The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  And so Albert A. Gore Jr. was obliged to decide whether this shattering blow to his lifelong aspiration would end his political career or whether he would try a third bid. He was only fifty-two years old and had plenty of time to seek the presidency again in 2004, or 2008, or even beyond. Instead, Gore turned away from politics altogether and created for himself a distinguished career as a groundbreaking thinker and innovator in the field of global environment. In 2007, he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work and wrote an award-winning book alerting the world to the perils of climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. He became, among other things, the founder and chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection and Current TV but seemed destined to be remembered in the history books as the victim of perhaps the single-most significant political decision ever handed down by the highest judicial body in the land.

  RICHARD B. CHENEY

  OF WYOMING

  Many leading American public figures in the early years shunned the vice presidency as a political dead end. But as time passed, many others looked to it as the best stepping-stone to presidential nomination. In 2000, Richard Cheney had no such expectation as a man whose history of multiple heart attacks seemingly disqualified him. Instead, he agreed to assist a presidential nominee in finding a running mate, vetting a number of prospects on their qualifications, and in the end finding—himself. He then disavowed any intention to reach higher, content to focus on defending and enhancing the power of the office to which he vowed not to aspire.

  Yet it fell to Cheney, in the first hours of the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks on American soil, to assert ultimate presidential powers in directing the nation’s first responses to the crisis. It was Cheney who, shortly after the first two hijacked aircraft struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, in New York, learned of another seized plane heading toward Washington and issued the order to shoot it down. He said later he had acted after conveying the situation to President George W. Bush. But there was, and has remained, conflicting testimony and evidence of any such notification. There was also the question of whether, beyond the imperative of immediate action, any authority ever existed for a vice president to issue such an order. Nevertheless Dick Cheney unhesitatingly filled the breach in behalf of the president and thereafter functioned more in the nature of an assistant president than any of his forty-five predecessors.

  Indeed, one perceptive analyst of the Bush-Cheney relationship has argued convincingly that although Cheney was “the most powerful vice president in U.S. history,” his real legacy is “his role as co-president.” Shirley Anne Warshaw, a professor of political science at Gettysburg College, has written that he took advantage of Bush’s inexperience in dealing with Congress and foreign policy to carve out for himself, with Bush’s full acquiescence, a clear “division of labor” in the running of his administration. At the start, with Bush more interested in and occupied with a faith-based agenda popularized as “compassionate conservatism,” Warshaw wrote, Cheney was able to take control of the key policies in the fields of energy, national security, and, eventually, the extension of presidential power that were at the heart of the George W. Bush White House years. And when the 9/11 terrorist attacks intruded, the response and the subsequent pivot to the invasion of Iraq naturally fell to Cheney’s assigned area of responsibility, with Bush again relying on him with his superior experience and aggressive assertion of that extended power.1

  Still, critics charged that in his actions Cheney flirted with long-term damage to both the presidency and the vice presidency, claiming he usurped the first and made the second the instrument of great constitutional mischief. As a result, future presidents may become warier about how they delegate to their presidents-in-waiting, keeping them on a shorter leash than Bush allowed Cheney.

  The man who generated such musings came from solid American stock, reaching back to ancestors who arrived from England in the 1630s, when the first of his Puritan ancestors sailed to the New England coast. There they and their descendants took part in the building of a new nation, and eventually his great-grandfather Samuel Fletcher Cheney was engaged in its preservation. In the mid-1800s, Samuel moved his family west to Defiance, Ohio, and when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter he joined the Union army, serving for the duration of the Civil War. He survived thirty-four battles in that time and also marched with General William Tecumseh Sherman from Atlanta to the sea and later with him past the White House, where they received and returned the salute of President Andrew Johnson.

  Richard Herbert Cheney, the father of the future vice president, was working for the Soil Conservation Service in Syracuse, Nebraska, when in 1940 he met and married Marjorie Dickey, daughter of the owner of the café where bachelor Cheney took his meals. On January 30, 1941, the young Cheneys had a son, also named Richard, born in Lincoln. After Pearl Harbor the elder Richard worked for the Department of Agriculture and in 1944 joined the navy. On his return he went back to Lincoln and the Soil Conservation Service and later was transferred with his family, now including another son, Bobby, and a daughter, Sue, to Casper, Wyoming. Both parents, beneficiaries of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, were loyal FDR Democrats.2

  Young Dick became an avid fisherman and a football player at the local high school, where he met Lynne Vincent, a top student who also excelled as a baton-twirling majorette, and began his courtship of her. In 1958, Dick Cheney, selected for Wyoming Boys State, attended an academic summer camp at Northwestern University. A local independent oilman offered Cheney a full scholarship to the oilman’s alma mater, Yale, for which he was a regional recruiter.3

  It was quite a culture change for the boy from the plains and mountain states to be thrown in with many graduates of elite prep schools. Later, he wrote about his study habits: “I found some kindred souls, young men like me, who were not adjusting very well and shared my opinion that beer was one of the essentials of life.”4 After his freshman year, he lost the scholarship but was allowed to return with a student loan, but he “continued to accumulate bad grades and disciplinary notices.” In the spring of 1962, he was kicked out of Yale.5

  Returning to Wyoming, he joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as a ground man, laying power transmission lines there and in Utah and Colorado. After work, he would join fellow crew members in local bars, later writing about that time, “I managed to get arrested twice within a year for driving under the influence.”6 Aware he was on the wrong course and told by his girlfriend, Lynne, that he would have to change his ways or lose her,7 Cheney then stayed out of the bars. He moved to Laramie and enrolled at the University of Wyoming, and in 1964 they were married in Casper. Under a grant, half of which was paid by the state Republican Party, he worked as an intern at the State of Wyoming Legislature in Cheyenne, leading to a Ford Foundation fellowship and work in the Madison office of the Republican governor Warren Knowles of Wisconsin, where he and Lynne continued graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. He traveled with the campaigning Knowles, further whetting his appetite for practicing politics.

  Earlier, upon attaining draft age at eighteen, Cheney had registered and twice thereafter was classified 1-A, but over the next eight years he applied for and received four student deferments and a fifth in 1966, when Lynne was pregnant.8 He later wrote that had he been called up in the draft he “would have been happy to serve,”9 but years later in 1980, at the time of his Senate confirmation hearings to be secretary of defense, he acknowledged, “I had other priorities in the 1960s than military service.”10

  In 1968, Cheney received an American Political Science Association fellowship in Washington and was interviewed for a job by the freshman Republican congressman Donald Rumsfeld of Illinois. He apparently didn’t impress Rumsfeld and signed up to work for Wisconsin congressman Bill Steiger.11 Subsequently he was hired to handle congressional relations for the Office of Economic Opportunity, the anti-poverty agency. He came under, of all people, Don Rumsfeld, drafted by President Richard Nixon to dow
nsize the agency. When Rumsfeld was made Nixon’s director of the Cost of Living Council, Cheney went with him.12

  Upon Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, chose Rumsfeld to head his transition team, bringing Cheney along. When Ford made Rumsfeld his White House chief of staff, Cheney became Rumsfeld’s deputy at age thirty-three, without ever having met Ford. In a subsequent shakeup in November 1975, Ford sent Rumsfeld to the Pentagon as secretary of defense and put Cheney in the top White House staff job at age thirty-four.

  Through all this time, Dick Cheney had been regarded as essentially a mild-mannered, hard-working bureaucrat of little-revealed ideological cast. The Secret Service code name for Cheney was “Backseat,” and it seemed appropriate. When Ford suggested that his chief of staff be given cabinet status, he demurred, observing later, “The top staff guy is still a staff guy.”13

  In advance of Ford’s bid for a full term in 1976, Cheney and Rumsfeld, aware of conservative dissatisfaction with the liberal vice president Nelson Rockefeller as next in the line of presidential succession, urged Ford to drop him as his running mate. They wrote Ford a detailed memo and attached their signed letters of resignation. “This wasn’t a matter of saying unless you accept our recommendations, we will quit,” Cheney wrote later. “Rather, we were telling Ford that if his idea of changes included moving us, we’d make it easy for him.”14 In any event, Ford finally got Rockefeller to step aside while publicly saying otherwise, but the Republican ticket lost anyway to Democrats Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

  Four years later at the national convention in Detroit, as a lowly freshman congressman from Wyoming, Cheney joined former Ford administration officials in weighing the prospect of having Ford as the retired president become Ronald Reagan’s running mate—the fanciful “copresidency.” Both Ford and Reagan eventually rejected the idea.

  Cheney climbed rapidly in the Republican congressional leadership, in 1986 serving on the House committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, wherein the Reagan administration illegally traded arms in return for financial aid to the anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. On this committee, the Cheney staff aide David Addington argued that as commander in chief the president had unchallengeable executive powers. Cheney joined him in declaring that the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power” and that any such laws “should be struck down.”15 He also wrote a long paper attacking “congressional overreaching in foreign policy,” and he called for repeal of the War Powers Resolution, saying he could not accept “such a limited view of the president’s inherent constitutional powers.”16

  In 1989, Reagan’s successor in the Oval Office, the senior George Bush, called on Cheney to come to the rescue again when the Texas senator John Tower’s nomination to be secretary of defense was rejected by the Senate. Reluctantly, after having survived two heart attacks, Cheney agreed to take over the Pentagon and was confirmed. After a third heart attack, he had successful bypass surgery and ran the Pentagon with his recommended appointee, General Colin Powell, as his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were an effective team through the ouster of the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega at the end of 1989 and the dramatic months of the reversal of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991. Cheney demonstrated his penchant for control of the news media by sharply limiting coverage of the buildup to the American military response, requiring monitoring of reporters’ interviews and then a total blackout on the ground in the decisive stages that drove the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

  In the summer of 1992, Bush sounded out Cheney about returning to the White House as his chief of staff, but Cheney preferred to remain at the Pentagon. When Bush failed in reelection in 1992, Cheney went back to Wyoming and private life. In early 1994, he considered a presidential campaign of his own for 1996, set up a political action committee, and started testing the waters. But he was getting nowhere and decided that at age fifty-three there was still time to have a lucrative career in the private sector. “I said I would like to be president but I said I wasn’t going to run,” he observed in a later interview for this book. “If I didn’t win, my health history would be blamed and that would disqualify me for future jobs.… I really put politics behind me.”17

  In late 1995 Cheney joined the giant Halliburton oil services company and took over as chief executive officer at the start of 1996. In 1999, he discussed the possibilities of managing the presidential campaign of Texas governor George W. Bush but decided to stay at Halliburton. He told Joe Allbaugh, the governor’s chief of staff, “I’ve never met a happy vice president,” quoting Gerald Ford as saying his brief time was “the worst period in his public life” and that it was his job “to shoot down” costly programs sought by Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller.18

  As early as March 2000, Bush had Allbaugh ask Cheney whether he would be interested in being Bush’s running mate. The answer was no. Among the reasons that Cheney said later he told Allbaugh: “Wyoming is a sure state. If he needs me to carry Wyoming, he’s not going to get elected anyway.” In a subsequent meeting with Bush and Karl Rove, Bush’s political adviser, Cheney said he told the prospective candidate that as head of a large oil company, his four previous heart attacks, and having been “kicked out of Yale and with two DUI’s,” he would be an easy target. Rove agreed, Cheney said.19 After Bush’s nomination, however, the Texas governor Bush asked Cheney to head the search for another running mate, and as a loyal Republican and proven staff man Cheney agreed to take on the task.

  Cheney set up a small search team that included his elder daughter, Liz, her husband, Phil Perry, and Addington.20 Cheney acknowledged later that in the process there usually were two lists of prospective nominees, one for “public consumption” to placate certain figures or party factions, and the “real” one of actual prospects.21

  Each vice presidential prospect who was asked to supply detailed background information was told he was on “a very short list.”22 One of those approached, the former governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said when he agreed to be vetted that Cheney said, “We’ll get together. The only thing was, I never heard from him again.”23 In fact, Cheney wrote subsequently that Bush had told him “more than once, ‘Dick, you’re the solution to my problem.’ ”24 Cheney finally said he would consider being Bush’s running mate, but he had a few preliminary conditions: “I needed to … go through all the reasons he shouldn’t pick me.… I didn’t want him to be surprised, and I needed to make sure he vetted the vetter.”25 But Cheney himself said he did not fill out the questionnaire required of the others.

  From all this it was not unreasonable to conclude that Dick Cheney, in his fortuitous position, was able to make himself in the end, as one biographer later put it, “the least worst option.”26 Dan Bartlett, later the communications director in the George W. Bush administration, observed, “Cheney was pushing on an open door,” while being able to leave the impression that he was not angling for the nomination for himself.27

  In the legal battle of campaign lawyers and strategists leading up to the eventual election of Bush and Cheney, they left the combat to others in Florida. As the legal maneuvering to secure the presidency dragged on, the prospective vice president elect returned to Washington and assumed the task of preparing for the transition of power. In the transition process, most of the key White House staff jobs went to Bush loyalists from Texas. But Cheney saw to it that not only were some of his own loyalists placed on his vice presidential policy staff but also some were made assistants to the president, integrated with the White House staff.

  Early in his vice presidency, he asked Addington as his general counsel to review the procedures under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, whereby he would be required, in the event of an incapacitated president, to “immediately assume the powers or duties of the office as Acting President.”28 But what if the vice president himself became incapacitated, a pertinent question in light of Cheney’s history of multip
le heart attacks? Cheney wrote a letter of resignation, signed it, and added a written instruction to Addington to present the letter to Bush “if the need arises.”29

  Nine days after taking office, Cheney announced he would head a White House task force on energy policy that ostensibly would focus on the debate over global warming and other environmental issues. But in reality it would go far beyond that to a matter close to Cheney’s concerns—the protection and extension of presidential power. His first challenge was to counter Bush’s statements in the 2000 campaign indicating he accepted the scientific findings that man-made carbon emissions contributed to the “greenhouse effect” and climate change. Cheney suggested that the president dodge the issue by saying that “given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change,” he favored a further examination of various “innovative options.”30

  The task force, with formal membership limited to executive branch staff but with the advice and testimony of unidentified outside participants in complete secrecy, soon raised the hackles of suspicious environmental groups. While the ongoing participation of all the major energy-producing companies was invited, more than a dozen “green” advocates were heard on a single day and were never invited back.31 Because the industry figures were not “members” of the task force, the White House insisted their identities did not have to be disclosed. Cheney persuaded Bush to go to court to protect his constitutional right to seek and obtain advice without public disclosure, as part of what advocates called the power of the “unitary executive.”

  The executive shielded its disclosure by using the same all-purpose justification that would be invoked by Justice Department lawyers in other, later arguments for the executive’s right to use all means to obtain intelligence to preserve national security without legislative or judicial interference. Cheney later noted, “On the scale of risks, I am more concerned about depriving the president of his ability to act than I am about Congress’s alleged inability to respond.”32