Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Bush at that point had yet to win public office and was still evolving into the politician he would later become. When he visited the West Wing in those days, he would stop by offices of aides he knew, plop down on a couch, and put his cowboy boots on the coffee table. Ronald Reagan, who had met the Bush children, thought that if any of them had a bright political future, it would be George’s brother Jeb. Their brother Marvin once gave his assessment of each sibling. “George?” he said. “George is the family clown.”

  Indeed, after their father won the presidency, the younger George attended a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II, lifted his pant legs to show her his cowboy boots, and proudly declared that he was the black sheep in the family. “Do you have any in yours?” he asked. What was certainly a defense mechanism for a son and grandson of accomplished men also became a conscious strategy of lowering expectations. “It is always better to lowball these things,” he once told a general years later in a revealing moment during a conference call about Iraq. “If you perform, people are surprised.” He added, “I really enjoy it when somebody says, that son of a bitch just got out a coherent sentence.”

  The day Bush met Cheney came less than a year after a radical midlife course correction. Although he never accepted the word “alcoholic,” Bush’s decision to quit drinking the day after his fortieth birthday reshaped his outlook on life, manifesting itself as both empathy and determination. The man who conquered his own weakness would stop whatever he was doing upon meeting an addict. “His cadence would change,” said David Kuo, a former aide. “He would put both of his hands on the man’s shoulders and look into his eyes. Any swagger disappeared. Something softer and perhaps more genuine took its place.” At the same time, the iron discipline it took to stop cold turkey would become a never-look-back approach to the Oval Office; he could be at once maddeningly stubborn about revisiting decisions and indefatigably upbeat in the face of crises that would leave other presidents talking to the paintings.

  It may have also fueled an urgent idealism that would characterize his presidency for better or worse; on some level, he believed he had been saved to accomplish great things. His zeal inspired supporters with its promise of transformation while dismaying critics as dangerously messianic. Bush’s favorite book was The Raven, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography that traced the life of Sam Houston from drunkard to president of the Republic of Texas. “His first thought, his constant thought, was to atone for the period of his delinquency,” the author, Marquis James, wrote of Houston. “He would do something grand. He would capture an empire.”

  Grandiosity never defined Cheney. He was, as the writer Todd Purdum once observed, “a never-complain, never-explain politician who reminded many of the younger officials and journalists who came to know him of their fathers.” A man who would survive five heart attacks, the first at age thirty-seven, Cheney demonstrated a grit he rarely got credit for, one that fostered a single-minded intensity to get things done regardless of others’ sensibilities. “I suppose it gives him a sense of you can’t count on being here forever and you have to accomplish what you can accomplish while you can,” his daughter Liz observed. His own mortality never far from mind, Cheney adopted a cold-eyed view of what was needed to protect the life of the country, never entertaining a moment of doubt over tactics that would cause others to recoil.

  Trent Lott, who served with him in the House before becoming Senate majority leader, remembered skiing with Cheney once in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the future vice president had a vacation home. Lott was decked out in a fancy outfit and red coat, while Cheney showed up at the lift in jeans, red scarf, and ragged old jacket that “looked like something a sailor would have worn in 1945.” Cheney took off “and all I saw for the next two miles was that red scarf flapping in the breeze as I skidded down the run on my butt,” Lott recalled. “He came up, very unimpressive looking, nothing fancy, skied like a wild man going down that run. I said that’s the real Dick Cheney. I looked good and he skied good.”

  Cheney’s DNA was missing that politician’s gene attuned to reputation, a trait that served him well for decades, only to betray him at the end as he allowed himself to be reduced to a cartoon figure in the public mind. “I think years ago, the rooms in his brain that normal people devote to keeping score of slights and Beyoncé and popular culture, he moved all the furniture out of those rooms and stuffed them full of file cabinets about GDP and throw weights and all that kind of stuff,” said Pete Williams, who worked for Cheney on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon. “He is fundamentally a very serious man.” And because Cheney flunked out of Yale and never became part of the club, he never felt beholden. “He didn’t have the blue blazer, he didn’t have the crest, and he didn’t have the whale belt and the purple pants and all that stuff,” Williams said. “There is no Ivy League thing, there is no big city thing, there is no prep school thing. He went to a public high school. So I think what that means is he came here pretty much on his own two feet. I think that that has always given him a great deal of self-confidence. That plays out in a number of ways. I think it liberated him to follow his own conscience. He didn’t have chits to repay, he didn’t have errands to run, he didn’t have to worry about being ostracized if he took a view that was unorthodox. He just took the measure of himself and that was enough.”

  GEORGE WALKER BUSH and Richard Bruce Cheney were born five and a half years and a world apart. Bush arrived on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, joining a blue-blazer-and-whale-belt family with a rarefied history dating back to the Mayflower. His mother, the former Barbara Pierce, was a distant cousin of President Franklin Pierce’s, while his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, had roots tied by researchers to fifteen American presidents and the British royal family. His grandparents traveled in the same circles as the Rockefellers, Tafts, Luces, Grahams, Harrimans, Lodges, Fulbrights, and Kennedys. Cheney was born on January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, to a family of New Deal Democrats who struggled through the Great Depression and were proud their oldest son was born on Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday. His grandparents had lost everything in the crisis except their house. His father, Richard Herbert Cheney, dropped out of college and worked for decades for the Soil Conservation Service teaching farmers how to rotate crops. His mother, Marjorie Dickey, waited tables at the family-owned Dickey’s Café in Syracuse, Nebraska, until meeting the young public servant. At various points growing up, Dick lived on an uncle’s farm and in a family friend’s basement.

  Yet from such disparate beginnings, the two future partners would travel familiar paths. Bush’s parents eschewed the easy life in the East to move to hardscrabble Texas oil country, and the Cheneys headed to the frontier of Wyoming, with the boys raised in settings not all that different. “There is a similarity, to a certain extent, between West Texas and Casper, Wyoming, in look and feel,” observed Dean McGrath, who spent years working for Cheney. “It is a long, long way between places. There was openness and expanse that when people in the West talk about, people on the East Coast don’t get.” From their western upbringings came strong views about the American ethos and an equally strong detachment from the coasts that dominated national life. As McGrath put it, “They are both pretty conservative, they are both pretty free market, they are both pretty free trade, and they both have pretty strong social values.”

  Nostalgia naturally shrouded the places that shaped Bush and Cheney in romantic hues, but friends describe them in similar terms, as towns where doors were left unlocked, boys played baseball day after day, and everyone knew each other’s business. Midland was a “little Mayberry type of town,” as Bush’s lifelong friend Joe O’Neill remembered it, while Joe Meyer, Cheney’s high school pal, described Casper as something out of Happy Days. They were towns on the rise, flush with oil and the entrepreneurs who chased it. Midland was the capital of the Permian Basin, which produced nearly 20 percent of America’s oil in the 1950s. Casper was called the oil capital of the Rockies. Both towns were formed in
the 1880s and topped twenty thousand residents in 1950; Casper had doubled in size since 1920, while Midland had quadrupled since 1930 and would triple again over the next decade. By the time the Bushes bought their first house in Midland, 215 oil companies had opened offices there. Both towns were arid, but Midland was flat and brown, prone to tumbleweed and sandstorms, while Casper was greener, perched at the base of a mountain and nearly as high as Denver.

  The Bushes came from money, of course, but family tradition dictated that each generation make its own. Prescott Bush, young George’s grandfather, who went by Pres, had refused his father’s inheritance and helped round up investors in early American icons like CBS, Prudential, and Pan Am. He helped Dresser Industries reorganize and go public with a Yale University friend, Neil Mallon, at the helm. George H. W. Bush, the youngest commissioned navy combat pilot in World War II and a star baseball player at Yale, set off for Texas in 1948 to make his own mark. That’s not to say family connections were unavailable. It was Mallon who gave him a job at a Dresser subsidiary in Odessa. But he had to start as an equipment clerk. It was a hard, peripatetic life in modest homes for years until oil began paying off. Settling in Odessa, the family rented a two-room duplex, sharing a bathroom with a mother-and-daughter prostitute team next door. After a yearlong transfer to California, where the family bounced around five different homes, they returned to Texas in 1950, this time to Midland. Pres Bush, meanwhile, embarked on a political career, losing a close Senate race in Connecticut that same year after an erroneous news report that he headed a birth control advocacy group, souring the family view of the media. He tried again in 1952 and this time won. In Washington, he became a friend and golfing partner of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s, stood up to Joseph McCarthy, helped write the interstate highway bill, and blazed a path for pro-business, pro-civil-rights moderate Republicanism. He was a stiff man, insisting that his grandchildren wear coat and tie to dinner and address him as “Senator” instead of “Grandpa.”

  The younger Bush family lived in a succession of houses in Midland, each time trading up as George H. W. Bush’s fortunes rose. The house where they spent most of their time was a cozy, one-floor home with knotty pine walls on Ohio Street that Bush bought for $9,000 in 1951. With three bedrooms, one bathroom, no shower, wall heaters, but no air conditioners, it hardly looked like the home of a future president, much less two. It might have fit inside one wing of the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, that Bush would later purchase.

  For Georgie, as the son was called at the time, life was carefree, a time of bicycles and baseball. “He lives in his cowboy clothes,” his father wrote to a friend. With the elder Bush often away on business, Georgie bonded with his mother. He would grow up like her, straightforward, tough, acerbic. He would later joke that he had his father’s eyes and his mother’s mouth. He was not above troublemaking. Once he stole a pack of his mother’s cigarettes, and the football coach caught him smoking in an alley; the principal at another point paddled him three times for drawing a mustache, beard, and sideburns on his own face with an ink pen. At fourteen, he wrecked the family car—twice. “Georgie aggravates the hell out of me at times (I am sure I do the same to him),” the elder Bush wrote to his father-in-law in 1955, “but then at times I am so proud of him I could die.”

  The “starkest memory of my childhood” came when he was seven. Georgie’s younger sister, Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia, and their parents took her to New York in a losing battle to save her. Georgie was never told what was going on, so when he walked down a covered walkway at Sam Houston Elementary School carrying a phonograph to the principal’s office one day, he was excited to see his parents’ green Oldsmobile pull up on the gravel driveway with what he thought was Robin’s head in the back. “My mom, dad, and sister are home,” he told a teacher. “Can I go see them?” But when he got to the car, Robin was not there. “She died,” his mother whispered.

  As for any boy his age, processing such a loss was hard. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. But with his father back on the road for business and Jeb too young to understand, Georgie focused on helping his mourning mother. When a friend came by, the young Bush said, “I can’t come over to play because I have to play with my mother. She’s lonely.” Barbara overheard. “That started my cure,” she later said. “I realized I was too much of a burden for a little seven-year-old boy to carry.” She went on to have three more children, Neil, Marvin, and Dorothy.

  Nearly eight hundred miles to the north, Dick Cheney experienced a similar childhood, though without the tragedy. His first years had been spent in Nebraska, listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio, playing Little League, and joining the Cub Scouts. The family moved around until finding an eight-hundred-square-foot house with a bedroom that he would share with his brother, Bob. His parents did not own a car until Dick was eight, and even then it was a twelve-year-old Buick coupe with no backseat, forcing the boys to ride in boxes on floorboards. His father was transferred in 1954 to Casper, where the family bought a small $15,000 house on Texas Place on the eastern edge of town. Out the window was prairie as far as the eye could see. “His father had a wry sense of humor but was a man of few words,” recalled Pete Williams. “His mom was the real ripsnorter of the family,” said Joe Meyer. “She was the athlete, just a ball of fire.”

  Dick learned to fish and hunt, the beginning of lifelong avocations. He and friends would shoot jackrabbits with .22-caliber rifles and give them to his mother to fry for school lunch boxes. As they got older, they went to ten-cent movies and cruised the small city. “We had an A&W on one side of town and a drive-in on the other side, and for fifty cents’ worth of gas you could drive back and forth all night just to see who was driving around,” recalled Bernie Seebaum, who grew up a block away. Like the young Bush, Dick got in trouble on occasion. Once he and a friend were taken to the police station for throwing snowballs at passing cars and hitting a driver who had left her window open. While he had been on the honor roll in Nebraska, he was not impressing teachers in Casper. One complained of “too much time wasted foolishly” and wrote that “he needs to get over his very smarty attitude.” He and his friends played poker, smoked cigars, and once in a while snuck a beer. “We thought we were pretty hot stuff,” Seebaum said.

  At Natrona County High School, Dick became a star halfback and linebacker on the football team and caught the eye of Lynne Vincent, a state champion baton twirler and ace student. When he gathered the nerve to ask her out, she exclaimed, “You’re kidding!” But she meant it as surprise, not disinterest, and the two soon became the school’s leading couple, the senior class president and football co-captain who crowned the homecoming queen at the dance. It was a simple and satisfying life, “like a classic fifties movie,” as he remembered it. Dick delivered newspapers, cut lawns, and even worked at the rodeo grounds. “We didn’t know we were poor and that we were missing things,” said Mick McMurry, a longtime friend.

  THEIR PATHS ALMOST crossed in New Haven, Connecticut, where Bush enrolled in Yale just two years after Cheney left. Neither one of them found Yale to his liking, and in some ways their campus stays would shape their views of the Eastern establishment for life.

  Leaving behind Lynne, his parents, and his siblings, Bob and Susan, Cheney took the train across the country in 1959 with his friend Tom Fake. He and Fake were tight; during high school, they double-dated, played football together, took up boxing, and spent weeks learning how “to beat the crap out of each other.” They received scholarships through Thomas Stroock, a classmate of George H. W. Bush’s who operated an oil company in Casper and employed Lynne as a part-time secretary.

  It was Cheney’s first time east of Chicago, and getting off the train was like stepping into a foreign country where “they were speaking another language.” He was used to open spaces and western sensibilities where people looked you in the eye. More significantly, he realized he was not prepared academically. “We went from being the big fish in a small pu
ddle to being thrown into Yale with all the fifth-year boys and really sixth-year boys who had gone to prep school,” Fake recalled. “We were just struggling to stay afloat.” It was a shock. “You’d come home dragging your tail between your legs when everything else for eighteen years had gone so well.”

  Moreover, like many young men, Cheney believed that “beer was one of the essentials of life.” A dean wrote to his parents, “Dick has fallen in with a group of very high-spirited young men.” After freshman year, his grades were so bad the university cut off the scholarship. He paid for the first semester of sophomore year through loans, but after that the school would no longer provide even those and told him to take a year off. He returned to Wyoming and worked as a $3.10-an-hour electrical lineman before returning to Yale for spring semester in 1962. Once again, he flunked out and returned to the lineman job, spending off-hours consuming life’s essential and getting arrested for drunk driving in October 1962 and again in June 1963. The second time he found himself nursing a hangover in jail around the time his Yale classmates were graduating. Lynne put her foot down. “She made it clear eventually that she had no interest in marrying a lineman for the county,” Cheney said. He got his act together, enrolled in community college, and then transferred to the University of Wyoming. They were married in August 1964, but he got sick and spent the honeymoon money on treatment.