by Dick Cheney
I REMEMBER WELL THE afternoon when I sought recognition by the Speaker and then rose to address the House of Representatives for the first time as a member. I was less than thrilled with the subject matter, which dealt with one of the many sad cases the Ethics Committee had to pass judgment on. Charles Diggs was a longtime congressman from Michigan’s 13th District. He had been one of the bright young men of the civil rights movement, and he had been elected the first chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Now he had been convicted of taking kickbacks from his congressional staff, but while he was appealing his case, his Michigan constituents had reelected him.
An incensed group of members, mostly Republican and led by Newt Gingrich, were demanding his expulsion, but the Ethics Committee recommended censure instead, a decision I was happy to defend. As I pointed out in my speech, the Constitution clearly gives the House the right to expel a member, but it also bestows upon the people the right to choose their representatives, and the people of Michigan’s 13th had chosen Diggs even after he was convicted. “Much as I deplore Mr. Diggs’ unethical behavior,” I said, “much as I believe that he should no longer serve in the House of Representatives, I cannot support the contention that this body should now take the unprecedented step in these circumstances, of setting aside the right of the voters of Michigan’s 13th District to select the congressman of their choice.” The vote to censure rather than expel Diggs passed by an overwhelming majority.
The most important cases considered during my term on the Ethics Committee stemmed from the so-called Abscam scandal. The “Ab” in Abscam was short for Abdul Enterprises—the name of the phony company the FBI set up supposedly representing the interests of an Arab sheikh who was prepared to pay bribes to obtain U.S. government help. What began as an FBI sting operation targeting corrupt local officials in the Philadelphia area ended up ensnaring six congressmen and a U.S. senator.
Most of those convicted in Abscam lost their bids for reelection or resigned after their trials, but Ozzie Myers of Pennsylvania insisted on taking his case before the entire House and forcing a vote on the question of whether he should be expelled. In his case, there was no intervening election, as there had been for Diggs, and there was an absolutely damning videotape that showed him telling undercover agents, “Money talks in this business and bullshit walks.” I joined in the overwhelming vote in both the Ethics Committee and the House to expel him, but it was painful business for everyone, not because Congress should protect its own or its members should expect special treatment, but because the Constitution provides for the direct election of representatives by the people. The only qualifications are age, citizenship, and residence. At the time of Abscam, Myers was only the fourth member in history to be expelled. The previous three expulsions had been during the Civil War, and the grounds were treason.
One of the members caught up in Abscam was John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a former marine and the first Vietnam veteran to be elected to Congress. He made an appearance on one of the FBI’s undercover surveillance tapes that was embarrassing, but not, in my opinion, illegal. Still he was being tarred with the same brush as the others, which I didn’t think was fair, so one afternoon I talked to him on the House floor and told him I thought he was getting a bum rap. I said that if he needed any help on our side, he should let me know. He thanked me, and we never mentioned it again. In July 1981, the Ethics Committee cleared him.
DURING MY FIRST YEAR in the House, Republican leader John Rhodes of Arizona announced that he would not run for that position again after the next election. This immediately set off a major succession battle within the Republican caucus. One of the major contenders for the post was Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, a charismatic individual and an impressive orator, who had worked closely with most of the new members in his capacity as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Many of them felt they owed their election to Guy, and he had a considerable following. The other contender was Bob Michel of Illinois, Leader Rhodes’s second in command as minority whip. He was widely liked and universally respected, though some of the younger members in the Vander Jagt camp criticized him for being too comfortable in the minority, too unwilling to take on the Democrats.
Only two members of the ’78 class, Tom Loeffler of Texas and I, supported Bob Michel. I liked both him and Guy Vander Jagt, but I had run my campaign without any help from the NRCC. I knew Bob Michel from my earlier work in the Nixon and Ford administrations—and I thought he would win the Leader’s job. I signed on early.
Shortly before the 1980 election I was approached by one of Bob’s key floor assistants, Walt Kennedy. There were certain people, Walt said, who thought I should run for a leadership position—in particular the chairmanship of the Republican Policy Committee, the fourth-ranking position behind the Leader, the whip, and the chairman of the House Republican Conference (or caucus). I responded cautiously, telling Kennedy I’d think it over. There were already two announced candidates for the post, Marjorie Holt of Maryland and Eldon Rudd of Arizona, both senior to me and holding commitments from a number of members.
I figured Bob Michel was behind Kennedy’s suggestion, but I couldn’t really talk with Bob about it. His contest with Guy Vander Jagt was close and hard-fought, and if word got out that he was actively recruiting me to run against more senior members for policy chairman, it might well cost him support from their backers and lose him the contest for Leader. On my own I took some quiet soundings, and when I determined I could marshal enough support to win, I announced for the race.
Some years later Bob Michel confirmed that he had asked Walt Kennedy to suggest that I run for policy chairman. One of his rationales was that my candidacy would attract support and energy among my fellow freshmen and thereby lessen their fervor for Vander Jagt. He was also thinking about putting together a leadership team that he could count on and work with in the years ahead.
When the voting was over in that 1980 caucus, Michel was the GOP Leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi was the newly elected whip, Jack Kemp of New York was Conference chairman, and I was policy chairman. It was an effective team, and we worked well together throughout the 1980s, the Reagan years.
Because of the way the House is organized and its rules are written, individual members of the minority typically have little impact on the overall work of the House, but being in the leadership took me into the meetings where legislative and political strategy were decided and the relationship with the administration was managed. From my personal standpoint, being in the leadership made a world of difference.
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MY FIRST TERM IN the House coincided with the last half of President Carter’s administration. The 1976 campaign had not left me a fan of President Carter, nor had his first two years in office. I found his administration singularly unimpressive.
Despite the fact that the Democrats had an overwhelming margin of more than one hundred House seats during 1979 and 1980, the Carter White House found it difficult to achieve legislative successes. In 1979, faced with serious shortages in fuel, partly as a result of the Iranian Revolution and other unrest in the Middle East, President Carter pushed hard to enact energy legislation in the Congress. At the end of a House debate on one of the administration’s energy-related initiatives, Tip O’Neill made the dramatic gesture of coming down from the Speaker’s chair—where custom prohibited him from taking a position for or against any piece of legislation—in order to speak from the well of the House on behalf of the administration’s bill. On this day Tip was particularly eloquent in his remarks. He talked about how, as a young man visiting Washington, he had been sitting in the gallery of the House on the day in the fall of 1941, not long before Pearl Harbor, when the House was asked to extend the Selective Service System. He argued that now, in 1979, we were faced with a crisis of similar magnitude, and the stakes of the vote were no less high.
It was an extraordinary performance, and when he finished, all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, ro
se and gave the Speaker a standing ovation. Then we voted—and beat him decisively. Tip O’Neill was much loved and highly respected, but he couldn’t transfer either of those sentiments to the president, and he couldn’t translate them into votes when we were considering the president’s proposals.
President Carter encountered difficulties as well in trying to project American power. When the Shah was toppled in Iran and the Saudis asked for a demonstration of U.S. commitment to the Kingdom, President Carter responded dramatically by sending a squadron of F-15 fighter aircraft to the Persian Gulf. Then, when the planes were in the air, he announced that they were unarmed. The Iranian hostage crisis plagued him for his last year in office. A bungled and failed attempt to rescue the American hostages—code-named Desert One—seemed to symbolize his administration’s ineptitude.
His difficulties with Congress stemmed in part from a lack of understanding about how to manage relations with Capitol Hill. Speaker O’Neill, after being treated cavalierly by the president’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, took to referring to him as “Hannibal Jerkin,” and the Georgians never achieved any kind of détente with the powers that be at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Carter made a big deal of getting rid of the presidential yacht Sequoia. He didn’t realize that far more than being an expendable perk for the man in the Oval Office, the historic vessel was a great tool for lobbying Congress. One of the most sought-after invitations in Washington during the Ford years had been for drinks and dinner with the president on an evening cruise on the Potomac. It was a tradition that when the Sequoia sailed past Mount Vernon, all aboard came on deck to join the crew in an official salute to the first president. Many votes were quietly won on those evening cruises.
My biggest frustration with President Carter arose while I was serving as secretary of defense. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were working to get U.N. Security Council approval of a resolution authorizing the use of force to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1990–91. We found out that former President Carter was actively lobbying against the U.S. position. He had contacted heads of government with seats on the Security Council and urged them to oppose our resolution. His intervention was ineffective—and also totally inappropriate for a former president.
Many years later, long after they had both left office, President Ford developed a strong friendship with the man who had handed him the only electoral defeat in his long career. He used to take a certain delight in letting me know that he disagreed with my rather harsh judgment of his successor. Near the end of his days, President Ford spent a good deal of time planning the details of his state funeral. He must have had a good laugh setting down the arrangements for the burial near his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, which required the Cheneys and the Carters, together with the Rumsfelds, to spend the afternoon in close quarters.
THE PENDULUM CAN SWING fast in presidential politics, and it looked as if 1980—only six years after Nixon’s resignation and four years after Jimmy Carter’s election—was going to be a very good year for Republicans. Ronald Reagan was the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination, and nearly every Republican officeholder was now a Reaganite, including many of us who had supported Jerry Ford four years earlier.
President Ford had briefly considered the possibility of making another run for the White House. Early in the year he asked a group of us who had worked for him to visit Palm Springs, California, to discuss the subject. Among those attending were Jack Marsh, Stu Spencer, and Bob Teeter. We spent the better part of a day discussing the possibility of mounting a campaign at this relatively late date and his prospects of capturing the GOP nomination.
At the end of the day, he said he wanted to sleep on it. The next morning when he reconvened the group of advisors, he announced that he really did not want to be a candidate in 1980. He said that he simply wasn’t prepared to subject himself to the rigors of another national campaign. By this time he had acquired a very nice home on a golf course in the desert near Palm Springs and built a new home in the mountains in Beaver Creek, Colorado. He was earning a good living in the private sector. I always believed that he felt an obligation to consider the possibility of mounting a campaign in 1980, in part because he was still smarting from the closeness of his defeat in 1976, and in part because he really didn’t like the idea of Ronald Reagan as the nominee. But when he focused on what a national campaign would require of him, he had little interest.
IN WYOMING I HAD worked hard to build a strong political base and to head off any serious opposition, and I pretty much succeeded. I had no Republican challengers in 1980, and the four-man Democratic primary was won by Jim Rogers, a bartender from Lyman, a small town in the remote southwest corner of the state. Rumor had it that he had meant to run for the state legislature but checked the wrong box when filing his papers. I had to go through the motions of a campaign—fund-raising, advertising, and making public appearances—but I coasted to an easy victory with 69 percent of the vote.
One of my campaign re-election brochures, 1980.
In 1976 I had played a major role in the Republican convention in Kansas City. I had a spacious suite next to President Ford’s and cars and drivers to whisk me around. But in 1980, as a freshman congressman, I was only one member of the Wyoming delegation. Reflecting our state’s population and general role in the proceedings, we were assigned a motel about half an hour outside Detroit, and if I didn’t catch the delegation bus each morning, I was looking at a fifty-dollar cab ride.
The 1980 Detroit convention was basically a coronation for Ronald Reagan. Although there had been several candidates for the party’s nomination, the former California governor’s victory was never really in doubt. For one brief moment in Detroit, I found myself back in the action, when attention turned to our nominee’s choice of a vice presidential running mate. A number of Reagan’s top advisors, foremost among them campaign manager Bill Casey, believed that a Reagan-Ford ticket would be the strongest possible combination. In the Ford camp Henry Kissinger, Jack Marsh, and Bryce Harlow were among those urging President Ford to give serious consideration to joining his former rival’s ticket.
Bryce Harlow in particular was a strong advocate of a Reagan-Ford ticket. The little-known Harlow, who had first served in the Eisenhower administration, was one of the wisest, most respected, and most influential men in Washington for three decades. In 1976 he believed that Ford would win if he could put the wounds of the nomination fight behind him and invite Reagan to join his ticket. Harlow considered the electoral logic no less compelling four years on. Reagan and Ford were the unrivaled leaders of their wings of the Republican Party. At the time, before Carter’s extreme unpopularity and Reagan’s great appeal were fully appreciated, a Reagan-Ford ticket looked like the best way to bring the party together and enter the race with a united front.
On the third day of the convention, I was invited by Howard Baker and John Rhodes, the Senate and House minority leaders, to join them and representatives of Governor Reagan and President Ford at the Renaissance Hotel to discuss the proposal. President Ford had made it clear that he would consider the vice presidency only if there was an agreement giving him significant responsibilities in a Reagan-Ford administration. At the meeting Bill Casey indicated they were willing to go a long way toward meeting the Ford demands, including giving the former chief executive a major role in foreign policy, the budget, and personnel. I realized that what was being discussed all but amounted to a co-presidency, with the president and vice president dividing and sharing the powers of the office.
I was stunned at the extent to which Bill Casey, and presumably Governor Reagan, were willing to share the power of the president. After the meeting Bob Teeter and I joined Baker and Rhodes in discussing the proposal. It was clear that none of us thought the arrangement being discussed was even remotely workable. There can be only one president at a time, and certain presidential powers cannot be delegated.
Fortunately, later that evenin
g the Reagan people arrived at the same conclusion and offered the second spot on the ticket to George H. W. Bush, who readily accepted. On reflection, I don’t think President Ford had any intention of being vice president a second time. He often told me over the years that the months he spent as vice president were the most miserable of his career. I think he deliberately made demands that he fully expected to be rejected and that he was surprised at how far Reagan was prepared to go to persuade him to accept the vice presidential nomination.
AFTER THE 1984 ELECTION, Speaker O’Neill, at the recommendation of Bob Michel, appointed me to a seat on the House Intelligence Committee.
With fellow members of the Wyoming congressional delegation, Al Simpson and Malcolm Wallop at a campaign rally with President Ronald Reagan in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1984. (Photo by David Kennerly)
I regarded my assignment as an honor—though I realized it was not an honor that all members sought. The committee requires a tremendous amount of time, work, and study. Because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, much of the work can’t be delegated to staff members and the material can’t be duplicated or distributed outside the committee’s high-security offices. That means going over to the offices in person and spending hours reading the reports that pour in daily from all over the world and the detailed analyses prepared by the professional staff. Further, the very nature of the committee’s work requires absolute confidentiality and secrecy. There can never be a press conference to claim credit or even a passing mention in a newsletter to constituents with respect to most of what a member on the Intelligence Committee does.
