In My Time (27 page)

Back at the Cannon House Office Building, I went ahead with my schedule and was being interviewed by an assistant professor from the University of Georgia, John Maltese, about my experiences as White House chief of staff, when Kathie Embody buzzed in to tell me the president was on the phone. I asked Maltese to excuse me, and when he was safely out the door, I picked up the phone.

“Dick,” the president said, “I want you to be my secretary of defense. Will you take the job?” I said, “Yes, sir, Mr. President.” “All right,” he said, “get yourself back down here and we’ll announce it right now.” Not wanting word to get out about my new assignment before the president had a chance to announce it, I proceeded as though nothing extraordinary was going on and finished up my interview with Maltese. Then I headed downtown, and at 4:06 that afternoon walked into the briefing room with the president and became the secretary of defense–designate.

My loyal and longtime congressional staffers may have begun to suspect something was up because of my repeated trips to the White House, but most of them found out I was about to become secretary of defense from CNN, just like the rest of America. Then the phones started ringing off the hook, and the FBI showed up to begin a full-field background investigation on me.

My confirmation hearings started the following Tuesday, March 14, and the whole process was one of the speediest on record. The background investigation, committee hearings, and unanimous Senate vote to confirm me all took only seven days. The issue of my arrest record was handled in a closed session of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I had submitted the information in my written answers to committee
questions, and Sam Nunn said he didn’t see the need to bring it up in open session. Senator John Glenn of Ohio asked me in the closed session how I had managed to “clean up my act.” I replied, “I got married and gave up hanging out in bars.”

My official swearing-in ceremony was scheduled for the following week at the Pentagon. In the meantime, so that I could begin work right away, I needed to take the oath of office the day the Senate confirmed me. As a final tribute to the House of Representatives, I planned to have Jim Ford, chaplain of the House, swear me in, but moments after the Senate vote, I received a phone call from an Admiral Bill Owens at the Pentagon. He explained that he was going to be my military assistant and that he was on his way to my office with David O. “Doc” Cooke, who, Owens said, had sworn in every secretary of defense since Clark Clifford. Cooke, the senior career civil servant in the department and a much-revered figure, was popularly known as the Mayor of the Pentagon, and I decided that carrying on a Pentagon tradition would probably be a good thing.

Surrounded by my family and my congressional staff, I repeated after Doc Cooke the oath I had taken as a congressman and would later take as vice president, to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Accompanied by military aides and a newly assigned security detail, I left my congressional office for the last time, walked down the marble halls of the Cannon House Office Building, and went out the door and into an armored limousine. It was a moment of real transformation—and it felt like it. I had arrived at work that morning as the lone congressman from the state of Wyoming, responsible really only for my own vote. I was leaving that afternoon as the secretary of defense, in charge of the world’s most formidable military and the roughly four million men and women, military and civilian, who make up the Department of Defense. Fifteen minutes later, when I walked into the secretary’s suite at the Pentagon, a nameplate had already been placed on the desk that read, “Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense.”

__________

SATURDAY, MARCH 18, WAS my first full day on the job, and I had the limousine pick me up early. Accompanied by my military aide and security, I took the elevator from the Pentagon garage directly into my new office in the Pentagon E-ring, the outermost of the five concentric rings that make up the building. Inside the spacious office was a huge and ornate desk designed for General “Black Jack” Pershing, famed World War I commander, that the Pentagon inherited after Pershing’s death in 1948. On the wall across the room was a large world map, one of many maps I would have in this office over the next four years. Behind the world map was a small bedroom where later I would spend nights during Desert Storm.

Next to my desk was a small round table, where a lot of important decisions would be made during my time in office. At the end of every day, when we were all in town, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Don Atwood, deputy secretary of defense, and I would meet, often with our military assistants, to go over the key issues we were facing. Sometimes we’d kick out the aides, so it was just the three of us. This was where we did the heavy lifting.

As I settled in behind Pershing’s desk, Kathie Embody buzzed in to tell me that I was expected at a meeting in the White House residence later that morning. As the appointed hour approached, I got in the elevator to go down to the garage and pushed the wrong button, ending up in the basement of the Pentagon instead of in the garage. This would have been an easy mistake to remedy, except, as I discovered after I had gotten off and the doors had closed behind me, there was no button to call the elevator back to the basement. Someone had made a perfectly sensible security decision that people shouldn’t be able to ride from the basement straight into the secretary’s office, but what this meant for me was that the president of the United States was waiting, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to get to the garage and my limo.

I wandered around until I found some stairs headed up. At the top I could look through a glass window in a door out to where my limousine was parked and see a number of very upset aides running around, yelling,
I was sure, “Where the hell’s the secretary?” I straightened my tie, walked out, and got in my limousine, acting like nothing was wrong. I was driven to the White House for my meeting with the president—and no one ever had the nerve to ask me where I’d been.

ONE OF THE FIRST things I did at the Pentagon was ask to see an organizational chart of the Department of Defense. When I received it, I unrolled it and watched it fall off both sides of the Pershing desk. I rolled it back up and never looked at it again. I decided then and there that if I spent time trying to reorganize the Pentagon, I wouldn’t get anything done.

I wanted to address questions of grand strategy. We couldn’t yet be sure of the end result of glasnost and perestroika, the “openness” and “restructuring” that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was advocating, but we needed to address the matter of what changes in the Soviet Union might mean for our force structure and our strategy, from what we would need to fight an all-out global nuclear war to how to defeat anyone trying to dominate a region of the world vital to us.

I also wanted to focus on the operational command of the forces, the wartime system. When you go to the Department of Defense, you don’t know if you’re going to have to use the force, but it’s something I wanted to be prepared for. Early on, I asked for the after-action reports from major uses of force since the end of the Vietnam War. They laid out our successes and failures in those previous engagements, and I spent time studying them. I’ve always been convinced that we don’t do enough during the transition to a new administration to prepare those coming in for the possible use of the force. We spend a lot of time briefing on the SIOP—the Single Integrated Operational Plan—for launching our nuclear weapons, but any president is much more likely to have to use conventional or special operations forces, and we do little to prepare them for that.

I also wanted to spend significant time on intelligence matters, which had been a special interest of mine since my time on the House Intelligence Committee. As secretary of defense, I was in charge of a
larger portion of the government’s intelligence assets than the director of the CIA.

Finally, I had learned from long experience that nothing was more important than personnel. I could make the best possible policy decisions, but unless I had the people on board to execute those decisions, the policies wouldn’t succeed. When I took over the Pentagon, there were forty-four presidential-level appointments requiring Senate confirmation in DOD. Ultimately I put new people into thirty-nine of those positions.

Perhaps the single most important personnel decision I would make during my first six months was for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I began to think about it the first night I was secretary. I was well aware that if I made a mistake, I would have to live with it for two years and maybe four. Brent Scowcroft had already indicated his preference for reappointing Admiral Bill Crowe, who would be completing his second two-year term as chairman on October 1, 1989, but I wanted to make my own selection for the chairman’s job—a task that became easier when Crowe indicated to me that he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about serving another term.

I was leaning toward Colin Powell, whom I had met when I was on an Intelligence Committee trip in 1986. We had stopped in Germany, where Powell was commander of the U.S. Army’s V Corps. I subsequently had the opportunity to watch him work when he served as national security advisor in the aftermath of Iran-Contra at the end of the Reagan administration. I had been impressed enough with his abilities that I called him during the Reagan-Bush presidential transition and expressed the hope that we would have the opportunity to work together at some point in the future. I had no idea that that opportunity was just months away.

The weekend after the president had announced that I would be the secretary of defense, I paid a visit to an old friend, Frank Carlucci, who also happened to be my predecessor at the Pentagon. I sought Frank’s advice about running the department, and knowing that he had worked closely with Colin Powell during tours at Defense and the National
Security Council, I also asked his opinion about Powell as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Carlucci was enthusiastic.

General Powell was at that time in command of U.S. Forces Command, or FORSCOM, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, a post he’d gone to after leaving his Reagan White House assignment. I didn’t have to make a decision right away, but I was increasingly attracted to the idea of him as chairman.

A crucial job I had to fill immediately was deputy secretary of defense, a post more important than most cabinet secretaries. Don Atwood of Michigan, formerly vice chairman of General Motors, had been slotted to be John Tower’s deputy, and the president asked me to look at him. It was the only time the president weighed in with a suggestion, and it was a good one. Don was sometimes frustrated at the way Washington worked, especially the relations between the Defense Department and the Congress. He told me once that “at least at General Motors the board of directors wanted us to succeed.” But Atwood brought great managerial strength to the Pentagon and got us through many of our toughest problems, from reform of the procurement system to the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, which devastated Florida and Louisiana in 1992.

I chose Paul Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense for policy. A former ambassador and assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, Paul had the ability to offer new perspectives on old problems. He was also persistent. On more than one occasion, I sent him on his way after I had rejected a piece of advice or a policy suggestion, only to find him back in my office a half hour later continuing to press his point—and he was often right to do so.

As general counsel for the department, I recruited Terry O’Donnell, an Air Force Academy graduate and Vietnam veteran, whose wisdom and discretion I had first seen when he was President Ford’s personal aide and I was deputy chief of staff. David Addington, a CIA-trained attorney with experience working at both the White House and on Capitol Hill, became my special assistant. Bright, completely discreet, and with tremendous personal integrity, Addington was an ideal choice.

Pete Williams, who had been press secretary in my congressional office, became assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. A Stanford graduate, Pete was from my hometown of Casper, Wyoming, where he had once been news director of KTWO television. He had the intellect and judgment to know what he could say to the press and what had to remain confidential. Others from my personal staff, including Dave Gribbin, Patty Howe, Jim Steen, Kim McKernan, and Kathie Embody, moved to the Pentagon with me.

WITHOUT QUESTION ONE OF the most significant posts is that of senior military assistant to the secretary of defense. During my tenure, the military assistant was usually the first person I saw each morning when I arrived for work, and he accompanied me to many of my meetings throughout the day. Inside his office, right next to mine, there was a photograph on the wall taken during the Civil War that showed the military assistant’s supposed forebears. Called
Horse Holders,
the photo shows a number of junior officers holding the horses of Ulysses S. Grant’s commanders while they meet with the general. If the young men in that photograph were the predecessors of the military assistants I knew, they must have gone on to distinguished careers. My three military assistants all went on to become four-star officers. Admiral Bill Owens would serve as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Joe Lopez would command all U.S. naval forces in Europe, and General John Jumper would become air force chief of staff.

ON FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 1989, I held my first press conference. That morning a front-page story in the
Washington Post
reported that Air Force Chief of Staff, Larry Welch, had been negotiating directly with Congress about the future of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile systems. Specifically, the issue was whether we should continue to fund the MX missile system based in silos at Warren Air Force Base, outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. The alternative to the MX was a smaller, single-warhead system called the Midgetman. Both systems had benefits and drawbacks, and choosing between them—or coming up with a compromise—
was a major strategic decision for the secretary of defense and ultimately the president to make.