Vice (13 page)

At an arraignment
of Weinberger on November 24, 1992
, an attorney for the special prosecutor complained that Cheney's team had given Weinberger special access to government files to aid in his defense, as well as information about what investigators were looking at. This was contrary to Defense Department regulations, according to the lawyer. "One of our attorneys found that Weinberger's attorneys had documents that came from the Department of Defense," says a member of Walsh's team. "Cheney was passing them information that pertained to our prosecution. He was working on behalf of Weinberger's defense." At about the same time, Cheney went on
Meet the Press
and called Weinberger's indictment "a travesty."

On Christmas Eve 1992, after having failed in his reelection bid, President George H. W. Bush pardoned those who had been convicted in the special prosecutor's investigation, and threw in a preemptive pardon of Weinberger.

A few days before Christmas in 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney gave the press corps that travels with him a rare opportunity. On a trip to Muscat, Oman, he made himself available to answer questions from reporters on
Air Force Two
.
The New York Times
had just reported that the administration was involved in a program of warrantless wiretapping, and Cheney had something to say about it. In the course of the conversation, a questioner asked about the vice president's view on "executive power" in light of his experience under Ford. It would be the first time in years that Cheney would mention Iran-Contra.

If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-Contra Committee. . . . Nobody has ever read them, but we—part of the argument in Iran-Contra was whether or not the president had the authority to do what was done in the Reagan years. And those of us in the minority wrote minority views, but they were actually authored by a guy working for me, for my staff, that I think are very good in laying out a robust view of the president's prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters. It will give you a much broader perspective. I served in the Congress for ten years. I've got enormous regard for the other body, Tide I
[sic]
of the Constitution, but I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the Cold War, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy. That's my personal view.

As Cheney is finally in a position to turn his personal views into federal policy, Bruce Fein has parted ways with his old boss. He sees "a chasm of difference" between
Iran-Contra and
the current
secrecy of
Bush-Cheney. "Then it was part of the democratic process," he says. "The way you debate the process, it allows for self-correction. This is the essence, the lifeblood of democracy."

Whereas the Reagan administration was forced by a Democratic Congress to reveal its inner workings when it came to covert action, there is no disclosure today. "They think that democracy ends if you win elections," says Fein.

Although he stood just five foot six,
John Goodwin Tower
was a Texan larger than life.

The son of a Methodist minister, Tower was a World War II veteran who had done graduate work at Southern Methodist University and postgraduate work at the London School of Economics. In England, he had acquired an expansive worldview, an appreciation for tailored suits, and the notion that a public figure's sex life could remain private. The 1960 presidential election provided him a way out of a teaching position at an undistinguished state university in Texas. Tower ran for the Senate against LBJ, whose name appeared on the ballot twice in 1960—for the Senate seat he'd held since 1948 and for the vice presidency. When Johnson vacated his Senate seat in 1961, Tower was positioned to run again. He emerged from a pack of seventy-one candidates, and after a runoff, he became the first Texas Republican to win a statewide election since Reconstruction.

In Texas, John Tower worked to build a
Republican Party
where there was none, and helped the senior George Bush win a seat in the U.S. House. In Washington, he distinguished himself as a senator with a remarkable grasp of defense and banking policy. He left the Senate in 1985 and briefly campaigned to become Ronald Reagan's
defense secretary
. Reagan appointed him to lead the U.S. team in Geneva, negotiating nuclear arms reductions in formal bilateral talks with the Soviet Union. Along the way, Tower booked $750,000 in defense industry lobbying and consulting accounts. It was his experience in Geneva, his position on the
Senate Armed Services Committee
, and his generous political support that led President George H. W. Bush to nominate John Tower as secretary of defense in 1989. It was also Tower's experience in Geneva that ultimately made Dick Cheney secretary of defense.

John Tower was ideologically consistent—a fiscal conservative regarding domestic issues and a Cold War conservative when it came to foreign policy. He was equally consistent in what should have been his private life. The sort of Armed Services Committee chairman for whom "procurement" was a double entendre, Tower was a notorious drunk and a domestic and foreign ass-grabber with few peers in the United States Senate—a poor choice to send to arms negotiations in Geneva in 1985. The Soviet Union was a dangerous nuclear adversary. Tower was the custodian of his country's weapons intelligence. And Geneva was an international center of espionage, where attractive female Soviet agents known as "swallows" worked in bars, restaurants, and hotels.

Tower's colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee could not have been unaware of his
drinking and the accounts of his pursuit of women
. But a cabinet nomination entailed a level of scrutiny he couldn't withstand. An FBI background investigation of the former senator found a situation in Geneva so bad that the CIA had been called in to investigate American negotiators in 1985 and 1986. The agency's 120-page report confirmed that swallows from the
KGB
(Soviet intelligence) were assigned to U.S. negotiators. There were uncorroborated accounts of fourteen extramarital relationships in the U.S. delegation, some involving foreign women. Delegation members frequented bars that were known KGB hangouts. At one drunken bash, people drank from the shoe of a delegation member. Investigators even turned up a double-ended dildo.

The background report—and, of equal importance, concerns about Tower's close and possibly compromised relations with defense contractors—cost him the support of the Georgia Democrat who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator
Sam Nunn
told reporters that the secretary of defense job required clarity of thought twenty-four hours a day, implying that Tower's drinking would present a problem. (Nunn also had concerns about Tower's defense industry contacts, but stories of sex and alcohol seize the public's attention and always make for a more marketable narrative than does corruption.) When his former colleagues on the Armed Services Committee rejected him by an 11–9 vote, it was over, even if the president refused to move on to a new candidate.

Dick Cheney has often had the good fortune or good sense to be in the right place at the right time. On the night of the committee vote, he was at the vice presidential residence with
Dan Quayle
, who was looking for someone to salvage the nomination. Cheney told the vice president it was over. "Tower's down the tubes. You've got to get someone to work with Congress," Cheney said, according to
Washington Post
editor
Bob Woodward
.

More than two weeks after Cheney's meeting with Quayle, the Senate rejected Tower's nomination by a 53–47 vote. George H. W. Bush became the first U.S. president to lose a first-round cabinet appointment. "There were Tower people moving into Pentagon offices and waiting for the secretary to be confirmed," says a former
Defense Department
employee. "Everything was on hold. We were going to go into May without a secretary." Bush had to find a nominee the Senate would confirm with no delay.

Cheney had warned the president that Tower's nomination was dead. He also suggested the president find someone "to work with Congress." Cheney himself fit the bill. His unopposed election as minority whip established his ability to work with Congress. He was a loyal lieutenant in the Republican Party. And he was the only member of the House to have served as a White House chief of staff. On the day the Senate voted to reject John Tower, Bush chief of staff
John Sununu
called Cheney over to the White House. Sununu and Bush national security advisor Brent Scowcroft were waiting in the office Cheney had occupied when he was Gerald Ford's chief of staff. Sununu asked Cheney whether he would accept the appointment if Bush offered it to him.

Cheney was Brent Scowcroft's choice. The two men had worked together in the Ford administration. "We needed a secretary of defense very badly," Scowcroft told James Mann, the
Los Angeles Times
reporter who wrote
Rise of the Vulcans.
"This was already March, and we just couldn't make policy with a big gap there. So we needed somebody fast. That meant it had to be somebody from the Congress because otherwise we'd go through long hearings. And then I automatically went to Cheney."

The FBI waved Cheney through. The only obstacle remaining was the questions that would be raised—as they are each time Dick Cheney makes a career move—about his heart. At forty-eight, he had already had three heart attacks. The previous August he had undergone quadruple bypass surgery. It was an elective procedure, he told Sununu and Scowcroft. He did it because he wanted to continue downhill skiing. A cardiologist would, as always, provide medical records attesting that Cheney's heart was up to the job.

The nomination was announced the day after the Senate rejected Tower. And although confirmation looked like a formality, Cheney took no chances. He had watched the White House string John Tower's nomination along until the FBI provided his opponents with the information to destroy his career. He wasn't going to allow Bush's staff to handle his confirmation vote in the Senate. Cheney asked
Alan Kranowitz
to take charge of the process. Kranowitz was a friend who had worked as an aide for Democratic senator
Thomas Dodd
, for the Reagan White House, for Flouse minority leader Bob Michel, and for Cheney.

Dick Cheney had never served in the military. He had received five deferments during the Vietnam War. He had never served on a House committee that dealt with military issues. But he was a proven leader in the House and had no skeletons (or dildos) in his closet. His confirmation vote would be a cinch in the Senate.

Sooner or later, it seems, someone always asks: What about Dick?

"The whole world we live in would be totally different if Dick Cheney had not been plucked from the House to take the place of John Tower," says Mickey Edwards, the former Republican House member from Oklahoma who served with Cheney. Edwards, a congressional scholar and author, recognizes the extraordinary influence Vice President Cheney exercises in the "war on terror." But he also emphasizes how Dick Cheney's departure from the Republican minority in the House changed the Congress and transformed American politics.

"Dick was in line to become the party's leader in the House and ultimately the majority leader and Speaker," Edwards says. "If that [had] happened, the whole Gingrich era wouldn't have happened." Newt Gingrich ushered in fifteen years of rancorous, polarized politics. He presided over the shutdown of the federal government when the House was unable to agree to a budget compromise with Bill Clinton. He drove the House to impeach Bill Clinton. Cheney had cultivated cordial relations with Michel, who was sixty-six when Cheney left and beginning to look toward retirement. He worked with Democratic Speaker Tom Foley.

It wasn't that Cheney was a nonpartisan Republican ingratiating himself with the Democratic leadership. He had, after all, called Democratic Speaker Jim Wright a "son of a bitch" and filed a questionable ethics complaint against Wright. But no one interviewed could envision Dick Cheney taking the House down the path that Gingrich followed when he became Speaker.

The Senate moved with breathtaking speed, racing through FBI investigations (agency background investigators were in Cheney's House office even as the president was announcing his appointment). A committee hearing and debate were all completed within a week of Tower's defeat in the Senate. On the floor of the Senate, the debate consisted of overblown encomia of the sort John Tower would not receive even after he died in a plane crash in Georgia in 1991.

Dick Cheney's tenure at the Department of Defense was, by most accounts, his finest hour. "I saw him for four years as SecDef," Colonel
Lawrence Wilkerson
says. "He was one of the best executives the Department of Defense had ever seen. He made decisions. Contrast that with the other one I saw [Clinton secretary of defense
Les Aspin
], who couldn't make a decision if it slapped him in the face."

Cheney had been in his Pentagon office for less than a week when he made a decision that established who was in charge. He publicly attacked
Air Force
chief of staff General
Lawrence Welch
. It was unprecedented that a defense secretary would openly criticize a four-star general. Cheney blindsided the general, complaining that he had been "freelancing" on Capitol Hill, where he was meeting with members of Congress to defend several options for the basing of
ICBMs
—without direction from the Pentagon.

Wilkerson, a lifetime soldier who ended his active military career on Colin Powell's staff, says Cheney instantly asserted his authority over the Pentagon's top brass. "There are two ways to take command of a military unit," Wilkerson says. "One is you come in and try to bribe, wheedle, and persuade everybody. The other is you come in and fire a couple of people and let everybody know who's boss, then back off. . . . If you've got to pick one, the best pick is to be a hardass."

Secretary of Defense Cheney picked the hardass management strategy. Air Force secretary
James McGovern
resigned, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff quietly disagreed, and some of the top brass in the building seethed. "Larry Welch wasn't doing anything that wasn't expected of him," says a retired officer who worked with Cheney
at the Pentagon
. "Policy had been in favor of smaller ICBMs. Larry was keeping the ball rolling on the Hill. That was the mantra: smaller ICBMs. He wasn't out there freelancing."

Welch had, in fact, cleared his congressional discussions with the secretary of the Air Force. "He was just an easy target for Cheney," says the retired officer. Cheney violated an unspoken code relating to civilian direction of high-ranking officials: no humiliating public reprimands of senior brass. And he didn't even slow down to look back.

On the Monday following his smackdown of Larry Welch, Cheney summoned the Pentagon's top civilian officials to his third-floor conference room. He told them the
Welch affair
was done with and that he wouldn't tolerate the four-stars getting "out ahead of civilian leadership— in particular the secretary of defense."

Cheney's dressing-down of the general bothered House Armed Services Committee chair Les Aspin. "It was unfair," Aspin said, because "it was a bum rap." When Aspin confronted Cheney and said Welch wasn't doing an end run, Cheney smiled. "It was useful to do that," he told Aspin.

It probably was. Three weeks earlier, Dick Cheney had been a minority congressman from Wyoming, hiring staff for the whip's office. Within a few days of moving into his third-floor office at the Pentagon, he was kicking ass and taking names. To underscore his point, and make sure his back was covered, he evicted a general from the office next to his. The new occupant would be Cheney's trusted assistant, David Addington.

It was an impressive beginning.

"He was a little slow to accept that the Cold War ended," says one of Sam Nunn's former staff defense policy analysts.

In fact, Cheney was fighting the Cold War even after German entrepreneurs were selling pieces of the Berlin Wall and
Warsaw Pact
leaders were openly discussing new relations with the West. Americans don't like to think of their country as militaristic, but no country in the world has ever proposed a military
budget
that would match what is spent by the United States. The increase in spending in the Reagan years was breathtaking. Total military spending in 1980, the last year Jimmy Carter was president, was $134.6 billion. By the time Reagan completed eight years of strategically outspending the Soviet Union, annual military expenditures in 1988 were $290.9 billion. (Bush-Cheney
defense expenditures
in 2005 were $493.6 billion.)

Before the
Berlin Wall collapsed
,
Mikhail Gorbachev
was discussing reductions in troops and military spending. When the Wall did come down, members of Congress began to clamor for substantial reductions in
defense spending
. Massachusetts senator
Ted Kennedy
talked about putting tens of billions in a "National Needs Trust Fund" to pay for social programs. Georgia senator Sam Nunn proposed cuts of $180 to $190 billion and an ambitious program to pay for the acquisition and dismantling of Soviet nuclear weapons (the
Nunn-Lugar Comparative Threat Reduction Initiative
). Military analysts from the Brookings Institution and policy intellectuals from Harvard proposed cuts as large as 10 percent in 1991, 20 percent in 2005, and 50 percent by 2000.