by Peter Baker
Laura pressed him about the alcohol. “Can you remember the last day you didn’t have a drink?” she challenged him.
“Of course, I can,” he replied. But he realized he could not. He regularly indulged in what he called the four Bs—beer, bourbon, and B&B.
That summer proved a pivot point. Celebrating his and Laura’s fortieth birthdays with friends at the Broadmoor in Colorado, the group emptied $60 bottles of Silver Oak and repeated the same toast, by Laura’s count, twenty times. “We made a little noise in the dining room that night,” conceded Joe O’Neill. After waking up the next day with a pounding hangover that did not begin to dissipate until halfway through his daily run, Bush made the resolution that changed him forever, vowing to give up drinking. Bush later joked that Laura insisted, “It’s either Jim Beam or me,” although she never actually put it that starkly. Either way, friends understood his father’s campaign also played a part. “He said one day I might be an embarrassment to my father, and he never picked up another drop,” said O’Neill.
In Washington, Bush claimed an office at campaign headquarters. “He was a big, booming personality,” recalled Debra Dunn, his assistant. “He’s an action guy. He liked to make decisions.” He showed up in his jogging suit, dipping chewing tobacco and making friends. “Everyone loved him because he treated everyone the same way,” Dunn said. His humor still leaned to the juvenile. A driver named Payne was nicknamed “Payne-is.” But the experience was a lesson in power. He learned that by showing up for a meeting with his father twenty minutes before anyone else, other advisers would arrive and take note of his access, even if they had just been talking sports. He also developed a taste for the crowd.
“Yeah, I killed them in Atlanta,” he was saying into the phone the day the author Richard Ben Cramer was first brought into his office. “I killed them. They were saying, ‘Junior! Junior!’ ”
And then “Junior” made the crowd noise into the phone. “He was fully alive to who he was and how he was,” observed Cramer, who became a friend.
It fell to the younger Bush to publicly quash talk of adultery by his father. “You’ve heard the rumors,” he recounted asking his father. “What about it?” His father answered, “They’re just not true.” Atwater then arranged a call between the younger Bush and Howard Fineman of Newsweek. “The answer to the Big A question is N-O,” Bush told him. His parents were later chagrined at that, especially his mother. But he was tough on those who crossed or embarrassed his father. When an Esquire magazine profile of Atwater reported that he answered his hotel door wearing only underwear and socks, then kept talking to the writer while using the bathroom, à la Lyndon B. Johnson, George W. reamed him out. When Newsweek ran a cover on his father with the headline “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor,’ ” Bush was “red hot” and called the reporter Margaret Warner to accuse her of “a political ambush.” Just as the false news report on Prescott Bush in 1950 colored his son’s view of journalism, so did this episode shape the younger Bush’s.
If Bush was a fiercely loyal son, he was also a nervous one. During the second presidential debate, he could not bear to watch, so he took Marvin to the movies. But he kept sending Marvin out to phone for updates, eventually giving up and leaving to watch for himself. He did not have to avert his eyes on election night. His father swept to a forty-state victory. More important, working together seemed to wipe away at least some of George’s complex about his father. Bush declared that he had gotten over his “self-pity” about “being George Bush’s son.” As Laura put it, “If there was any sort of leftover competition with being named George Bush and being the eldest, it really at that point was resolved.”
WITH THE WIN, Bush headed home to Texas. Cheney, however, became one of the new president’s most important advisers. He was not the first choice to be secretary of defense, but even before John Tower’s nomination crashed in March 1989, the phone rang in Cheney’s office summoning him to the White House.
Cheney proved an easy confirmation, although not before lawmakers questioned him in closed session about his own raucous past. How did you clean up your act? asked Senator John Glenn, the Ohio Democrat. “I got married and gave up hanging out in bars,” Cheney answered.
Having never served in uniform, Cheney was eager to make clear who was in charge. On his eighth day on the job, he saw a Washington Post story about General Larry Welch, the air force chief of staff, negotiating a compromise ballistic missile plan on Capitol Hill. “My instinct is to cut him off at the knees,” Cheney growled to the Pentagon press secretary before heading into his first news conference to do just that. “General Welch was freelancing,” Cheney told reporters. “He was not speaking for the department.” He added, “I’m not happy with it, frankly. I think it’s inappropriate for a uniformed officer to be in a position where he’s in fact negotiating an agreement.” In fact, Welch was not freelancing. He had cleared his discussions with the White House and the acting defense secretary before Cheney’s confirmation. Even Cheney later concluded that Welch “got a bit of a bum rap.” But “it was a target of opportunity if you wanted to sort of reassert civilian control.”
His most important personnel move came later in 1989 when he reached deep into the ranks to select the most junior of fifteen eligible four-star officers, General Colin L. Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first African American to hold the post. Powell, a Vietnam veteran with a magnetic bearing and political savvy, had vaulted through a series of Washington jobs until he found himself in the White House at the very moment when Ronald Reagan needed a new national security adviser. Cheney thought picking someone with that combination of backgrounds to run the Joint Chiefs was “a stroke of genius.” As for Powell, he viewed Cheney as “a cerebral Wyoming cowboy” who was “supremely self-confident,” or at least gave that impression, at bottom “a loner who would take your counsel, but preferred to go off by himself to make up his mind.” The two proved to be great partners, though not without tension. At one point when Powell argued for cutting tactical nuclear weapons, Cheney said none of his civilian advisers agreed. “That’s because they’re all right-wing nuts like you,” Powell said half jokingly.
Cheney faced early tests, most notably the brief war in Panama to arrest the drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega. But it was the attempted military coup in the Philippines in December 1989 that brought to the fore questions of authority. When the White House got word of the attempt to seize power in Manila, the president was flying to a Middle East summit, so Vice President Dan Quayle called a National Security Council meeting at the White House. Cheney, at home, refused to attend, arguing that the vice president was not in the chain of command. Instead, he stayed in contact directly with the president on Air Force One. Once again, Cheney was fighting a vice president he thought was overstepping his bounds. From the plane, Scowcroft juggled telephone calls from Cheney and Quayle, but the power struggle was never fully resolved.
In Dallas, the younger Bush had largely checked out of his father’s administration. He nursed his own political ambitions but confronted the harsh reality that he had no record. “George, everybody likes you, but you haven’t done anything,” a Texas Republican operative told him. “You need to go out in the world and do something, the way that your father did when he left Connecticut and the protection of his family. You just haven’t done shit. You’re a Bush and that’s all.” His opportunity came when Bush heard the owner of the Texas Rangers wanted to sell. He worked his contacts, played off his family name, and put together an investor group to buy the ailing baseball team in April 1989. Bush himself ultimately put in just $606,000 of the $86 million but would be the public face as co-managing partner. “How cool is this?” he asked his partner Rusty Rose on the pitcher’s mound on opening night.
The baseball venture relaunched his political career. No hands-off owner, Bush regularly sat in Section 109, Row 1, Seat 8, behind the Rangers’ dugout, signing autographs. He printed baseball cards with his face on them a
nd traveled Texas giving speeches. “I can’t tell you how many Rotary lunches and Kiwanis lunches he would do,” recalled his driver, Israel Hernandez. “It was baseball, baseball, baseball. He loved talking about baseball.” But it also helped build a foundation for his political career. Bush orchestrated a referendum approving a temporary tax increase to pay for a new stadium that would open in the spring of 1994, just months before a governor’s election. While he traded away the future slugging star Sammy Sosa to his later regret, the Rangers went from a losing team to winning records in seven of the next ten seasons, nearly doubling attendance and increasing revenues. The success “solved my biggest political problem in Texas,” he reflected. “My problem was, ‘What’s the boy ever done?’ ”
Cheney’s defining test came in a far different arena when in August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. While Powell questioned whether anyone cared enough about Kuwait to commit troops, Cheney clearly did. His question was whether President Bush would go for it. “Did the president have the balls to call out the Reserves?” Cheney wondered. He did. Cheney wanted to prove he had balls too. When he read another Washington Post article quoting another air force chief speaking out of turn, he again took action. This time it was General Michael Dugan discussing plans to target Saddam Hussein and other sensitive details. Cheney read the article twice, went for a walk along the C&O Canal to cool down, returned home, reread the story, and got mad all over again. He called the president at Camp David, pulling him off the tennis court to tell him he might relieve Dugan. The next morning he did. “It sent a hell of a message,” Cheney said later. “Dugan was a gift from that perspective.”
Cheney also found himself at odds with Powell. The general did not think it was worth going to war over Kuwait and made that point in a White House meeting, only to be dressed down by Cheney, who made clear that his job was to offer military, not policy, advice. Likewise, Cheney rejected the first war plan sent to him by Powell, an up-the-middle assault that he and James Baker, by then the secretary of state, derisively called the “Washington Monument plan.” Bypassing Powell, Cheney ordered a rewrite that envisioned a left hook to cut off Iraqi forces. Worried about “bugs and gas,” Cheney also ordered contingency plans to use tactical nuclear weapons if Iraqi forces employed biological and chemical weapons. The notion was so sensitive that Powell later had the study destroyed. As for the war itself, Cheney argued against asking Congress for permission, but the president disregarded him and won authorization. Cheney later admitted he had been wrong.
Two nights before the Gulf War began, Cheney made a secret visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington to contemplate mistakes of the past and pray he did not repeat them. But he was no tortured soul. The night the war started, he ordered Chinese food and calmly monitored reports. He spent so much time schooling himself on military techniques that his uniformed staff later jokingly awarded him an honorary war college degree. He did not like everything he learned. When military attorneys barred a strike on a Hussein memorial, he scoffed, “Lawyers running a war?”
In any case, American forces easily expelled the Iraqis from Kuwait. When retreating Iraqis were being slaughtered on what was now called the Highway of Death, the president asked whether it was time to end the war. “The unanimous view of those of us who were there, civilian and military, was yes,” Cheney later said. “Our objective was to liberate Kuwait.” The war was over with just 148 American battle deaths.
In years to come, critics dismissed by Powell as “simple solutionists” would deem it a profound mistake not to have taken out Hussein. But Cheney never publicly expressed second thoughts. A few months before the 1992 election, he defended the decision and predicted America would have gotten “bogged down” running Iraq if it had deposed Hussein. “Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place?” Cheney asked. “You know, you then have accepted responsibility for governing Iraq.” He added, “The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.” Eight years later, just before joining George W. Bush’s ticket in 2000, he had not changed his mind. “I still think we made the right decision there,” Cheney said in a secret oral history taped that year but not released until after his vice presidency. “I don’t think we should have gone to Baghdad.”
As successful as the Gulf War was, it was the zenith for the Bush team. From Texas, George W. was tapped by his father to help sort out a dysfunctional West Wing, starting at the top. John Sununu, the chief of staff, had burned bridges. “Smart guy, arrogant, didn’t know what he didn’t know,” as Cheney later described him. The president wrote notes to seven or eight longtime allies seeking advice. His son then put them inside envelopes with his own return address in Dallas and followed up with telephone calls. The verdict was unmistakable, and so the day before Thanksgiving the younger Bush arrived at the West Wing to deliver the message.
“You know,” he told Sununu, “I’ve talked to a lot of people. They’re down on you. It’s going to be tough for you to work with these people.”
But Sununu did not take the hint. Only after Bush’s father sent three aides, Andy Card, Dorrance Smith, and C. Boyden Gray, to deliver the same message one after another did the headstrong chief resign.
George W. Bush was even less successful in dislodging the vice president, whom he deemed a drag on reelection. Much as Cheney helped orchestrate the replacement of Nelson Rockefeller, Bush tried to persuade his father to dump Dan Quayle from the 1992 ticket. In his place? He recommended Cheney. The defense secretary knew nothing about this, but he had made clear through intermediaries like Baker that he also thought Quayle should go. While the president privately acknowledged that he “blew it” by picking Quayle in the first place, he was unwilling to cut loose a loyal lieutenant.
“But,” George W. Bush wrote waggishly after his own presidency, “I never completely gave up on my idea of a Bush-Cheney ticket.”
THE DEFEAT OF the president in 1992 disappointed both Bush and Cheney, but it also proved liberating. For the first time in years, each of them could again pursue an independent path.
Bush had been eyeing the Governor’s Mansion in Texas but put off a run while his father was in office. With his father now retired, he was free to run—not that anyone thought he could beat the incumbent governor, Ann Richards, a folksy, well-liked Democrat. “George, you can’t win,” his mother told him with characteristic bluntness. His friends told him the same thing. “I thought she was unbeatable,” said Charlie Younger.
Undaunted, Bush threw himself into the campaign, eager both to prove himself and, friends thought, perhaps even to avenge his father against Richards, who had memorably mocked the president for being “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” and Bill Clinton, who had prematurely ended his father’s presidency. When the sportswriter Randy Galloway sidled up to the candidate in the dugout and asked why he was running against Richards since she would beat him, Bush said, “I’m not running against her. I’m running against the guy in the White House.” His motivation increased when Richards turned her taunts on him, calling him “some jerk” and “shrub.” When Bush found himself in an elevator with Richards heading to a debate, he wished her luck. She responded, “This is going to be rough on you, boy.”
It proved rougher on her and a surprise to the nation. With a youthful message of change much like the one Clinton had used successfully against his father, Bush barnstormed the state focusing on four campaign issues: education, juvenile crime, welfare reform, and litigation limits. With the help of Kenneth Lay of Enron and other deep-pocketed contributors, Bush competed financially. “He just flat outworked her,” said Joe O’Neill. As it happened, his upset victory with 53 percent in November 1994 came the same night Jeb Bush lost his first race for governor of Florida. George was disappointed that his parents were focused on consoling Jeb. “Why do you feel bad about Jeb?” he asked his father over the phone. “Why don
’t you feel good about me?” His parents did feel good about him, of course, as did Republicans far from Texas who saw a new star.
Also working the campaign circuit that fall was Cheney, who had cleared out his desk at the Pentagon and left without even saying good-bye to his partner, Powell, who later admitted being “disappointed, even hurt, but not surprised.” Cheney decided to test his own possible run for the presidency, driving eight thousand miles across the country to appear at nearly 160 fund-raisers and political events for Republican candidates. Cheney raised $1.3 million for a political action committee run by David Addington and spent so much time on the road that he mailed dirty shirts home to be laundered. At Christmas, he retreated to snowy Jackson Hole to talk it over with his family. Ultimately, he decided against it.
When Cheney announced his decision in January 1995, Sean O’Keefe, a former aide, asked why. Cheney said he would explain when they had more time, so the two arranged to go fishing in Pennsylvania one day. As they stood there in Spring Creek, Cheney was “beating the water as hard as you can imagine,” as O’Keefe recalled it, but hours passed without an explanation. Finally, O’Keefe couldn’t stand it.
“Mr. Secretary, you told me you were going to tell me why you didn’t do this,” he said. “We were in the foxhole ready to do this.”
Cheney cast his line and looked at O’Keefe. “You know,” he said, “the idea of spending the rest of my life begging for money was just unappealing.”
And then he flipped the fly right back in. That’s it? O’Keefe thought. “Caught a lot of fish that day,” he later recalled, “and one nugget of insight.”
Cheney was somewhat more expansive with other former aides. Grilling steaks one afternoon in the backyard of his Wyoming home, he told Pete Williams, “I just decided I didn’t want to do this to my family and they didn’t want to have this done to them. And there was the health issue. But at the end of the day, I just didn’t have the fire in the belly for fixing the Social Security system.” Over lunch with another former aide, Stephen Hadley, Cheney articulated a three-part test: “You have to first be able to visualize yourself in the office. Then you have to be able to decide that you are prepared and able to put together the organization and the money that you need to win it. Then you have to make sure that you have the fire in the gut to see it through. I couldn’t check all three of those boxes.”
