At one point my friend Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma asked why the executive branch had the right to decide when members of Congress, a coequal branch of government, could come back to Washington. “Because we’ve got the helicopters, Don,” I told him.
Someone needed to make a formal statement to the nation — and I knew it couldn’t be me. My past government experience, including my participation in Cold War-era continuity-of-government exercises, had prepared me to manage the crisis during those first few hours on 9/11, but I knew that if I went out and spoke to the press, it would undermine the president, and that would be bad for him and for the country.
In the meantime I was starting to think about our response to this act of war. I had managed to get my general counsel, David Adding-ton, back into the White House after he had been forced to evacuate. Almost as soon as he arrived in the PEOC, he began coordinating by phone with a team of the president’s staff who were in the Roosevelt Room thinking through what kind of legislative authorities we would need in the days and months ahead.
The SCS taught farmers about crop rotation, terraced planting, contour plowing, and using “shelter belts” of trees as windbreaks — technique that would prevent the soil from blowing away, as it had in the dust storms fo the Great Depression. My dad stayed with the SCS for more than 30 years, doing work of which he was immensely proud.
He was also proud fo the pension that came with federal employment — a pride that I didn’t really understand until as an adult I learned about the economic catastrophes that his parents and grandparents had experienced and that had shadowed his own youth. I’ve often reflected on how different was the utterly stable environment he provided for his family and wondered if because of that I have been able to take risks, to change directions, and to leave one career path for another with hardly a second thought.
Syracuse loved the Bluebirds. They gave people something to hope for and cheer about in the lingering gloom of the Great Depression.
I’d never seen Yale before I showed up in the fall of 1959 to begin my freshman year. In fact, I’ve never been farther east than Chicago, and when I got off the train in New Haven, Connecticut, it felt like arriving in another country.
Many of my fellow students had gone to prep school. They had had experiences very different from mine and knew things I did not. I sometimes felt they were speaking another language.
It had taken a lot to drive the message home, but I realized the morning I woke up in that jail that if I didn’t fundamentally change my ways, I was going to come to a bad end. As soon as I was released, I drove home to Casper. I remember spending the better part of a day on Casper Mountain, up near the top where you can see all the way to the Bighorns. It was a good place to get perspective on life and to figure out what I was going to have to do to get off the self-destructive path I was on.
I was moving out and camping at the job site. When he asked me why, I told him I’d decided to clean up my act and go back to school in the fall. “I’m going to make something of myself,” I said. “Who in the hell do you think you are?” he responded. “You’re no better than the rest of us.” It was the last time we spoke.
I stood among the crowd of thousands and listened to him deliver an eloquent call to public service. He talked about the Greek definition of happiness — the full use of one’s powers along lines of excellence — and said that working for the public good could provide that kind of satisfaction.
I don’t remember the problem we were discussing, but I do recall that I saw the answer with crystal clarity and offered it up, using a tone of some authority, as I remember. There was silence, then the group went on talking, eventually ending up with the solution I had proposed, though it was as if I’d never offered it. As I thought about what happened, I realized that it’s often better to listen than to speak, particularly if you are the junior person around. Moreover, when a group has a problem to solve, they usually need to grapple with it for a while. If you have a solution, wait until people are ready for it, and then present it in a cool and collected way that makes the answer to the problem be about the answer — and not about you.
If you get involved in politics, you will not be taken seriously by political scientists.
The chairman quoted Aage Clausen saying that I was “the most cooperative, capable, and helpful assistant” he had ever worked with. When I read that letter 37 years later, what struck me most was to think that in 1963, just five years before the letter was written, I had been sitting in a jail cell with my life pretty much in ruins around me. I’d gotten a second chance, and I’d made pretty good use of it.
Because I was cramming for my upcoming preliminary exams, I was determined to complete the whole process, including the 1,700-mile drive and finding and renting the apartment, over the weekend and be back studying by Monday morning.
I learned that there were multiple copies of the grant package and that my request for one of them had triggered an alarm that led to the speeding up of the announcement. Thus in my first days I learned a valuable lesson about dealing with bureaucracies: There is always more than one copy.
He was certainly a tough and demanding boss, but no longer or more demanding of others than of himself, and that was a quality I greatly respected. Beneath the gruff exterior he was as thoughtful as he was focused, and he had developed an intensely loyal team of which I already considered myself a part.
But now we had 2 young children and I was working long hours. Especially during these early years, I operated on the assumption that the more time you put in, the better you were doing in meeting your responsibilities and achieving your potential. I hadn’t figured out it was important to pace yourself and accept that sometimes less produces more.
After a long lunch, Khrushchev became expansive. He said that sometimes in order to be a statesman, you have to be a politician. If the public sees an imaginary river in front of them, the politician doesn’t tell them there’s no river. A politician builds an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river. Nixon told the story as though there was guidance to be found in it, and I took his point to be that if the public thought food prices were a problem, the politician should offer a solution, thereby preserving his ability to make statesmanlike decisions another day.
I hadn’t had much time to think about it, but by now I realized that every day millions of people were making millions of economic decisions, and it didn’t matter how smart we were or how many regulations we wrote. There wasn’t any way we could intervene without doing more than good.
These thoughts confirmed my innate skepticism about what government could and couldn’t do. We could write checks, and we could collect taxes. We could run the whole military and defense side of things. But when something as big and ham-handed as the federal government tries to run something as complex and dynamic as the American economy, the result is sure to be a train wreck.
He and I had one other advantage. We were both young and foolish enough to think there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do.
“Here’s Nelson Rockefeller with planeloads of people flying down from New York,” he said, “and all I’ve got is you, Cheney.”
The impact of the pardon was intensified by the fact that it was a total surprise to everyone. Ford announced it on a Sunday morning at a time when not many people were watching TV, so few Americans heard his explanation directly. Additionally, the announcement was made without any notification to the Congress or discussion in the press. I always believed that the negative impact could have been lessened if more thought had been given to how the pardon was announced.
What I remember most about that first encounter was how quickly and completely Jerry Ford accepted me. I was 33 years old, just six years out of graduate school, with a resume that wouldn’t necessarily rise to the top of anyone’s pile. All I really had going for me was the good opinion of Don Rumsfeld.
And suddenly I had the confidence of the POTUS. At the time I felt very lucky and grateful to them both, and the feeling has never changed.
One obstacles to bringing order to the WH in the early months was President Ford’s preferred model of WH organization, a design he described as the “spokes of the wheel” model, which was based on the way he had structured his congressional and committee staffs. The idea was to have 8 or 9 senior advisors each reporting directly to him, without anyone having authority over the rest. It was a collegial style of doing business that had served him well for 25 years on the Hill as a representative from Michigan, and he assumed it would work in the WH. There was also a widespread belief that Watergate had been caused in part by Bob Haldeman’s domination of the WH staff, and Ford saw “spokes of the wheel” as a healthy break from the past. The problem was that it soon became clear it didn’t work. It took a while, but the president finally agreed that he needed someone on the staff who could wield real authority, a conclusion that all his successors have ratified.
My desk in the West Wing was a cubbyhole outside Don’s office, nothing to impress visitors, but I didn’t have time to worry about that. Don was the toughest boss I’d ever had — or ever would have. He demanded a high level of performance, and if you came through, your reward was more work. He expected loyalty, but he also knew it is a two-way street. And you could count on his word. Don had assured me when I accepted the job as his deputy that he would do everything he could to give me a real piece of the action, to see that I had regular access to the president, and to share as much as possible his own responsibilities.
His certainty that he was the man to continue running the show after August 9 led him to make a move that was admirable only in its audacity.
But there was also a growing view in the press that Jerry Ford, though he might be a very decent and well-meaning man, just wasn’t up to the job of president.
Unfortunately, Ford’s easygoing manner and casual demeanor supplied some ammunition for this attitude.
Alan combined economic expertise with an appreciation of practical politics. No less important, he had a real knack for capturing large and complicated ideas in a few well-chosen words. The president liked him and put a lot of stock in his judgment. After I became chief of staff, I would take Alan into the Oval Office, as Don had before me, for lengthy discussions of economic policy.
When I think of all that Henry had been through in that same room with President Nixon, I still marvel at the energy and focus he brought to the service of President Ford. He’d been with Nixon from 1969 until the very last day — seeing all the highs and lows of the Vietnam peace negotiations, the great breakthrough with China, the endless exertions of Cold War diplomacy, the shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East — and still showed no sign of weariness or passivity in his service to the president or his defense of America’s interests. Even while acting as both national security advisor and secretary of state, he was remarkably clear in mind and purpose. Henry was one of America’s higher-profile secretaries of state and not exactly the kind to resist the pull of celebrity. But all that was part of a very impressive package. If ever there was a Washington heavy hitter whose actual talent and achievements justified his star billing, it’s Henry. Nothing about him is overrated.
But I had never been much impressed by presidential aides who cultivated a high public profile, and I didn’t intend to become one of them. When the Secret Service assigned me the code name “Backseat,” I took it as a real compliment.
In the White House, the top staff guy is still a staff guy, which is why, when President Ford offered to attach cabinet status to my job, I turned it down. I also tried to turn down having a White House car and driver pick me up in the morning and take me home at night. But Jack Marsh, the Ford White House’s wise man, convinced me that with the hours I was working and all I had to do, I should take advantage of the extra time I’d gain each day for work if I weren’t driving myself.
The main reason I wanted to keep a low profile was so that I could be an honest broker. If the chief of staff is out giving interviews every day and advocating a particular point of view, he loses credibility with those in the administration who disagree with him. Cabinet members begin looking for ways to go around the system instead of going through the process. They need to know that you’ll go to the president and present their views fairly and won’t tilt it to get a particular outcome.
My method was direct: no hints, cold shoulders, or slow, agonizing departure. Those were not good for anyone — neither the president nor the person being fired. Anyone failing to serve the president’s interests, intentionally or not, simply needed to move along.
Jim is the kind of guy you want around when things get tense and complicated, and even in the mid-70s, anyone watching him in action at the President Ford Committee could observe the calm and shrewd turn of mind that future presidents, including Reagan himself, would depend upon. Jim was in charge of every detail and knew the precise state of play at any given moment; he knew who was with us and who was against us and who was uncommitted.
The truest glimpses of democracy in action don’t always come during a presidential election, but often right afterward, when suddenly one team places itself at the service of the other. Overnight, you go from “How do we beat them?” to “How can we help them?” The finality of defeat has a way of awakening goodwill all around, sometimes more than the losing side might have thought possible.
In the way of consolations, my colleagues and I knew at least that the presidency of Gerald Ford was incomplete only in its count of 895 days. It had been filled with testing and trial enough for a much longer stay. And we who had worked for this president knew he had proved as worthy of that office as any who had ever come before. I’ve always liked the late columnist David Broder’s observation that Ford was exactly the kind of person Americans say they want in a president, but didn’t know it when they had him.
My own debt to the man is beyond my power to settle, though he was not the type to make you feel indebted. Just about everything that followed in my career I trace back to the break he gave me and the confidence he placed in me. Many others will tell you the same story about themselves. Among veterans of the Ford years, there is also a warmth and camaraderie you don’t always find among the alumni of administrations past. To a person, they’ll all tell you that this good spirit began with our leader.
As I have told many an aspiring candidate since, if you want to run for office, you have to get out of DC and establish yourself someplace around the country where you may someday have the chance to run. Washington is full of people who would like to hold office and would be good at it, but they can’t bring themselves to take that first step.
As a candidate I was not without liability. Between graduate school and working in Washington, I had been away from Wyoming for a dozen years. The last time I had voted there was in 1964. Even having served in the White House as President Ford’s chief of staff was a mixed blessing. On the one hand it was by far the most impressive entry on my resume, but few Wyoming voters would be all that impressed. I would have to be careful not to come across as some hotshot from Washington who thought he was entitled to the House seat. I had to earn it by persuading Wyoming voters that I was really from Wyoming and the best man for the job.
I talked to the Rotary clubs and Kiwanis clubs and Chambers of Commerce. Yes, I had been White House chief of staff, I would say, after I’d been introduced, and the guy who held the job before me was Don Rumsfeld. He’d gone on to be secretary of defense. And before that it had been Al Haig, who’d gone on to be supreme Allied commander in Europe. And the guy who’d held the job before that was Bob Haldeman. He’d gone on to do time in a California penitentiary. It was a good way to describe my credentials in Riverton, Wyoming — or most places for that matter.
Some places what you weren’t was more important than who you were. In the Ramshorn Bar in Dubois, when I was introduced as Dick Cheney, candidate for Congress, and old cowboy at the bar looked at me over and asked, “Son, are you a Democrat?” I said, “No sir.” “Are you a lawyer?” he asked. I said nope, and he said, “Then I’ll vote for you!”
When I asked him whether I could — or should — resume my campaign, he said, “Look, hard work never killed anybody. What takes a toll is spending your life doing something you don’t want to do.”
But a man’s political beliefs are only a part of what motivates him, and in June an event in my life gave me reason to evaluate why I am running for Congress from a different perspective. While I was campaigning in Cheyenne, I suffered a mild heart attack. At 37 years old, I had hardly expected such a thing to happen.
An event like a heart attack, however mild it might be, causes a man to reflect upon himself and what is important to him. I must admit that when I found out what had happened, it occurred to me that there are certainly easier ways for a man to spend his life than in running for Congress and being a public official, ways of life which are easier on his family, on his privacy, on his pocketbook.
But as I talked to my family, it became clear to me that while public life is sometimes difficult, it is also, for the Cheneys at any rate, immensely satisfying. All of us, Lynne, our two daughters, and myself, like being involved in an effort which goes beyond our own personal interests. Trying to achieve goals which benefit many people gives all of us a good feeling, an uplifting sense of purpose.
That first election victory was an emotional high, topped by few things in life, not just because of all the hard work, although there was plenty of that, but because of the ups and downs and the risks we had taken. In the end, it had all worked out, and we celebrated with family and friends into the wee hours of the next morning.
The star of the ’78 GOP road show was Al Simpson, our candidate for the US Senate. His father, Governor Milward Simpson, had unexpectedly been defeated for reelection in 1958, and Al worked hard on that first campaign and every one after to make sure that never happened to him. He kept precise notes of all the people he met and how their families were doing and carefully filed the cards away after each event. He was a diligent politician, which I think most people never guessed because they were so taken with his sense of humor. It wasn’t that the jokes he told were so great, but the way that he told them brought the house down every time. In fact you could hear his jokes many times (and, believe me, I have) and still find yourself laughing.
I was often asked by people why in the world I wanted to be a freshman member of the House, serving in the minority party, after I’d already been White House chief of staff. I used to explain that there was something very special about having your name on the ballot and convincing thousands of voters to support you. That running and winning the right to cast your state’s vote in the US House of Representatives was politics at its best. That being elected in accordance with our Constitution meant you had earned the right to cast that vote and no one could take it away except by defeating you at the polls. Your political fate didn’t depend upon someone else’s success in an election.
It would also be accurate to say that I was heavily influenced by my experience with men such as Jerry Ford, Don Rumsfeld, and Bill Steiger. An institution that could attract men like these had to be one that I could be proud to be part of. The fact is I loved the House of Representatives and had every intention of spending the rest of my career as a “Man of the House.”
Every new class of House members arrives in Washington with the conviction that they are going to “clean out the stables” or “drain the swamp”; that at long last they are going to be the “reformers” the Congress so badly needs. Most of the time this phase passes, and the new members become established senior members with all the privileges and opportunities that entails.
Because of the way the House is organized and its rules are written, individual members of the minority typically have little impact on the overall work of the House, but being in the leadership took me into the meetings where legislative and political strategy were decided and the relationship with the administration was managed. From my personal standpoint, being in the leadership made a world of difference.
Carter made a big deal of getting rid of the presidential yacht Sequoia. He didn’t realize that far more than being an expendable perk for the man in the Oval Office, the historic vessel was a great tool for lobbying Congress. One of the most sought-after invitations in Washington during the Ford years had been for drinks and dinner with the president on an evening cruise on the Potomac. Many votes were quietly won on those evening cruises.
I regarded my assignment as an honor — though I realized it was not an honor that all members sought. The committee requires a tremendous amount of time, work, and study. Because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, much of the work can’t be delegated to staff members and the material can’t be duplicated or distributed outside the committee’s high-security offices. That means going over to the offices in person and spending hours reading the reports that pour in daily from all over the world and the detailed analyses prepared by the professional staff. Further, the very nature of the committee’s work requires absolute confidentiality and secrecy. There can never be a press conference to claim credit or even a passing mention in a newsletter to constiuents with respect to most of a what a member on the Intelligence Committee does.
I burrowed into the work, spending many hours in the offices. The committee staff responded to my interest by giving me even more material. I was fascinated by all the information, which was sometimes conflicting, and by the challenge of assimilating and assessing it.
I answered directly. “General Welch was freelancing. He was not speaking for the department. He was obviously up there on his own hook, so to speak.” Then I was asked whether I accepted this. “No, I’m not happy with it, frankly. I think it’s appropriate for a uniformed officer to be in a position where he is in fact negotiating an arrangement. I have not had an opportunity yet to talk to him about it. I’v been at the WH all morning. I will have the opportunity to discuss it with him and I will make known to him my displeasure. Everybody’s entitle to one mistake.”
My statement sent a clear message through the building about who was in charge. And that’s what I had intended.
I realized early on as secretary that I wasn’t likely to succeed in killing the Osprey, but I went ahead and knocked it out of my budget each year anyway. I figured that if the Congress was busy fighting to restore the Osprey, members wouldn’t have time to go after something I really cared about.
My view hadn’t changed by 1989. But the month after I took office, I learned an important lesson about the difference between sharing your view when you’re a member of Congress and sharing it when you’re secretary of defense. Appearing on CNN, I said I believed Gorbachev’s efforts would “ultimately fail.” I hadn’t been off the air long when I got a call from Jim Baker telling me I was out of my lane, that my comments, now that I was a member of the administration, would have a direct impact on relations between the US and the Soviet Union. Jim was right. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Goldwater-Nichols also took the chiefs out of the chain of command. The air force and army chiefs as well as the Marine commandant and the chief of naval operations would no longer command forces when they were deployed. They were responsible for recruiting, training, and equipping the force, but not for using it in combat. That role was reserved for the CINCs, the commanders in the field.
Powell seemed more comfortable talking about poll numbers than he was recommending military options. Part of it was just Colin, the way he was attuned to public approval, but listening to him also make me think about how Vietnam had shaped the views of America’s top generals. They had seen loss of public support for the Vietnam War undermine the war effort as well as damage the reputation of the military. There was a view in the Pentagon, for which I had a lot of sympathy, that the civilian leadership had blown it in Vietnam by failing to make the tough decisions that were required to have a chance at prevailing.
I understood where Powell was coming from, but I couldn’t accept it. Our responsibility at the DoD was to make sure the president had a full range of options to consider. No one else in the government could provide him with these options. He had plenty of people who could give him political advice. I brought the meeting to a close, and afterward, although we normally operated on a first-name basis, I addressed Powell formally. “General,” I said, “I need some options.” The business we were about was deadly serious, and I wanted him to understand he was receiving an order. “Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary,” he replied.
Sitting at my desk that afternoon, I filled several pages of a yellow legal pad, going over the consequences of Saddam’s move and listing questions I had about it. “Shouldn’t our objective be to get him out of Kuwait?” “Isn’t that the best short and long term strategy?” I went over nonmilitary options, from diplomatic condemnation to economic sanctions, and concluded, “No non-military option is likely to produce any positive result.” The key to the situation, I wrote, was “US military power — the only thing Hussein fears.” The key to our success would be “determination to use whatever force is necessary.”
I also had concerns about Powell’s participating as the senior military official. He had been hesitant in discussions of military options, and we needed to convince the Saudis to accept troops — and accept them now. I wasn’t sure Powell would deliver the strong message they needed to hear.
It wasn’t clear the Saudis would accept such a high-level team. Scowcroft worked the phones with them all afternoon and through the night. “If we send Cheney,” he told them, “the answer better be yes.” It would be a clear setback to have the US SecDef make the trip and get turned down.
Military deterrence would be critical, I said, “as economic measures began to bite and Saddam, feeling the pain, might be tempted to lash out.”
As the Iraqi representative exited one door, I entered another, and I found a very angry President Mubarak. The Iraqis had lied to him, he said. Just days before the invasion, all the Arab countries had been together for an Arab League summit, and at dinner one night, the Iraqis had made a big show of sitting next to the Kuwaitis, calling them “brothers” and promising never to invade.
If the military action was successful, it wouldn’t matter whether Congress had supported us beforehand. If, on the other hand, we failed, even if we had a vote supporting the use of force we’d be faced with intense criticism, including from those who had voted with us. In other words, I thought there was significant risk in seeking their approval and very little to be gained.
Years later, President Bush wrote that if the vote had been negative, he would still have ordered our troops into battle — and probably been impeached. Going to Congress was high-risk, no doubt about it, but it had worked.
Ultimately, no matter what the Pentagon does with the press during a time of war, the US government is likely to be criticized for it. If they embed reporters and give them access to lots of information, the military is accused of trying to shape the truth or sugarcoat things. If reporters don’t get access then the military is accused of trying to hide the truth. In some sense it’s a no-win situation, but I think all in all we handled it pretty well.
One of my main concerns was not getting into a situation where the press was deciding whether or not we were winning. I wanted information about what was happening to come straight from the military and civilian leadership, not be filtered or skewed by the press in any way. Though we could not guard against this completely, I think our schedule of daily briefings and pool coverage helped ensure that plenty of accurate information did get through.
As it became clear that our forces had delivered a massive defeat to the Iraqis, we addressed the question of when to order them to stop. After months of planning and dealing with issues of transportation and logistics to get our troops to the desert, it was a very sudden shift, after three days of ground operations, to be sitting in the Oval Office deciding when to call a halt.
America endures because it dares to defend that dream. That dream links the fields of Flanders and the cliffs of Normandy, Korea’s snow-covered uplands, and the rice paddies of the Mekong. It’s lived in the last year on barren desert flats, on sea-tossed ships, in jets streaking miles above hostile terrain. It lives because we dared to risk our most precious asset — our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives — the finest troops any country has ever had.
It had been my experience that too often everyday challenges prevent top policymakers from taking the time to think strategically. It is much easier to accede to the moment, blunting crises or responding to opportunities. It takes time and discipline to force yourself and those in the bureaucracy to take a step back and think about America’s strategic goals and challenges, but it is essential. You can’t hope to adopt the wisest policies without a sense of where the country should be heading and how we should steer the ship to get there. There are places set up to do this in the government, such as the policy planning shop at the State Department and the office of the undersecretary for policy in the Pentagon. But often the individuals in these offices either get drafted to help manage day-to-day crises or their strategic work is so removed from the real-time policymaking that it has little impact.
The DoD, in my experience, is better at both strategic policymaking and at producing rigorous “lessons learned” reports than any other agency in government.
Our preference was to counter threats whenever possible with friends and allies at our side, but we were clear that America must lead. Only a nation that is strong enough to act decisively can provide the leadership needed to encourage others to resist aggression.
I also understood the importance of recognizing that no one gets a lot of opportunities to run under circumstances that are right to sustain a presidential campaign. If you don’t take your chance when it comes along, you may never get another.
On the other hand, I knew how tough, brutal, and demanding a national campaign can be. It is possible to preserve even a modicum of privacy for either the candidate or his family under the intense scrutiny that goes with running for president. And fund-raising, which I had never learned to like, demands an enormous commitment of time and energy.
The 1994 midterm elections were historic, with Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The last time we had control in the Senate was 1986; in the House, 1954.
I felt that I was still young enough at 53 to have another career in the private sector, and that possibility was certainly more appealing than putting my family through the meat grinder of a national campaign for what would be the long shot prospect of getting elected president.
I think part of the reason they wanted me was my international experience. As much as half the company’s income was coming from overseas.
Dad was handling the end the way he had handled so much in his life — with quiet courage and dignity. But there is no denying the pain of closing out a home and a life full of memories. One morning after all the furniture and belongings had been moved into the garage and tagged for sale, Sue arrived at the house to find Dad sitting in the garage alone, among the belonging of a lifetime, with tears running down his face.
One of the lessons we’d learned in Desert Storm was that it is both more effective and cheaper to have a private contractor with the right gear and equipment set up and maintain camps and provide food service and other basics of support than it is to have fulltime active-duty military personnel do these jobs.
My son-in-law and some other lawyers from his firm worked with Dave to produce the questionnaire we asked each candidate to complete. Dave Gribbin also assisted, particularly with reviewing voting records and public speeches of the candidates. And Jan Baran, terrific election lawyer, helped us review tax returns and answer questions about election laws in individual states.
It’s harder to find a good vice presidential candidate than you might think. You might start off with the idea that it is a very prominent job that thousands of politicians would be dying to have an that a lot would be well qualified for. But when you start looking, you find that everyone has negatives. Everyone has some kind of baggage — whether i’s a voting record, a financial problem, or something in his or her personal life.
We started with a list of everyone who should be considered and then began narrowing it down to the truly viable candidates. Sometimes the media refers to the “long” list and the “short” list, but it’s really more like the list for public consumption and the real list of possible choices. There are lots of reasons why someone might be put on the list for public consumption. Perhaps you’re trying to placate a certain wing of the party, or maybe you want to attract those who supported your opponent in the primaries. And so you mention certain people, although there’s not a chance they will be chosen.
For those who agreed, I explained that we would be sending a questionnaire similar to the paperwork federal employees fill out for employment or for security clearances and warned that it had some intrusive questions on it. I said that I would also be setting up one-on-one interviews. There would be low-profile — without no media attention - and I would have to ask some personal questions. Most candidates who end up on the short list are seasoned enough to know that if they are picked as the nominee, nothing about them will be off-limits and nothing can be counted on to stay secret. The press will start digging, and the other side will unleash opposition researcher. Your whole life will be an open book. Most people understood this and realized how important it was to give us a heads-up about anything that could possibly cause trouble or embarrassment or worse.
We also asked each potential candidate to submit ten years of tax returns; copies of speeches, books, and articles; and videotape of recent TV appearances.
Over the past few months, as I had listened to George Bush talk about what kind of VP 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.
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.
Unfortunately, in the high-intensity atmosphere of a presidential campaign, facts don’t always matter. You can tell your side of the story, but the press will keep hammering, as will your opponents, who want nothing more than knocking you off message. Any moment I spent explaining why I hadn’t voted in 14 or 16 elections was a moment I wasn’t spending telling people why they should vote for us in this election.
Afterward, we’d gather to recap the highlights — and the lowlights. All these years later, I realize that the disasters often made for the best stories — and the most laughs.
Presidential and vice presidential debates are events like no other. First of all, the stakes are unbelievably high, and a single gaffe can derail a candidacy. A mistake can cost an election. And although being able to answer the questions competently is crucial, it isn’t nearly enough. A candidate has to have a sense of the most important messages he or she wants to leave with voters and the presence of mind to return to those messages again and again — and then again. It also helps a lot if you can come up with some memorable one-liners. After all is said and done, after all the studying and planning and strategizing, it is likely to be the one-liners that stay with people and determine who wins and who loses a debate. Knowing that I had my work cut out for me, I asked Liz to organize a process for formal debate preparation.
In late September we moved the debate prep out to Wyoming and instituted a pretty rigorous schedule. Each morning we’d spend three hours going over questions on a particular subject. Each night, at precisely the time the debate would be taking place in Kentucky, we would hold a mock debate. We filmed these prep sessions, and when each session was done, Liz worked with my assembled advisors to summarize their comments on my performance. With their assessment in hand, Liz, Lynne, Rob, and I would review the video and work to improve and hone my responses.
By this time we knew that Lieberman and I would be seated at a round table on the debate stage, and we looked around for some place in Jackson where we could replicate this setup.
The effort that we put into debate preparation was critically important. But if I had to give one piece of advice to future presidential and vice presidential candidates preparing for debates, it would be this: Get some rest. Once you’ve gone over the issues and know what message you want to convey to the voters, you can do yourself a real favor by just taking a nap. You’ve got to be relaxed — or at least look like you are — when the moment comes. I think voters figure out pretty quickly that if you can’t handle the stress of a political debate, you’re not going to be much good in an actual crisis.
We did a lot of these events in a lot of different places. In order to avoid the obvious disaster, a staff member was assigned to tape a piece of paper just outside the airplane door, so as I disembarked I would see “Portland, Oregon” or “Everett, Washington” and know for sure where we had landed and where I could say I was so glad to be.
Everybody was angry and frustrated with Gore. Who retracts a concession? In 1976 the election had also been very close, and we had decided to sleep on it and see how things looked in the morning before making any decision about conceding to Carter. I thought that if the Gore campaign had been any kind of a professional operation, they would have realized how close the vote was and wouldn’t have conceded in the first place. But to concede and take it back was amateur hour. And the fact of the concession hurt Gore, I believe, as we headed into the recount.
Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman are apparently still unwilling to accept the outcome. That’s unfortunate in light of the penalty that may have to be paid at some future date if the next administration is not allowed to prepare to take the reins of government.
The interviews covered general topics and discussion, but we also asked specific questions — how would you handle a crisis in Taiwan, for example. We had a number of excellent candidates to choose from, but Don Rumsfeld outperformed the others in his interview. Having had the job before and having clearly spent time thinking about what should be done to transform the military into a modern fighting force, he was very impressive in our small meeting.
Al Gore rode with me to the Capitol, and he seemed relaxed and in good humor. Looking at his watch, he explained that we’d been kept waiting because President Clinton was signing last-minute pardons. He smiled and wondered aloud, “How many more do you think he can get signed before noon?”
In addition to being the oldest guy in the West Wing, I was also the only one the president couldn’t fire. As VP, having been elected and sworn in, I carried my own duties as a constitutional officer. There were only two of them: succeeding the president if he was unable to complete his term and serving as president of the Senate, where I got to cast tie-breaking votes. Beyond that, my role depended on George W. Bush. I had no line responsibility. I wasn’t technically in charge of anything. I could only give advice. And the impact of my advice depended first and foremost on my relationship with the president. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t have mattered how many years of experience I had or how many other offices I’d held, if the president wasn’t interested in what I had to say.
We worked hard to prevent Jim from switching, and certainly weren’t pleased when we failed. But as I look back now, I believe that Jefford’s switch actually contributed to our victory in the 2002 midterm elections. He put the Democrats in control, but their margin was so narrow there was very little they could actually get done. Their inability to show any real accomplishment hurt them and helped us when the voters went to the polls a little over a year later.
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.
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. 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 WH to offer advice have to worry about lawsuits or being called before congressional committees, it would pretty severely curtail the counsel a president and VP could receive.
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 US, and hopefully thwart them before they can be launched.” Intelligence, I said, is our “first line of defense.”
What was needed was a way to remove me from office should I be unable to fulfill my duties, and so I took the extraordinary step of writing a letter of resignation as VP shortly after I was sworn in. The resignation letter would be effective, as provided by federal law, upon its delivery to the secretary of state.
We also had to realize that defending the homeland would require going on the offense. Relying only on the defense was insufficient. The terrorists had to break through our defenses only one time to have devastating consequences. We needed to go after them where they lived in order to prevent attacks before they were launched.
I emphasized how important intelligence would be in this new kind of war. We could not hope to learn about and prevent attacks, to disrupt networks, to defend the nation, without robust intelligence programs. I told Tim we would have to work “the dark side, if you will”:
We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.
And, yes, I said, when Tim asked, this would mean working with some less than savory characters. Penetrating terrorist networks would require that. “If you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing,” I said. “We need to make certain we have not tied our hands.”
He said that there was no way in an economy as complex as ours to predict accurately the overall impact of an event like 9/11. He talked about the “million equation model,” a paradigm that takes into account the enormous number of factors that have economic impact. All the million equations that make up our economy had received a huge shock, he said. Citing one example, he talked about the “just in time” inventory system. The effect of the 9/11 attacks on the airline industry and the disruption in air travel had a big negative impact on this system.
If you look at the situation from a purely military standpoint, you would say time is on our side. Continuing operations against Taliban targets will weaken them, and the insertion of special forces and resupply efforts will strengthen the Northern Alliance. But in the larger strategic context, it was just the opposite. Time is not on our side. Everyday that al Qaeda and its supporters went without a major defeat, the danger to the US grew.
Our special forces gave the first victory of the first war of the 21st century a lasting symbol: the man on horseback armed with the ability to call in a 500-pound laser-guided bomb.
In my view, the most important lesson to be learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s is what happened after the Soviets left. The US turned its attention elsewhere, and Afghanistan descended into civil war. The resultant instability and eventual takeover of the country by the Taliban meant that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists were able to find a safe haven there. When I hear policymakers talk about walking away from Afghanistan, I want to remind them of what the consequences can be.
The president has also suggested that Guantanamo should be closed because it is hurting America’s image around the world. But it’s not Guantanamo that does harm, it is the critics of the facility who peddle falsehoods about it. Even if, for the sake of debate, one were to accept the image argument, I don’t have much sympathy for the view that we should find an alternative to Guantanamo — a solution that could potentially make Americans less safe — simply because we are worried about how we are perceived abroad.
In 1998 Saddam Hussein insisted that international weapons inspectors stop work and leave Iraq. In response, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act, making regime change in Iraq the policy of the US government and approving nearly $100M to fund Iraqi opposition groups working for Saddam’s ouster.
He knew that critics in America were asking why we had to take the lead in liberating Iraq and confronting terror, and he gave the answer: “Because destiny put you in this place in history, this moment in time, and the task is yours todo.”
But it was critically important that we not launch high-profile international conferences or summit meetings in futile pursuit of a final settlement agreement that Arafat showed no willingness to embrace on any reasonable terms. Bill Clinton had made that mistake at the end of his second term with a high-profile, high-expectations, and high-stakes maneuver that brought Arafat and Israeli PM Ehud Barak to Camp David for a series of talks that failed tragically and let to the renewed intifada. There was no way we could afford to repeat that train wreck if we wanted successfully to pursue the War on Terror.
Inspections, I thought, could too easily be a source of false comfort, allowing us to think that we were doing something significant about the threat Saddam posed, when, in fact, we were not.
He was going there, as presidents often do, for the opening of the General Assembly. I was a strong advocate of using the speech to challenge the UN. The president should point out that the UNSC had passed 16 resolutions aimed at removing the danger posed by Saddam. When he repeatedly violated them, the UH had responded with yet more resolutions. I argued that the time had come to confront the UN, hold the organization accountable, and make clear that if the UNSC was unwilling to impose consequences for violations, the UN would become irrelevant.
I often clipped pieces out of newspapers, and that’s what I did with Wilson’s op-ed. I wrote a few comments in the margin that expressed my consternation.
I was also disappointed when Tenet, citing personal reasons, told the president he would be leaving. Throughout the intelligence mistakes of Tenet’s tenure, the president and I had backed him. For him to quit when the going got tough, not to mention in the middle of a presidential campaign, seemed to me unfair to the president, who had put his trust in George Tenet.
In my view Don Rumsfeld was a formidable SecDef. He engaged more directly in managing the building than any before or since. He got things done. Maybe he didn’t have the best bedside manner in the world, but he is one of the most competent people I’ve ever met. He brought vast experience, endless energy, and total loyalty to the president to the job. He would argue passionately for what he believed in, but once the president made a decision, he would salute smartly and make it happen.
I was also worried about the message we were sending to our troops and their families. They were the constituency that mattered more than any other, and this was the first time since we’d created the all-volunteer force that our soldiers had been committed in an unpopular war. Their morale and that of their families was crucial, and as criticism mounted, we had to be absolutely clear, internally and publicly, that we would not compromise our fundamental mission for political reasons. There is a sacred trust between our soldiers and their civilian leaders, and no matter how loudly we were being criticized in the press or how vehemently the Democrats were attacking us, we had to remember what mattered — giving our troops a mission they could carry out to fight and win in Iraq.
I appreciated the work this bipartisan group had done. They had taken their responsibilities seriously and worked hard to come up with a sound recommendation. But I was troubled as I listened to their suggestions and latter as I read the report. The only place the word victory appeared in the document was in connection with the chances for an al Qaeda victory. This was no a strategy for winning the war.
I disagreed. Our national security depended on victory in Iraq. That was simply the truth, and the president should be clear about it. I also thought about our soldiers and their families and what they could think when they heard the president’s remarks. The commander in chief could not be sending men and women into harm’s way if we weren’t fighting to win.
“Mr. President,” I said, holding up the proposed remarks, “you can’t refuse to talk about winning. That will be a huge signal that you no longer believe in victory.”
By the next morning, when we gathered in the Roosevelt Room for a meeting on this topic with the president, much of the distinction between Secretary Rice’s view and mine had been airbrushed away. Instead of two crisply drawn options for the president, the NSC staff presented what they described as “an emerging consensus.” They were following a practice for managing conflicting views that Rice had started when she was national security advisor. I’d never been a fan of it, but I was particularly concerned that in the case of Iraq the president should be presented with clear choices, but halfway measures, not policy recommendations that split the difference.
They knew there was a strategy review under way and that there was talk of a surge, and they were concerned that it would have a negative impact on overall force readiness and troop morale. But it was pretty clear, as the president observed, that the worst thing for troop morale would be losing the war.
The resistance to a surge that the president and I heard that day was in fact a product of the chiefs’ mission as mandated by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. That legislation essentially took the chiefs out of the war-fighting business and put them in charge of raising and sustaining our military forces. The chiefs don’t take our forces to war, and they weren’t in the chain of command. They nurture, prepare, train, and equip the force, but then it gets turned over to a combatant commander to fight and win wars. So, when you go into the Tank and talk to the chiefs, they have responsibilities that go beyond what’s happening on the ground in Baghdad. They are also focused on supporting and sustaining our overall military readiness. Surging forces in Iraq could make that more difficult.
One argument the chiefs made that didn’t go far was the notion that we ought not commit more forces to Iraq because we needed to maintain a reserve force to deploy in the event of an unforeseen contingency somewhere else in the world. The president wasn’t persuaded. He told them his priority was to win the war we were fighting, not hold back out of concern for some potential future war.
Jack said that what motivates generals like Petraeus and Odierno is duty. The president gave them a mission. He told them to surge, extend the deployments, and defeat the insurgents. Those generals carry out that mission out of a sense of duty. Now, he said, they may hear from folks back here in Washington who don’t like the policy, and they may hear criticism or skepticism from visiting members of Congress. But it was critically important that they not hear it from their civilian leaders. He stressed the importance of keeping the chain of command knitted together and moving forward with the mission. He said that our troops in the field wouldn’t be much affected by “Plan B” talk, but for our senior commanders it could be corrosive if they thought that civilian leadership had lost confidence in the mission.
I had been in Wyoming for the Fourth of July holiday while the meetings thad been going on, but I’m not sure I would have been invited if I had been in town, since I was so opposed to temporizing on the surge in order to placate the Democrats. Not only was this the absolute wrong time to send a message that we were wavering; it wasn’t even good politics. In trying to pacify opponents, we’d drive away supporters who understood the stakes, and in the end the Democrats wouldn’t be appeased. They would simply demand more withdrawals.
There was also concern that the Syrians might take retaliatory actions against American troops in Iraq. My view was that these concerns were not well founded. I believed the dangers of allowing the North Korean-Syrian nuclear project to go forward were far greater than the prospect of a wider conflict. The worst outcome would be one in which no action was taken and the Syrian were allowed to become a nuclear power.
I thought back to the history of WW2. US intelligence had failed to predict the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. A few months later, when Admiral Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, received intelligence that the Japanese fleet was headed for Midway, he did not hesitate to act. He could have questioned the accuracy of the intelligence or ignored it, based on the error at Pearl Harbor, but he didn’t.
In the days that followed the strike, the Israeli government asked that we not reveal what we knew about the target they’d struck in the desert. They believed that widespread public discussion about the nuclear plant or the fact that the Israelis had launched the strike might force Assad to respond, launching a wider conflict.
It was with the intention of breaking this pattern of deceit and deception that President Bush in 2003, established the six-party talks made up of the US, South Korea, North Korea, China, and Russia. The idea was to move away from the bilateral, or one-on-one, negotiations that had failed in the past and to bring into the diplomatic process other nations that had an interest in preventing North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.
Said one member of the delegation, “We pulled out all the stops because we wanted to demonstrate that we were serious and sincere.” The North Koreans had crossed one of the brightest of bright lines — they had tested a nuclear weapon — and we were hosting them at a banquet.
By December 2007 I was not just concerned about where we stood on North Korea. We faced a number of critical foreign policy challenges at the very same time that the power of the president and the administration to solve them was waning. It is a natural phenomenon that most administrations face as they get down to the end of their time in office: The president’s ability to do big things diminish on an almost weekly basis in the final year of his presidency.
Secretary Gates had apparently just informed the king that the president would be impeached if he took military action against Iran. The president had not decided what the next steps were on Iran, and it was inappropriate for key officials to suggest either publicly or with important allies that his options were limited. We had to tell the Saudis that Secretary Gates was speaking for himself and not reflecting US policy. Statements like those by Gates and Fallon removed a key element of our leverage and convinced allies and enemies we were less than serious about addressing the threat. This, in turn, made a diplomatic solution more difficult.
As the NIE indicated, there are three parts to making a nuclear weapon: weapons design, weaponization of the nuclear material, and production of the nuclear material — whether plutonium or enriched uranium. The NIE judged that Iran had halted the first two activities, which are easily resumed, and had made “significant progress” in the third area, involving “declared centrifuge enrichment activities.” But it took careful reading to get to this understanding, and there were few careful readers, especially in the media. The report was read as providing assurance that we need no longer worry about Iran’s nuclear program.
A few days later the president and I had our weekly lunch, and as we sat out on his private patio he encouraged me to keep challenging policy that I thought was mistaken. He did not say he agreed with me, but I think he believed the debates would make for a better outcome in terms of his decision making. I hadn’t planned to stop arguing anyway. I feared we were headed for a train wreck.
I was disappointed, and not just because I disagreed with the president. It was his call. But the process and the decision that followed had seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded way I’d seen him make decisions in the past.
The story of our diplomacy with North Korea, particularly in the second term of the Bush presidency, carries with it important lessons for American leaders and diplomats of the future. First is the importance of not losing sight of the objective.
This leads to the second lesson. The most effective diplomacy happens when America negotiates from a position of strength.
The third lesson is that red lines must mean something.
Fourth, effective diplomacy requires that we think strategically.
History in a broader sense is also important. In every administration, Republican and Democrat, there is often an inclination on the part of the State Department to make preemptive concessions to bad actors in the hope that their behavior will change. I often wondered what historical lessons or example my State Department colleagues were drawing on as they advocated such policies.
He survived two attempts on his life within 11 days in December 2003. Within the Pakistani government, there were also some who continued to support the Taliban, which, among other things, hindered efforts to clear out the tribal areas.
After my visit with Musharraf in 2007, his position grew increasingly weak. He suspended the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, which brought thousands of protestors into the streets. In November 2007, he suspended Pakistan’s constitution and declared emergency rule.
Not long after passage, Secretary Paulson, Chairman Bernanke, and New York Chairman Geithner recommended using $250B of the TARP for direct infusions of capital into the banking system. I agreed with this approach. We were facing a situation where the value of the troubled assets could have been as much as $5T, and we did not want to run the risk of having our $700B disappear with no impact. On the other hand, if we put $1 into a bank, they could leverage that amount by ten to multiply the impact of the money.
Trust me, if you get your granddaughters a meeting with the Jonas Brothers, they’ll think you’re the coolest grandfather in history.
In 1982, when Yuri Andropov became general secretary, I recall getting reports that he liked jazz and drank scotch, both supposedly signaling that he was a reformer. Similarly, when Putin transferred authority to Medvedev, some Russia analysts saw this as heralding a new day of openness and increased commitment to reform and democracy. It wasn’t true of Andropov, and it wasn’t true of Medvedev. We need to be very careful on whom we pin our hopes.
The path I had traveled was partly due to the circumstances of my birth. Not that I had been born into a powerful or privileged family; I wasn’t. But I was born an American, a blessing surely among life’s greatest. I had parents who loved me and taught me the importance of sacrifice and hard work. I was privileged to have chances — and second chances — of the kind that may be possible only in our great nation.
He had made some decisions I didn’t agree with, but he had paid me the high honor of listening to my views, which, of course, he did not have to do. History is full of examples of VP who were kept far from the center of power. Indeed, I’ve known a few personally. But at the beginning George W. Bush had said that I would be part of governing. He had been — as I had known he would be — a man of his word.
In my long political career I had seen politicians run for the hills when things got tough, trying to distance themselves from those on the ground when subpoenas started arriving. I had no intention of turning my back on honorable public servants. To the contrary, I counted it a privilege to speak in their defense.
The mind is an amazing thing, and during the weeks I was unconscious, I had a prolonged dream, more vivid than any I’ve ever had, about a beautiful place in Italy. It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there. I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of newspapers. It was a lengthy and very pleasant stay, far preferable to a daily awareness of where I really was and what was really happening.
I’ve seen some high-achieving people go far in the world more at the expense of their families than with their families, and to do that is to miss out on one of life’s finest experiences. As a family we’ve shared the work, the joys, and the laughters, the setbacks and the successes, and for that I am a grateful man.
There have been nearly 10 generations since the country’s founding, and each succeeded in overcoming great challenges. All that I have seen in my time tells me that we will as well — but it is not inevitable. We hear warning after well-founded warning that we are living beyond our means, but we have not shown the political will to change that. Therein lies a danger not only for us but for generations to come whom we are burdening in ways our forebears would never have thought to burden us. And the technology that has eased our lives — indeed, that has saved mine — has a deadly downside. It has always been easy for those who are evil to kill, but now it is possible for a few to do so on an unimaginable scale. This is a danger all too easy to put out of mind, but one we simply cannot grow careless about.