In My Time: A Personal and Political
Memoir
By Dick Cheney with Liz
Cheney
(Threshold Editions, 565 pages,
$35)
IF I HAD to sum up both the tone of this memoir and the
character of its author in six words, I would quote—as he does on
page 18—the words of Miss Korbel, his kindergarten
teacher. “Richard,” she wrote on his first report card, “does not
give up easily.” This simple, straightforward evaluation goes far
to explaining both Dick Cheney’s many impressive achievements in
public life and his occasional missteps. But before going any
further, I need to make a personal disclosure. Although three years
his junior, I was briefly, and only technically, Dick Cheney’s boss
when we first met on Capitol Hill 42 years ago. I formed a high
opinion of him then, and I still hold it today.
What brought us together in 1969 was an unofficial task force of
22 rising young Republican members of Congress created and headed
by Rep. Bill Brock of Tennessee (later a senator, Republican
National Committee chairman, U.S. trade representative, and
secretary of labor), for whom I worked at the time. As Brock’s man
on the task force I served as de facto staff director, coordinating
the activities of the 21 other staffers detailed by the
participating congressmen. One of those congressmen was a future
president and vice president, George H. W. Bush; one of the
staffers was Dick Cheney—a very smart, slightly stolid young PhD
candidate on a congressional fellowship in the office of Rep. Bill
Steiger of Wisconsin. So, without knowing it, I had one future
president and two future veeps on board.
The mission of the task force was to visit college campuses
around the country—a listening tour before the invention of the
term—and meet with students, faculty, and administrators in as
calm and non-confrontational a setting as was possible at the
height of the Vietnam War. Afterward, as Dick Cheney explains in
this memoir, back in Washington, “the congressmen briefed the
president on their campus visits and issued a public report that
offered a number of ideas, including lowering the voting age to
eighteen.”
Lending momentum to the drive to lower the voting age was not,
however, the task force’s only historic legacy. Over lunch at the
GOP Capitol Hill Club shortly after the task force wound down, Dick
confided that the experience had convinced him that his future
would be better spent in the corridors of power rather than in the
halls of academe. Or, as he puts it in his forceful but
sparely-written memoir, “I was beginning to realize that it was the
political life that I preferred.” He soon hitched his wagon to one
of the Congress’s fastest rising stars. Don Rumsfeld was a
promising Illinois House member President Nixon had just named head
of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the organizational
residue of Lyndon Johnson’s long lost and long forgotten—though
we’re still paying for it—“War on Poverty.” Like Dick Cheney, Don
Rumsfeld has a well-earned reputation for bluntness. Witness the
way he welcomed Cheney to his OEO staff: “You, you’re congressional
relations. Now get the hell out of here.”
In fact, Cheney would stick close, becoming Rumsfeld’s trusted
trouble-shooter at OEO and then following him to the Cost of Living
Council and the Nixon White House staff. Post-Watergate, when
Rumsfeld was named President Ford’s White House chief of staff,
Cheney would be his deputy. Both men were alpha male Washington
political types, very smart, very aggressive, and very ambitious,
but they were far enough apart in age—Cheney being younger by
nearly a decade—to avoid career collisions. Indeed, as the younger
man, Cheney would literally follow in Rumsfeld’s footsteps,
replacing him as White House chief of staff when Ford named
Rumsfeld secretary of defense, then, while still a young man,
successfully running for Congress just as Rumsfeld had before him.
Later, he would emulate Rumsfeld by transferring to the private
sector and becoming a dynamic CEO (Rumsfeld at Searle
Pharmaceuticals, Cheney at the energy giant Halliburton), amassing
a personal fortune that would allow him to re-enter public life
whenever and however he chose. Cheney would also follow in his
mentor’s footsteps at the Pentagon, serving as the senior Bush’s
defense secretary just as Don Rumsfeld had served Jerry Ford.
Only in 2001, more than 30 years after they first worked
together, would their roles be reversed with Cheney jumping the
queue to be W’s vice president and Rumsfeld returning to the
Pentagon for a second stint as secretary of defense. Small wonder
that the two men would think so much alike politically and
militarily when facing the biggest challenge of their careers:
charting the right response to 9/11. Their like-mindedness would be
reinforced by a mutual reliance on a tight circle of advisors with
a doctrinaire view of the world and a lock-step approach to foreign
policy. To label this influential group of unelected operatives as
Straussian neoconservatives is a gross oversimplification, but men
like Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s right hand man at the Pentagon) and
Scooter Libby (Cheney’s vice presidential chief of staff) shared a
formulaic, interventionist view of Middle East policy and
recognized the unique opportunity that the national trauma of 9/11
offered for putting it into effect by launching twin wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Billions of dollars and thousands of American lives later, what
is one to make of that response? In his thoughtful, well-researched
Sands of Empire, the distinguished journalist and
historian Robert Merry—hardly a raving lefty—summed it up rather
neatly:
Administration rhetoric justifying and explaining the war policy
turned out to be riddled with inaccuracies and misperceptions. The
war was justified primarily on the basis of the weapons of mass
destruction that Saddam possessed and was building. No such weapons
were ever found. Vice President Cheney insisted Saddam was linked
to the al Qaeda network that perpetrated the September 11 attacks,
but there was no evidence of consequence to that effect, and
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet felt obliged to
correct Cheney privately on more than one occasion.
Donald Rumsfeld, he adds, bluntly asserted that “no terrorist
state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of
our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam
Hussein in Iraq.” Subsequent events proved that statement
erroneous, Merry points out; the ongoing terrorist threat “was much
greater than any threat from the hapless Saddam Hussein and his
military, severely attenuated by the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent
U.N. Sanctions.”
Believing what his advisors told him, Dick Cheney had said of
the Iraqis, “I really believe we will be greeted as liberators.”
The same advisors had also sold both Cheney and Rumsfeld on the
merits of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, a shadowy exile
group headed by convicted bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi who fed his
backers doctored or fabricated intelligence inciting America to
invade. Interestingly, in the many pages he devotes to defending
his role as chief administration hawk, Dick Cheney omits any
mention of the dubious Mr. Chalabi.
IT IS UNFORTUNATE that a book with such an overwhelmingly
positive story to tell—a triumphant and honorable personal rise
from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of power, a warm family
saga, and an instructive look behind the curtain of public politics
to the way the executive and legislative branches really
work—should in the end be weighed down by an obsessive attempt (as
Miss Korbel recognized all those years ago, “Richard does not give
up easily”) to justify understandable mistakes rather than
acknowledge them.
Given his parlous state of health, I can sympathize with Dick
Cheney’s sense of urgency in going to press. And, like the
president he served, he deserves full credit for keeping our
country safe from further mass terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11.
But history will surely record that the greatest victories in the
war on terror have been won on the ground in America where
murderers with box cutters can no longer board planes at their
pleasure, and through carefully targeted intelligence work and
small, elite force operations like the one that took out Osama bin
Laden.
And let’s not forget Dick Cheney’s masterful election debate
performances in 2000 and 2004. They helped keep two prime liberal
goofs (Al Gore and John Kerry) and one dirty, rotten scoundrel
(John Edwards) at a safe distance from the White House. In the end,
that alone should earn Dick Cheney a place of honor in the
conservative pantheon.
