In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  We are, indeed, fortunate that George Bush was our president when the nation faced the first major crisis of the post Cold War era—the invasion of Kuwait. . . . From the earliest days of the crisis, he refused to ignore or pander to aggression. His clarity of purpose focused the world on the need for action.

  I offered my personal thanks as well. “I will always be grateful to you, Mr. President, for the opportunity you’ve given me to serve as your Secretary of Defense.” George Bush had been a tremendous leader. His wisdom had seen us through changes more significant than any of us could have imagined we would see in our lifetimes. Serving as his secretary of defense was one of the highest honors of my life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Out of the Arena

  As noon approached on Inauguration Day, I gathered my few remaining belongings in the office, said goodbye to my staff, and left the Pentagon for the last time as secretary of defense. Although I would still be secretary for another few hours—until the Senate confirmed Les Aspin and he was sworn in later that afternoon—the moment at which Bill Clinton was taking the presidential oath seemed to be the appropriate time for me to leave.

  I was out of public office for the first time in fourteen years, and Lynne and I were moving home to Wyoming. We packed a big U-Haul truck full of furniture and the boxes of my congressional papers, and with help from my new son-in-law, Phil Perry, I strapped a large display case filled with the battle streamers earned by the U.S. military during my time as secretary of defense to the back of the truck. The streamers were a unique and thoughtful farewell gift from the military, but because each one was about four feet long, the glass-fronted display case was too big and too fragile to pack inside the truck with our other belongings.

  Phil, who had married Liz just three weeks earlier, would be joining me on the cross-country drive to Wyoming. It takes someone with a strong constitution to agree to make a two-thousand-mile road trip alone with his father-in-law less than a month after joining the family, but Phil stepped up to the task. Luckily he is a man of few words, just as I am, so neither of us worried much about having to make small talk along the way.

  When we got to Wyoming, we stopped at the university in Laramie so I could drop off my papers and the battle streamers for safekeeping at the American Heritage Center. The staff seemed surprised when we pulled up in the U-Haul to deliver the materials personally, but it never occurred to me to get them there any other way. Lynne met me that night in Jackson, where we began unpacking and planning for our new life in the private sector.

  I KNEW AT LEAST two things for sure: I wanted to spend more time with my family, and I wanted to spend more time fishing. Of course, I also needed to earn a living—hopefully doing useful things—and I wanted to continue to contribute to the major policy and political debates of the day. So, I signed on with the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. I also agreed to join the boards of directors of Procter & Gamble, Union Pacific, US West, and Morgan Stanley. Having spent most of my career in government or academia, I knew I’d learn a lot by serving on the boards of some of the finest corporations in the country.

  During that first summer out of office, I had plenty of time to think about the future on an eight-thousand-mile road trip I took alone across the country. I drove from Washington, D.C., to British Columbia, and then doubled back to Wyoming, giving speeches along the way, some paid and some unpaid, and traveling through beautiful country in Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and the Canadian Rockies, including Banff National Park, with its forests and rivers, and Glacier National Park, with some of the most rugged mountain territory in North America. I also enjoyed some great fishing for rainbow trout in the headwaters of the North Platte and steelhead in the Dean River in British Columbia. It was on this trip that I began seriously to contemplate the possibility of running for president myself in 1996.

  The idea of serving as president was very appealing. I had worked in the White House or served in the cabinet of three presidents—Nixon, Ford, and Bush—and I had watched Ronald Reagan from the perspective of my eight years in the House leadership. I had seen presidents succeed and fail. And I believed I knew what it takes to make an effective chief executive.

  I also understood the importance of recognizing that no one gets a lot of opportunities to run under circumstances that are right to sustain a presidential campaign. If you don’t take your chance when it comes along, you may never get another.

  On the other hand, I knew how tough, brutal, and demanding a national campaign can be. It is impossible to preserve even a modicum of privacy for either the candidate or his family under the intense scrutiny that goes with running for president. And fund-raising, which I had never learned to like, demands an enormous commitment of time and energy.

  And, of course, there was my health. In 1996 I would be fifty-five years old with an eighteen-year history of coronary artery disease, including three heart attacks and a quadruple coronary bypass. If I decided not to run for president, I wouldn’t link the decision to my health, because I didn’t want people to think that I was somehow limited in what I could do or that I had decided not to run because I had a “bad heart.” But clearly my health history would be an issue in a campaign, and it figured in my thinking as I evaluated the prospects of a grueling presidential run.

  Meanwhile, I was itching to get involved in the 1994 midterm elections. As secretary of defense it hadn’t been appropriate for me to participate in politics, and now that I was no longer bound by that tradition, I had a lot I wanted to say. I thought Bill Clinton had been let off easy during the 1992 campaign, and I was less than enthusiastic about the way he was managing national security policy. The botched operation in Somalia in October 1993 particularly troubled me. Men were sent on a mission in Mogadishu without being allowed to use the AC-130 gunships that could have helped them succeed. They were denied the armored support they needed—and that their leaders had requested—and eighteen brave Americans lost their lives.

  IN DECEMBER 1993 OUR family gathered once again in Jackson, where we had celebrated many happy holidays, but the end of 1993 was filled with great sadness. My mother died the day after Christmas. She had fought Parkinson’s disease for years, absolutely refusing to give into it. There would be no assisted living facility for her, she said, because she had to take care of my dad. When the disease began to cause her to lose her balance, she bought a pair of black rubber knee pads to cushion the blows when she fell. And she always picked herself right back up again. I was on a hunting trip in South Texas in the fall when I got word she’d had a stroke. Our friends the True family from Casper sent their plane to pick me up so I could get home as quickly as possible. I got to her bedside, and she knew I was there, but after the stroke she never spoke again.

  Five months after Mom died, our lives were filled with joy when our first grandchild, Kate Perry, was born. Today, when I see Kate’s skill and athleticism on the softball field, I think of my mother, who loved her ball-playing years with the Syracuse Bluebirds, the team from a little Nebraska town that twice played the Cleveland Bloomer Girls for the national championship. I know Mom would have been so proud of Kate, and all seven of her great-grandchildren.

  EARLY IN 1994 WITH a presidential run in mind, I set up a political action committee. The Alliance for American Leadership would contribute money to Republican candidates and finance my own political travels. When I announced the PAC, I explained its purpose this way:

  Americans want safety from dangers at home and abroad, the opportunity to pursue a livelihood to support themselves and their families, and freedom from excessive governmental intrusion. The Alliance for American Leadership will help achieve those goals by supporting the election of highly qualified Republican candidates across the nation.

  I kept the PAC simple. I was chairman of the board and two of my former staffers, Patty Howe and David Addington, were the members. I hired Addington away from his job as minority staff director and counsel of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence to make sure the PAC was run in scrupulous compliance with the complex FEC rules. Through fund-raising events and direct mail, the PAC raised more than $1.3 million in less than a year—a significant sum in politics in those days, particularly for such a small operation—and disbursed it to advance the cause of Republican candidates. I personally did close to 160 campaign events in the 1994 election cycle, traveling the country from coast to coast.

  In September 1994 Lynne and I gathered some close friends with experience in presidential campaigns and sought their advice: Stu Spencer had been political director in the 1976 Ford campaign; Bob Teeter was another close friend and our pollster; Terry O’Donnell had been Ford’s personal aide, general counsel of the Defense Department, and was my private attorney; and Red Cavaney had been lead advance man for the Ford White House. I knew all of them to be dependably discreet, but also willing to tell me exactly what they really thought. I knew that none of them would pull punches.

  We met in Jackson, and during a couple of gorgeous fall days we talked about the 1996 campaign, the other prospective candidates, the pros and cons of a run for the presidency, the prospects for fund-raising, and what it would take to run and win. Although we didn’t come to any final conclusions, they gave me their best advice on what I could expect.

  THE 1994 MIDTERM ELECTIONS were historic, with Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. The last time we had had control in the Senate was 1986; in the House, 1954. Even the Democratic Speaker of the House, my friend Tom Foley, lost his seat and became the first Speaker defeated at the polls since the Civil War. It was a stunning result, a clear repudiation of Bill Clinton and his administration. But more than that it represented a revolution in the Congress, particularly in the House. No Republican member of the House then serving had ever served in the majority, chaired a committee or subcommittee, or presided over the House as Speaker. Nineteen ninety-four changed everything—who hired most of the staff, who had the most members on each committee, who controlled the Rules Committee, which set the terms of debate for each bill coming to the floor, and who was given offices in the Capitol. Under the Democrats only three members of the GOP had offices there.

  During all those years we spent in the minority, Republicans could never be certain that what we did really mattered. Unless we were willing to sign on and support a Democratic proposal, we rarely had any impact on the floor debate. If we had a good idea, chances were we could advance it only with the approval or permission of some Democratic chairman. Now all of a sudden Republicans were going to be running the show.

  Lynne and I hosted an election evening party for some of our close friends, and I don’t think I moved from in front of the television the whole night. As I watched the Republicans win control of the Congress, I couldn’t help but contemplate what might have been if I had stayed in the House leadership instead of going to the Defense Department. My friend, and successor as House Republican Whip, Newt Gingrich, was about to become Speaker of the House.

  I wouldn’t have traded my years as secretary of defense for anything—not even presiding over a Republican House of Representatives. And I had to hand it to Newt. Ever since I’d first met him in 1978, he’d been saying the Republicans could win back the majority. Most of us thought that was an unrealistic dream. But not Newt, and he didn’t just dream about it. He put together the Contract with America and recruited candidates all across the country to run on the elements of the Contract. Without Newt, a Republican majority might well have stayed a dream.

  ONCE THE MIDTERMS WERE over, it was time for me to make a decision about 1996. Did I want to run for president or not? Was I prepared to do all that would be required to mount a successful campaign? At Christmas our family gathered again in Jackson Hole, and as the snow fell outside our windows, we had a running conversation over several days about whether I should run. Although some family members were more enthusiastic than others, I knew I would have everyone’s full support for whatever I decided to do.

  And what I decided was not to seek the presidency. After stacking up the pros and cons, I looked at it this way: I believed I’d had a great twenty-five-year career in public life, including service as White House chief of staff, secretary of defense, and Wyoming’s congressman for ten years. I felt that I was still young enough at fifty-three to have another career in the private sector, and that possibility was certainly more appealing than putting my family through the meat grinder of a national campaign for what would be the long-shot prospect of getting elected president. So, on January 3, 1995, I gave a heads-up to some of my key supporters that I wasn’t going to run and then issued this press statement:

  After careful consideration, I have decided not to become a candidate for the presidency in 1996. I appreciated very much the kind words of encouragement and support I received from many Americans who had urged me to seek the presidency. I look forward to supporting the Republican nominee for President in 1996.

  WITH MY CAREER IN politics now apparently over, I turned my attention back to fishing. I had already been lucky enough to fish some of the world’s great waters. During my time at the Defense Department, my counterparts in other countries had invited me to fly-fish while I was visiting. After a NATO meeting in Scotland, while everyone else went golfing at St. Andrews, I was treated to trout fishing with a ghillie, a Scottish fishing guide. The Chileans took me to the wilds of Tierra del Fuego. The Canadian armed forces invited me to the Eagle River in Newfoundland, where I fished for my first Atlantic salmon—big, powerful fish that are very challenging to catch—out of an historic fishing camp that Generals Hap Arnold and George C. Marshall had enjoyed on stopovers as they returned from Europe via the great circle route during World War II. The premier of Newfoundland invited me to fish in the Grand Cascapedia, another of his country’s superb salmon rivers.

  Now I also had time to go back to places that I loved, such as the Dean River in British Columbia, where Oregon friends had taught me to fish for steelhead—a fish that hatches in fresh water, goes to sea after a couple of years, and then a few years later returns to fresh water to spawn. Rather than dying, they go back to sea and return to spawn again, all the time growing bigger and wilier. They are fast, challenging to hook, tough to land—a real test of skill. And you fish for them in some of the most beautiful parts of North America.

  I continued fishing the Snake River in Wyoming and Idaho and the Bighorn in Montana with Wyoming friends as passionate about the sport as I am. My longtime friend Dick Scarlett usually arranged our trips. I made time every year to fish in Pennsylvania with my dear friend Don Daughenbaugh, a retired schoolteacher and coach, who knows more about fly-fishing than anyone I’ve ever known. I also fished some new territory, going twice to New Zealand, and taking an amazing trip with my daughter Mary and my friend John Robson to fish for Atlantic salmon in the Ponoi River in Russia.

  A Canadian businessman, Fred Mannix, invited me to the fabled Ristigouche Salmon Club in New Brunswick. The club was established in 1880, and wealthy American and Canadian members used to make the trip up there in private railway cars to fish for salmon. A. N. Cheney, one of my ancestors, who was far from wealthy, but a noted fly fisherman, used to fish with a friend about six miles above the club for what he called “the grandest of all fish.” Together with another friend, Charles Orvis, A. N. Cheney edited Fishing with the Fly, a book that has become a fly-fishing classic.

  IN 1994 I WAS invited by John Georges, the chairman and CEO of International Paper, to come to the Rocky Brook Salmon Camp on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick. The camp was once part of International Paper’s timber holdings, which are mostly sold off now, but the company had the good sense to hold on to this terrific salmon camp. The other guests with me that week were Roger Smith of General Motors; my friend and pollster, Bob Teeter; Patrick Noonan, who was head of the Conservation Fund; and Tom Cruikshank, who was chairman and CEO of Halliburton.

  I’
d never met Tom Cruikshank before and didn’t know he was getting ready to retire and was looking for a replacement. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I had, because I wasn’t looking for work. I was there to fish, and that’s what the group did each morning and late afternoon. At dinner, we’d sit around the fire and have long and sometimes contentious debates about politics and public policy.

  A few months after Rocky Brook, I answered the phone one day in my kitchen in Jackson, and it was Tom Cruikshank calling. He told me about his planned retirement and about Halliburton’s search. He said they hadn’t had any success finding a replacement and that he had mentioned my name as a possible candidate to several members of his board. They were intrigued with the possibility, and he was calling to see if I could fly down to Dallas to meet with them.

  I was also intrigued. Halliburton was the second-largest oil services company in the world. They owned Brown & Root, a large construction company with deep roots in Texas and reach around the globe. Altogether, the company had some one hundred thousand employees operating in 130 countries. I agreed to make the trip and landed in the Halliburton plane at Love Field a few days later. I had dinner at Tom Cruikshank’s house with several board members, including Anne Armstrong, whom I had known when she was ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Ford. Bob Crandall, the chairman and CEO of American Airlines, was there, as was W. R. Howell, the chairman of JCPenney. We talked about Halliburton and what they were looking for in a CEO. It was a pleasant evening, and they flew me back to Wyoming when it was over.