Vice (14 page)

Cheney refused to get caught up in the euphoria. He believed an aggressive leader who would reverse the reforms in the Soviet Union would replace Gorbachev. Cheney proposed a budget request of $303 billion, $8 billion more than total military spending in the final year Bill Clinton was in office.
Business Week
described Cheney's reluctance to accept victory over the Soviet Union in the headline "Dick Cheney: The Loneliness of the Last Cold Warrior."

That hard-line position created budgetary problems for a president who faced declining revenues aggravated by his "read my lips"
no-new-taxes pledge
. Cheney was making final technical adjustments on his first budget as the Berlin Wall finally came down. Over the course of six quick rewrites, he grudgingly trimmed about $10 billion from the figure he had begun with. He went to Congress with a request of $295 billion, adjusted it upward, and got an appropriation of $297 billion. The following year, in 1991, he asked Congress for $291 billion and got only $270 billion. His final budget request to Congress in 1992 was for $261 billion, from which Congress cut another $10 billion. Cheney was a long way from the $180 billion in
cuts the conservative and defense-oriented
Sam Nunn had hoped for.

Cheney would later claim that he cut $300 billion from the defense budget. That claim doesn't measure up against the checks written for DOD spending. Defense Department budget requests are not the same as defense spending. Nor are appropriations bills, which do not account for "supplementals" added on to cover cost overruns and unanticipated expenses. The Congressional Budget Office calculates dollars actually spent on defense. Cheney did stop the huge annual leaps in spending that began when Ronald Reagan took office. But military spending was not "cut" until Bill Clinton submitted his first defense budget.

Cheney turned the inevitable reduction in troops garrisoned abroad over to his
chair of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Colin Powell. Cheney bypassed dozens of more senior officers to find the most talented candidate, even if he had misgivings about Powell's position on Iran-Contra. Powell designed a "base force" program that gradually brought home (and in some cases discharged) large numbers of American occupation forces in Europe, coordinating every reduction with individual commands. As personnel accounted for almost 50 percent of the Pentagon budget, Powell's gradual reduction in force helped reduce defense spending.

The selection of Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs, long assumed to be Cheney's choice, was actually something of a shotgun wedding. At fifty-two, Powell was younger than most others who were in line for the job. But he had served as Reagan's national security advisor and was the senior Bush's choice to lead the Joint Chiefs. Powell had doubts about Cheney. He considered Cheney's uncompromising support of Ollie North's rogue operations to be an endorsement of military officers going out of channel and running unauthorized operations. The elder George Bush, however, wanted Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs.

Cheney did make one particularly bold move on the military budget. While Ronald Reagan was president, spending on weapons had spiraled completely out of control. Again, with one decision, Cheney took charge. When he learned that the
Navy's
A-12 fighter jet
was $1 billion over budget and eighteen months behind schedule, he canceled the program and fired the vice admiral in charge of naval aviation. He also ordered two senior officers demoted for mismanagement. With three stars on his epaulets, Vice Admiral
Richard Gentz
was the highest-ranking officer ever dismissed for failure to manage costs and deadlines on a weapons system. Cheney also curtailed production of the Air Force's B-2
Stealth bomber
, from 132 to 20—essentially killing a weapons system designed to penetrate Soviet radar and conduct long-range bombing missions. He targeted the Marines' V-22 Osprey, perhaps the most problematic American military aircraft ever to make it off the drawing boards. But the tilt-rotor, vertical-takeoff helicopter had powerful friends. Congress, led by the Texas and Pennsylvania delegations, overrode the cut. When Cheney refused to spend the money appropriated, Texas senator
Lloyd Bentsen
and Fort Worth congressman
Pete Geren
filed suit—more over plant closings than national security. To increase the pressure, Texans and Pennsylvanians on the House Armed Services Committee passed a provision that would cut 5 percent per month from overall defense spending until funding for the Osprey was released. "It wasn't exactly blackmail," says a general who worked on Pentagon budgeting. "But they threatened to be a constant pain in the ass for us until we gave in."

The Osprey proved to be a durable disaster. Midway through George W. Bush's second term, the tilt-rotor helicopter Cheney had tried to ground still wasn't exactly flying. Sixty helicopters had been produced. Five had crashed, which might have been predicted after the prototype crashed. The accidents killed twenty-six marines and four civilians. In March 2006, a year before the aircraft was to be deployed for combat in Iraq, another $71-million Osprey went down in the woods in Florida, though this time no one was injured.

In a 1992 speech, Cheney claimed he "terminated or canceled over 120 different weapons programs." He might have been using canceled software programs to pad his list. And he failed to ground the Osprey. But no secretary of defense since the beginning of the Cold War had taken as hard a look at weapons systems or gone head-to-head with the Pentagon brass and defense contractors. Cheney didn't deliver a peace dividend, but he did stop the exponential growth in the military budget that, along with tax cuts, had driven the deficit during the Reagan presidency.

Most of John Tower's hires at the Department of Defense moved on when the Senate rejected his nomination, but Cheney asked one high-ranking Tower appointee to stay.
Paul Wolfowitz
had begun his career as a Democrat, working for Washington senator
Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson
. He crossed party lines to work in the Nixon and Ford administrations, then took a midlevel position at the Pentagon when Jimmy Carter was elected president. Cheney's decision to keep Wolfowitz, though little noticed at the time, was a small first step toward the invasion and occupation of Iraq that consumed the Bush-Cheney administration fourteen years later.

While Wolfowitz was at the
Defense Department
during the Carter administration, Secretary of Defense
Harold Brown
asked him to look at Third World countries where the United States might face a threat. Wolfowitz's
Limited Contingency Study
, carefully tracked in James Mann's
Rise of the Vulcans,
shifted attention from the Soviet threat and considered the possibility of the seizing of
Saudi
Arabia's
oil
fields by a Persian Gulf nation. It focused specifically on Iraq, described in the study as the preeminent military power in the region. At the time, no one involved in preparing the report considered Iraq a threat. Saddam Hussein had not consolidated his power, engaged in any widespread repression, or acquired chemical weapons.

What concerned Wolfowitz was oil.

Brown wanted nothing to do with the report. He shelved it, fearing that were it leaked, the Iraqis would believe the United States was working on behalf of the Saudis. But Wolfowitz would not let it die, even if it would not be made policy during the Carter administration.

In a Pentagon where Dick Cheney was running the show, Wolfowitz was in a better position to again turn his attention to the Persian Gulf. In 1992 he was responsible for drafting the first biennial
Defense Planning Guidance
document that would not focus on the Soviet Union. Wolfowitz had assigned the project to his deputy,
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
, and Libby delegated the work to
Zalmay Khalilzad
. Both men would figure prominently in the
administration of
George W. Bush, Libby
as Cheney's chief of staff
and Khalilzad as the American ambassador to occupied Iraq, where he would exercise the plenipotentiary power of a viceroy.

The new planning guide, shaped by Khalilzad, Wolfowitz, and Libby, envisioned a superpower so dominant that it could intervene in and resolve any conflict: "Potential. . . competitors need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests." The United States would "sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." A nuclear arsenal would "provide an important deterrent hedge against the possibility of a revitalized or unforeseen global threat, while at the same time helping to deter third party use of
weapons of mass destruction
through the threat of retaliation."

Among the threats the report anticipated were conflicts that threatened access to Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, and terrorist threats to U.S. citizens. The primary case studies that justified the use of the tactics described in the plan were Iraq and
North Korea
. The report made it clear that the United States would act unilaterally; there was no role for the
United Nations
.

A Defense Department employee who believed the policy Wolfowitz was promoting needed to be debated in public leaked the report to
The New York Times.
The report was immediately denounced by President Bush. The leaked document became a political issue in the
1992 campaign
, attacked by Clinton. It angered foreign leaders, who saw it as a blueprint for American hegemony. After Bush distanced himself from it, Wolfowitz followed. Khalilzad was left hanging, the principal author of an orphaned report rejected by all of his superiors. Then Cheney read it. He told Khalilzad, "You've discovered a new rationale for our role in the world." He issued the report under his own name. "He wanted to show that he stood for the idea," Khalilzad said. "He took ownership in it."

The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document would go back on the shelf while Bill Clinton was president. But like the Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, it wouldn't go away. The original Iraq War thinking rejected by Harold Brown and George H. W. Bush had taken root and would be waiting eight years later when Dick Cheney returned yet again to the White House.

Cheney's canonization of the report marked an odd but important historical moment. George W. Bush was sitting in the owners' box seats of the
Texas Rangers
ballpark, where he was a managing partner and a 2 percent owner, while the men who would define his foreign policy ten years later were sitting in their Pentagon offices, where they were in charge, writing the foreign policy they would hand him after the 2000 election.

"He was the finest secretary of defense I've ever seen, from the standpoint of the military," says a general who was already at the Pentagon when Cheney arrived. It is a common response to the open-ended question: How would you describe Dick Cheney as secretary of defense? Like Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who would break with the Bush-Cheney
administration because of
its conduct of the war in Iraq, the general, a career officer who saw Cheney work at the Pentagon, describes him as a near-perfect administrator: "He was in control. Bill Clinton is the smartest man I've ever worked with. But Dick Cheney came close. In a briefing, he's so smart he's intimidating. He listens. He listens in a way that most people don't listen. And he gets everything. It is daunting, can be frightening. But when you walk out of his office, you know that he understands every detail you briefed and every implication of the decision he's going to make. No emotion. No anger. He's annoyed if you are not prepared. I have never seen him raise his voice."

Cheney's time at the Pentagon was a dress rehearsal for the vice presidency. He had no administrative experience, but he seemed to understand, almost instinctively, that the secret to success and control lies in staffing. David Gribben, the high school friend from Wyoming who served as Cheney's chief
of staff
in the House, was also his chief of staff at the Pentagon.
Pete Williams
, the former Wyoming television newscaster who worked as Cheney's House press person, was the Pentagon spokesman. And David Addington, who had been with Cheney since Congress, was now his special civilian assistant.

"Cheney always has the best staff," the Pentagon source says. "David Gribben was loyal, smart, and had no ego. And he understood legislative affairs. Pete Williams could take the most complex issue and dumb it down into a sound bite. And David Addington is one of the smartest people I ever knew. He was on top of things."