Although he stood just five foot six, John Goodwin Tower was a Texan larger than life.
The son of a Methodist minister, Tower was a World War II veteran who had done graduate work at Southern Methodist University and postgraduate work at the London School of Economics. In England, he had acquired an expansive worldview, an appreciation for tailored suits, and the notion that a public figure's sex life could remain private. The 1960 presidential election provided him a way out of a teaching position at an undistinguished state university in Texas. Tower ran for the Senate against LBJ, whose name appeared on the ballot twice in 1960—for the Senate seat he'd held since 1948 and for the vice presidency. When Johnson vacated his Senate seat in 1961, Tower was positioned to run again. He emerged from a pack of seventy-one candidates, and after a runoff, he became the first Texas Republican to win a statewide election since Reconstruction.
In Texas, John Tower worked to build a Republican Party where there was none, and helped the senior George Bush win a seat in the U.S. House. In Washington, he distinguished himself as a senator with a remarkable grasp of defense and banking policy. He left the Senate in 1985 and briefly campaigned to become Ronald Reagan's defense secretary. Reagan appointed him to lead the U.S. team in Geneva, negotiating nuclear arms reductions in formal bilateral talks with the Soviet Union. Along the way, Tower booked $750,000 in defense industry lobbying and consulting accounts. It was his experience in Geneva, his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and his generous political support that led President George H. W. Bush to nominate John Tower as secretary of defense in 1989. It was also Tower's experience in Geneva that ultimately made Dick Cheney secretary of defense.
John Tower was ideologically consistent—a fiscal conservative regarding domestic issues and a Cold War conservative when it came to foreign policy. He was equally consistent in what should have been his private life. The sort of Armed Services Committee chairman for whom "procurement" was a double entendre, Tower was a notorious drunk and a domestic and foreign ass-grabber with few peers in the United States Senate—a poor choice to send to arms negotiations in Geneva in 1985. The Soviet Union was a dangerous nuclear adversary. Tower was the custodian of his country's weapons intelligence. And Geneva was an international center of espionage, where attractive female Soviet agents known as "swallows" worked in bars, restaurants, and hotels.
Tower's colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee could not have been unaware of his drinking and the accounts of his pursuit of women. But a cabinet nomination entailed a level of scrutiny he couldn't withstand. An FBI background investigation of the former senator found a situation in Geneva so bad that the CIA had been called in to investigate American negotiators in 1985 and 1986. The agency's 120-page report confirmed that swallows from the KGB (Soviet intelligence) were assigned to U.S. negotiators. There were uncorroborated accounts of fourteen extramarital relationships in the U.S. delegation, some involving foreign women. Delegation members frequented bars that were known KGB hangouts. At one drunken bash, people drank from the shoe of a delegation member. Investigators even turned up a double-ended dildo.
The background report—and, of equal importance, concerns about Tower's close and possibly compromised relations with defense contractors—cost him the support of the Georgia Democrat who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Sam Nunn told reporters that the secretary of defense job required clarity of thought twenty-four hours a day, implying that Tower's drinking would present a problem. (Nunn also had concerns about Tower's defense industry contacts, but stories of sex and alcohol seize the public's attention and always make for a more marketable narrative than does corruption.) When his former colleagues on the Armed Services Committee rejected him by an 11–9 vote, it was over, even if the president refused to move on to a new candidate.
Dick Cheney has often had the good fortune or good sense to be in the right place at the right time. On the night of the committee vote, he was at the vice presidential residence with Dan Quayle, who was looking for someone to salvage the nomination. Cheney told the vice president it was over. "Tower's down the tubes. You've got to get someone to work with Congress," Cheney said, according to Washington Post editor Bob Woodward.
More than two weeks after Cheney's meeting with Quayle, the Senate rejected Tower's nomination by a 53–47 vote. George H. W. Bush became the first U.S. president to lose a first-round cabinet appointment. "There were Tower people moving into Pentagon offices and waiting for the secretary to be confirmed," says a former Defense Department employee. "Everything was on hold. We were going to go into May without a secretary." Bush had to find a nominee the Senate would confirm with no delay.
Cheney had warned the president that Tower's nomination was dead. He also suggested the president find someone "to work with Congress." Cheney himself fit the bill. His unopposed election as minority whip established his ability to work with Congress. He was a loyal lieutenant in the Republican Party. And he was the only member of the House to have served as a White House chief of staff. On the day the Senate voted to reject John Tower, Bush chief of staff John Sununu called Cheney over to the White House. Sununu and Bush national security advisor Brent Scowcroft were waiting in the office Cheney had occupied when he was Gerald Ford's chief of staff. Sununu asked Cheney whether he would accept the appointment if Bush offered it to him.
Cheney was Brent Scowcroft's choice. The two men had worked together in the Ford administration. "We needed a secretary of defense very badly," Scowcroft told James Mann, the Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote Rise of the Vulcans. "This was already March, and we just couldn't make policy with a big gap there. So we needed somebody fast. That meant it had to be somebody from the Congress because otherwise we'd go through long hearings. And then I automatically went to Cheney."
The FBI waved Cheney through. The only obstacle remaining was the questions that would be raised—as they are each time Dick Cheney makes a career move—about his heart. At forty-eight, he had already had three heart attacks. The previous August he had undergone quadruple bypass surgery. It was an elective procedure, he told Sununu and Scowcroft. He did it because he wanted to continue downhill skiing. A cardiologist would, as always, provide medical records attesting that Cheney's heart was up to the job.
The nomination was announced the day after the Senate rejected Tower. And although confirmation looked like a formality, Cheney took no chances. He had watched the White House string John Tower's nomination along until the FBI provided his opponents with the information to destroy his career. He wasn't going to allow Bush's staff to handle his confirmation vote in the Senate. Cheney asked Alan Kranowitz to take charge of the process. Kranowitz was a friend who had worked as an aide for Democratic senator Thomas Dodd, for the Reagan White House, for Flouse minority leader Bob Michel, and for Cheney.
Dick Cheney had never served in the military. He had received five deferments during the Vietnam War. He had never served on a House committee that dealt with military issues. But he was a proven leader in the House and had no skeletons (or dildos) in his closet. His confirmation vote would be a cinch in the Senate.
Sooner or later, it seems, someone always asks: What about Dick?
"The whole world we live in would be totally different if Dick Cheney had not been plucked from the House to take the place of John Tower," says Mickey Edwards, the former Republican House member from Oklahoma who served with Cheney. Edwards, a congressional scholar and author, recognizes the extraordinary influence Vice President Cheney exercises in the "war on terror." But he also emphasizes how Dick Cheney's departure from the Republican minority in the House changed the Congress and transformed American politics.
"Dick was in line to become the party's leader in the House and ultimately the majority leader and Speaker," Edwards says. "If that [had] happened, the whole Gingrich era wouldn't have happened." Newt Gingrich ushered in fifteen years of rancorous, polarized politics. He presided over the shutdown of the federal government when the House was unable to agree to a budget compromise with Bill Clinton. He drove the House to impeach Bill Clinton. Cheney had cultivated cordial relations with Michel, who was sixty-six when Cheney left and beginning to look toward retirement. He worked with Democratic Speaker Tom Foley.
It wasn't that Cheney was a nonpartisan Republican ingratiating himself with the Democratic leadership. He had, after all, called Democratic Speaker Jim Wright a "son of a bitch" and filed a questionable ethics complaint against Wright. But no one interviewed could envision Dick Cheney taking the House down the path that Gingrich followed when he became Speaker.
The Senate moved with breathtaking speed, racing through FBI investigations (agency background investigators were in Cheney's House office even as the president was announcing his appointment). A committee hearing and debate were all completed within a week of Tower's defeat in the Senate. On the floor of the Senate, the debate consisted of overblown encomia of the sort John Tower would not receive even after he died in a plane crash in Georgia in 1991.
Dick Cheney's tenure at the Department of Defense was, by most accounts, his finest hour. "I saw him for four years as SecDef," Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson says. "He was one of the best executives the Department of Defense had ever seen. He made decisions. Contrast that with the other one I saw [Clinton secretary of defense Les Aspin], who couldn't make a decision if it slapped him in the face."
Cheney had been in his Pentagon office for less than a week when he made a decision that established who was in charge. He publicly attacked Air Force chief of staff General Lawrence Welch. It was unprecedented that a defense secretary would openly criticize a four-star general. Cheney blindsided the general, complaining that he had been "freelancing" on Capitol Hill, where he was meeting with members of Congress to defend several options for the basing of ICBMs—without direction from the Pentagon.
Wilkerson, a lifetime soldier who ended his active military career on Colin Powell's staff, says Cheney instantly asserted his authority over the Pentagon's top brass. "There are two ways to take command of a military unit," Wilkerson says. "One is you come in and try to bribe, wheedle, and persuade everybody. The other is you come in and fire a couple of people and let everybody know who's boss, then back off. . . . If you've got to pick one, the best pick is to be a hardass."
Secretary of Defense Cheney picked the hardass management strategy. Air Force secretary James McGovern resigned, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff quietly disagreed, and some of the top brass in the building seethed. "Larry Welch wasn't doing anything that wasn't expected of him," says a retired officer who worked with Cheney at the Pentagon. "Policy had been in favor of smaller ICBMs. Larry was keeping the ball rolling on the Hill. That was the mantra: smaller ICBMs. He wasn't out there freelancing."
Welch had, in fact, cleared his congressional discussions with the secretary of the Air Force. "He was just an easy target for Cheney," says the retired officer. Cheney violated an unspoken code relating to civilian direction of high-ranking officials: no humiliating public reprimands of senior brass. And he didn't even slow down to look back.
On the Monday following his smackdown of Larry Welch, Cheney summoned the Pentagon's top civilian officials to his third-floor conference room. He told them the Welch affair was done with and that he wouldn't tolerate the four-stars getting "out ahead of civilian leadership— in particular the secretary of defense."
Cheney's dressing-down of the general bothered House Armed Services Committee chair Les Aspin. "It was unfair," Aspin said, because "it was a bum rap." When Aspin confronted Cheney and said Welch wasn't doing an end run, Cheney smiled. "It was useful to do that," he told Aspin.
It probably was. Three weeks earlier, Dick Cheney had been a minority congressman from Wyoming, hiring staff for the whip's office. Within a few days of moving into his third-floor office at the Pentagon, he was kicking ass and taking names. To underscore his point, and make sure his back was covered, he evicted a general from the office next to his. The new occupant would be Cheney's trusted assistant, David Addington.
It was an impressive beginning.
"He was a little slow to accept that the Cold War ended," says one of Sam Nunn's former staff defense policy analysts.
In fact, Cheney was fighting the Cold War even after German entrepreneurs were selling pieces of the Berlin Wall and Warsaw Pact leaders were openly discussing new relations with the West. Americans don't like to think of their country as militaristic, but no country in the world has ever proposed a military budget that would match what is spent by the United States. The increase in spending in the Reagan years was breathtaking. Total military spending in 1980, the last year Jimmy Carter was president, was $134.6 billion. By the time Reagan completed eight years of strategically outspending the Soviet Union, annual military expenditures in 1988 were $290.9 billion. (Bush-Cheney defense expenditures in 2005 were $493.6 billion.)
Before the Berlin Wall collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev was discussing reductions in troops and military spending. When the Wall did come down, members of Congress began to clamor for substantial reductions in defense spending. Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy talked about putting tens of billions in a "National Needs Trust Fund" to pay for social programs. Georgia senator Sam Nunn proposed cuts of $180 to $190 billion and an ambitious program to pay for the acquisition and dismantling of Soviet nuclear weapons (the Nunn-Lugar Comparative Threat Reduction Initiative). Military analysts from the Brookings Institution and policy intellectuals from Harvard proposed cuts as large as 10 percent in 1991, 20 percent in 2005, and 50 percent by 2000.
Cheney refused to get caught up in the euphoria. He believed an aggressive leader who would reverse the reforms in the Soviet Union would replace Gorbachev. Cheney proposed a budget request of $303 billion, $8 billion more than total military spending in the final year Bill Clinton was in office. Business Week described Cheney's reluctance to accept victory over the Soviet Union in the headline "Dick Cheney: The Loneliness of the Last Cold Warrior."
That hard-line position created budgetary problems for a president who faced declining revenues aggravated by his "read my lips" no-new-taxes pledge. Cheney was making final technical adjustments on his first budget as the Berlin Wall finally came down. Over the course of six quick rewrites, he grudgingly trimmed about $10 billion from the figure he had begun with. He went to Congress with a request of $295 billion, adjusted it upward, and got an appropriation of $297 billion. The following year, in 1991, he asked Congress for $291 billion and got only $270 billion. His final budget request to Congress in 1992 was for $261 billion, from which Congress cut another $10 billion. Cheney was a long way from the $180 billion in cuts the conservative and defense-oriented Sam Nunn had hoped for.
Cheney would later claim that he cut $300 billion from the defense budget. That claim doesn't measure up against the checks written for DOD spending. Defense Department budget requests are not the same as defense spending. Nor are appropriations bills, which do not account for "supplementals" added on to cover cost overruns and unanticipated expenses. The Congressional Budget Office calculates dollars actually spent on defense. Cheney did stop the huge annual leaps in spending that began when Ronald Reagan took office. But military spending was not "cut" until Bill Clinton submitted his first defense budget.
| Total Defense Spending During Reagan's Presidency |
Total Defense Spending While Cheney was Bush's Secretary of Defense |
Total Defense Spending While Bill Clinton Was President |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY | $ in billions | FY | $ in billions | FY $ in billions | |
| 1981 | 158.0 | 1989 | 304.0 | 1993 | 292.4 |
| 1982 | 185.9 | 1990 | 300.1 | 1994 | 282.3 |
| 1983 | 209.9 | 1991 | 319.7 | 1995 | 273.6 |
| 1984 | 228.0 | 1992 | 302.6 | 1996 | 266.0 |
| 1985 | 253.1 | 1997 | 271.7 | ||
| 1986 | 273.8 | 1998 | 270.2 | ||
| 1987 | 282.5 | 1999 | 275.5 | ||
| 1988 | 290.9 | 2000 | 295.0 | ||
Cheney turned the inevitable reduction in troops garrisoned abroad over to his chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. Cheney bypassed dozens of more senior officers to find the most talented candidate, even if he had misgivings about Powell's position on Iran-Contra. Powell designed a "base force" program that gradually brought home (and in some cases discharged) large numbers of American occupation forces in Europe, coordinating every reduction with individual commands. As personnel accounted for almost 50 percent of the Pentagon budget, Powell's gradual reduction in force helped reduce defense spending.
The selection of Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs, long assumed to be Cheney's choice, was actually something of a shotgun wedding. At fifty-two, Powell was younger than most others who were in line for the job. But he had served as Reagan's national security advisor and was the senior Bush's choice to lead the Joint Chiefs. Powell had doubts about Cheney. He considered Cheney's uncompromising support of Ollie North's rogue operations to be an endorsement of military officers going out of channel and running unauthorized operations. The elder George Bush, however, wanted Powell as chair of the Joint Chiefs.
Cheney did make one particularly bold move on the military budget. While Ronald Reagan was president, spending on weapons had spiraled completely out of control. Again, with one decision, Cheney took charge. When he learned that the Navy's A-12 fighter jet was $1 billion over budget and eighteen months behind schedule, he canceled the program and fired the vice admiral in charge of naval aviation. He also ordered two senior officers demoted for mismanagement. With three stars on his epaulets, Vice Admiral Richard Gentz was the highest-ranking officer ever dismissed for failure to manage costs and deadlines on a weapons system. Cheney also curtailed production of the Air Force's B-2 Stealth bomber, from 132 to 20—essentially killing a weapons system designed to penetrate Soviet radar and conduct long-range bombing missions. He targeted the Marines' V-22 Osprey, perhaps the most problematic American military aircraft ever to make it off the drawing boards. But the tilt-rotor, vertical-takeoff helicopter had powerful friends. Congress, led by the Texas and Pennsylvania delegations, overrode the cut. When Cheney refused to spend the money appropriated, Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen and Fort Worth congressman Pete Geren filed suit—more over plant closings than national security. To increase the pressure, Texans and Pennsylvanians on the House Armed Services Committee passed a provision that would cut 5 percent per month from overall defense spending until funding for the Osprey was released. "It wasn't exactly blackmail," says a general who worked on Pentagon budgeting. "But they threatened to be a constant pain in the ass for us until we gave in."
The Osprey proved to be a durable disaster. Midway through George W. Bush's second term, the tilt-rotor helicopter Cheney had tried to ground still wasn't exactly flying. Sixty helicopters had been produced. Five had crashed, which might have been predicted after the prototype crashed. The accidents killed twenty-six marines and four civilians. In March 2006, a year before the aircraft was to be deployed for combat in Iraq, another $71-million Osprey went down in the woods in Florida, though this time no one was injured.
In a 1992 speech, Cheney claimed he "terminated or canceled over 120 different weapons programs." He might have been using canceled software programs to pad his list. And he failed to ground the Osprey. But no secretary of defense since the beginning of the Cold War had taken as hard a look at weapons systems or gone head-to-head with the Pentagon brass and defense contractors. Cheney didn't deliver a peace dividend, but he did stop the exponential growth in the military budget that, along with tax cuts, had driven the deficit during the Reagan presidency.
Most of John Tower's hires at the Department of Defense moved on when the Senate rejected his nomination, but Cheney asked one high-ranking Tower appointee to stay. Paul Wolfowitz had begun his career as a Democrat, working for Washington senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. He crossed party lines to work in the Nixon and Ford administrations, then took a midlevel position at the Pentagon when Jimmy Carter was elected president. Cheney's decision to keep Wolfowitz, though little noticed at the time, was a small first step toward the invasion and occupation of Iraq that consumed the Bush-Cheney administration fourteen years later.
While Wolfowitz was at the Defense Department during the Carter administration, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown asked him to look at Third World countries where the United States might face a threat. Wolfowitz's Limited Contingency Study, carefully tracked in James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, shifted attention from the Soviet threat and considered the possibility of the seizing of Saudi Arabia's oilfields by a Persian Gulf nation. It focused specifically on Iraq, described in the study as the preeminent military power in the region. At the time, no one involved in preparing the report considered Iraq a threat. Saddam Hussein had not consolidated his power, engaged in any widespread repression, or acquired chemical weapons.
What concerned Wolfowitz was oil.
Brown wanted nothing to do with the report. He shelved it, fearing that were it leaked, the Iraqis would believe the United States was working on behalf of the Saudis. But Wolfowitz would not let it die, even if it would not be made policy during the Carter administration.
In a Pentagon where Dick Cheney was running the show, Wolfowitz was in a better position to again turn his attention to the Persian Gulf. In 1992 he was responsible for drafting the first biennial Defense Planning Guidance document that would not focus on the Soviet Union. Wolfowitz had assigned the project to his deputy, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Libby delegated the work to Zalmay Khalilzad. Both men would figure prominently in the administration of George W. Bush, Libby as Cheney's chief of staff and Khalilzad as the American ambassador to occupied Iraq, where he would exercise the plenipotentiary power of a viceroy.
The new planning guide, shaped by Khalilzad, Wolfowitz, and Libby, envisioned a superpower so dominant that it could intervene in and resolve any conflict: "Potential. . . competitors need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests." The United States would "sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." A nuclear arsenal would "provide an important deterrent hedge against the possibility of a revitalized or unforeseen global threat, while at the same time helping to deter third party use of weapons of mass destruction through the threat of retaliation."
Among the threats the report anticipated were conflicts that threatened access to Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, and terrorist threats to U.S. citizens. The primary case studies that justified the use of the tactics described in the plan were Iraq and North Korea. The report made it clear that the United States would act unilaterally; there was no role for the United Nations.
A Defense Department employee who believed the policy Wolfowitz was promoting needed to be debated in public leaked the report to The New York Times. The report was immediately denounced by President Bush. The leaked document became a political issue in the 1992 campaign, attacked by Clinton. It angered foreign leaders, who saw it as a blueprint for American hegemony. After Bush distanced himself from it, Wolfowitz followed. Khalilzad was left hanging, the principal author of an orphaned report rejected by all of his superiors. Then Cheney read it. He told Khalilzad, "You've discovered a new rationale for our role in the world." He issued the report under his own name. "He wanted to show that he stood for the idea," Khalilzad said. "He took ownership in it."
The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document would go back on the shelf while Bill Clinton was president. But like the Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, it wouldn't go away. The original Iraq War thinking rejected by Harold Brown and George H. W. Bush had taken root and would be waiting eight years later when Dick Cheney returned yet again to the White House.
Cheney's canonization of the report marked an odd but important historical moment. George W. Bush was sitting in the owners' box seats of the Texas Rangers ballpark, where he was a managing partner and a 2 percent owner, while the men who would define his foreign policy ten years later were sitting in their Pentagon offices, where they were in charge, writing the foreign policy they would hand him after the 2000 election.
"He was the finest secretary of defense I've ever seen, from the standpoint of the military," says a general who was already at the Pentagon when Cheney arrived. It is a common response to the open-ended question: How would you describe Dick Cheney as secretary of defense? Like Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who would break with the Bush-Cheney administration because of its conduct of the war in Iraq, the general, a career officer who saw Cheney work at the Pentagon, describes him as a near-perfect administrator: "He was in control. Bill Clinton is the smartest man I've ever worked with. But Dick Cheney came close. In a briefing, he's so smart he's intimidating. He listens. He listens in a way that most people don't listen. And he gets everything. It is daunting, can be frightening. But when you walk out of his office, you know that he understands every detail you briefed and every implication of the decision he's going to make. No emotion. No anger. He's annoyed if you are not prepared. I have never seen him raise his voice."
Cheney's time at the Pentagon was a dress rehearsal for the vice presidency. He had no administrative experience, but he seemed to understand, almost instinctively, that the secret to success and control lies in staffing. David Gribben, the high school friend from Wyoming who served as Cheney's chief of staff in the House, was also his chief of staff at the Pentagon. Pete Williams, the former Wyoming television newscaster who worked as Cheney's House press person, was the Pentagon spokesman. And David Addington, who had been with Cheney since Congress, was now his special civilian assistant.
"Cheney always has the best staff," the Pentagon source says. "David Gribben was loyal, smart, and had no ego. And he understood legislative affairs. Pete Williams could take the most complex issue and dumb it down into a sound bite. And David Addington is one of the smartest people I ever knew. He was on top of things."
Addington, the Pentagon source added, could read the draft of an appropriations bill in one day and ferret out the one paragraph that wasn't supposed to be there: "He would fix that one paragraph, and he would know exactly which undersecretary had been over there on the Hill freelancing." After cleaning up the bill, Addington would "add a corrected provision that might adversely affect the undersecretary and send him a little message."
At the Pentagon, it sometimes seemed as if David Addington was training Dick Cheney to be vice president—or perhaps president. Almost every decision started in Addington's office, where he would meet with "the uniforms," civilians—even the Joint Chiefs. Then he would take his decisions in to Cheney, who would be briefed. When necessary, Addington would take the parties into Cheney's office. Addington, by intellect and force of personality, took charge and dealt with the details. "He allowed Cheney to be the chief."
"Addington was always deeply involved in issues," the Pentagon source says. "But he was always in the background. If you wanted to get something to Cheney, you did it through Addington. For three years it was the best-run operation you could imagine. It worked because Addington ran it on behalf of the Secretary of Defense."
Addington also worked on appropriations, which Cheney mastered by collaborating with Jack Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Murtha is an institutional politician, always aware of and insinuating himself into positions of power in the House. When Cheney was appointed secretary of defense, Murtha hosted a dinner for Cheney and his wife and the Appropriations Subcommittee members—known as the cardinals—and their spouses. It was an invitation to collaborate—and a showcase of Murtha's influence on "Approps." Cheney, Murtha, Addington, and a few high-ranking officers from the Pentagon managed DOD appropriations and developed a working relationship between the Congress and the uniforms, to ensure that in a time of shrinking budgets, no vital weapons systems or bases were cut. Powell was intimately involved in appropriations. But difficult problems were resolved by discussions between Murtha and Cheney.
Murtha is a hawkish former marine and Vietnam veteran who has cultivated close ties to the military. Congressional staff traveling with him on congressional delegation trips ("codels") complain that he spends so much time listening to enlisted men that schedules are difficult to keep. Cheney and Murtha remained close friends when Cheney became Bush's vice president, which later made Murtha's harsh criticism of the Bush-Cheney White House so loaded. "I like guys who got five deferments and have never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," Murtha said in November 2005. One of Murtha's staff members insisted the Democratic congressman's statement didn't pertain to Cheney, but that was a hard sell. Cheney is the only high-profile member of the Bush administration who had five draft deferments and is making decisions that put American soldiers at risk.
Some of Cheney's critics claim the Pentagon brass was hostile to Cheney because he was a secretary of defense who had avoided service in Vietnam. (After all, during his confirmation Cheney had said, "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.") A retired officer who was at the Pentagon while Cheney was there disagreed. "I never saw it," he says. "Everyone immediately saw he was a good administrator who had good relations with Congress. That's what matters. Rumsfeld came over as a former Navy pilot and within six months no one in the building wanted to talk to him because he is so arrogant. Cheney came over here aware that he knew nothing about defense issues. Cheney and David [Addington] listened."
Wilkerson, a career officer who worked for Colin Powell at the Pentagon and State Department, also says Cheney's deferments were not an issue. "There may have been a little grumbling," the retired officer says. But he added that Cheney was far too good at what he did, and far too protective of the interests of the armed forces, to engender much hostility. Wilkerson describes a moment at the end of the Gulf War at which the very officers who might have been expected to be Cheney's critics publicly embraced him. "It was at the National Military Command Center at Fort Leavenworth. Everyone got together, all the military types, and presented Cheney with an honorary certificate of graduation from the Command General Staff College. The little speeches that accompanied that. . . were quite poignant."
While Dick Cheney's first big challenge as secretary of defense was the U.S. attack on Panama, his defining moment was the first Gulf War. The textbook success of both ventures perhaps convinced him that invading Iraq in 2003 would be quick work, followed by Iraqis tossing rose petals at American soldiers as they prepared to move east into Iran. Though he never wore a uniform, Cheney had been involved in every American military adventure since the Korean War: Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan. If he missed Somalia and Bosnia, the company he directed had won big, lucrative contracts in both attempts at nation building.
The invasion of Panama was a textbook exercise in regime change. Initially a CIA asset, Panamanian president Manuel Noriega had become impossible for the American president to control. Noriega's thugs had beaten and bloodied their boss's opponent in the presidential race. Panamanian soldiers had shot one American serviceman and briefly detained an American lieutenant (and his wife, whom they threatened to sexually assault). They also arrested a CIA operative who was operating a clandestine radio station. It wasn't hostile warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, but for the first Bush administration, a sufficient casus belli to invade a country and remove a thuggish regime.
Cheney had been six months on the job at the Pentagon when the senior George Bush made the decision to attack Panama. It was a decision made in careful collaboration with Cheney, who was attentive to detail, aware of the larger foreign policy context of the invasion, and not hesitant to put overenthusiastic generals on short leashes. At one point he questioned plans to use the Stealth bomber, a high-tech radar-evading aircraft designed to penetrate Soviet defenses. (He reluctantly signed off on it, though he regretted it later.) He refused to allow the lieutenant's wife to do a TV interview in which she would have described the sexual taunts of Noriega's soldiers, arguing that it would only be inflammatory. He cut one target from the list of sites to bomb, complaining about a Stealth attack on a Noriega hangout. And he went after Congress for encroaching on the executive's authority to conduct foreign policy. Members of Congress, whom Cheney caustically referred to as "my former colleagues," were "literally calling [executive branch] agencies downtown, or even people in Panama," Cheney complained. "That creates all kinds of problems. [They] certainly complicate our lives when they run out and make public pronouncements in front of the press, knowing only half of what there is to know." Cheney also refused to provide New York congressman Charles Rangel copies of combat videos shot by Apache helicopters in Panama. Rangel was responding to numerous complaints that most of the civilians killed died in Apache attacks on civilian targets.
The assault on Panama bore all the signature marks for which Dick Cheney would become known. Willingness to exercise broad executive authority, low regard for the role of Congress in foreign policy, high tolerance for non-American civilian casualties, and near-absolute secrecy. The assault, in which fifteen Americans died, was a technical success, even if it involved the conquest of a small country already occupied by thirteen thousand American troops. Cheney allowed only reporters based in the United States to cover the war, so he could slow the credentialing process and thus slow the coverage, although there were fully credentialed bilingual American reporters on the ground in Panama. The result was sporadic coverage of the "war," in which hostilities lasted only a few days. Critics of the invasion, including the Catholic Church in Panama, insist that far more Panamanians died than the two hundred civilians listed in official American reports. The Catholic Church, no great friend of Noriega, said deaths numbered in the thousands. The use of the Stealth bomber in an attack in which the resistance was so feeble that only fifty Panamanian soldiers died was something of an embarrassment. More embarrassing was the fact that the 100-million-dollar bomber was far off target when it dropped its bombs. (Cheney was furious when he learned the Air Force had kept him in the dark about the Stealth's failure.) The operation took a while to achieve its objective, the capture of General Manuel Noriega. The Panamanian dictator eluded the army and took sanctuary in the offices of the papal nuncio. Rather than violate the sanctity of a church that was also a diplomatic mission, U.S. forces surrounded the nuncio's residence and played high-decibel rock music until Noriega and his host could endure it no longer and he surrendered to American forces.
"Operation Just Cause" in Panama was a dress rehearsal for the larger military adventure to follow, when Iraq's president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. From the moment intelligence reports indicated that Saddam Hussein's troops appeared to be preparing to invade Kuwait, Cheney was at the center of the military campaign known as Desert Storm. The first Gulf War was Dick Cheney's war as much as it was George Bush's war. It began with yet another Iran-Contra connection. Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar had moved $25 million from the Saudis to the Contras, working with CIA director William Casey. He was also a friend of the Bush family. Powell had misgivings about Bandar; Cheney had none.
It was Bandar who initially informed Bush that Hussein's behavior had the Saudis worried. And it was Bandar with whom Bush negotiated, sending Cheney to Saudi Arabia on a critical diplomatic mission to persuade the Saudis to accept U.S. ground forces. Before the ground war in Iraq started in late February 1991, Cheney had flown to Riyadh four times. Yet on the road to the Gulf War, Cheney was cautious. Not as cautious as Powell, but not overeager to push the country into war. The story line for the American public was that Hussein had invaded a sovereign nation. The concern within the administration was that Hussein had designs on the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.
Cheney was practical. Given the alternatives of attacking Hussein or deploying a force to defend Saudi Arabian oil, he argued that it was better to avoid a direct confrontation with Hussein's million-man army. He was critical of Bush's personal attacks on Hussein, complaining to Brent Scow-croft that the overheated rhetoric was putting the lives of American soldiers at risk. And he cautioned Bush against ordering American sailors to board Iraqi tankers to signal the beginning of a blockade.
Cheney's August 1991 trip to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Fahd was critical to the success of a large mission to deter the Iraqis. Cheney, accompanied by Paul Wolfowitz and General Norman Schwarzkopf, imposed the American plan upon the reluctant and difficult king. There would be no caps on the size of the American force deployed in Saudi Arabia. Nor would there be any fixed date by which troops would depart. They would remain "until justice is achieved," Cheney told Fahd, adding that they would leave when the king asked them to leave. Cheney used classified satellite intelligence to convince the king of Hussein's intentions, and went to great lengths to emphasize the gravity of Iraqi troops amassed on his border and the impossibility of a U.S. mission to stop Hussein once he moved into Saudi Arabia. Fahd, the custodian of the two holiest sites of Islam, was being asked to accept the presence of troops from the country that was Israel's financial and military underwriter. Cheney wouldn't allow him time to think it over.
Once the decision was made to go to war, Cheney turned his attention to the generals who would do the fighting. "He looked at the war plan and was appalled by its lack of creativity and tore it to pieces," says a former defense aide on Sam Nunn's staff. Cheney spent days with Colin Powell, poring over war plans, pushing Powell, and leaning on the generals doing the planning. He personally got on the phone with, and in the faces of, the generals who were drawing up the war plans. "He wasn't a micromanager like McNamara," says one of the generals involved in the planning. "And he wasn't arrogant like Rumsfeld. He wanted this one done right." Cheney joined Powell in arguing for the "enhanced option"—adding a hundred thousand more troops to the American contingent in Saudi Arabia, bringing troop strength to half a million. It was his moment to end the country's Vietnam War syndrome. "The military is finished in this society if we screw this up," he told Prince Bandar.
Cheney and Powell agreed on most issues regarding the war. But they had one fundamental disagreement regarding weapons. As they were flying back from the Persian Gulf in the run-up to the war, Powell pulled out a report he had ordered his staff to complete. It was a proposal to retire the Army's tactical nuclear weapons arsenal. The copy of the report Powell handed Cheney as the two men flew home from Saudi Arabia was covered with critical marginalia, all in the hand of David Addington. Addington and Wolfowitz had strong objections to giving up nuclear weapons that Powell said were inaccurate, expensive to maintain, and irrelevant in a modern arsenal of sophisticated conventional weapons. Cheney dismissed Powell, saying "not one of my civilian advisers supports you." Powell would prevail—after a Gulf War in which the Army's tactical nuclear weapons were not necessary. In September 2002, President Bush overruled Cheney and implemented Powell's recommendations.
In the Gulf War, Cheney saw a limited role for Congress, just as he had in the Panama operation. Despite the fact that going to war with Iraq would be a larger undertaking than the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Cheney argued that the president did not need the consent of Congress. He seemed more understanding of King Fahd's polling the royal family and calling Arab leaders than he was of Bush's willingness to go to Congress for consent. He told Bob Woodward that after meeting with his House colleagues, he remembered that four months before Pearl Harbor, the House had approved an extension of the Selective Service System by only one vote. Bush took his case to Congress. The Senate voted 52 to 47, the House 250 to 183, to approve the "all means necessary" resolution.
The Gulf War began with thirty-eight days of intense bombing of Iraqi positions in Kuwait—and strategic sites in Baghdad and across Iraq. In the first forty-eight hours of the war, 2,107 combat missions dropped more than five thousand tons of bombs on Baghdad, nearly twice the amount Allied forces dropped on Dresden in 1945. The bombing plan was similar to what was laid out for reporters four months earlier, by an Air Force chief of staff Cheney fired for his loose talk. "The cutting edge would be downtown Baghdad," Air Force general Michael Dugan said. Dugan also told a Washington Post reporter that he had been informed by Israeli intelligence that Hussein would be devastated by an attack on his family and his mistress. The September 16 Post story ran under the headline "U.S. to Rely on Air Power if War Erupts." The follow-up story on September 18 required a headline and a subhead. "Candor Cost Top Airman His Job; Dugan Discussed 'Things We Never Talk About,' Cheney Says." Cheney's firing of Dugan, who coincidentally had replaced General Larry Welch, was another demonstration of what Wilkerson described as Cheney's "real ability to administrate, to make a decision, to be an executive." No member of the Joint Chiefs had been fired since 1948. But Dugan had talked to the press, described a plan of attack, and revealed that Israeli intelligence was involved in a war his boss had just sold to King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
Cheney's firing of Dugan was bloodless and fast. He didn't even bother to interrupt President Bush's tennis game at Camp David to tell him the Air Force chief of staff was going to be canned.
News stories and various sources describe Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell as a near-perfect tandem at the Pentagon. The SecDef who had avoided the draft and the general whose life had been defined by the Army set aside their differences over Iran-Contra and conducted the most successful U.S. military operation since World War II. After thirty-eight days of bombing, the ground campaign lasted four days and resulted in only 137 American fatalities.
The war that brought the two men together would also divide them. Cheney was already thinking about a run for the presidency in 1996. And while he was averse to the press, working to limit media coverage of the war and firing a four-star general for talking to reporters, he was not averse to hagiography when he could find it. The details he revealed to a Time magazine team read like a storyboard for a campaign video: never losing a night's sleep over a difficult decision; packing his own bag to fly to Saudi Arabia; bringing along his cowboy boots and lucky beige zippered jacket; and connecting with the troops once he was on the ground. David Hume Kennedy's campaign boudoir photography complemented what was probably the most glowing portrait of a cabinet minister done since newsweeklies went from black-and-white to color. Cheney was taking full advantage of the Gulf War success to write his campaign biography. But then, as now, he lacked Powell's charisma and telegenic qualities.
A general who worked at the Pentagon says he witnessed the public moment he believes caused the Cheney-Powell divorce: the "Salute to the Men and Women of the Desert Storm Campaign" at the Washington Hilton in April two months after hostilities in Iraq ended. Congressman Jack Murtha insisted on bringing in a large number of enlisted men. "There were E-ls to E-4s with their girlfriends dressed to the nines running all over the hotel. Everyone made speeches. The event broke up and those kids mobbed Powell. They couldn't get enough of him. Cheney was definitely not mobbed. The TV moved to Powell and left Cheney with a few people talking to him. Cheney looked over there and saw a rival he could not match."
There had been talk of a Cheney-Powell ticket in 1992. But as the pundits and the public sized up the two men, talk began to shift to a Powell-Cheney ticket. On the day Dick Cheney left the Pentagon to return to private life, he didn't even bother to stop by Powell's office to say goodbye, says Wilkerson. "There was no farewell. Powell never knew he departed and all of a sudden he's still the chairman and Cheney's gone."