by Peter Baker
For three and a half hours, Bush chatted with both Danforths, mainly about personal issues rather than grand political philosophy. For Danforth and his wife, joining the ticket would mean a wholesale change in lifestyle, and that was on the top of their minds. “You’d think it would be about what should happen with taxes or foreign policy or the budget or something global,” Danforth recalled a little ruefully. “And it was, well, how often could we get back to St. Louis? Dumb stuff like that.” Bush did ask Danforth about the role of faith in his public life, and the former senator demurred. “I just wanted to make clear that I didn’t see my religion translating into a political agenda,” Danforth said.
Danforth had no idea the Sherpa who had escorted him to the interview had already been secretly tapped for the job ostensibly under discussion. Cheney even sat in on the interview until he was told that Liz was on the phone. Excusing himself, he picked up the line, and Liz told him Pete Williams had called to say that NBC was about to report that he was the pick for vice president. Cheney told Liz to call back and say no decision had been made. That might have been technically true, but reporters were picking up the scent, and the secret could not hold long. Bush left his meeting with Danforth impressed, but he had not changed his mind.
Cheney set about clearing away the underbrush. His longtime friend and aide David Gribbin called another Cheney friend, Joe Meyer, now Wyoming’s secretary of state, to ask what had to be done to be a voter in the state; Meyer said a recent state supreme court case had made clear that someone who had a home in the state could declare it his primary residence and register. The deadline for the Republican primaries, though, was fast approaching. So Cheney and his wife made a secret trip on July 21 to Teton County, where their vacation home was located, and went to the courthouse to fill out paperwork. It did not take long for word to leak, setting off a flood of speculation. Caught off guard, Karen Hughes tried to find out what was going on by calling Liz Cheney, who was getting a haircut and had to slip into a utility closet to explain the Twelfth Amendment problem. Rove was eager to preserve surprise for Bush’s decision. On July 22, he found a fellow campaign aide often suspected of leaking to the media and lied to him by saying Danforth was the choice. By that evening’s network news, Danforth was being reported as a leading candidate.
Cheney, of course, knew better, even if he had not been formally offered the job or formally accepted. He confided in only a few trusted friends and presented himself as the reluctant candidate.
“Look,” he said when he reached his friend David Hume Kennerly, who had been the Ford White House photographer. “You’re going to hear something tomorrow that Bush has asked me to be his running mate.”
Kennerly didn’t miss a beat. “You told him no, right?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Not exactly? Let’s get this clear—you helped him find his vice president and it’s like a bad love story and it turns out to be you?”
“He kind of twisted my arm.”
“Oh, bullshit, how’s that one going to play?”
They would find out. At 6:22 a.m. on July 25, Bush called Cheney at home and formally offered him the nomination. Cheney, reportedly on the treadmill, accepted. He hung up the phone and turned to Lynne. “Honey, let’s sell the house,” he said. “I quit my job. We’re going back into politics.”
The Cheneys flew to Austin for the 2:00 p.m. announcement and then later to Wyoming for a raucous rally in the Natrona County High School gymnasium. During their speeches, both Bush and Cheney referenced Cheney’s initial refusal to be considered and suggested their months working on the selection brought them together. “I was impressed by the thoughtful and thorough way he approached his mission, and gradually I realized that the person who was best qualified to be my vice presidential nominee was working by my side,” Bush told supporters.
Cheney offered a similar account. “I was deeply involved in running a business, enjoying private life, and I certainly wasn’t looking to return to public service,” he said. “But I had an experience that changed my mind this spring. As I worked alongside Governor Bush, I heard him talk about his unique vision for our party and for our nation. I saw his sincerity. I watched him make decisions, always firm and always fair. And in the end, I learned how persuasive he can be.”
PERSUASIVE OR NOT, it was still unclear why Cheney would want the job. Vice presidents have historically found themselves consigned to political exile, deprived of real power unless the most awful thing happened. John Adams, the first to hold the job, called it “the most insignificant office” ever invented, and John Nance Garner, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s vice presidents, called it “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” or something even more graphic. Lyndon B. Johnson was so despondent about the job that he stared at the television the morning after the 1960 election palpably depressed at having won the vice presidency and later declared, “I detested every minute of it.” Walter F. Mondale called it a job “characterized by ambiguity, disappointment, and even antagonism.”
Cheney knew that firsthand. “It is a crappy job,” he said. “Jerry Ford often told me that it was the worst eight months of his life.” Moreover, Cheney said, “I had been there in the Nixon administration and seen Agnew go down in flames, and I had been on the receiving end of Nelson Rockefeller’s frustration, which was wide and deep; he hated the damn job.” As the instrument of that frustration, Cheney understood intimately the office’s limitations. The only constitutional duty beyond succession is to preside as president of the Senate, casting no votes except in case of ties. As Cheney had made clear with Dan Quayle during the attempted coup in the Philippines, the vice president is not in the chain of command.
But the vice presidency had been expanding since the days of Adams and Garner. Johnson was the first with an office in the White House complex, in the Old Executive Office Building next to the West Wing; John F. Kennedy gave it to him to separate Johnson from his old power base in the Senate, where vice presidents typically had an office. Jimmy Carter moved Mondale into the West Wing itself, finally installing him and every vice president who followed just steps from the Oval Office. Bill Clinton gave Al Gore broad responsibility over policy areas like the environment, Russian-American relations, and reorganizing government. Yet for all that, any vice president’s influence is strictly derivative, dependent entirely on the beneficence of the president.
So why did Cheney accept? For all of his skepticism, the vice presidency ultimately appealed to him because it offered the prospect of shaping policy without having to endure the hassles required to be elected president. Cheney once said he had no appetite to run for president, but he would happily accept if someone wanted to simply offer it to him by fiat. The more Bush talked about making Cheney a real partner, the closer he came to such a scenario. Bush could be the front man, the baby kisser and rope-line worker, while Cheney focused on what he cared about most. Cheney surely understood that a president with as little knowledge or interest in details as Bush would leave him plenty of room to maneuver. “I was impressed and believed that he was serious,” Cheney said years later, “that he was looking for somebody of consequence to do the job and he wasn’t just worried about the Electoral College.”
Cheney was also a competitive man, despite his quiet manner, and he had been turned off by what he saw of Clinton’s White House. “The idea of not wearing a tie in the Oval Office and running around in jeans and just the whole style thing and Clinton’s policies struck him as wrong,” said Pete Williams. “I think he felt so viscerally that Clinton was pushing things in the wrong direction, that there was a part of him that said, this has got to be fixed. There was a part of him that’s a little bit of the fire horse, and the bell rang.”
Answering the bell, though, would require adjustment. It had been twelve years since Cheney last faced voters, twenty-two since his only competitive race, and that was a Republican primary in Wyoming, far from the harsh glare of the modern political-media culture. A decad
e earlier, while he was defense secretary, activists had threatened to out Mary if Cheney did not end the ban on gays and lesbians serving in uniform. He had ignored it. But there would be no ignoring such issues now.
On the day of the announcement, the new environment confronted him right away. Just after the speeches, Howard Fineman of Newsweek approached Mary with questions. She rebuffed him. Then he spoke with Cheney.
“Your daughter’s sexual orientation and views on same-sex marriage have become a topic in the campaign,” Fineman remembered saying. “What do you say to those who point out the conflict between her views and those of the party and the campaign?”
Cheney brushed it off. It was nobody’s business, he said. “He did not snap at me or snarl,” Fineman recalled. “He was grim as usual, but subdued. More sad and smoldering about politics and the world than visibly or volubly angry.”
Overhearing the exchange, Bush leaned over and took it upon himself to answer the question Cheney did not want to. “The secretary loves all of his family very deeply,” Bush volunteered.
The issue came up within the campaign operation when Cheney decided Mary would travel as his campaign aide. Two Bush advisers, Dan Bartlett and Ari Fleischer, were concerned it would invite media attention. The two agreed to talk with Cheney and rehearsed their approach. The next day they got into a car with the future vice president heading to the site of the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, where the nominations would be ratified. Bartlett expected Fleischer to raise the issue, but when the moment came, he was reading a newspaper and not paying attention. So Bartlett, all of twenty-nine years old, jumped in.
“There is one issue we need to talk about,” he told Cheney. “We heard that maybe your daughter was going to be on the campaign trail with you. Perfectly fine, but I just want you to know that the press is really going to focus on this. They’re going to maybe intrude more into her life than you would be prepared for.”
Bartlett paused and noticed what he thought were darts shooting from Lynne Cheney. Nobody said anything for a minute. Bartlett looked to Fleischer for help, but he kept quiet too.
“Well,” Bartlett ventured again, “I just wanted to put this on the table for you.”
Cheney looked at him with impassive eyes. “We won’t be talking about my daughter,” he said flatly, shutting down the discussion.
“Okay,” Bartlett said, retreating quickly. “Thank you very much.”
No sooner had his selection been announced than Cheney and Lynne sat down with two speechwriters, John McConnell and Matthew Scully, to talk about his convention speech. It was Lynne who came up with the most cutting line. Recalling Al Gore’s “it’s time for them to go” riff from the 1992 Democratic convention, she suggested turning it against him. The speechwriters incorporated that into their draft.
As the planning for the convention advanced, Bush advisers concluded the governor’s speech was too harsh and put the toughest lines in Cheney’s instead. It was the time-honored role of the vice presidential candidate to be the attack dog. Cheney had no problem with that. But Andy Card, a former lieutenant for the elder Bush who had been tapped to run the convention, decided Cheney’s speech was too negative as well and sent edits toning it down. Cheney ignored them and never got back to Card. When he got up before the cheering delegates at Philadelphia’s First Union Center on the night of August 2, Cheney simply delivered the original speech as written, word for word. “I came up and gave them a little bit of red meat,” he said later.
To raucous applause, Cheney argued that the Clinton-Gore administration had “done nothing to help children” in mediocre schools, “never once” offered a serious plan to save Social Security, and starved the military while demanding more of it than ever. To the armed forces, Cheney said, “I can promise them now help is on the way.” He dismissed the Democratic team as full of “lectures and legalisms and carefully worded denials” and did his best, without explicitly mentioning Monica Lewinsky or Whitewater, to tie Clinton’s scandals to Gore. “As the man from Hope goes home to New York, Mr. Gore tries to separate himself from his leader’s shadow,” Cheney said. “But somehow we will never see one without thinking of the other. Does anyone, Republican or Democrat, seriously believe that under Mr. Gore the next four years would be any different from the last eight?” Three times he used the line “It is time for them to go.” Lynne beamed from the audience.
It was Bush’s turn the next night, August 3. He accepted the nomination with a host of Bushes on hand to witness his triumph, most notably, of course, the father who had stood there eight years before. Even with his speech toned down, the new nominee offered a harsh indictment, arguing that the outgoing administration had “coasted through prosperity” and wasted opportunities. “Our current president embodied the potential of a generation,” Bush declared. “So many talents. So much charm. Such great skill. But in the end, to what end? So much promise, to no great purpose.” Seeking to distance himself from Clinton and Newt Gingrich at the same time, Bush promised a new “responsibility era” and touted “compassionate conservatism.” He noted, “I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years,” and he vowed to “change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect.”
It was an effective speech. But in a time of peace and prosperity, it was, as Scully put it, “just straining for big themes.” If Bush and Cheney won, what would this presidency be about?
4
“We wrapped Bill Clinton around his neck”
Governor Bush,” the CIA man said, “if you are elected president, there will be a major terrorist attack during your time in office.”
With the nominations in hand, life around George W. Bush and Dick Cheney began to change. Their security details increased, their perimeters expanded, the advance operations became more elaborate, the events bigger. And the prospect of actually becoming president and vice president loomed ever larger.
Within days, Bush welcomed to Crawford a team of CIA briefers sent by Bill Clinton to give him a classified tour of the world. What the briefers expected to be a one-hour session stretched into four hours as Bush peppered them with questions. Bush jumped in so assertively and proved so interactive that after ten minutes the briefers put aside their binder and engaged in an expansive conversation with the candidate about trouble spots around the globe.
For Bush, this was a tutorial like no other. He proved familiar with Latin America and the Balkans and was especially interested in Russia and China, but he had little of his father’s grasp of the world and had traveled little himself. “There were some issues on which he was quite well briefed and others on which he wasn’t, and he used the occasion to get smart about things that he didn’t know a lot about,” recalled John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director who led the briefing.
At one point, terrorism came up, and McLaughlin and his team had brought charts and graphs, as well as a briefcase that was set down in front of Bush and opened to expose a timing device with red digits counting down as if it were a chemical bomb. McLaughlin offered the prediction that terrorism would mark his presidency. After all, during Clinton’s tenure, radicals had bombed the World Trade Center in New York, a housing complex full of American military personnel in Saudi Arabia, and two American embassies in East Africa, and intelligence agencies had broken up a plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. The nation’s intelligence agencies were hunting down a shadowy Islamic terrorist group called al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. Bush was attentive, though no more than on other topics like Russia. “He absorbed it and was interested and took it on board,” McLaughlin said.
None of that played out on the campaign trail, where the issues were domestic. Bush and his team recognized his challenge of taking on Al Gore in a prosperous moment. Stuart Stevens, a consultant to the campaign, jokingly suggested the slogan “Times Have Never Been Better, Vote for Change.” But Bush had little respect for his opponent, privately dismissing Gore as “pathologically
a liar,” and he anticipated an abrasive fall campaign. “I may have to get a little rough for a while,” he told Doug Wead, “but that is what the old man had to do with Dukakis, remember?” While the elder George Bush had assailed Michael Dukakis on prison furloughs and his supposed lack of zeal for the Pledge of Allegiance, the younger Bush’s strategy was simple. “What we did with Gore was we wrapped Bill Clinton around his neck and never talked about one without talking about the other,” Cheney said later. Gore played into that by viewing the scandal-tarred Clinton as an albatross and keeping him on the sidelines. Bush baited the president to come out of hiding. “If he decides he can’t help himself and gets out there and starts campaigning against me, the Shadow returns,” Bush said.
For Cheney, the return to the stump proved rocky. The basics eluded him. Bush aides watched him walking with Lynne to a rally and thought he needed to learn how to hold her hand. Cheney cared more about the issues than atmospherics and spent hours boning up. “The binders came back fully consumed,” remembered Stuart Holliday, an aide dispatched by the Austin headquarters to staff the new candidate. But it would take a while to find his best role on the trail, and with Cheney never vetted the way he had vetted other candidates, the campaign was ill-equipped to respond when Democrats attacked his conservative votes in Congress. “The whole thing was a surprise to him,” said his friend Alan Simpson. “He hadn’t prepared for it at all.”
