Vice (20 page)

Cheney's testimony, along with that of former NEH chairman Bill Bennett, failed to carry the day, in part because right-wing actor
Charlton Heston
testified against them. Moses argued that the endowments were essential, and the Republicans parted. Constituents whose communities had received NEH funding also lobbied their congressmen not to eliminate the agency.

With Republicans dominating Congress, Lynne bided her time in the late 1990s, writing books and arguing politics on
Crossfire.
She had confided to the National Alliance's Hammer while at the NEH that she coveted the position of Secretary of Education. Yet there was no way that she would be appointed to the cabinet while her husband was Secretary of Defense. When the Clintons came into power, the prospect of her working in the federal government evaporated. Then in 2000, with her husband about to take office as vice president, his career smothered Lynne's ambition. As Dick pondered joining the Bush ticket, Lynne was unenthusiastic about the move since she knew it would sideline her career. At the time of the election, Lynne was working on a book on elementary and secondary education reform, but she shelved it to avoid creating controversy for the new administration. She has kept her position at the American Enterprise Institute, but instead of ginning out hard-hitting polemics, today she writes children's books and styles herself "the first grandmother."

The sense of sacrifice could be heard in her words to
NezvsHour's
Jim Lehrer
when he asked her about the change. "I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to do the children's books if I had just gone on the course I was on. I'm at the American Enterprise Institute, where typically scholars aren't writing children's books."

But Lynne's legacy lives on. Two months after the September 11 attacks, a self-styled academic watchdog group called the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA)
issued a report under the modest title
"Defending Civilization
: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." It purported to make the case that "college and university faculty have been the weak link" in the nation's response to the
al-Qaeda
attack. The authors painted a dire picture of America's system of
education
. They described a "pervasive moral relativism," which endorsed the notion that Western civilization is "the primary source of the world's ills." Insufficiently patriotic professors were traitors. "We learn from history that when a nation's intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries." To prove its point, the report included 117 alleged instances of unpatriotic statements that occurred after the attacks, with the names of the perpetrators listed.

In the weeks that followed, the report came under heavy criticism. Many of the unpatriotic statements didn't hold up or proved so mild as to be ridiculously inoffensive. Former U.S. ambassador
Strobe Talbott
, then at Yale, was quoted as saying, "It is from the desperate, angry and bereaved that these suicide pilots came." One of the co-founders of ACTA, Senate Democrat Joe Lieberman, asked that his name be removed from the organization's website. Not Lynne. She lauded the group in a speech at Princeton for speaking "out forcefully in favor of well-rounded general education." Editorialists decried the report as a blacklist. Under the barrage of criticism, ACTA took the report off its website a week after its release. When the report reappeared, the names were gone. Today, not even the report is available online.

To Lynne Cheney watchers, all of this came as no surprise. She had helped start ACTA, originally called the National Alumni Foundation, as a vehicle to attack the national history standards. She was still chairman emeritus of the group. ACTA's two leaders,
Jerry Martin
and
Anne Neal
, had been part of Cheney's "fifth-floor mafia" at the NEH. According to the Media Transparency project, the right-wing Bradley and Olin foundations had provided the seed money to launch the organization. It appeared that Cheney the culture warrior was back, only behind the scenes.

Rumors began to circulate that Cheney was surreptitiously running the NEH. The Bush administration had nominated art history professor
Bruce Cole
to chair the endowment. Cheney had placed Cole on the National Council on the Humanities during her tenure. Cole picked
Lynne Munson
, one of Lynne Cheney's confidantes, as his top deputy. Flagging grant proposals for ideological purity, which had ended under the Clinton administration, resumed.

Evidence mounted that Cheney was operating behind the scenes in at least one other agency as well. A month before the 2004 election, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a front-page story reporting that the
Department of Education
had destroyed more than three hundred thousand copies of a history study guide printed to help parents who were homeschooling their children, a key GOP constituency. The
Times
revealed that department officials destroyed the booklets after the office of the vice president's wife had contacted them. The copywriters who produced the pamphlets had committed the unpardonable sin of mentioning the national history standards. Secretary of Education
Rod Paige's
chief of staff at the time was
Anne-Imelda Radice
, another former Cheney mafia member at the NEH, with no education experience. A Democratic congresswoman from California,
Zoe Lofgren
, sent a letter to Paige asking how much it cost taxpayers to destroy and reprint the booklets. Paige never responded. Luckily for Cheney, no other media picked up the story and it didn't become an election issue.

Publicly, Lynne Cheney is seldom seen. In recent years, she has given few public speeches. She spends her time with her daughter Mary's partner Heather at Restoration Hardware buying things for the new house they are building with Mary's advance, or playing with the grandkids. "She's bored," says a friend. "She wants to run for office."

When her husband is scheduled to leave the White House in January 2009, Lynne will be almost sixty-eight years old. Her controversial past makes any future appointment requiring Senate confirmation doubtful. And although some who know her say she would like a Senate seat, a run for higher office remains a long shot. Still, those who have felt her wrath are loath to count her out.

It starts with a trip to the governor's mansion. Located in downtown Austin, the mansion is a commanding Greek Revival with six imposing Ionic columns across the front. But the grandeur of the building does not reflect the stature of the office. Texans decided early on that they didn't want a powerful governor. They created a weak executive and a strong legislature.

It's December 1998. The occupant of the mansion is a Republican of modest accomplishments, a politician who has learned to work with the Democratic statehouse across the street and won high approval ratings in the process. At the beginning of his second term, the governor is already looking beyond his Lone Star state. He wants the biggest political prize of all. Yet while he has mastered his current elected office, and despite a sterling pedigree, he's not knowledgeable enough to be the president. Thus begins the education of George W. Bush.

Bush had always liked and respected Dick Cheney, a rare departure from his tendency to reject his father's advisers and associates. In 1992, as the senior Bush's presidency degenerated into crisis and recrimination— often played out as leaks in the press—the eldest son put aside a difficult filial relationship to move into the White House and lend a sharp elbow. Bush helped his father oust chief of staff John Sununu, who was replaced by
Samuel Skinner
. But the former secretary of transportation couldn't make the executive office run. The son and his father's advisers cast about for a competent manager to substitute for Skinner, someone with organizational abilities and loyalty—a quality prized above all others by the younger Bush. Reportedly the man the son favored was Dick Cheney, but the secretary of defense resisted this draft. He wasn't going to give up what he told congressional colleagues was "the best job you could ever have." Instead, the elder Bush turned to the family's trusty handyman, James Baker III—like Cheney, a former chief of staff.

While George W. was in the governor's mansion, Cheney was just a short drive up 1-35, in Dallas, running Halliburton and getting his first taste of the plutocracy. Throughout the mid-1990s, the governor and the CEO would see each other at events, keeping open the lines of communication. When it came time for Bush to receive tutoring to fill the biggest blank spot on his résumé—foreign policy—Cheney was an obvious choice for instructor. Bush had also developed a rapport with Condoleezza Rice, his father's special assistant for national security affairs. As early as the summer of '98, the two met at the family vacation compound in Kenne-bunkport. Rice was then a tenured provost at Stanford, but she wanted out of academia and back into government. The campaign signed her up as foreign policy "coordinator."

In mid-December, Rice took fellow Stanford professor and former secretary of state George Shultz to the mansion for a seminar with the prospective candidate. Cheney also attended that mid-December policy session. He brought along a guest, too: Paul Wolfowitz, who would become a regular tutor at Bush's home school. Wolfowitz would not be the only member of the Project for the New American Century whom Cheney introduced to the governor, but he was one of the more popular ones. The absence of
Bush père
loyalists such as Brent Scowcroft suggested Bush the younger would follow his PNAC advisers and chart a more aggressive and unilateral foreign policy distinct from his father's soft internationalism. Wolfowitz believed in the neoconservative ideal of muscular moralism, the notion that the world could be remade in America's image—as that was what people everywhere really wanted anyway—if necessary at the tip of a spear. With Wolfowitz and Cheney in Austin, the future war cabinet had started to form almost two years before the election.

When Cheney came back for another session in February 1999, Bush responded to a reporter's query about the visit. "It's not the first time he's been down here," said Bush. "It won't be the last time he'll be down here. He's a person whose judgment I rely on a lot."

Throughout the summer and into the fall, the foreign policy team expanded to include Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle, both PNAC co-founders. Bush even mixed in a few token realists, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, among the ideologues. (His advisers were smart enough to at least feint toward the more pragmatic side of the Republican Party to try and keep everybody happy.) But the tutoring wasn't enough to help the governor when he opened his mouth. Repeated gaffes fed a perception that he was out of his depth. Bush would counter by pointing to the experience of those he had gathered around him. But what the governor knew didn't really matter. He had enough money to clear the Republican field, and an agile and ruthless campaign team headed by Karl Rove, soon to be dubbed "Bush's Brain." By Super Tuesday on March 7, Bush had effectively put away his only real rival, John McCain—when necessary, with the dirty campaigning that is a Rove trademark. It was time to think about choosing a vice president.

Back at the mansion in Austin, Bush invited his first choice for the job to dinner. After the meal, the two men retired to the library. Surrounded by portraits of Stephen F. Austin and Davy Crockett, Bush asked Dick Cheney to join him on the ticket.

At that moment, there were plenty of reasons for Cheney not to accept the offer. For starters, he was sitting on hundreds of thousands of Halliburton shares and options worth tens of millions of dollars. By joining the ticket, he would deny himself the opportunity to sell his shares and exercise his options when the market dictated the maximum price. Also, he had signed an employment contract that stipulated he would lose some compensation if he retired before the age of sixty-two. There was a loophole—the board could waive the deal—but a mutually acceptable agreement would take time. An early vice presidential pick wouldn't do Bush any favors either, as Rove surely knew. Vice President Al Gore would be pitching policy proposals from here to the convention in August. The Bush campaign had to give the media something to report. If they named someone now, the press would spend months dissecting the ticket. Yet if they conducted an elaborate search, one that would stroke the GOP's strongest candidates, it might help unite the party behind Bush, and provide the easy horse-race stories reporters adore. During dinner they decided not to announce that Cheney had turned down the job.

The Bush campaign waited until April 19 to start leaking that Dick Cheney would manage the vice presidential search team. As word spread, the Halliburton CEO conveniently couldn't be reached for comment, as he was traveling in Australia, where apparently there are no telephones. In almost a week of free media, the news dribbled out as campaign officials fed favored reporters the scoop. The articles cited unnamed sources, usually identified as "close to Bush" or "from the GOP." The campaign officially remained silent. This debut would set the tone for the artful
media
manipulation to come.

On Tuesday, April 25, Bush formally made the announcement in Austin that "he couldn't think of a better person" than Dick Cheney to lead the hunt. "Fortunately, there are many good candidates to choose from in our party," read a prepared statement from Cheney. "We will look at them all. And we will make sure we have the best possible ticket this fall."

Three weeks later, at a Halliburton board meeting, Cheney denied he would serve in another Bush administration. He had "made a long-term commitment to the company." There was nothing left for him in Washington. "I have no plan, intention, desire under any circumstances to return to government," he said.

Then Halliburton stock rose slightly. On May 31, Cheney filed an intent to sell nearly half his Halliburton holdings, about a hundred thousand shares, for an estimated payoff of $5.1 million. If there were a futures market on the vice presidency, this stock sale would have grabbed the attention of Wall Street analysts.

One of those "many good candidates" to whom Cheney referred was Oklahoma governor
Frank Keating
. He made everybody's short list. Keating had all the qualities the campaign wanted. The former FBI agent had served in a number of posts in the Reagan and Bush administrations. He was widely praised for his response to the
Oklahoma City bombing
. A devout Catholic, he was a favorite of the GOP base because of his pro-life stance. Granted, Oklahoma was a lock for Republicans, but Clinton's choice of Gore had disproved the conventional wisdom that a ticket needed regional diversity or a state with a large number of electoral votes. Above all, Keating's self-effacing style wouldn't upstage Bush. That was one of the overarching concerns regarding the VP pick. Cheney had a budget for polling, and campaign advisers went so far as to present focus groups with pictures of Bush in different pairings, to check the height ratio.

So it was not a surprise that the governor received a phone call from his old friend Dick Cheney. After the Oklahoma City bombing, Keating had successfully recruited Cheney to chair the fundraising committee for the memorial to the victims. Cheney wanted to send Keating a background questionnaire that was being given to all the potential nominees. Would he fill it out? Keating had been through this before, having worked in three separate government agencies: Justice, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development. He had been confirmed by the Senate four times and gone through six FBI background checks. He had even been a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and had been awaiting confirmation when George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. How bad could Dick Cheney's questionnaire be? Keating readily assented. Others got the call as well: Pennsylvania governor
Tom Ridge
, Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel, Tennessee senator
Bill Frist
, and former Tennessee governor
Lamar Alexander
, to name a few on a "short list" of about eleven.

The questionnaire was extensive. Lamar Alexander received the eighty-three-question document in early June, during what was supposed to be his holiday month in Nantucket. It asked for the address of every residence in which he had lived from the age of nine, every political contribution he had made since the age of eighteen, every taped interview he'd given, and every article written about him. The last item was laughable. All the prospective candidates had lived in the public spotlight, many for decades. "I have been governor of Tennessee twice, run for president twice, I've been through a Senate confirmation [when appointed secretary of education], and I've never seen anything like it," Alexander would tell
The Washington Post.

"These [forms] are not easy to do," says a Republican who has participated in a vice presidential search. "It's a long, complicated process. It's everything: personal history, family health; but it's real heavy on financial. You can spend thousands on this with your CPA and lawyers."

"Dick Cheney knows more about me than my mother, father, and wife," Tennessee senator Bill Frist told the
Post
after filling out the questionnaire.

Keating gave Cheney three big indexed binders with an offer of boxes of supporting background material. While the search meandered on, the governor basked in the media exposure that the consideration brought him. As the candidates complied with Cheney's interrogatories, a steady drumbeat of newspaper stories and television chatter hashed and rehashed who was up and why that person would be best or not. Campaign officials shrugged and told reporters that the only two people in the know were Bush and Cheney. Communication Director
Karen Hughes
said Bush "leaves the room" when Cheney calls to report on how the search is progressing.

On July 3, Cheney visited Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, to give what campaign spokesman
Ari Fleischer
termed "an update." Bush and Cheney participated in the obligatory press conference before their meeting. The all-business Halliburton CEO carried a battered briefcase in which he had brought information from the questionnaires. "I'm running the process in advance to make sure we've done the kind of thorough scrub on these individuals in terms of their backgrounds both public and private that you would expect these days of a vice president," said Cheney.

After he
accepted the nomination
, he would subsequently describe to CNN's
Larry King
what happened later that day. "After lunch, [Bush] walked me out on the back porch and reiterated once again his desire to consider me as a potential candidate for the post," he related. "And I told him at that point that—in light of his desires and an obligation I felt, that I'd take a look at it; that I'd talk to my family about it, and see whether or not it was something that I could agree to."

It was official—at least between Bush and Cheney. They were still not ready to tell the public. Within a week, Cheney went to Washington, D.C, for a thorough medical exam by his doctors. He had to answer the same nagging question Bush's father had asked before choosing Cheney as secretary of defense. The man had survived three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery. He suffered from high cholesterol and gout and had been treated for skin cancer. Could he endure the rigors of a presidential campaign? Would he be able to serve? His doctors once again pronounced him ready to go.

On July 15, Bush and Cheney met with the "iron triangle" of Rove, Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh. Hughes would claim that it was the first time the group had talked through the ramifications of naming Cheney VP. The Halliburton CEO would manage to escape the scrubbing he required for the nominees under his review. According to Hughes, Allbaugh would vet Cheney's public record and, implausibly, Bush, a man notoriously averse to details, would look into Cheney's finances and personal life. (At one point, Hughes also claimed that Cheney had investigated himself.)

The most serious consideration was still Cheney's health. Before they announced, Bush and his father, who approved of the choice, wanted a second opinion. Bush family friend and cardiac surgeon
Denton Cooley
spoke with Cheney's doctors. Cooley, a heart transplant pioneer, agreed that Dick Cheney's heart was up to the task. Still, the
search charade
continued. During this period, Bush and Cheney had high-profile meetings with potential candidates, even flying a clueless Senator John Danforth to a private meeting in Chicago.