by Peter Baker
But Cheney had been at Ford’s side when he stripped Kissinger of his White House title to establish clearer lines of authority, and he concluded any such arrangement now would be unwise. A defense secretary was subject to Senate confirmation and oversight by Congress. He could be summoned to testify, his papers subpoenaed. Protecting executive privilege while serving in the cabinet seemed problematic. “To be in a position where you would have to step down in a sense and take off your constitutional hat and go up and be a cabinet member who has been through confirmation by the Senate, it really puts a strain on the system,” Cheney said later.
Instead, Bush’s first choice for the Pentagon was Frederick Smith, founder of FedEx, but he underwent emergency heart bypass surgery during the Thanksgiving holiday. Bush’s second choice was the former senator Dan Coats of Indiana, who had the support of Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader. But when they met, Coats did not impress Bush or Cheney as forceful enough to handle Powell. So they went to the third choice, Donald Rumsfeld. In his memoir, Bush attributed the idea to Condoleezza Rice, but Cheney clearly played an important role. In late December, Cheney sent a car to bring Rumsfeld to the Madison Hotel in Washington, where he was slipped in through a basement to avoid witnesses. When the old friends sat down, Cheney told Rumsfeld he was thinking about him for Defense or CIA.
Rumsfeld flew to Austin to meet with the president-elect on Decem- ber 22. The same “awkward issue” that Bush identified in ruling out Rumsfeld for vice president loomed over a cabinet appointment too. “All I’m going to say to you is, you know what he did to your daddy,” James Baker told Bush. But even if Rumsfeld had maneuvered his father out of contention for vice president a quarter century earlier, the younger Bush was no longer going to hold it against him. “I had no way of knowing if this was true,” he later wrote, evidently choosing not to ask his father or, if he had, not taking his version on faith. “Whatever disagreements he and Dad might have had twenty-five years earlier did not concern me so long as Don could do the job.” Rove also argued against Rumsfeld, warning that the appointment would feed impressions that Cheney was in charge. Bush brushed him off.
Four days later, Cheney called Rumsfeld, who had gone to New Mexico for the holidays. Rumsfeld started suggesting other possibilities.
“Dick, here’s an interesting idea,” he said. “What if—”
Cheney interrupted. “Hold on, Don, I’ve got another call. Let me get back to you.”
Cheney called back ten minutes later. “That was the president-elect calling. He told me to tell you he wants you to be secretary of defense.”
“Actually,” Rumsfeld interjected, “before we were interrupted, I was going to suggest you as SecDef.”
Cheney did not seem surprised. “The president-elect had the same idea,” he said, attributing the idea to Bush. But Rumsfeld was the choice.
To some around Washington, it seemed as if the old gang was getting back together. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, thought it was like the second coming of the Ford administration, where he had worked along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and O’Neill. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime ambassador from Saudi Arabia and man-about-town in Washington, thought it was more like the return of the first Bush administration, when he worked with Cheney and Powell to organize the Gulf War. “My God, talk about a replay,” the prince said. It was “too good to be true.”
Still, the new president was torn between the work-across-the-aisle instincts of Ford and his father, and the no-compromise resolve of his new vice president. Bush yearned for a Bob Bullock, a Democrat he could work with the way he did with the lieutenant governor in Texas. But a Texas Democrat was more like a Republican in Washington. Bush was looking less for someone to compromise with than a Democrat who would agree with him.
His search took him to the Capitol Hill office of Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader. The two sat in front of a fireplace on a cold, dark January day, and Bush quickly cited Bullock as proof of his bipartisan spirit.
“We got to be very close,” Bush said. “I’d like to see if we could do that too.”
As Daschle weighed his response, Bush added, “I hope you’ll never lie to me.”
Surprised, Daschle replied, “Well, I hope you’ll never lie to me.”
Bush was edgier than Daschle anticipated. Then the president implicitly raised Cheney’s role in his White House.
“I know there’s been a lot of talk out there about who’s in charge around here,” Bush said. “There’s not ever going to be any question about who’s in charge. Decisions are going to come to my desk, and I’m going to be the one making them.”
It struck Daschle as a little defensive, even insecure.
A LIGHT FREEZING RAIN fell on the Capitol on January 20, 2001, as Bill Clinton prepared to hand power to the son of the man he had taken it from eight years earlier. Bush and Cheney were both kept in their limousines as they waited for Clinton, ever behind schedule, to get ready to receive them for the traditional White House coffee that preceded the inaugural ceremony.
After an abbreviated visit, Cheney and Al Gore climbed into the limousine they would share to the Capitol for the ceremony. Gore noted that Clinton had been busy with last-minute pardons. “How many more do you think he can get signed before noon?” he asked sarcastically. After eight years together, Clinton and Gore were parting on sour terms, a president and a vice president ending their partnership in schism.
At the Capitol’s West Front, the steps were narrower than Bush expected, and he forced himself to pay special attention to avoid falling. As he stared at the sea of overcoats, Bush focused on the cacophony of sounds and images and worried that the sleet might make it hard for him to read his inaugural address on the teleprompter. He took the thirty-five-word oath, then offered a vision for his presidency that suited the moment. “I will live and lead by these principles—to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, and to call for responsibility and try to live it as well,” he said. Cheney watched from a leather chair several feet away. A tear rolled down Bush’s face as he hugged his father.
It was a unifying speech at a time when many liberals viewed Bush as a usurper. Hendrik Hertzberg, who was President Jimmy Carter’s speechwriter, called it “shockingly good” as a piece of writing, “by far the best Inaugural Address in forty years,” and “better than all but a tiny handful of all the Inaugurals of all the Presidents since the republic was founded.”
Like others, Kirbyjon Caldwell, the African American pastor from Texas who performed the benediction, took it as a sign that Bush would steer to the political center. “Had you closed your eyes, you would not have known if it was a Republican or a Democrat that had given the speech,” he said. He buttonholed Bush afterward to ask about some policy—he later forgot the specifics—and was struck by the answer.
“Did you hear my speech?” Bush asked.
“Yes, I did.”
“Well, that is where I am going to be.”
Caldwell took that to be the middle of the road.
After traveling down the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route, Bush arrived in the White House for the first time as president. He looked around with a familiarity many predecessors did not have, but somehow it felt different. He asked someone to find his father, who had already settled into the Queen’s Bedroom in the residential quarters and slipped into a hot bath to chase away the cold. Told his son wanted him, the elder Bush jumped out of the tub, dressed again, and raced to the Oval Office.
“Welcome, Mr. President,” his son greeted him when he arrived.
“It’s good to see you, Mr. President,” the father replied, his hair still damp.
It was a mind-spinning experience for a onetime screw-up from Midland. It all took some adjusting. The younger Bush did not even know how to react when two men introduced themselves as his valets.
“I don’t think I need a valet,”
he confided to his father.
The elder Bush smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”
FROM THE START, Bush intended to put his own mark on the White House. He kept the Resolute desk, built from the timbers of the HMS Resolute and sent as a gift by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes. He kept the bust of Abraham Lincoln. But he replaced the carpet, designing a new one with a sunburst pattern to send a signal of optimism, and he replaced the Andrew Jackson bust Clinton favored with one of Dwight Eisenhower. He also hung a portrait of Eisenhower in the Cabinet Room. In his private study, as an inside joke with his father, he put up a painting of John Quincy Adams, the only other son of a president to reach the White House. The two would come to call each other 41 and 43, after their order in the presidency, and the dining room would come to be called the “Johnny Q Room.”
For the central piece of art in the Oval Office, Bush borrowed a painting from his friend Joe O’Neill called A Charge to Keep. The painting, by W. H. D. Koerner, showed a rugged cowboy racing a horse up a wooded mountain trail, followed by a couple of other roughriders, and rushing so fast his hat has fallen off. Bush thought it had been inspired by the Charles Wesley hymn of the same title, which began, “A Charge to keep I have, A God to glorify.” He had hung the painting in the governor’s office too, and described it to visitors as a portrait of a circuit rider spreading Methodism in the Alleghenies. He liked it so much he made it the title of his campaign autobiography, A Charge to Keep.
Later research, however, determined that the painting had no religious meaning and nothing to do with the hymn. In fact, it was commissioned in 1916 to accompany a Saturday Evening Post story about a horse thief escaping a lynch mob in Nebraska. It was later reprinted in another magazine to illustrate another story, titled “A Charge to Keep,” about a son who inherits a forest from his father and must protect it from timber barons. Whatever its origins, much meaning would be attached to the imagery. While Bush identified with the heroic qualities he saw in the mysterious rider, David Gergen, who worked for four presidents and was once hired by Cheney, later wrote that critics saw “a lone, arrogant cowboy plunging recklessly ahead, paying little heed to danger, looking neither left nor right, listening to no voice other than his own.”
For Cheney, the inauguration meant a return to the West Wing twenty-four years after he left. This time he took the suite down the hall and around the corner from the Oval Office, somewhat smaller than the corner office next door that he had occupied as chief of staff. His office had large bay windows, a mahogany desk, a deep blue carpet, and a series of flags, including one with the vice presidential seal. He hung portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first two vice presidents. During his second week on the job, as a sixtieth birthday gift, his daughters gave him a hand-painted map they had commissioned showing all the battles that his great-grandfather Samuel Fletcher Cheney had fought in on the side of the Union during the Civil War. That would hang on his wall for the next eight years.
Unlike the Bushes, who moved into their new quarters on Inauguration Day, the Cheneys remained at their suburban town house. The vice president’s residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory was in need of renovation, especially the flooring. While some Republicans groused that Gore had run down the place, Cheney considered it nothing more than the typical wear and tear of a family with children, and he made no protest about the delay. For a while, he even still headed over to the supermarket in McLean to do his own grocery shopping, albeit trailed by Secret Service agents.
Both Bush and Cheney had ideas about how to run things, based on experiences with past White Houses. Bush wanted to return the West Wing to traditions observed under his father—always a coat and tie in the Oval Office, none of the casual, late-night, college pizza-party atmosphere that sometimes prevailed in the Clinton days. Yet he had his own fraternity-boy style; he delighted in those early days at popping into meetings to see aides jump to their feet, then leaving and popping back in a moment later to see them do it again. He eschewed formalities like state dinners. He preferred lunch from the White House chef to be a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, or a grilled cheese sandwich with Kraft singles on white bread, or a peanut butter and honey sandwich, with Lay’s potato chips on the side. For dinner, he favored anything Tex-Mex, no soup or salad and no “wet fish,” meaning poached, steamed, or boiled.
Organizing his staff, he took lessons from his father’s time. He wanted a flatter structure, granting more access to more aides, a recipe for a relatively weak chief of staff, unlike the domineering John Sununu. But he also wanted a disciplined team that resisted being buffeted by outside events. His staff had laid out his first twenty-one days in office by the time he took the oath. He believed fervently in punctuality and obsessively worried about keeping others waiting, to the point of abruptly ending a meeting at its designated time regardless of where the conversation was. “It was probably the good breeding from his family,” observed John Bridgeland, an aide. Others who did not share that Bush punctuality were quickly taught a lesson. When Colin Powell showed up late for the first cabinet meeting, Bush had the door locked. When the doorknob jiggled a few minutes later, the room burst out laughing. But the point was made.
Perhaps the most important lesson was the insistence on complete loyalty, with none of the freelancing by appointees out to puff themselves up that he saw in his father’s White House. He surrounded himself with confidants from Texas, including Karen Hughes as counselor, Karl Rove as senior adviser, Dan Bartlett as communications director, Alberto Gonzales as White House counsel, Harriet Miers as staff secretary, and Margaret Spellings as domestic policy adviser. In tapping Andy Card as chief of staff, Bush was easing Joe Allbaugh out of the inner circle, making him director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Other campaign veterans transitioning into new roles included Ari Fleischer as press secretary, Michael Gerson as speechwriting director, and Joshua Bolten and Joe Hagin as deputy chiefs of staff. The twin poles in the inner circle were Hughes, who considered herself the champion of everyday Americans, and Rove, who viewed politics through a more Machiavellian prism.
Cheney likewise valued loyalty and brought several longtime advisers with him to the West Wing. He asked Scooter Libby to be his national security adviser; Libby asked to also serve as chief of staff, and the incoming vice president agreed. David Addington would be his counsel. Mary Matalin, a media-savvy veteran of the first Bush White House, would be his counselor. John McConnell, who helped write the convention address, would be his speechwriter. Cheney’s focus on national security issues was clear when Libby sent him Cesar Conda to interview for domestic policy adviser. The session lasted no more than ten minutes, with a television on in the background, and the only question Cheney asked was if Conda had ever done anything that would embarrass the administration. “No, sir,” Conda said, and got the job.
Most notable was how Cheney integrated his staff with the president’s. Both Libby and Matalin also carried the rank of assistant to the president, making them equivalent to Card and Condoleezza Rice. McConnell would be part of Gerson’s speechwriting shop also writing for the president. Addington would work closely with Gonzales, to the point of dominating the counsel’s office. National Security Council aides were told to make their computer calendars accessible to the vice president’s staff. “We said great, do we get to see their calendar?” recalled Michael Green, an Asia adviser. “The answer was no. At first people were a little bit intimidated by it.” Green would sometimes put “Meeting with Vice President” on his calendar as a joke on Cheney aides.
But Cheney’s efforts to establish himself as more than the typical vice president got away from him at times. Addington decided Cheney ought to chair cabinet-level national security meetings whenever the president did not attend. That was not unheard of; Richard Nixon had done so under Eisenhower. But in modern times, such meetings were typically chaired by the national security adviser.
; Rice took the issue to Bush. “Mr. President, this is what the NSA does: convene the national security principals to make recommendations to you,” she said. He agreed.
Her new deputy, Stephen Hadley, approached Cheney. “Mr. Vice President, your staff is pushing the notion that you should be chair of the Principals Committee,” Hadley said, using the formal title for the group. “I don’t believe that is what you want to do.”
“That is exactly right,” Cheney said, attributing the idea to overzealous aides. “I don’t want to do that. That is Condi’s job.”
The episode was blamed on Libby, but in fact he was chagrined when he learned. The proposal had actually come from Addington, who had not cleared it with his bosses. Cheney and Libby said it was a stupid idea. Still, not everyone believed Cheney; at least one Rice aide saw a memo mentioning the idea signed by Cheney. Rice took it as an early warning sign that Cheney’s staff “seemed very much of one ultra-hawkish mind” and “was determined to act as a power center of its own.” For their part, Cheney’s staff saw a red flag when Rice’s intramural victory was leaked to the media, building her up at his expense.
While he would not chair the Principals Committee, Cheney made clear he would not sit quietly on the sidelines. He would attend meetings of the principals, even though he once believed Gerald Ford’s vice president should not participate in meetings with advisers because his presence would warp the discussion. He got Bush to agree to have lunch once a week, and the new president told aides to invite Cheney to any meeting he wanted to attend. Bush’s scheduling director would later estimate that Cheney attended 75 percent to 80 percent of Bush’s meetings. Cheney even arranged to have the intelligence report known as the President’s Daily Brief presented to him first in the library of his residence each morning at 6:30. Then, having already read the materials, he would join Bush for the official briefing at 8:00 a.m., led by the CIA director, George Tenet, a Clinton appointee kept on at the urging of Bush’s father. Cheney expressed so much interest in intelligence that his CIA briefers began preparing a second part just for him dubbed “Behind the Tab” that the president never saw.
