by Peter Baker
CHENEY RARELY ROSE to the bait while on the campaign trail, but he lost his famous cool one summer day. Democrats were pounding him for his roots as chief executive of Halliburton, which now had extensive government contracts in Iraq. On June 22, he was in the Senate chamber for a class photograph when Senator Patrick Leahy wandered over and put his arm around him as if they were best friends. Cheney knew Leahy just the day before had kicked off what Democrats were calling “Halliburton Week” with a conference call to reporters calling for an investigation into a Halliburton contract.
Cheney could not stomach what he saw as the rank hypocrisy—impugning his integrity one day and chumming up the next.
“Fuck yourself,” he growled at Leahy and stalked away.
The confrontation did not become public for several days, but when it did, even Cheney’s family was surprised.
“Did you say that to Pat Leahy?” Liz Cheney asked when she heard.
“Yes, I did,” he said matter-of-factly.
White House officials debated whether he should apologize. They need not have bothered. Cheney had no intention of saying he was sorry when he was not.
From Air Force Two, he called Steve Schmidt, his campaign adviser. “You’re about the only person who doesn’t think I should apologize,” Cheney said.
An apology would be contrived and insincere, Schmidt felt, and Leahy had it coming. “Besides, sir, I’m from North Jersey,” Schmidt added. “It’s a term of affection where I come from.”
Cheney laughed. He never did apologize. “It was probably not language I should have used on the Senate floor,” he wrote years later, “but it was completely deserved.”
Leahy had never been an administration favorite; after he resisted some provisions of the Patriot Act, White House officials privately nicknamed him Osama bin Leahy. But the Halliburton attacks particularly peeved Cheney. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the government had dramatically expanded its reliance on private firms to provide everything from food and gasoline to security, and Halliburton had been one of the primary beneficiaries, often through no-bid contracts. Cheney did not help himself by claiming in 2003, “I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had now for over three years,” even though he had received $1.6 million in deferred compensation between the election and the inauguration and had received another $398,548 since taking office.
What Cheney meant was that the deferred compensation was set before he became vice president and not dependent on the company’s financial health. Like many corporate executives, Cheney had opted to spread compensation for his work in the 1990s over a number of years. If Halliburton made or lost money, Cheney’s checks would be the same, so he did not benefit if the company received contracts. In an abundance of caution, Cheney before taking office had paid $14,903 for an insurance policy to guarantee payments even if Halliburton went out of business, so no one could claim he had any interest in keeping the firm afloat. And before taking office, he gave up $8 million in stock options from Halliburton and other companies, assigning their after-tax profits to charity. In his view, he had done everything he could to avoid conflict, so attacks aggravated him. The Annenberg Public Policy Center agreed that “Cheney doesn’t gain financially from the contracts given to the company he once headed,” and the journalist Barton Gellman, who wrote a tough-minded book about Cheney, “found no evidence of self-dealing behavior in office, involving Halliburton or anything else.”
Others, though, were looking for evidence of wrongdoing in the West Wing, and it was Bush’s turn to talk with Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case. Unlike Cheney, Bush was friendly and acted perfectly happy to see his visitors. For seventy minutes on June 24, he answered their questions, seemingly in no rush. Without realizing it, he contradicted Karl Rove’s version of their conversation, saying Rove had denied he was a source for Robert Novak.
“If Rove said he didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it,” Bush told the prosecutor. “If he was involved, he’d tell me.”
When it was over, Fitzgerald pulled out another waiver of confidentiality promises made by reporters.
“Sure, I’ll sign that,” Bush said instinctively, shrugging off his lawyer as he grabbed the paper, read it over, and pulled out his Sharpie pen.
The next few days brought mixed news for Cheney in his perpetual fight to preserve and expand executive power as the Supreme Court weighed in on two of the biggest controversies of his time in office.
In the first, the justices took the vice president’s side in the long-running battle over the secrecy of his 2001 energy task force. In a 7-to-2 decision, the court overturned a lower court’s ruling and ordered it to give more weight to Cheney’s argument of executive privilege. As a practical matter, that settled the legal battle. Cheney felt vindicated. He had helped reestablish some of the authority that had been chipped away from the executive branch over the past three decades. Others in the White House, though, lamented that the victory on principle had unnecessarily fueled an image of a secretive government in the pocket of corporate titans. And for what? In the end, everyone assumed anyway that the panel’s report was shaped by industry, and its recommendations had largely gone nowhere.
Four days later, on June 28, the same court handed Cheney a major defeat, ruling the government could not hold Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters without access to court. Ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the court affirmed the president’s right to declare not just foreigners but even an American citizen caught fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan like Yaser Esam Hamdi an enemy combatant but required the government to allow such detainees—including those at Guantánamo—to challenge their imprisonment in court. “We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens,” wrote Sandra Day O’Connor, a stinging rebuke from the justice whose vote had decided Bush v. Gore four years earlier.
BUSH WAS IN Istanbul at a NATO summit the same day when Donald Rumsfeld reached over his shoulder and passed him a note from Condoleezza Rice: “Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from Bremer at 10:26 a.m., Iraqi time.”
Bush picked up a pen and scrawled on it, “Let freedom reign!” Then he turned to his right and shook hands with Tony Blair.
It was an exciting moment for Bush, one he would long cherish. A giant picture of him with the “Let freedom reign!” note was later hung in the West Wing. While others were rotated regularly, that one stayed there for years.
Just like that, the occupation was officially over. But the war was not. As hopeful as Bush was, the very manner in which the transfer took place underscored the decidedly mixed nature of the accomplishment. Bush, worried about terrorist attacks timed to the scheduled transfer of authority on June 30, had suggested through Rice that Bremer secretly move it up a few days. Bremer’s aides even confiscated the phones of reporters summoned to hear the announcement so he could leave the country before it was publicly known. Better to live with the troublesome symbolism than to let a bomb go off in the middle of a ceremony.
Bremer’s replacement would be an ambassador who would still wield outsized influence in Iraq but no longer as the governing authority. Bush picked John Negroponte, a veteran diplomat who had been serving at the United Nations. Replacing Ricardo Sanchez was General George Casey, a well-respected officer but one who had never served in combat and had no background in the Arab world. Bush invited Casey to the White House for a social dinner with their wives, but otherwise the two men had no substantive meeting before Casey’s departure for Baghdad. Bush and Cheney hoped that Iraq might be on a path toward stability, a hope enhanced by the approach of the presidential election.
NEITHER BUSH NOR Cheney was all that impressed with the emerging Democratic ticket. Karl Rove had assumed John Kerry would pick Richard Gephardt as his running mate to lock down labor support, but Matthew Dowd correctly predicted it would be John Edwards.
On July 7, the
day after Kerry’s announcement, Bush was asked about the choice by a reporter during a stop in Raleigh.
“He’s being described today as charming, engaging, a nimble campaigner, a populist, and even sexy,” the reporter said. “How does he stack up against Dick Cheney?”
“Dick Cheney can be president,” Bush answered sharply, then moved on to another reporter. “Next.”
As it happened, the 9/11 Commission had been investigating whether Cheney actually was president, at least briefly, on the day of the hijackings. In its draft report, the panel raised questions about whether the vice president gave the order to shoot down threatening planes before getting permission from Bush. Reading over the draft before its release, Cheney grew incensed and called Thomas Kean, the commission chairman.
“Governor, this is not true, just not fair,” he told Kean. “The president has told you, I have told you, that the president issued the order. I was following his directions.”
Kean said he would ask the staff to review the language in the report again. But the commission ended up releasing the report on July 22 largely unaltered. It came out shortly after another report produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the botched prewar intelligence about Iraq’s weapons program. The two reports collectively called attention to the lowest moments of Bush and Cheney’s tenure, the failure to adequately see the threat of al-Qaeda and move more expeditiously to counter terrorism in the months before September 11 and the fixation on Saddam Hussein that led them to disregard contrary evidence on the preordained path to war. Both reports threw cold water on Cheney’s view of the links between al-Qaeda and Hussein’s Iraq.
At the same time, the reports also provided balanced portraits that undercut the worst charges lodged against Bush and Cheney by their critics. The Senate report found no evidence that Bush or Cheney had pressured intelligence agencies into skewing reports on Iraq. The 9/11 Commission spread blame around evenly without singling out Bush or Cheney. While the vice president was still irritated, White House officials who had feared the worst in an election year sighed in relief.
A week after the 9/11 Commission report, Democrats officially nominated Kerry and Edwards. Cheney hit the campaign trail with gusto. In Dayton, Ohio, on August 12, he mocked Kerry for being weak. “Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge, he would fight a ‘more sensitive’ war on terror,” Cheney said, provoking a wave of laughter. Lincoln and Roosevelt “did not wage sensitive warfare,” he added. “Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed.”
Two weeks later, though, Cheney finally got the question he had avoided since January.
“I need to know what do you think about homosexual marriages,” a voter asked at a forum in Davenport, Iowa.
Cheney did not duck. “My general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone,” he said.
Then he noted that Bush had come out in support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The issue had come up for a vote in the Senate the month before and fell nineteen votes short of passage. Cheney could have ducked, but he acknowledged that he and Bush disagreed.
“My own preference is as I’ve stated,” Cheney said. “But the president makes basic policy for the administration. And he’s made it clear that he does, in fact, support a constitutional amendment on this issue.”
Aides were surprised that Cheney had just taken on Bush in public. “We were all proud of him because we were all close to Mary,” said Neil Patel, his domestic policy adviser. Cheney’s traveling press secretary, Anne Womack, e-mailed a heads-up to campaign headquarters and soon received an anxious phone call demanding to know what happened. But then the issue was dropped. Cheney said later that neither Bush nor Karl Rove ever brought it up with him. “They were pretty good about letting me do my thing,” he said.
LIFE ON THE ROAD took on a familiar rhythm and drew Bush closer to his aides. After a rally in Taylor, Michigan, on August 30, Bush heard that his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin, had lost his mother. Hagin had not told the president or even dropped off the campaign swing.
Bush went to Hagin’s hotel room and found him on the phone with his brother. Hagin’s back was turned, so Bush just sat down on the bed and waited. Only after five minutes or so had passed did Hagin hang up and realize who was there. Bush spent an hour consoling Hagin, an eternity in the life of a president.
From there, Bush headed to the Republican National Convention, intending to use it to bolster his credentials as America’s protector. By holding it in New York, a city not normally friendly to Republicans, he and Cheney reminded everyone of their role in responding to the attacks three years earlier, and they depicted Iraq as a logical extension of the war on terror that followed. What they were not acknowledging was how bad the fighting in Iraq had become. Bush had just gotten a letter from Prime Minister Ayad Allawi making that point. “The situation on the ground in Iraq is grossly unstable,” Allawi wrote to Bush. “The threat is now much greater than it was a year ago and it is continuing to escalate.”
For public purposes, though, Bush and Cheney depicted Iraq being on the right course and potentially jeopardized by a Democratic victory. In his address the night of September 1, Cheney enthusiastically took on the other ticket. “Senator Kerry’s liveliest disagreement is with himself,” he said to chants of “flip-flop, flip-flop!” “His back-and-forth reflects a habit of indecision and sends a message of confusion. And it is all part of a pattern. He has, in the last several years, been for the No Child Left Behind Act—and against it. He has spoken in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement—and against it. He is for the Patriot Act—and against it. Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. He makes the whole thing mutual—America sees two John Kerrys.”
For Bush’s speech the next night, aides wanted to strike a more measured tone. Ed Gillespie, the Republican National Committee chairman, was worried about “Bush fatigue”—not the blinding hate felt by many liberals who were never going to vote for him, but a certain weariness among everyday voters. Gillespie suggested the president talk about seeking “a new term” rather than “a second term,” to sound fresh rather than more of the same.
As he practiced his speech in a hotel suite, though, Bush kept tripping over a line about holding “the children of the fallen.” Invariably, he choked up. However justified he felt the Iraq War was, Bush understood the toll it was taking on families across America. It was the one thing that cracked his Texas bravado.
Maybe it would be safer to just take the line out, someone suggested.
Michael Gerson objected. “Mr. President, we need to do this,” Gerson said.
Bush grew snippy. “We don’t have to do this,” he said. “I am doing this.”
As he stepped onto the stage that night, Bush was greeted by a wave of enthusiasm. He opened with praise for his partner. “I am fortunate to have a superb vice president,” he said. “I have counted on Dick Cheney’s calm and steady judgment in the difficult days, and I am honored to have him at my side.”
As delegates chanted “four more years,” Bush outlined what he termed the Ownership Society, ideas like providing tax credits to encourage health savings accounts, allowing workers to invest some of their Social Security payroll taxes in stocks or bonds, and encouraging more home ownership. As a conservative counter to the New Deal and the Great Society, the Ownership Society was intended to give Americans more control to make decisions. Little did he imagine that making it easier for people to buy homes might prove to be a risky venture.
But his main focus was national security, declaring that “freedom is on the march” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and going directly after Kerry by citing his voted-for-it-before-voting-against-it quote. He mentioned hearing “whatever it takes” at Ground Zero on that wrenching day after the Twin Towers fell. “I will never relent in defending America—whatever it takes,” he said. He defended his decision to invad
e Iraq by recalling that Kerry supported it too, and he linked it to the attack on the city playing host to the convention. “Do I forget the lessons of September the 11th and take the word of a madman?” he asked, referring to Saddam Hussein. “Or do I take action to defend our country? Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time.”
He got through the line about the children of the fallen without a problem. After he stepped offstage, Gerson asked how he did it.
“I didn’t look at the audience,” Bush said. “I just looked up.”
Bush had another emotional encounter the next day as he headed out to campaign. At a minor-league baseball stadium in Moosic, Pennsylvania, on September 3, someone in the crowd called out, “Mr. President, we can hear you now!”
The crowd got the reference and cheered, but Bush didn’t and apologized for being hoarse. Sitting onstage, Laura Bush looked at the man who had yelled.
“I’m the voice from Ground Zero,” he said.
It was Rocco Chierichella, the firefighter who met Bush at the site of the attacks.
Laura whispered in the president’s ear, and he turned. “I’ll see you later,” he told Chierichella.
After the speech, Chierichella and his son were brought into the locker room to meet Bush.
“So you’re the guy,” Bush said. “I’ve been using your line for years.”
Bush told him he would be in the history books.
Chierichella shrugged. “I couldn’t hear you,” he said.
Bush shook his hand and grew emotional, wiping tears from his eyes.
“Mr. President, my daughter’s going to West Point,” the firefighter told him. “Because of you. You changed my life.”
Bush shook his head. “No,” he said, “you changed my life.”
BUSH AND CHENEY emerged from the convention with the traditional bounce. Karl Rove had left little to chance in building a reelection architecture. From the start, he had set out to fully tap the resources of the federal government within the broad and relatively permissive extent of the law. Other presidential strategists had done much the same over the years, but few as systematically.
