COMING INTO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION so late, Cheney knew that he was months behind the curve. He needed to play some quick catch-up. So the next day, Sunday, March 12, he drove over to Frank Carlucci’s McLean home. It was Carlucci who, as Rumsfeld’s assistant at OEO, had hired Cheney for his first executive branch job in 1969. If Cheney were confirmed, he would for practical purposes be succeeding Carlucci, who had been notified that he had to leave his office by January 20, when Bush ordered all Reagan holdovers out. Carlucci was still annoyed.
Carlucci said that Cheney should stay close to Bill Crowe, that Crowe would not steer him wrong.
The next day Cheney went to the Pentagon to see Crowe.
Right after they had sat down, Cheney said, “I understand you’re going to stay on.” Crowe’s second two-year term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was going to expire at the end of September, and Bush had asked him to remain for another term.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Crowe replied. There were personal considerations.
Crowe wasn’t definite, but Cheney got the impression he wanted out.
After nearly two months without a confirmed Secretary of Defense in the new administration, Crowe said he was looking forward to Cheney’s arrival. The department desperately needed a political leader.
Crowe recommended that Cheney go ahead and begin to move into the Secretary’s office on the third floor. Confirmation looked assured.
Rear Admiral William A. Owens, the military assistant to the Secretary, ought to be kept on, Crowe added. Owens, a nuclear submariner, was the best man Crowe had ever seen in that job. He knew how to stay in the background and he realized he was not Deputy Secretary.
The quality of the military as a ready, well-equipped fighting organization was very high, Crowe said. And happily there was no immediate problem that Cheney had to concern himself with, no pressing crisis on the horizon. There were sensitive operations, war plans, contingency plans and procedures that he would want to be briefed on as soon as possible, but for the moment he could focus on getting confirmed and then on the upcoming budget battle with Congress, where his status as a former member would be really helpful.
The next afternoon at 2 p.m., Cheney, wearing cowboy boots and a business suit, walked across a light green carpet to take his seat in a small, packed Senate hearing room before Nunn’s Armed Services Committee.
“I, as you all know, am not here because I sought the position of secretary of defense,” Cheney told the senators. It was well known that Tower had actively pursued the job. “I am here because the President has asked me to undertake a very difficult assignment.”
Senator John Warner of Virginia, the ranking committee Republican, asked Cheney about his military deferments during the Vietnam War.
“Senator, I have never served in the military in uniform,” Cheney began. He explained that when he was in college he’d gotten a 2-S student draft deferment, and after his first daughter was born in 1966, a 3-A deferment that was granted to parents. “I basically always complied with the Selective Service System, did not serve, and would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called.”
In three hours of questioning, Cheney referred frequently to his past work on intelligence and defense issues, but also admitted that he had to get up to speed in many areas.
The next day Nunn and Warner reviewed the summary memo on the FBI’s background investigation of Cheney and then briefed the committee in closed executive session.
“He got fined for fishing out of season,” Nunn reported. The two charges of driving while intoxicated were ancient. Nunn and Warner did not see them as impediments to confirmation. All the members agreed.
Cheney joined the committee during the closed session. He said he thought it would be best to make public the old driving-while-intoxicated charges, but the committee said there was no need.
At 9:30 the next morning, Nunn called the full committee of 20 to order in public session. The committee’s conclusion was that there was nothing in Cheney’s background that “would render him unfit to serve,” Nunn said. The remarks of the few senators who spoke were brief and enthusiastic. The sense of relief was palpable. The vote to confirm was 20 to 0.
At 10:50 a.m. March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, Nunn took to the Senate floor. He said the committee had approved Cheney unanimously, “after careful and thorough consideration.” Nunn spoke quickly and matter-of-factly, dismissing any suggestion that he or the Armed Services Committee was rushing to judgment. Without even hinting that he was talking about the driving-while-intoxicated charges, which still remained confidential, Nunn said that he and Warner had found “a couple of items” in the FBI reports that had no bearing on the committee’s final positive decision, but which they had felt obligated to share in closed session with the other committee members.
As senators filed in to pass judgment on Cheney, they saw a sign at each end of the long table in the Senate well that said LAST VOTE TODAY in red capital letters.
The final tally was 92 to 0 to confirm.
Within minutes Cheney received a call in his Republican Whip’s office. The caller identified himself as Rear Admiral Owens, the military assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Cheney thought to himself, “Admiral—I don’t need this now.” But Cheney knew that his new life was starting, and that he had to listen. Addressing Cheney as “sir,” Owens said he wanted to come right up to the Hill with Doc Cooke—David O. Cooke, the Pentagon’s director of administration and management—to swear Cheney into office. Cooke, 68, was known as the mayor of the Pentagon to the staff of more than 23,000, military and civilian, who worked there. A fixture of the defense bureaucracy, he oversaw the daily housekeeping of the Pentagon, from parking spaces to office space, and had sworn in the last seven secretaries.
Cheney had wanted to be sworn in by the House Sergeant-at-Arms, as a final gesture to the institution he was leaving. But Cooke and Owens pressed him to continue the tradition.
Cheney shrugged his shoulders and went along. He resigned his House seat, and with aides and his family crowded around, he took the oath.
Cheney had asked his press secretary, Pete Williams, to be the new Pentagon spokesman, and Williams had accepted. After the swearing in, Cheney was going over to the Pentagon, and Williams intended to drive there separately. But David S. Addington, a Cheney aide and former CIA attorney who was now going to be Cheney’s special assistant in the Pentagon, told Williams to make sure he arrived at the Pentagon in the Cheney motorcade. You’ve got to be seen—this is important in Washington, Addington told Williams.
“Be seen by whom?” Williams inquired.
The people who work there, Addington said. It’s tremendously important that they see you as one of the people who are arriving with the new man. It will help you immeasurably in your job.
So Williams, Addington, Dave Gribbin and Kathie Embody all piled into the Secretary’s limousine with the red light on top. Uniformed staff people as well as civilians and all kinds of hangers-on were waiting at the Pentagon door to observe and take note of the little entering parade.
Up on the third floor, where the Secretary’s suite is located, a nameplate emblazoned Richard B. Cheney was already on the door. Williams thought, now there’s one thing we’re going to have to change. He’s not a “Richard B.” kind of guy. It would have to be “Dick,” he thought, and made a mental note to have it changed.
Inside the office, photos were taken, and Cheney looked pleased.
Cheney had given some thought to reorganizing the Pentagon. Its multilayered, bureaucratic complexity was a conservative Republican’s nightmare of waste. But he soon decided that even if it were possible to rearrange the organizational boxes, to cut and streamline the place, it might not be worth the trouble.
On Tuesday afternoon, March 21, thousands of civilians and military men and women streamed into the Pentagon’s internal courtyard for Cheney’s formal swearing in as the 17th Secretary of Defense. President Bush spoke first, delivering a stock speech about peace through strength, reform, teamwork and opportunity. Vague on the world situation Cheney’s Pentagon would face, the speech reflected the uncertainty of national security policy in the new administration.
Cheney was then sworn in again, this time by federal appeals Judge Laurence H. Silberman.
“It is a humbling experience to assume office,” Cheney began, reading from a prepared text, his voice bouncing off the building’s five inner walls.
“To the men and women of America’s armed forces: I am honored to serve with you in the defense of freedom,” he said. Then, departing from the text, he added, “You, our uniformed men and women, are my number-one priority.”
Afterwards, Williams told Cheney his emphasis on people had played well.
Later that day, Cheney went to the White House to see Sununu and the personnel chief, Chase Untermeyer. Sununu—in public a strong opponent of racial and gender quotas—told Cheney the White House wanted 30 percent of the remaining top 42 jobs in the Defense Department to be filled by women or minorities.