In My Time

by Dick Cheney

But no one told the House leadership, and they were thoroughly irritated when the deal became public. House passage of a $550 billion tax cut on May 9 did nothing to ease their aggravation, because now a conference between the House and Senate was looming. How could you have a conference, House leaders wanted to know, when one of the leading conferees, Senator Grassley, had already announced a limit?

  The president invited all the players for a drink on the Truman Balcony on May 19, 2003. Speaker of the House Denny Hastert was one of those who enjoyed the fine view from the balcony that evening, as were House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley. The president talked about his tax cut plan, which would speed up rate reductions scheduled for coming years and eliminate the individual tax on dividends. The point of it was to promote economic growth, and he wanted to get it in place fast, by Memorial Day at the latest.

  Denny Hastert, one of the most even-tempered, easygoing men I’ve ever known, then spoke up—and his exasperation with his Senate colleagues was pretty obvious. He recommended to Majority Leader Frist that since Senator Grassley had already staked out a position, he should not be appointed to the conference. There was silence as the group on the balcony calculated the number of improprieties Hastert had just committed. There was, first of all, the House telling the Senate what to do and added to that was the insult of anyone daring to propose that the Senate finance chairman be denied a seat on a tax bill conference. And, then, of course, Senate Finance Chairman Grassley was sitting right there.

  I knew that Hastert was doing more than just sending a shot across the bow. He’d phoned in the last couple of days to tell me that House members were saying they wouldn’t go to conference with Grassley. They were thinking about sending a bill with a higher number back to the Senate and telling the senators to take it or leave it.

  Bill Frist had also called me. Senators were getting their backs up at the idea the House was trying to “jam” them, he said, and personal animosities were running high. Could I step in and help broker a deal?

  I was happy to do it. I certainly understood the institutional rivalries at work, and I knew the people involved well. Finance Chairman Grassley and House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas were barely speaking. There was a report that a meeting between them grew so heated that Thomas stomped out of his own office. I liked and admired both men. Chuck is a down-to-earth and decent man who still works his Iowa farm. I remember at least once calling him and reaching him on his cell phone while he was out driving his tractor. He has a stubborn streak, but it has served him and his constituents pretty well over the years. Thomas, who’s from Bakersfield, California, loves to legislate, and he brings a very sharp mind to the task. An ex-academic like me, he is famously prickly, but we had known each other since we had both been elected to the House nearly a quarter century before and enjoyed each other’s company.

  I went to visit Bill in his Ways and Means Committee office on the afternoon of May 21, 2003, and we spent some time reminiscing. We agreed that nobody would have believed it back in 1979 when we were freshman members of Congress that the two of us would be sitting here in 2003, he the chairman of Ways and Means, one of the most powerful positions on the Hill, and I the vice president. Then Bill walked me through where the House was on the tax bill, including the fact that there was great interest in seeing a cut in capital gains included in the final bill. The president’s proposal was to eliminate the individual tax on dividends, but Bill didn’t think that would fly.

  The House had grudgingly come down in its number to a cut of $350 billion and had a tentative deal on that with the Senate, but the bill also included outlays for state assistance and child-credit refunds, which Chuck Grassley thought he needed to get the conference bill through the Senate. That ran the top number up to $382 billion, setting off Senator Voinovich, who decided that the spirit of the $350 billion cap had been violated. I got him to come over to the Ways and Means Committee office, and after what the Washington Post correctly called “a tense meeting,” there was a deal: tax cuts of $320 billion and reduction of the capital gains tax as well as the individual tax on dividends to 15 percent. That left room for the sweeteners the Senate needed and the whole thing still came in under the $350 billion limit.

  I went over to the Senate to get sign-off from Chairman Grassley and Majority Leader Frist and helped work out a few other details that day and the next. By the time I took my seat as president of the Senate on May 23, I felt I had earned my keep. And when I cast the tie-breaking vote to ensure the bill’s passage, I was sure I had. On May 28 President Bush signed into law the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.

  The Bush-era tax cuts helped grow the economy and create jobs, and I was glad to see them extended in December 2010 for two more years. If the Obama administration had reversed course and let tax rates rise across the board, the results would have been devastating.

  DURING MY FIRST WEEKS as vice president I had another obligation to fulfill. The previous October, as the campaign was winding down, our whole family was out on the road fulltime. After one late-night rally, my six-year-old granddaughter, Kate, climbed into the seat next to me on the campaign plane. “Grandpa,” she said, “if you win, will you come to school as my show-and-tell?” “You only want me if I win?” I asked. “Yep,” she answered. I had to admire the kid’s frankness, so we struck a deal, and on a snowy February morning, I was Kate’s show-and-tell. My impression was that most of her fellow first graders were more interested in my Secret Service agents than in Kate’s old grandpa, but I’ll never forget the huge smile on her face as I walked into the classroom.

  I SOON SETTLED INTO an early morning routine that varied little during my eight years in office. Around 6:30 a.m. my CIA briefer would arrive with my copy of the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, which contains reports on the most critical intelligence issues of the day. We met in the library on the first floor of the Vice President’s Residence, and while I read through the briefing book, the briefer waited, ready to answer questions and to take the book back when I had finished. Scooter Libby, my chief of staff, often joined me for these sessions. Most days, after I received and read through my own copy of the PDB, I would join the president for his briefing. If I was traveling or at an undisclosed location, the president would often be briefed in the White House Situation Room, so I could join by secure videoconference.

  During my years as vice president, I had some absolutely first-rate briefers. When a new briefer was assigned to me, we would sit together and go over a list of issues I was particularly interested in following. As a result, my copy of the PDB quickly expanded to two sections. The first section was identical to the president’s copy. The second section—“behind the tab,” we called it—contained responses to questions I’d asked or items my briefers knew I was interested in. Some mornings I would pull material from my section behind the tab and tell my briefer I thought the president needed to see it. Other times I would raise questions in the session with the president based on items I’d seen behind the tab. On at least one occasion, I asked to have material reinserted in the President’s Daily Brief after others on the national security staff decided that he didn’t need to see it. In my experience, intelligence was an absolutely crucial element for those in policymaking positions, and if the briefers thought it should be in the PDB, it should go in.

  I had spent time on intelligence issues throughout my career, beginning when I was Ford’s chief of staff, then when I served on the House Intelligence Committee, and, of course, as secretary of defense. But when I became vice president, I had been away from it for eight years, and I felt it was important to get up to speed. Early on in the administration, I visited various parts of the intelligence community, such as the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. I thought it showed respect to go see people on their turf, and I could meet more of them by visiting
an intelligence agency in person.

  ONE OF THE CHALLENGES we faced immediately on taking office was the energy crisis in California. The state was experiencing brownouts because it lacked the generating capacity to meet power needs. Over the previous ten years, California’s economy had grown 34 percent, and not a single new power plant had been built. Heavy environmental regulations, in particular, discouraged new construction. The state had also, over the years, imposed price caps, so that utility companies facing a significant increase in the price of electricity were unable to pass this cost on to the consumers.

  Alan Greenspan, my old friend, who was now the chairman of the Federal Reserve, had been warning us about the looming California crisis since before the inauguration. Now he advised that since California accounted for close to 15 percent of the U.S. economy, the energy shortages there could lead to a nationwide recession. We put in place some short-term emergency orders that required out-of-state utilities to sell their surpluses to California, but we also knew we needed to address the larger problem of our nation’s overall energy policy. There would be no overnight fix. Energy shortages are often years in the making, the result of shortsighted solutions too often geared toward a political calendar. We needed to change that.

  On January 29, 2001, President Bush announced that he had asked me to chair a task force on the nation’s energy situation. In a little more than three months—lightning speed by government standards—we released “Reliable, Affordable, and Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future,” a report that made recommendations to “modernize conservation, modernize our energy infrastructure, increase energy supplies, accelerate the protection and improvement of our environment, and increase our nation’s energy security.” The report is one I am very proud of. I commend it to anyone looking to understand America’s energy challenges still today. The report had its critics, but I’ve long suspected them of not reading it. They certainly seem to have missed chapters 3 and 4 on the importance of protecting the environment and improving conservation.

  The environmental groups that criticized the report are all too often, in my experience, opposed to any increase in the production of conventional sources of energy. They don’t want to drill anyplace. They don’t want to mine coal anyplace. They seem to believe that we can depend on alternative sources of energy, such as solar or wind. It’s my view—and it’s the view reflected in the report—that while we should develop alternative sources, in the final analysis, we can’t effectively address our energy problems in the near term nor can we remain competitive in the global economy unless we also produce more energy from conventional, domestic sources.

  Right now, none of the alternative sources of energy can compete economically with petroleum and coal and other conventional sources. It’s also the case that time and again we have found that developing alternative sources has undesirable, unanticipated consequences. The push for ethanol fuel produced from corn, for example, resulted in driving the price of a bushel of corn up significantly. This had a huge impact on people who used corn for purposes other than fuel—purposes that weren’t subsidized. Cattlemen, for example, were suddenly faced with significantly higher feed prices. We also saw deforestation in places such as Malaysia as farmers cut down trees in order to plant crops that would bring higher prices during the biofuels craze.

  Those who are opposed to producing more energy here at home sometimes point to conservation as an alternative. As the energy report made clear, conservation is important, but it is nowhere near sufficient to address our energy challenges. In a speech in Toronto in April 2001, I made this point:

  Now, conservation is an important part of the total effort. But to speak exclusively of conservation is to duck the tough issues. Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for sound, comprehensive energy policy. We also have to produce more.

  Critics jumped on this statement, and without ever fully quoting what I’d said, alleged that I was ignoring the importance of conservation. As I look back on the statement now, ten years later, I stand by it 100 percent.

  Although all of the formal members of our energy task force were government officials, we sought advice from thousands of outsiders, and it wasn’t long after the report was released that several groups, including the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, filed suit demanding we release the lists of everyone we met with during the course of our work. Democrat Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, also began demanding the lists. Then the General Accounting Office got involved and demanded the lists. We said no, not because we had anything to hide. Every recommendation we made was publicly available, as was the legislation we put forward based on the report. But I believed, and the president backed me up, that we had the right to consult with whomever we chose—and no obligation to tell the press or Congress or anybody else whom we were talking to. If citizens who come to the White House to offer advice have to worry about lawsuits or being called before congressional committees, it would pretty severely curtail the counsel a president and vice president could receive.

  There were plenty of people, including some in the White House, who thought we should just turn over the lists. Since there were no nefarious secrets hidden in them, they argued, all we were doing was creating a real political headache for ourselves by refusing to give them up. But I believed something larger was at stake: the power of the presidency and the ability of the president and vice president to carry out their constitutional duties.

  We eventually prevailed—on the Hill when the GAO dropped their efforts to get the names and in the United States Supreme Court when the justices ruled 7 to 2 in our favor, remanding the case back to the district court. It was a major victory both for us and for the power of the executive branch. President Bush deserves tremendous credit for standing by me when a lot of people wanted us to take the easy way out. As for the energy report itself, while a number of its recommendations were eventually adopted either through legislation or executive order, our opponents continued to block a more comprehensive approach to the nation’s energy challenges.

  IN EARLY MAY, A few weeks before we unveiled our national energy policy, President Bush announced another initiative he had asked me to undertake. It concerned our responses to the possibility of weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons—being used in an attack against our homeland. While we worked to deny such weapons to our enemies, we also needed to be prepared, as the president said, “to defend against the harm they can inflict.”

  The problem of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that terrorists could acquire such devastating weapons had been a particular concern of mine for some time. The Defense Planning Guidance I issued as secretary of defense in 1992 listed the need to prevent such proliferation as a key objective of the United States. In April 2001, when Nick Lemann of the New Yorker magazine asked me about the nature of the threat facing the United States, I said,

  I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some inspired by terrorists external to the United States—the World Trade Towers bombing, in New York. The threat of a terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological, or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons.

  Then Lemann asked me what we could do to reduce those threats. I answered, “You need to have very robust intelligence capability if you’re going to uncover threats to the U.S., and hopefully thwart them before they can be launched.” Intelligence, I said, is our “first line of defense.”

  When we took office there were numerous federal agencies charged with addressing the consequences of an attack against the United States with weapons of mass destruction. The president asked that I oversee an effort that would study the current s
ystem as well as the recommendations made by a number of task forces that had already looked at the issue and suggest ways we could improve our responses.

  Members of my staff, including Scooter Libby, retired Admiral Steve Abbot, and Carol Kuntz, who’d been on my Pentagon staff, went to work reviewing studies that had already been completed on this topic. Within a couple of months, they presented me a report that recommended several key steps we could take to improve U.S. preparedness and response to a WMD attack. The list included crafting and implementing a national strategy for preparedness and response; improving the intelligence warning of a WMD attack; clarifying lines of federal authority for counterterrorism and emergency response between FEMA and law enforcement; integrating local, state, and federal emergency response agencies; and improving bioterrorism detection and the public health system’s ability to respond to such an attack. The work of my staff on these issues fed directly into efforts we would undertake in the aftermath of 9/11, such as establishing a Department of Homeland Security to coordinate all homeland defense for the nation.

  FROM MY TIME IN Congress participating in continuity-of-government exercises, I knew how important it was to ensure we had a plan in place for leadership succession and survival. We had a duty to make sure an enemy attack could not result in decapitation of our government. I asked my general counsel, Dave Addington, to review the formal procedures in place.

  With David Addington, my general counsel and later chief of staff, at the vice president’s residence in the summer of 2006. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  What happens, for example, if the president becomes ill or is incapacitated? What happens if the vice president can no longer perform his duties? Who should be notified and what steps should be taken to ensure the government can continue to operate in the wake of a national disaster or act of war? These were matters that Addington and I had worked on together before, and we both knew they needed to be addressed before a crisis was at hand. Early in 2001, I asked him to work closely with the White House counsel’s office to provide advice and guidance as our administration began its own review.