by Peter Baker
The notion turned off many Republicans, who considered compassionate conservatism an insult to traditional party values or believed it “sounded less like a philosophy than a marketing slogan,” as David Frum, who would work for Bush, put it after leaving the White House. But it drew others to Texas hoping that Bush’s idealistic talk was more than a campaign tactic, people like Michael Gerson, who became his chief speechwriter, a low-key, bespectacled evangelical Christian uncomfortable with Texas swagger and locker-room humor. “It took a little getting used to for me because I am not much of a towel snapper,” Gerson said.
For all the speeches he would give and policy papers he would issue, Bush crystallized his image as a different kind of Republican with a single sentence one day that fall when congressional Republicans proposed stretching out earned income tax credits to the working poor.
Hughes went to Bush’s hotel room. “You’re going to get asked about this,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like something you would do.”
Bush agreed, and when a reporter did ask, he responded, “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor.”
He could get away with the overt appeal to independents and moderates in part because of his own ties to the Christian conservative wing of the party. While his father’s faith was the traditionally quiet Episcopalianism of New England, the new Bush had publicly embraced the evangelical notion of Jesus Christ as his personal savior. “I’m always amazed when I read that George Bush is moving this way or that way for the religious right,” his cousin John Ellis once said. “George W. Bush is the religious right.”
When Bush said at a Republican debate in December that his favorite philosopher was Jesus, his father was chagrined. “I don’t think your answer will hurt you too much,” the elder Bush told him.
“Which answer?”
“You know, that one on Jesus.”
Rather than hurt, it served as a powerful message to a section of the party that voted most often. Consciously or not, Bush was again emulating Ronald Reagan, who once said that Christ was the historical figure he most admired. And Bush was distancing himself from his father, who lost reelection after breaking his famous “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge. “This is not only no new taxes,” the younger Bush said of his economic plan during a debate in January 2000. “This is tax cuts so help me God.”
ON THE CAMPAIGN plane, Bush acted playful, even goofy with the reporters following him. He enjoyed a winking, mischievous relationship with Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of the Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and a documentary filmmaker following him with her camera. He showed her his boots and Texas-seal belt buckle, performed an Elvis Presley impression, and grabbed her camera to quiz her about her dating life. “I can see a little chemistry there,” he teased her about another reporter. “You know what I mean by ‘chemistry there’?” At times, he was too loose. Talking with the conservative writer Tucker Carlson, he mocked Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman put to death in Texas in more than a century. “Please, don’t kill me,” he whimpered in imitation.
That was, for the most part, an aberration. As a campaigner, Bush described himself as “a uniter, not a divider,” and largely meant it. He rejected advice to demonize gays and lesbians. “I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner,” he told Doug Wead. “How can I differentiate sin?” He complained about the Christian Coalition’s divisive tactics. “This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It’s hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality.” He added, “I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays.”
Still, Bush was rough on the campaign trail, a walking gaffe machine at times, mocked for bringing his own pillow on the road. He mangled various nationalities, referring to “Grecians” and “Kosovarians.” He confused Slovakia and Slovenia and failed a pop quiz by a radio reporter who asked him to name the leaders of Taiwan, Chechnya, Pakistan, and India. Words had a way of coming out in all the wrong places. “Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?” he said one day in South Carolina. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” he said a couple weeks later in New Hampshire. Bush was okay with it if it meant his rivals thought less of him. “They misunderestimated me,” he declared.
And yet, backed by money, charm, and a famous name, Bush quickly outdistanced most of the Republican field, including not just Steve Forbes but also Dan Quayle, the former transportation secretary Elizabeth Dole, and the former education secretary Lamar Alexander. To win the nomination, Bush still had to vanquish Senator John McCain, a war hero from his years as a prisoner in North Vietnam and the embodiment of a maverick reformer. Bush did not take McCain seriously at first. “He’s going to wear very thin when it is all said and done,” he told Wead. The scale of that misjudgment became clear when McCain thrashed Bush by eighteen percentage points in the New Hampshire primary on February 1, 2000. Not used to conceding defeat, Bush left it to Karl Rove to call McCain, which did not go over well with the senator’s consultant John Weaver. “Consultants don’t concede to candidates,” Weaver instructed an aide to tell Rove. A few minutes later, Bush himself called to talk with McCain. The conversation lasted about ninety seconds. “We said good-bye as friends,” McCain recalled. “We would soon be friends no more.”
Bush took the loss better than his advisers, who were summoned to his hotel room expecting to be fired. Instead, the candidate bucked them up. “This is my fault, not yours,” he told them. Every president stumbles on the way to the White House. His father had lost Iowa in 1988 before winning the nomination. Such defeats strengthened a campaign. “He really was like a coach whose team had a bad first half,” said Senator Judd Gregg, who led the New Hampshire effort. “He was telling everyone to suck it up and get back in the game. There was virtually no self-pity or woe is me. Just the opposite.” But in private, Laura Bush put her finger on the problem; he had gotten away from his core message of changing Washington. “You got defined,” she told him. “And you need to make up your mind whether or not you’re going to go down there and tell people who you are, instead of letting people define you.”
The campaign’s crucible was South Carolina. Karen Hughes called Rove to vent about how a longtime senator and chairman of the Commerce Committee had somehow co-opted their outsider status. “McCain has managed to steal our reform mantra,” she said. They came up with a new slogan, “Reformer with Results,” and resolved to refer to McCain as “Chairman” to paint him as a creature of Washington. Then the campaign in the Low Country took a decidedly low turn. Bush, who had rejected divisive politics against gays, visited Bob Jones University, the conservative Christian school known to almost everyone but him apparently for its ban on interracial dating. He also stood by as a surrogate at another campaign event accused McCain of forgetting fellow veterans when he returned after five and a half years of captivity in Hanoi. At McCain headquarters, reports poured in about flyers and phone calls insinuating scurrilous things about the senator—that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock, beat his wife, was mentally unstable, had a secret Vietnamese family, was a Manchurian candidate. Bush denied involvement.
Bush all but ended McCain’s threat with a strong victory in South Carolina on February 19. McCain did little to hide his anger, calling Bush “a combination of the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow”—in other words, a man with no courage, no heart, and no brain. Eventually, McCain backed Bush for the general election without enthusiasm. He grew testy at reporters parsing his words, at one point blurting out, “I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush, I endorse Governor Bush,” repeating it seven times as if he were scrawling his punishment on a chalkboard. For years afterward, a debate would rage over whether McCain actually voted for Bush. Several liberal celebrities claimed he told them at a dinner once that he did not. McCain denied it.
Either way, the bad blood ensured that Bush would not follow Reagan’s precedent of picking hi
s toughest competitor to join the ticket in the fall.
WHILE BUSH WAS securing the nomination, he began thinking ahead to the general election. Weeks after South Carolina, he sent Joe Allbaugh to visit Dick Cheney with a question: Would he agree to be considered for the vice presidential nomination?
Cheney said no. “I cited all the reasons why that was a bad idea,” he said later. He had had three heart attacks, he would reinforce the notion of a Big Oil ticket, and he brought no geographic balance to the campaign. Indeed, there could even be a constitutional problem because under the Twelfth Amendment electors cannot cast ballots for both presidential and vice presidential candidates from their own state. Since Cheney at the time lived in Dallas, that would mean Texas’s electors could vote for Bush but not for Cheney.
Undeterred, Bush came back a few weeks later with another request. If you won’t be my vice president, he asked, will you find one for me? This time, Cheney said yes. He figured at most that assignment would last a few months and he could then return to Halliburton full-time.
He set out to cull names, relying on the help of his daughter Liz, David Addington, and a few others. He eliminated the most obvious candidates, including McCain. Cheney’s old Pentagon partner, Colin Powell, now one of the most popular figures in the country, made clear he was not interested and insisted on a public statement that he was not under consideration. Senator Connie Mack of Florida told Cheney that if he was put on a list, he would never speak to him again. Cheney wanted his old mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, to be considered, but Bush personally shot that down. Cheney assured Bush that Rumsfeld really had not been out to get his father in the 1970s, but it was a nonstarter.
Cheney soon assembled a list of nine candidates: Governors Frank Keating of Oklahoma, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, and John Engler of Michigan; Senators Bill Frist of Tennessee, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and Jon Kyl of Arizona; Representative John Kasich of Ohio, former governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and former senator John Danforth of Missouri. Each agreed to fill out a seventy-nine-part questionnaire and turn over tax returns, medical records, employment and residential history, and every speech and interview ever given.
Helping put together voluminous binders on the candidates, Addington joked that if Cheney did a good enough job, maybe Bush would ask him to be the running mate. Cheney just laughed.
He deflected friends who suspected something was up. When former senator Alan Simpson quizzed him about who was on the short list, Cheney refused to say.
“Are you on it?” Simpson asked.
“No. Lynne isn’t going to go for that. I’m not going to go for that.”
When his old aide and friend Pete Williams, now at NBC News, called to ask, Cheney said, “I am so glad to be out of public life. Forget it.”
What happened from there usually falls into two competing narratives. The official version is that Bush never gave up on the idea of having Cheney as his running mate and wore him down. “If someone says no, do they mean it?” he asked his father at one point. The more conspiratorial version is that Cheney actually did want the nomination and manipulated the process to uncover the flaws of the others, leaving himself the only logical candidate without ever being vetted himself.
In the years that followed, Cheney offered a powerful rebuttal to the suspicions. “He didn’t have any desire to be vice president,” Liz said, “otherwise he would have agreed the first time Joe Allbaugh asked him if he wanted to be on the list.” And Bush by his own account told Cheney every time they talked that he was the solution to his problem. Yet some losing candidates and even some Cheney friends were convinced it was all an elaborate orchestration. “Cheney engineered the whole vice president thing,” said one friend. “The brilliance of Cheney is he let the other alternatives just light themselves on fire, one after the other. It was perfect.” Cheney never said as much to this friend, but it says something that someone close to him would come to this conclusion.
By summer, Cheney was certainly entertaining the idea. In June, he flew to South America for a hunting trip with his daughter Mary. They spent a week sitting in duck blinds, talking about family and Mary’s school plans and their home in Jackson Hole. Only on the flight home on July 1 did he reveal what really was on his mind.
“What do you think about me running for vice president?” he asked.
Mary thought he was kidding. She knew he headed the search committee but did not realize until then that Allbaugh had sounded him out or that Bush still wanted him.
Cheney asked what she thought. Mary had come out to her parents in high school and was now in a committed relationship with another woman, Heather Poe, a former park ranger. Her private life was sure to come under public scrutiny if he were to run.
“Personally, I’d rather not be known as the vice president’s lesbian daughter,” she told him frankly. “But if you’re going to run, I think the country would be lucky to have you. I want to do whatever I can to help out on the campaign. And you’d better win.”
When they got home, the family had several conversations about the idea. Lynne Cheney was unexcited. She liked their life. She had her own career writing fiction, appearing on television, and serving on boards, still leaving her time for grandchildren. For months, she had been asking her husband, “You’re not going to do this, right?” And he would answer, “No, no”—right until he said yes. Liz Cheney, on the other hand, was bursting with enthusiasm, joking that she had already started painting “Cheney for Veep” signs.
Two days after the flight home from South America, Cheney went to visit Bush at his ranch outside Crawford, Texas.
LAURA BUSH AND her friend Nancy Weiss made sandwiches while Bush and Cheney went through binders in the other room. It was July 3, and the Republican National Convention was only a few weeks away. Time was running short, and Bush had conducted no formal interviews for the job. Bush and Cheney then joined Laura, Weiss, and Karen Hughes for lunch.
Laura asked how the search was going.
“The man I really want to be the vice president is here at the table,” Bush said as he ate his sandwich.
Cheney said nothing. The others at the table were stunned.
The two men then retired to the back porch on what Cheney described as a “punishingly hot” day to keep talking amid the cactus and sagebrush. Cheney would later joke that the heat overcame his good sense because he finally agreed to consider joining the ticket. He would have to consult with Halliburton’s board and see a doctor, plus talk with Lynne again. He mentioned that Mary was gay. He also said he wanted a chance to go through all the arguments against his selection. Bush said fine.
Bush told Hughes on the way out to her car that afternoon that he was serious about Cheney, and soon he began telling other top advisers. But there was resistance. Hughes warned that they did not know enough about Cheney, who after all had not been vetted. She favored Tom Ridge. Karl Rove also harbored “real doubts” about Cheney and leaned toward John Danforth, as did Joshua Bolten, the campaign policy director. Matthew Dowd, a campaign strategist, still wanted Connie Mack. During a run with Bush, Mark McKinnon, the media consultant, argued for John McCain. Bush invited Rove, Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh to the Governor’s Mansion on July 15 to present the case against Cheney. Gathering in the Austin Library, decorated with portraits of famous Texans, they were joined by Cheney himself.
“Tell me why you think I shouldn’t pick Dick Cheney,” Bush said to Rove.
Stealing a nervous glimpse at Cheney, Rove gamely plowed ahead.
The strategist mentioned the gamut of objections, from Cheney’s health and congressional voting record to oil industry ties and the constitutional residency conflict. Unlike Danforth, Cheney brought no battleground state to the table; Bush would obviously have conservative Wyoming’s three electoral votes no matter what, while Missouri looked close. And picking Cheney would look as if he were “falling back on his father’s administration for help.”
After a half hour, Bush asked Cheney
if he had anything to ask Rove. Cheney shook his head. “He’d looked at me impassively the entire time, with a poker face that betrayed not a hint of emotion,” Rove recounted. “If he was amused, dismissive, angry, or impressed, I couldn’t tell.” Rove worried he had made an enemy for life out of someone who was about to become vice president.
But Cheney made the same arguments to Bush and mentioned as well his two drunk-driving convictions and flunking out of Yale. Finally, he emphasized to Bush how conservative he was.
“Dick,” Bush said dismissively, “we know that.”
“No,” Cheney said. “I mean really conservative.”
Bush was unbothered. Cheney was his man. He had gotten to know Cheney and grown to appreciate his quiet command. He found it amusing when Cheney told him that a personality test had determined his ideal job would be funeral director. Bush emphasized to advisers that here was someone eminently qualified to step into the presidency, and he liked the fact that Cheney did not seem to actually want it. He had talked with his father about Cheney, although the elder Bush later said it was “absolutely inaccurate” that he drove the choice.
For the younger Bush, Cheney was the lesson from his father’s mistakes, the un-Quayle who would never be accused of being a lightweight. And Bush understood that a neophyte on the world stage like himself could use a seasoned veteran like Cheney at his side. Cheney was “the mature person sitting next to him,” Dennis Hastert, then the House Speaker, said years later. “He was the most prominent adult in the room,” agreed Sean O’Keefe, the former Cheney aide who would go on to work in the White House. Details like Cheney’s voting record were less important. “You know, I really wasn’t looking that closely at it,” Bush later told an ally.
Although he had made up his mind, Bush went through with plans to interview another candidate. If nothing else, it could reinforce that he had made the right choice while also throwing a head fake to the media. Cheney flew to St. Louis to pick up John Danforth and his wife, Sally, and accompany them to Chicago, where he spirited them unseen into a hotel on July 18 to meet with the governor. Bush was intrigued with Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest and former three-term senator known for his probity and sometimes called “St. Jack,” both admiringly and derisively.
