Some of the Bush foreign policy people would later acknowledge their impotence in face of the mounting tragedy in Yugoslavia. That they had stumbled was obvious in retrospect to all of them. Larry Eagleburger, the number two man in the State Department for much of that period, and the number one man in the final few months of the Bush administration and among the most influential men in that administration, knew that he had fallen short. It was, he said, the issue about which he had most come to doubt himself after he left government. Every day when I look at myself in the mirror when I shave, he added, I question myself on what happened there. Should we have done more, should I have expressed my doubts harder with the president? Yes, he had warned about what might happen, but he had never gone to Bush and said, “Mr. President, you’ve got to do something on this one.” Late in the game, he had suggested some kind of action, he remembered, but he had never really pushed for military intervention, always aware of the cost of that kind of commitment. The figure of two hundred thousand ground troops had frightened him off, as it had the others.
Some younger people at State, and some critics of the administration, thought it a rare moment lost to history. Not only was American power at its absolute maximum, but probably more could have been done for less in the Balkans. Ironically, the Bush people comprised, arguably, one of the most experienced foreign policy teams to come to power in the postwar era. Many of them, including the president himself, had spent a great deal of time in highlevel national security positions. Foreign policy, rather than domestic affairs, was the administration’s area of expertise, interest, and passion. Even more ironically, they tended to be men much more committed to America’s role in the world, more truly internationalist, than the congressional leadership of their own party, the leadership of the Democratic Party, the news executives of the three main television channels, and the country as a whole.
If a generational divide was taking place in the country toward foreign policy and the overall importance of internationalism, they were all on the traditionalist side, one that greatly valued foreign policy and thought it was at the very heart of governance. The young men and women coming of age in their own party and the Democratic Party, in the Congress and in the media, did not have the history of commitment, the experiences that made internationalism seem so necessary. They had never suffered the consequences of isolationism, and they were receiving very different signals from their even younger constituents. Different political polls were already beginning to show a mutinous feeling in the country because of the president’s preoccupation with foreign policy, and the young challenger emerging from the Democratic primary season was preparing to use Bush’s obsession with foreign policy as a weapon against him. We need, Bill Clinton was saying at every stop in his campaign as a kind of mantra, a president who cares about the Middle West as well as the Middle East. That meant, of course, that Bush was ignoring America’s domestic problems, particularly the economy.
So as the 1992 election year dawned, not only was the president himself reluctant to use force in a conflict that seemed so complicated and bewildering to him, but a de facto pincer movement was also working against intervention, formed by his national security people in one phalanx and his political people in the other. His three top national security advisers, all of whom were supposed to know a good deal about issues like this, and two of whom were experts on this country, men he trusted and admired—Larry Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft, and Colin Powell—were apprehensive about military intervention in Yugoslavia. And his political advisers, men like Bob Teeter and Jim Baker (who, in the growing anxiety about how poorly the reelection campaign was going, would soon switch from being a national security man to a top political adviser), were warning him that he was too involved in foreign policy and needed to show, in as dramatic a way as possible, greater concern for domestic issues.
No one watching the way the Bush team had handled the end of the Cold War questioned the level of its talent. Some of the top people, like the president himself, had served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. They were by and large the most careful of men, internationalists, anticommunists, but not ideologues or moralists. Typically, they had watched the Gorbachev revolution skeptically at first—much of the U.S. government, most notably the CIA, had been slow to pick up on it—but when they had finally accepted that it was real, they had dealt with it deftly. Most of them had roots in the moderate, internationalist wing of the Republican Party, rather than in the competing Reagan wing, which often seemed more concerned about the morality of foreign policy. The Bush people tended to see the Cold War as an ongoing conflict between two superpowers; the Reagan people had seen it as a clash between good and evil.
Before the end of the Cold War, the pragmatic Bush people had generally been détenters, seeking small slices of mutual accord with the Soviets and a reduction in nuclear tensions. By contrast many of the Reagan people had cared not just about national security but rather which side was right and which side was wrong. Not by chance had Reagan himself called the Soviet empire “evil”; that was a word unlikely to come from Bush’s mouth. To the Reagan people, détente was a dirty word. They had never accepted the idea of coexistence with Moscow and looked on their Bush cousins as compromisers without true beliefs. Of the high-level Bush people, only Dick Cheney, the secretary of defense, was considered, by the standards then employed in calibrating ideology in Washington, a true conservative.
The top civilians in the Bush administration were cautious in general, befitting men who had grown up and come to power during a prolonged period of relentless Cold War tensions, tensions made ever more dangerous by the mutual availability of nuclear weapons. They had come of age when you inherited a difficult, divided world, and if all went well during your tour of office, you handed off to your successor a difficult, divided world. The principal military men were cautious, too, but in a different way, befitting men who had experienced the full bitterness of the Vietnam War. Thus for all of the men around Bush, the geopolitical tensions in their lifetimes had been constant, the victories essentially incremental. Keeping things from getting worse was, in itself, a victory. These men were all survivors; yet when their predecessors and in some cases their colleagues in office had some fifteen years earlier begun to advocate the policy aimed at reduction of conflicts with the Soviet Union known as détente, a vast wing of their own party had rejected that concept and had gradually, under Ronald Reagan, become the majority wing.
Some Bush people, like Scowcroft and Eagleburger, were associated in various ways with the most dominant figure of American foreign policy in the late sixties and seventies, Henry Kissinger, and on occasion they would even tease each other during high-level meetings about whether they had received their orders from Park Avenue yet. That was a mocking reference to the fact that not only did Kissinger, who had a consulting firm in New York on Park Avenue, like to feel he was still influential, but to emphasize that in the minds of their more conservative critics they were always going to be seen as pawns of Kissinger—the master of realpolitik—waiting for secret word about how to carry out his orders.
In their years under Reagan and even to some degree Bush, it had been important not to look as if they were too close to Kissinger, who had become something of a bête noire to many of the new Sun Belt conservatives. Kissinger’s policies of détente, to many centrist Americans among the most laudable of his achievements during his tenure, had openly and angrily been repudiated during the 1976 election year, principally at the GOP convention, which gave its nomination to Jerry Ford but its heart to Ronald Reagan. The convention had nearly been torn asunder by a debate over ideology and foreign policy. Oddly enough, though an internal fight, it was quite possibly the fiercest battle over foreign policy of the previous twenty-five years. The repudiation of détente at the 1976 convention—the rejection by a ruling party of its own foreign policy—remained something of a shadow over those actually charged with foreign policy under Bush. They always had to be aware that they were significantly more internationalist than the rest of the party, which took a much harder line on the Soviet Union. It was also a reminder that they were becoming, if not an anachronism, then something of a minority, their domestic hold on power ever more fragile, and the Republican Party as it existed in Congress, and in future primary runs and conventions, not necessarily behind them. On some issues—like the collapse of the Soviet Union—it would be relatively easy to keep everyone in line, but in other, more subtle international crises, particularly those that might demand the use of the American military in a multinational force, it would not be easy to gain support.
The Bush people were by and large an anomaly, practical men and women of an earlier era in what had been a stronger, more muscular centrist wing of the party. That wing had come on harder times in the sixties and seventies, even as these men rose higher and higher in the national security hierarchy. Bush himself had served Reagan, a more obviously ideological figure, with singular loyalty over eight years, never allowing even a glimmer of dissent to come out of his office about anything the Reagan people did with which he might disagree. Yet Bush, finally running on his own after those eight years, got the most tepid of endorsements imaginable from Reagan. The true Reagan enthusiasts did not really trust Bush in 1988, when he made his first presidential run on the Republican ticket, because they had never trusted him. He was not one of them, and no matter how hard he tried, he never would be. They might one day accept his son, who spoke like a real Texan, but the jury was always out on the father. It was hardly Bush’s fault. He had more than paid his dues. A kind of old-fashioned loyalty was at the center of his personal codes. He played the game by old-fashioned rules, never leaking anything that might cast him in a better light at the expense of those he served. Those were his values and they reflected the way Bush had been raised.
No one could have served Reagan more faithfully, but Bush was what he was and he could never pass certain tests, if not from his boss, then from the president’s considerably more judgmental wife, Nancy, and other people who loved and admired Reagan so much they were probably truer Reaganites than the ever supple Reagan himself. Indeed the very word that defined the centrists’ search for a less troubled, less divided world—détente—was a red flag to the more ideological people in the party. Détente meant you accepted the right of the communists to occupy a large part of the world, which was not to be tolerated.
Fortunately for the Bush people, once they took office in 1989, the leadership of the newly ascending political right seemed to be far more interested in domestic issues—abortion, crime, and gun control, for example—than the things Bush cared about, foreign policy issues, and they tended to allow the people in the executive branch considerable freedom to deal with foreign policy within certain proscribed limits. After all, the Cold War was winding down and becoming less of a concern. That evil had been defeated, and now other forms of evil had to be taken on, this time in domestic guise. But the limits of the party’s political support for an essentially centrist president were always there, right in the background, as was an implied lack of congressional support if the president went too far. This meant that by the time Bush took office there were two wings of the Republican Party, a somewhat more internationalist and centrist one in the executive branch, and a far more conservative and isolationist one in the Congress and in the party machinery that controlled future nominations.
This division within the party structure had begun in the midsixties when there had already been an immense shift of power and affluence from the Eastern and Middle Atlantic states to the Sun Belt, a shift that would dramatically change national politics. Moreover, the 1965 Voting Rights Act had been passed, after brutal beatings inflicted upon blacks trying to register to vote in Alabama and Mississippi. It would be hard to think of a precedent for a piece of liberal domestic legislation—designed to empower those most powerless in our society—that had so profound an effect on the nation’s political alignment. It caused the backlash of all backlashes. Lyndon Johnson had pushed it through, and it was quite possibly his single greatest legislative triumph. But even at the time it was a bittersweet victory for Johnson, something he was doing because it was so obviously right, even though it would have dire consequences for his own political party.
On the night the act was passed, Bill Moyers visited Johnson in his bedroom expecting to find the president exhilarated by his victory. Instead he found him quite depressed. What was wrong? Moyers asked. “I think we’ve just handed the South over to the Republican Party for the rest of our lives,” Johnson answered sadly and prophetically.1 That he was right was immediately evident within the boundaries of the old Confederacy when thousands and thousands of Democrats became Republicans virtually overnight. With that, the Democrats lost their last great bastion, the Solid South, to the Republicans, and liberal Southern Democrats were very much in jeopardy. If passage of the act devastated the Democrats, it had an even more profound effect on the Republican Party. It meant that Sun Belt Republicans were on the rise both in the nation and in the party, and they were a very different breed from the Eastern establishment Republicans, who had long held power within the party. This new breed was narrower of view, particularly on foreign policy, warier of foreign involvements, especially with international organizations like the United Nations, more connected to the agenda of and dependent on the support of the fundamentalist right, and significantly more conservative in general. They regarded America’s interaction with the rest of the world with greater suspicion. Nothing could be more reflective of the rise of Sun Belt Republicanism than one of the men the party sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the old days George Aiken of Vermont and Chuck Percy of Illinois had served on that committee. Now it was Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whose suspicions of all foreign nations seemed to be a constant, unless, of course, they showed themselves willing to import American cigarettes.
Bush and those around him were viewed with a guarded tolerance by the conservative Republicans who were coming to dominate the party. Still, even critics and opponents admired their foreign policy professionalism. They were well credentialed, worked harmoniously with each other, and perhaps most fortunate of all, operated in the area that the president cared most about. By contrast, from the very start, Bush’s domestic political team was considered highly inadequate, and it was operating in an area that barely interested the president and which he instinctively neglected—the kind of neglect that inevitably led to a series of costly miscalculations.
The foreign policy people were probably the last of a kind of public official, almost all of whom had grown up in the post–World War II and the Cold War era, bright young men who had gone into public service, anxious to deal with foreign policy rather than domestic issues because that was where the action was and where the fate of the world might be decided. Issues of foreign policy always took primacy in their minds. They assumed that when they got to the highest levels in government, they would have the full attention of the president himself—which at that time was still true. There was the president, who had served in World War II, surely the last World War II president the nation would elect. There was Brent Scowcroft, born in 1925, who had gone to West Point hoping to be a fighter pilot in the days when there was no Air Force Academy. He had been injured in a crash landing, which had ended his flying career, and he then went on to become first an academic within the military and eventually one of its reigning policy experts. Also on board were James Baker, who had served in the marines at the tail end of the Korean War, Colin Powell, who had served two difficult tours in Vietnam, and Larry Eagleburger, who had served in the army in the early fifties and then had a career operating at the highest level of the State Department under several different presidents. By the time these men entered the White House in 1988, most of them had worked with each other for a decade or more. But their service would mark the end of an era. For running in the election against Bush would be a young man born in 1946, after the end of World War II, who in some cases was the age of their own children.
They understood that in some ways Bush’s term in office was accidental. If Jim Baker had not convinced him to withdraw early enough in the 1980 primaries in favor of Reagan, more damage would have been done at a personal level between the two men. Bush would not have made the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee and got as his just reward eight years later what the commentator Mark Shields called Reagan’s third term.
Unlike previous groups of foreign policy advisers, the Bush administration had an unusually high quotient of men who had considerable domestic political experience. Jim Baker was widely admired as one of the most skillful operators not just in national politics but within the bureaucracy over several decades, a man so gifted at the highest levels of policy that when Reagan had been elected in 1980, Stu Spencer, one of his most senior advisers from California and among the architects of his political rise, had gone to Nancy Reagan and urged her to make sure that Baker, even though he was a Ford man and had run two successive campaigns against Ronald Reagan, be made chief of staff instead of Ed Meese, the ultimate Reagan loyalist. Baker got the job, which helped ensure that the Reagan White House worked with great efficiency, and it left the ideologues in the party free to blame Baker and others like him for the sin of preventing Reagan from being Reagan, even of course when the exact opposite was true and Reagan was being Reagan.
By the time Baker emerged as secretary of state in Bush’s administration, he was widely admired for his skills in running Reagan’s first term and in minimizing any potential damage caused by some of the president’s somewhat limited attention span. Baker as chief of staff had been considered something of a nonpareil, able to anticipate Reagan’s needs and act on his behalf, even without consulting him. Baker had made sure that the president’s seemingly casual, laissez-faire attitude toward events did not encourage those around him to try to move into a vacuum. Baker was always aware of the political equations of all decisions—most memorably, when he had decided that Paul Volcker, as head of the Federal Reserve, was not bringing interest rates down quickly enough and had squeezed him out of his job. Baker was brilliant at reading the needs, desires, and priorities of his boss, thereby allowing Reagan to be Reagan.
Because Baker was so cold and tough and efficient, the general belief was that the Reagan White House got into serious trouble only after Baker, wanting a portfolio of his own, had switched jobs with Donald Regan and went over to Treasury. Indeed, there had been a brief moment when Baker seemed destined to go to the NSC chair instead of Treasury, a change shot down by some of the old-time Reagan people. Michael Deaver, who would have been chief of staff if that had taken place, wrote later that if it had happened, “There would have been no arms sold to Iran, no Swiss bank accounts, or secret funds diverted to the Contras, no foreign policy seemingly created by Rube Goldberg.”2
As secretary of state, Baker brought both his skills and extensive political connections to the job. He was extremely knowledgeable about American politics, having served at the highest level in several state and national campaigns, going back to the failed Bush Senate race of 1970. He had also been the top vote counter in the 1976 Ford conquest of Reagan. His close personal relationship with the president was not the least of his many assets. He was conservative in the old sense of being a traditionalist, but a pragmatic conservative, someone who liked to get things done. If one of the true disappointments of Baker’s life was that he was never able to translate his skill in working the upper bureaucracy and handling the Washington press corps into a national political constituency for his own presidential candidacy, he was nonetheless an immensely successful figure for a dozen years in the domestic and foreign policy decision-making of two Republican administrations. Young, ambitious Republicans, coming to Washington during the Reagan years, looking for interesting jobs and meeting both Vice President Bush and his close friend Jim Baker, usually went away thinking Baker was the brighter and more charismatic of the two, the man who would surely go farther. Because a good many other people also thought that Baker was more talented politically and most certainly more verbally gifted than Bush, the relationship between the two men was not without its own complexities, even when Bush was president and Baker secretary of state. Baker, unlike the candidate and the president he served, was a masterful manipulator of the press, articulate, shrewd, always knowing not just where things stood in terms of reality, but able to spin them for the occasionally quite different reality they wanted reflected in the media. That was something Bush was almost completely incapable of doing. Baker always managed to come out looking good in the media, whereas Bush was perceived as being, in a generous phrase, media-challenged. As a result, Bush was as skeptical of the media as they were skeptical of him, and he often managed to appear maladroit.
Baker was very tough and not a man to tangle with. If you wanted something from James Baker, his probable answer would be, what’s in it for me? Your leverage with him was usually based on what you could do for him and his candidate; Jewish groups, for example, believed that he had once said of them, “Fuck the Jews. They never voted for us [the Republicans].” Whether he had said it or not was difficult to prove, but it certainly sounded like quintessential Baker: your leverage with him equaled the weight of your votes. He was also very territorial, within the accepted boundaries of the administration he served, and something of a control freak; he was not likely to let Defense dominate State in high-level meetings.
When Larry Eagleburger was first proposed as the number two man in the State Department, Baker had not been enthusiastic. He had finally accepted him with a good deal of reluctance because not only had Eagleburger been a Kissinger man, his long and distinguished career had given him a value system of his own and a considerable sense of independence. Eagleburger was known to have been loyal to everyone for whom he had worked from Nick Katzenbach to Henry Kissinger, but he also spoke his mind. Baker finally accepted him as his deputy but never as a member of his inner team. That meant Eagleburger was at the top, but always something of an outsider. On many an occasion when Eagleburger wanted to push an idea to the president, he did so through his old friend Scowcroft, who had the NSC chair, and with whom he could speak a kind of shorthand based on their long years of friendship and service together.
If Baker had no great philosophical vision of foreign policy, he was as professional as you could get, and he negotiated with considerable ability. He was exceptionally talented at letting others at any table know in all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways that he represented the might and majesty of the United States of America, a big and powerful country whose displeasure you did not lightly want to incur. If he was participating in the Middle East peace process, no one was likely to do it better, but he also wanted to waste no energy and had little time for the traditional amenities of diplomatic statecraft. No, he did not want to go to some ceremonial dinner with the host foreign minister after a long, hard day of negotiating. The Israelis and Egyptians just had to accept him for what he was, someone who worked hard, negotiated tough, and declined traditional diplomatic pleasures, which were rarely pleasures anyway. One might discount him as a player once, but never twice.
Brent Scowcroft at the NSC was a different sort of man—with fewer edges and fewer enemies. He was exceptionally modest, almost consciously so, much admired across a broad political spectrum, low-key, and good at what he did, though often overshadowed by men with a greater hunger for power and fame like Kissinger and Baker. Because of that it was easy to underestimate him. He never seemed to want anything for himself, more power or a grander title. In time that became not just a strength but a source of power. Only when the Bush years were over and other members of the administration were assessing what had been accomplished did they realize how much intelligence, judgment, and decency he had brought to his job. Scowcroft was, thought the people who had worked closely with him, quite possibly the ablest national security adviser of recent times. Though extremely well-informed and knowledgeable, he was exceptionally skilled at making sure that ideas with which he disagreed went forward to the president, something that had never been a Kissingerian specialty. He seemed, at the end of the Bush administration, to be almost physically joined to the president, and when Bush wrote a memoir, he not surprisingly did it jointly with Scowcroft, each of them writing alternate sections, as if acknowledging Scowcroft’s unusually influential role in foreign policy. The book said something about both men and their respective qualities of modesty. One could not imagine a comparable literary collaboration, for example, after their years in government were over, of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Bush was not the first president whom Scowcroft had served that faithfully. He had been a favorite of Jerry Ford’s as well. Scowcroft had, thought Jim Cannon, a Rockefeller man who had served in the Ford White House and had watched him carefully, the rare gift of being able to bring to two different presidents unwanted news that other men might not have been able to deliver without giving significant offense. The perfect example of this had come in the 1976 campaign when Ford made a horrendous mistake and claimed that Poland was not behind the Iron Curtain. It was a clinker of the worst kind—a possible election-loser that even a high school student should have gotten right—and an immediate retraction was called for. But Ford was so adamant—in no small part because he had screwed up on such a grand scale—that none of his staff dared to talk to him about it. Finally Dick Cheney, who was then Ford’s chief of staff, knowing that if anyone could turn the candidate around, it was the beloved Scowcroft, went to him and beseeched him to try to reach the candidate and get the retraction. But Ford was still mad—mad at the world, but mostly mad at himself—and he turned even Scowcroft down. “I said what I said, I know what I said, I know what I meant, and I’m not going to change it,” he told Scowcroft.
Dick Cheney, the third major civilian player in the Bush administration, had become secretary of defense almost as a fluke, when the Senate, bothered by reports of John Tower’s womanizing and drinking, had rejected him for the job. There was something brisk, almost brusque, about Cheney as a senior government official. It was as if—either for reasons of time or of professional objectivity—he wanted to keep his distance from his top people at all times. He was judged by those who worked with him as not particularly likable but adept at making a bureaucracy work. He appeared to care almost nothing about elemental popularity. He did not schmooze, he did not socialize, and memorably when, in January 1993, the Bush people began to close out their offices, Colin Powell, who had worked intimately with Cheney for three years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, went by his office to say good-bye, he found that the secretary had packed and left hours earlier. Yet Cheney was a considerable talent scout and had reached down to pick Powell when he was a brand-new four-star general to be chairman even though fourteen more senior four-stars were ahead of him.
Cheney was an egalitarian man with little time for pomp and circumstance. Norman Schwarzkopf had, without knowing it, almost lost the chance to command the United Nations troops in the Persian Gulf War not just because he had a reputation for being extremely volatile—a screamer—but because Cheney had once flown to Saudi Arabia with Schwarzkopf and had not liked his behavior. The crowded flight had a long line to the rest rooms, and Cheney had not been pleased to see a major standing in line, finally get to the toilets, and then call out to Schwarzkopf to take his place. Nor had Cheney been pleased to see another officer on his hands and knees ironing the general’s uniform. Cheney did not approve of that kind of use of hierarchical perks.3
Cheney was significantly more conservative than the others in the inner group, his personal politics by the time he took the job closer to those of the Reagan wing of the party than the Ford-Bush wing. But he had originally come out of the centrist Ford wing, and in the early days of their administration the Reagan people remained leery of him. At one point they were looking for a secretary of the interior, and Cheney, by then a Wyoming congressman, was on the short list. But Paul Laxalt, the conservative senator who was one of Reagan’s closest friends, was in charge of the screening and thought Cheney too much of a Ford man.
Cheney was not given to small talk. He was good at working efficiently inside a killer bureaucracy like the Pentagon. But he was hardly dashing as a candidate for elective office, and something of a Washington hostess’s nightmare, notorious for making a minimal social effort. He was the son of a soil conservation agent in Lincoln, Nebraska, who had moved to Casper, Wyoming, when Cheney was a boy. He had won a scholarship to Yale, dropped out after a year, and took a variety of blue-collar jobs before going back to school in Wyoming. Showing talent as a political writer, he won a fellowship that landed him on the staff of the governor of Wisconsin, where he served while also working toward a graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin. In 1968 he won another fellowship, which brought him to the staff of William Steiger, a Wisconsin Republican.
In 1969, a year later, when the Nixon administration was just taking office, Cheney was singled out by Don Rumsfeld, a great Republican talent scout in those days who was heading the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1974 when Ford replaced Nixon as president, Rumsfeld came over as the de facto chief of staff, bringing Cheney to the White House with him. His rise there had been meteoric. In the Ford years Rumsfeld instituted a policy under which everyone in the White House had to have a deputy who could speak for him in his absence. The policy was designed to cut back on the waste of White House time, and Cheney became Rumsfeld’s deputy and alter ego. Ford quickly came to like and trust Cheney. Rumsfeld, a man with limitless ambitions of his own, had his eye on a cabinet post—he tried for Treasury and Bill Simon beat back that thrust—but he soon ended up with Defense, and Cheney, at the age of thirty-four, became chief of staff of the White House.
When Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, Cheney went back to Wyoming to run for Congress, won, and quickly emerged as one of the more talented of the young conservative Republicans. Because of his previous experience in Washington, he did not act like a new boy at the old school and was soon catapulted into a leadership role. Yet there was always a certain question within Republican circles about Cheney, who had come to prominence first as a skilled functionary in a moderate White House (Ford) under the right hand of a moderate chief of staff (Rumsfeld) and later served a moderate president (Bush), but who on his own voted somewhat even to the right of the new Gingrich Republicans. Wyoming was a conservative state anyway, but Cheney as a congressman stood out as being far right.
In the summer of 2000 when George W. Bush picked his father’s onetime defense secretary for his vice-presidential candidate, those old House votes, on abortion, gun control, and keeping Nelson Mandela in prison (it was a procedural vote, Cheney explained, which must surely have been of great comfort to Mandela), became something of a burden for the ticket. The one thing about Cheney that the Democrats had quickly learned was that for all his bland exterior, he played very, very tough inside politics. He had been the leader in the movement that had ousted Jim Wright from his job as Speaker because of some violations over the House honorarium rule. Wright did not lightly forgive or forget and when a reporter later caught up with him back in Texas after he had left Washington to ask what happened, Wright answered, “What happened was that that goddamn son of a bitch Dick Cheney—he’s mean as a snake. No wonder he’s had three heart attacks.”4
When George H. W. Bush was elected president in 1988, a number of his close assistants had pushed Cheney for a top job, but Bush was hesitant. Cheney had been a protégé of Rumsfeld’s, and Rumsfeld and Bush, ambitious young men working the same political sector, both with presidential ambitions, had always been suspicious of each other, and Rumsfield had often spoken with open contempt of Bush. To Bush the word Cheney meant Rumsfeld. But at the beginning of his presidency, when John Tower’s nomination failed, Cheney, still a Wyoming congressman, was Bush’s fallback choice, largely regarded as a good one. Cheney moved over to the Pentagon and made it clear that he was going to run it. Anyone who crossed him on an issue of policy might pay dearly for it.