Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President

602 Pages·2007·1.64 MB·English

by  Stephen F. Hayes

C H E N E Y

The Untold Story of America’s
Most Powerful and Controversial
Vice President
S t e p h e n F . H a y e s
To Carrie
thanks for your help.
sfh
CONTENTS

Author’s Note v
Introduction 1
1. The West 11
2. To Yale and Back 27
3. Choosing Government 49
4. The Ford Years 70
5. On the Ballot 122
6. Leadership 159
7. At War 204
8. President Cheney? 253
9. Another George Bush 273
10. The Bush Administration 302
Photographic Insert
11. September 11, 2001 326
12. Secure, Undisclosed 348
vi Contents
13. Back to Baghdad 368
14. The War over the War 394
15. War and Politics, Politics and War 423
16. Dick Cheney: New Democrat? 466
17. “The Alternative Is Not Peace” 494
Notes 525
Acknowledgments 559
Index 563
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE

O
n June 23, 2004, I waited in the foyer of the vice presi-
dent’s residence for my first one-on-one interview with
Dick Cheney. Writing a book like this had crossed my mind, but
I was at work on another project and busy with my duties at the
Weekly Standard.
There was much to discuss. My first book, The Connection,
had been released earlier in the month, and among top Bush ad-
ministration officials, Cheney was one of the most receptive to
the argument that Iraq had been part of a broad global terror
network that included Al Qaeda. Leaks about the forthcom-
ing 9/11 Commission Report suggested that it would downplay
those ties. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee would soon
release its own report on the intelligence about Iraq that guided
policymakers before the war.
There was a lot of other news. In the morning papers were
several stories about the Bush administration’s detainee policy.
Earlier that same month, CIA Director George Tenet had re-
signed, and congressional Democrats were pushing the White
House to defer the selection of a successor until after the election
in November.
I was to have thirty minutes, on the record. Shortly before
we were to begin, Cheney’s communications director, Kevin
vi Author’s Note
Kellems, approached me with bad news. Scooter Libby, the vice
president’s chief of staff, had just changed the ground rules: No
questions about Iraq and terrorism.
That’s unacceptable, I protested, or words to that effect. He
was sympathetic. If my questioning is restricted in that manner,
I explained, then I’d write about the apparent unwillingness of
Cheney to talk about the issue that was being discussed every-
where else. He took my complaint back to Libby and returned
with good news.
“It’s all on the record,” he said. “Ask what you want.”
We sat in the library. Kellems and Libby stayed in the room.
For forty-five minutes, Cheney sipped a decaf latte as he an-
swered questions or, in several cases, didn’t.
There had been little actual news about the selection of a new
CIA director, so advancing the story would require only a short
comment from Cheney. Make the vice president talk about the
ideal candidate, I naively thought, and perhaps he’d say some-
thing revealing.
In the search for a new CIA director, can you briefly describe
what kinds of qualities you are looking for or what kind of per-
sonal characteristics you are looking for?
“Probably not.”
I waited for him to continue, but he said nothing.
Is there a rough timeline for a decision?
“If there were, I wouldn’t want to talk about it.”
At another point, I asked him about new reports on prewar
intelligence.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said recently that before the
Iraq War began he gave the Bush administration information
about potential Iraqi attacks on American soil. What kind of in-
formation was it and how serious was it?
“Yeah, I can’t really give you anything on that.”
Abu Musab al Zarqawi is the most dangerous man in Iraq.
Can you talk about U.S. efforts to capture or kill him?
“There’s nothing I can give you on that.”
Not all of Cheney’s answers were so brief, but he clearly knew
where he wanted to draw a line. There were subjects he would
discuss and others he would not.
Author’s Note vii
Over the next thirty-four months, I would spend nearly thirty
hours in one-on-one interviews with Cheney for this book: on
the telephone from my home; on my cell phone from a dingy
Wyoming motel; at the vice president’s residence in Washington,
D.C.; aboard Air Force Two somewhere over the Midwest, and
again flying back from Afghanistan, and another time returning
from Iraq.
He was considerably more forthcoming. Cheney spoke about
his boyhood in Nebraska, his difficulties at Yale, and his two
arrests for drunk driving. He talked about the psychological im-
pact of having a heart attack at thirty-seven, the power struggles
of the Ford administration, his frustrations in Congress, the high
points and low points of his time at the Pentagon, and the cross-
country driving trip he took alone as he considered a run for
the White House. We discussed the dynamics of the Bush ad-
ministration, his role as vice president, his reaction to 9/11. He
surprised me with his candor about the mistakes of postwar Iraq
and the personal and professional toll of the unrelenting criticism
directed his way.
But he still knew where he wanted to draw a line. On Au-
gust 9, 2006, I interviewed him at his home in Jackson, Wyoming,
as I had the previous summer and would again in two weeks.
Cheney was relaxed and actually seemed to be enjoying the in-
terview. Throughout our conversation, now in its fifth hour, he
had been remarkably open about his career in Congress and as
secretary of defense.
There had been exceptions, though, as there had been two
years earlier. To set up an amusing anecdote, he told me about an
urgent call summoning him to the White House on his first day
at the Pentagon. When he finished the story, I asked what seemed
like an obvious follow-up.
Do you remember what the meeting at the White House was
about?
Pause.
“I do.”
There was a long silence. I looked at him expectantly, raised
my eyebrows and gave him an encouraging, out-with-it nod of
my head. He laughed a little, but said nothing.
viii Author’s Note
“Umm,” I said, “anything you can talk about?”
“It’s classified still.”
I told this story to another journalist traveling with me on
one of Cheney’s trips, a highly respected White House corre-
spondent for one of the country’s leading newspapers. We chat-
ted a bit about covering the Bush White House and about writing
books. Then he asked me a question that has stuck in my mind
ever since.
“Don’t you think your book will have to be a hatchet job in
order to have any credibility?”
From his perspective it must have been a reasonable concern.
After all, I write for the Weekly Standard, a conservative
magazine that has often supported the Bush administration, par-
ticularly in foreign and national security policy matters where
Cheney’s influence is greatest. One of my articles ran under the
headline: “Dick Cheney Was Right.” It was a lengthy defense of
Cheney, pushing back against misreporting of his views by the
mainstream press. The article offered lots of supporting docu-
mentation, and a heavy dose of outrage.
This book, a reported biography, has a different and much
simpler purpose: to tell the story of Dick Cheney’s life. And
while I came to the book sympathetic to Cheney’s views, I tried
to go where the reporting took me. It will be up to others to de-
termine whether I succeeded or failed.
At several points in the book, I describe a different Dick
Cheney from the one who has emerged from more than six years
of scrutiny in the White House. Given the access I had to him
and those closest to him, that is not surprising. In an e-mail to
a top Cheney aide, Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York
Times, tried to persuade Cheney to cooperate more with report-
ers from his paper. Keller said that understanding political fig-
ures, particularly conservatives, requires access and journalists
who possess “a deep quality of open-mindedness” and “an abil-
ity to listen without reflexive cynicism.” He continued: “Our job
is not to ‘support’ our leaders, not to buy in to any administra-
tion, Democrat or Republican, but our job should be to figure
out what they believe and why, and how all of that shapes the