidently, has its pluses and minuses. "Bush wasn't sure of himself on foreign affairs. Cheney was," says a Bush family insider. "If Cheney were not vice president, it would've been different. The Iraq war situation would've been handled differently. There was a rush to judgment to go to war, all filtered through Cheney. If Cheney had not been there, there may have been a second chance for the weapons inspectors, we would've been slower to move to war, and, maybe, we would have organized a bigger coalition."
In White House meetings, Cheney's routine is to sit silently, hands folded or taking notes. He reserves his advice for his private sessions with Bush and is deferential to his boss, calling him "Mr. President" in public settings and almost always standing in the background or walking a step or two behind him.
Down time. He hates to talk about himself, especially the health problems that have led to several heart attacks and the placement of a pacemaker in his chest. But not even someone as private as Cheney can hide every aspect of his life. "Today," a friend says, "he's disciplined about exercise." He loves fly-fishing and, as with most everything else, he takes it very seriously. He'll interrupt a fishing trip to take a phone call from only two people: President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. On a brilliant afternoon in mid-August, while vacationing at his retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Cheney floated on a drift boat along the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park. His guide tried to explain why the trout weren't biting, and Cheney joked, "You sound like a damn politician, with all these excuses."
While at his $3 million home at Teton Pines, a gated golf community, the vice president and his wife, Lynne (former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities), have massages to relax, go for walks with their two Labrador retrievers, and dine with their daughters and granddaughters, who visit often. The vice president sometimes runs errands into Jackson and likes to stop at the Jack Dennis Outdoor Sports shop to stock up on flies and chat with customers.
When making appearances outside Washington, Cheney presents a hard-line view of the world. His visit to Dallas on September 5 appeared to be typical. Delivering his address to GOP donors in a monotone, he praised Bush for pressing ahead on a conservative agenda that included massive tax cuts, and he gave a detailed defense of the administration's war on terrorism. When he was done, he took no questions, acknowledging the applause from the well-heeled crowd. Then he smiled, waved, and disappeared offstage.
Cheney's Loyal Acolytes
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Rummy" (right, above) was Cheney's mentor a generation ago as President Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff. Cheney succeeded him in that job, and they have remained close. Today, they form the nucleus of the unilateralist forces that persuaded Bush to adopt the doctrine of pre-emptive war.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. A prominent neoconservative and key intellectual ally of both Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially on Iraq. He served as under secretary of defense for policy under Cheney from 1989-93.
White House Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley. Another aide to Cheney when he was at Defense, Hadley pushes the vice president's ideas within the National Security Council. Winning points for loyalty, he accepted responsibility for Bush's dubious claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa. Hadley said he forgot the CIA had expressed doubts. -Kenneth T. Walsh
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