by Dick Cheney
His name didn’t stay on long, though, and we never went through the vetting with him, because it was pretty clear early in the next session I had with the governor that a Rumsfeld vice presidency just wasn’t in the cards. Some in the Bush camp had long believed that back in 1975 Rumsfeld maneuvered George H. W. Bush into the job of CIA director as a way of taking him out of the political arena and precluding him from running as Ford’s vice president in 1976. I knew the truth, which was that Democratic senators, in return for Bush’s confirmation as CIA director, had required a pledge in writing from President Ford that he wouldn’t choose Bush as his running mate in 1976. In fact, George H. W. Bush wanted to be CIA director. I remembered being in the Oval Office when he urged Ford to sign the letter sealing the deal.
One night over dinner in the Governor’s Mansion I went through this history with Governor Bush, not because I was pushing him to include Rumsfeld on the ticket but because I wanted him to know the facts as I’d seen them. I told him I was personally convinced that his father’s going to the CIA had nothing to do with Rumsfeld. Indeed, if you had to single out one person as responsible, you might point to Elliot Richardson, who had been Ford’s first choice for the CIA post. Over the years, Richardson had irritated a number of people, including Henry Kissinger, and it was that kind of resistance to the Richardson choice that led President Ford to move on to nominating George H. W. Bush for the CIA. Governor Bush didn’t say a negative word about Rumsfeld, and of course a few months later he picked him to be secretary of defense. But he made it pretty clear that as far as the vice presidency was concerned Rumsfeld wasn’t going to be an option.
Over the course of the next few weeks, the governor and I had numerous meetings and phone calls to review the progress of the search for his running mate. He said to me more than once, “Dick, you’re the solution to my problem.” I chose to take the comment as an indication that I needed to redouble my efforts to come up with a candidate.
On July 3 I flew down to Crawford again to brief the governor. We met in the small single-story white frame house he and Laura used on the property before their current place was finished. That morning I sat inside with him and went through the updated binders giving him the latest rundown on everybody. After our meeting Laura joined us for lunch, and then he and I moved outside to the back porch. The porch was basically a concrete pad with a few posts holding up the roof, and it was punishingly hot out there. I remember looking out over the cactus and sagebrush and thinking that this was definitely Texas real estate.
Over the past few months, as I had listened to George Bush talk about what kind of vice president he wanted, I had been impressed. He had a strong sense of his own strengths and weaknesses, and he wasn’t looking for someone based on any purely political calculation. He was looking for someone who could help him govern, a person with experience in the kind of national security and foreign policy issues he knew every president must face. And, most important, his pick had to be someone who could step in and become president if the worst happened.
As we sat there looking out at the sunbaked landscape, he said once again, “You know, Dick, you’re the solution to my problem.” This time I said, “Okay, Governor, I will take a look at what I would have to do in order to be a viable candidate.” But I also told him that I needed to come and sit down with him and whomever else he wanted in the room and go through all the reasons he shouldn’t pick me. I told him he needed to be aware of the negatives about me. As I reflect back on it now, I suspect that George W. Bush had never really accepted my first answer—thanks, but no thanks—when Joe Allbaugh asked if I was willing to be considered. The governor had worked hard to convince me, but I didn’t want him to be surprised, and I needed to make sure he vetted the vetter.
I flew back to Washington that afternoon, and the next night Lynne and I went to Alan Greenspan’s July Fourth party on the top floor of the Federal Reserve Building. The Fed’s white marble headquarters faces the National Mall only a few blocks from the Washington Monument, and the view of the national fireworks from the top floor is spectacular. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, hosted a buffet dinner for friends and then invited everyone outside on the roof terrace to watch the fireworks.
Lynne and I went through the buffet line and then selected open seats at one of the dinner tables. Washington is a funny place when you’re out of power, and that, added to the fact that we had a couple of grandchildren with us, meant that no one rushed to join our little group—except for Bob Woodward. The famed Washington Post reporter brought his plate over, sat down beside me, and after some preliminary small talk proceeded to pump me for information about the VP search process and who the pick might be. His instincts were right—there was a big story here—but none of his speculation was focused on me, and I felt no need to broaden his horizons.
After we returned to Dallas, I called Dave Lesar, my chief operating officer at Halliburton, and asked him to come by the house early one morning. I told him what was happening—that there was a possibility George Bush would select me to be his running mate. I told Dave that if that happened I would recommend to the Halliburton board that he take over as chairman and CEO of the company. From my first days as CEO, I had always believed that there should be somebody in the wings ready to take over. Some CEOs don’t do that because they think such a person may emerge as competition. They don’t want anybody around who would be an obvious successor. I had always operated on the basis that if I got hit by a truck, somebody had to be able to take over—and Dave was the clear choice. I knew that if I did leave Halliburton, the company would be in good hands with Dave, and I wouldn’t be walking away leaving them in the lurch.
I also called a meeting of the board of directors. Even though I still considered it to be far from a sure thing, I thought that they needed to know that I might be selected as the Republican vice presidential nominee. Although I had enjoyed excellent relationships with the board, I wasn’t sure just how this news would be received. One of the questions that had come up when they’d hired me was whether I was through with politics, and I had assured them I was, because that is what I had believed. Fortunately, the board was supportive. I had given the company five years, and it had been a good five years for Halliburton. I had also picked a strong successor and brought him along. In addition, most of the board understood that when your party’s presidential nominee asks you to run with him, it’s the right thing to do. It’s an obligation.
The board was helpful as I worked to separate myself from the company financially. They even offered to accelerate the exercise dates on all Halliburton options that had been granted to me, so I could exercise them before I was elected, thus eliminating any accusations of a conflict of interest. I declined this offer because I did not want even the appearance that I was getting special treatment. After I left Halliburton I sold the stock I held outright and exercised options that had vested, but that left a significant number of options that had not yet vested. That is, they had been granted to me, but the dates when I could choose to sell them were in the future.
There was no legal requirement that we do so, but in order to sever all our financial ties to Halliburton, Lynne and I set up an irrevocable gift trust agreement that would donate all the after-tax profits from these unvested options to three charities of our choice: the University of Wyoming, George Washington University Hospital, and Capital Partners for Education, which provides scholarships to inner-city children in Washington, D.C. That agreement has resulted in more than $8 million being donated to charity.
I also had deferred income from the company from one year in which I had taken a portion of my salary and asked for the rest of it to be paid out over five years. This was salary that I had already earned, so it was due to me whether the company was doing well or badly. But before I became vice president, so that there would not be even the slightest confusion or suspicion that I had any ongoing connection with Halliburton or any interest or stake in the fortunes of the company,
Lynne and I took the extra step of obtaining an insurance policy, for which we paid fifteen thousand dollars, that guaranteed these payments regardless of what happened to the company.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but after all the steps I had taken to guard against any possible assertion that I had an ongoing stake in the fortunes of the company, it angered me that my critics continued to make false claims about my ties to Halliburton. During the 2004 campaign, the charges were especially outrageous. Early in that campaign summer, Senator Pat Leahy conducted a conference call as a campaign surrogate in which he suggested I was being dishonest and dishonorable and was profiting from Halliburton business while I was vice president. Not long afterward, when I was on the Senate floor for the annual Senate “class photo,” Leahy came over and put his arm around me, acting as though we were old buddies. I used a colorful epithet to suggest what he could do to himself and stepped away. It was probably not language I should have used on the Senate floor, but it was completely deserved.
The Kerry-Edwards campaign made a TV ad using the same lies, and I was gratified when the University of Pennsylvania’s Public Policy Center analyzed the ad, obtained the relevant documents, including the gift trust agreement, and concluded in a statement on the website FactCheck.org that the ad was “flat wrong.”
As I was notifying my board of the possibility that I might be selected as the vice presidential nominee, I also arranged to have a complete physical with my doctors in Washington. After taking a stress test and having an electrocardiogram and a battery of other tests, my doctors spoke with Dr. Denton Cooley, the world-renowned heart surgeon from Texas, who had performed the first heart transplant in the United States. Governor Bush had asked Cooley to assess whether my heart condition was a disqualification.
Lynne was on the board of American Express mutual funds, and once a year the company had a board meeting in Minneapolis to which spouses were invited. That’s where I was on the night of July 12, when I was called away from the dinner table to take a call from Governor Bush. He told me that Dr. Cooley had given me a green light on the health front, concluding that there was no reason why I could not run for and serve as vice president. Of course that was good news, but I was still looking ahead to the meeting scheduled for Saturday, July 15, at the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, where I intended to lay out the case against myself. And I wouldn’t be just going through the motions. There were solid reasons why I didn’t think I made sense as George Bush’s running mate, and I intended to put them on the table. I was so serious about talking him out of picking me that my family was confident I would come back from the meeting having taken myself off the list.
The governor, his chief strategist, Karl Rove, and I met in the yellow parlor of the Governor’s Mansion, a high-ceilinged room with portraits of famous Texans on the wall. I began by going through a list of things about me that I believed the governor should be aware of. First, I told them, I had been arrested twice when I was in my early twenties for driving under the influence, and I’d been kicked out of Yale twice.
I also had health problems. Despite Dr. Cooley’s reassurances I wanted to be sure Governor Bush understood how serious they were. At that point I’d had three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery. I explained what would happen on the campaign trail if I ever felt chest discomfort or any other symptom. Heart patients have to be vigilant, and I told them that if I ever felt even a twinge in my chest during the campaign, I would go directly to a hospital. It would make no difference if I were in the middle of a speech or in the middle of a debate; minutes could mean the difference between life and death. There was simply no way to judge the impact of such an event on the outcome of a presidential race, but it wasn’t likely to be positive.
I also pointed out that the governor and I both had a history in the oil business. Governor Bush had been in the oil business years ago in Midland, and I’d been running Halliburton for five years. It wasn’t hard to imagine the negative charges our opponents would level at us based on that common denominator. We also had a potential constitutional problem because we were both living in Texas. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution prevents the Electoral College electors from any state from voting for a president and a vice president from their state. In other words, the electors from Texas could not vote for both me and George Bush. Before moving to Texas in 1995, I had been a nearly lifelong resident of Wyoming and still had a home there. But we would need election lawyers to make sure that Governor Bush wasn’t giving away Texas’s electoral votes by putting me on the ticket.
Finally, I told the governor he needed to understand how deeply conservative I was. He said, “Dick, we know that.” And I said, “No, I mean really conservative.” I had a reputation of being somewhat moderate, partly, I think, because I wasn’t a “bomb thrower” like some of my conservative colleagues, and partly because I got along with people all across the political spectrum. I think it was also because I got my start on the national scene working for Jerry Ford, who was a moderate. I needed to make sure the governor understood that my voting record was certainly not moderate.
Karl joined me in vigorously making the case against me as the vice-presidential pick, and the governor listened carefully to both of us. When the meeting broke up, I had no indication whether I had changed Bush’s mind, but I was sure that there would be further discussions among his top advisors. We continued to look at one other possibility—former senator Jack Danforth from Missouri. On Tuesday, July 18, I picked up Jack and his wife, Sally, in St. Louis and flew with them to Chicago, where the governor was campaigning. We all met at his hotel downtown to discuss the vice presidency. I stayed for the first part of the meeting and then excused myself so they could talk alone.
During the meeting, the governor’s personal aide, Logan Walters, came in the room and told me Liz was on the phone and needed to speak with me. She told me that Pete Williams had called her to say NBC was getting ready to report that I was the governor’s pick to be vice president. I told her to tell Pete that no decision had been made yet, which was the truth, as George Bush was right that minute interviewing another potential candidate.
Later in the week I got some very timely advice from election lawyer Jan Baran, who had been one of our advisors in the vice presidential search process. I had asked Jan to look into what the requirements would be for reestablishing my Wyoming residency. Jan explained that there were generally a number of things a court would look at to determine an individual’s residency, including where he was registered to vote and whether he had voted in recent elections in his home state. Jan also explained that an important deadline was looming. If I wanted to register to vote ahead of Wyoming’s August primary, I would need to do so in person at the Teton County clerk’s office no later than that Friday, July 21. I arranged to make the trip home to Jackson and registered in person on that day.
I have always suspected that Pete Williams had a source in the Teton County clerk’s office that he shared with his colleague Lisa Myers, because shortly after I registered to vote, she ran it as breaking news on NBC. Suddenly the story was national news and speculation reached a fever pitch.
My voter registration trip even caught many in the campaign’s highest ranks by surprise. The process of selecting a vice president had been very closely guarded, and few knew that the governor was as close to picking me as he was. Joe Allbaugh and Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, who knew Liz had been helping me on the search, got hold of her on her cell phone and asked, “Could you explain to us just what your dad is doing in Wyoming?” Liz, who happened to be getting her hair cut at the time, excused herself, stepped into a utility closet at the salon, and whispered into her cell phone as much as she could about the Twelfth Amendment, the deadline to register in Wyoming, and why I was suddenly all over the news.
EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, I was working out on the treadmill at our house in Dallas when the phone rang. It was George Bush, and he was calling to formally as
k me to be his running mate. I said I would be honored.
Ever since the previous Friday when I’d registered to vote in Wyoming, the press had been camped out in front of our house in Dallas. There was a double front door with a large window over the top, and on Monday morning when I walked out of our bedroom in my pajamas, I looked up to see a camera mounted so that it was looking straight in through that window. Another enterprising journalist left a disposable camera on the doorstep, along with a note suggesting that we might use it to take some personal photos of this historic day and then give the camera back to her to develop them.
I drove Lynne and Liz to Love Field, parked the car, and we flew to Austin for the formal announcement that I would be George Bush’s running mate.
Getting ready to fish the Snake River with Mary and Liz during the Democratic National Convention in August 2000. (Photo by David Kennerly)
It was the last time I would drive myself for the next eight and a half years. Even though I had held some prominent public positions as White House chief of staff, member of Congress, and secretary of defense, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what was about to happen. When you become your party’s vice presidential candidate, you’re instantaneously swept into an all-consuming bubble of motorcades, campaign staff, and Secret Service agents, with legions of reporters and cameras following close behind.
After the formal announcement at 2:00 p.m., we headed back to the Governor’s Mansion, where photographers for Time and Newsweek were waiting to take the first official portraits of the newly minted Republican ticket. Newsweek ran the photo on the cover with the title “The Avengers: Taking Aim at the Age of Clinton.” The headline in the Washington Post the next day pretty accurately captured the gist of the coverage of Bush’s vice presidential selection: “GOP Hails Cheney’s Inclusion on Ticket; Democrats Prepare to Fight Big Oil.” A lot of the reaction focused on my experience, particularly in national security, and my twenty-five years of government service, but the Democrats were waiting in the wings, ready to attack.
