In My Time (83 page)

With my namesake, grandson Richard, on board Air Force II, summer 2007 (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

I cannot begin to imagine all the opportunities they will have and the ways in which their lives will unfold. They, too, have the blessings of love and the opportunities and freedoms only America can provide, and they have a grandfather who will be watching with great interest.

O
n the afternoon of January 20, 2009, as the president was getting ready to depart for Texas, I introduced him to supporters who had gathered at Andrews Air Force Base by saying that my eight years of service with him had been a special honor. He had made it possible for me to participate in momentous events, and as I looked back on what we had accomplished, nothing was more important than having kept the nation safe after the devastating attacks of 9/11. In that fight, he had been an outstanding leader, making tough decisions and inspiring others with the determination required for the war against a new kind of enemy. He had been a visceral and forthright commander, a president who strengthened all of us with his conviction. Few who experienced 9/11 will ever forget that September day when he stood at Ground Zero and promised “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

He had made some decisions I didn’t agree with, but he had paid me the high honor of listening to my views, which, of course, he did not have to do. History is full of examples of vice presidents who were kept far from the center of power. Indeed, I’ve known a few personally. But at the beginning George W. Bush had said that I would be part of governing. He had been—as I had known he would be—a man of his word.

For all of us who gathered at Andrews Air Force Base on January 20, it was the kind of event that completes one time in our lives and signals
that another has begun. And except for a veteran reporter or two, the Cheneys had to be the only ones at Andrews that afternoon who could remember being in the same place to see off another president thirty-two years earlier. Back then our daughters were little girls, and the president I had served had been voted out of office. Now Liz and Mary had children of their own, and this time the president was departing on his own terms, after eight years in office.

Being vice president certainly had its benefits, but I liked picking up where our family had left off in normal life. I got a new car, and it was good to be a driver again. I wanted to drive all the way to Wyoming, just as I had done in 1993 after leaving the Pentagon, but Lynne didn’t think that was such a great idea. I acquired a BlackBerry, began to do a little emailing, and even sent a text message or two. Instead of the intelligence briefings that used to begin the day, I had to make do again with the morning newspapers. As it turned out, they were still filled with stories and commentaries critical of the Bush administration’s national security record. I could read all of this and accept it in silence, but only for so long.

On his second full day in office, President Obama signed an executive order directing that the detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be closed within a year. He also ordered an end to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, all of this in keeping with his many repeated and categorical pledges on the matter during the 2008 campaign. As a candidate, he had cast the issue in terms of constitutional imperatives, basic American values, and elementary standards of human rights—often in a tone suggesting that we in the Bush administration had not considered any of these, or, indeed, had violated them. Senator Obama had not really been challenged on such assertions during the presidential race. His opponent, Senator John McCain, actually agreed with Obama on some crucial points. And John’s preference, in any case, was that President Bush and I lie low and let him frame the election in his own way. Personally, I felt that a straightforward defense by the president and me would be better than no rebuttal at all from the White House, but it was John’s campaign and he deserved to run it the way he wanted.

Even so, in those early days of the Obama administration, my first instinct was to let the criticism pass. But the subject kept coming up, and the president and members of his administration were making assertions about the program and its value that were inaccurate. I remembered two documents in particular that I had seen as vice president. They were CIA reports, one of which specified what we had learned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after he had been subjected to enhanced interrogation. The other reported on the pivotal role that detainee questioning had played in our battle against al Qaeda. It seemed to me that if the American people were going to have an informed debate about Bush administration counterterrorism policies, and enhanced interrogation in particular, they should have the facts about the intelligence we gained—and the attacks we prevented—through the program.

I wanted another look at the documents, so on March 31, 2009, I took a trip to the National Archives in downtown D.C. and reviewed them in a secure reading room. The reports were just as I recalled, and I filled out a form making an official request that they be declassified. Before I had a response to my request, the president decided to declassify a different set of documents. These were the memos produced by the Bush administration Justice Department that explained the legal rationale supporting enhanced interrogation and also detailed the particular methods involved. At about the same time, President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, signaled the possibility that the lawyers who prepared these memos and the intelligence officers who conducted enhanced interrogations might face professional sanction or even criminal prosecution.

I was appalled that the new administration would even consider punishing honorable public servants who had carried out the Bush administration’s lawful policies and kept the country safe. I was also deeply concerned about the selective fashion in which sensitive information was being declassified and made public. The administration had just revealed to the world, including our enemies, methods used to question detainees thought to have information about future attacks. Yet the information
in the memos I had requested—detailing all we had learned, and the attacks we had stopped through the enhanced interrogation program—was being kept secret. A few weeks after President Obama released the legal memos, I heard from CIA Director Leon Panetta, a colleague and friend from my days in the House. He wrote to tell me that my request was being denied.

I had scheduled a speech on these matters for Thursday, May 21, 2009, at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank with which I have been long affiliated. On Monday of that week, the White House announced that President Obama would also be giving a speech that day at about the same time. I think his speech was meant to preempt mine, but I was happy to slide the time for mine back so that he could speak first. The result was what the media called “dueling speeches.”

In his speech, President Obama reaffirmed his pledge to follow the “imperative” of closing Guantanamo within a year, adding that the facility had “likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.” Indeed, he said, “By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it.” On the matter of enhanced interrogation, he said, “I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation,” and called the techniques we had authorized “torture.” Such methods, the president explained, had all arisen from the “expedience” of the previous administration, at an unacceptable cost to conscience and to the fundamental values of our country: “They are not who we are, and they are not America.”

When my turn came, I recalled the days after 9/11 and the absolute determination of the Bush administration to make sure our nation never again faced such a day of horror. The key to ensuring that was intelligence, and we gave our intelligence officers the tools and lawful authority they needed to gain information, some of it known only to the worst of the terrorists, through tough interrogation, if need be. The interrogations had the sole purpose of gaining specific information that would save American lives and did in fact yield such
information. I called again for the release of the memos that would prove just that.

To describe what we had done as a program of torture, I said, “is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.” I also challenged the whole assumption that American values were abandoned, or even compromised, in the fight against terrorists:

For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.

In my long political career I had seen politicians run for the hills when things got tough, trying to distance themselves from those on the ground when subpoenas started arriving. I had no intention of turning my back on honorable public servants. To the contrary, I counted it a privilege to speak in their defense.

Two years later, as I write in the spring of 2011, I am happy to note that for President Obama the “imperative” of closing Guantanamo has evolved into the necessity of keeping it open. The memos I asked for were eventually released. They are available on the Internet, and I used them
in writing this book
.

On May 1, 2011, President Obama announced that we had located and killed Osama bin Laden in a compound an hour or so outside Islamabad, Pakistan. Through years of hard work by our intelligence professionals and our military, we were able to track down the world’s most wanted terrorist. It was a moving day for all Americans, and President Obama deserves credit for making the call to send our special forces in to act on the intelligence. He should honor all the brave Americans who helped make this mission possible, including the men and women of the CIA interrogation program, who obtained some of the intelligence
we relied on to find bin Laden. They do not deserve to be the targets of ongoing investigations and possible prosecution. They deserve to be decorated.

The exchange I had with the president in the spring of 2009 was an unexpected detour. There were plenty of younger Republican leaders to carry on in the cause, and I hardly aspired to be Barack Obama’s principal adversary. I also had a book to get moving on and a few other concerns that wouldn’t wait.

One of them was a new turn in some old health issues. I’d had an amazing run since my first heart attack in 1978. All along the way I had benefited from advances in medical research and technology—and fabulous doctors. After my fourth heart attack in 2000, my cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner of George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., advised that I have an implantable cardioverterdefibrillator, or ICD, placed in my chest. It’s a device that shocks the heart back to normal rhythm if necessary. Mine didn’t go off for the eight years I was in office, but around Christmas 2009, while I was backing my car out of the garage of our house in Wyoming, everything went blank. I had gone into ventricular fibrillation. Somebody else would likely be telling the story right now if the ICD hadn’t kicked in to do exactly what it’s supposed to do.

By the summer of 2010, I was rapidly descending into end-stage heart failure. Dr. Reiner recommended that I consider a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, which is essentially a battery-operated pump that helps the heart push blood to the body. I entered Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia, which has an outstanding LVAD program, on July 6 for surgery two days later, but declined so rapidly that the doctors decided they needed to go in right away. In long overnight surgery, the LVAD was implanted.

It was not easy surgery and I was in the intensive care unit for many weeks. I received wonderful medical attention and love and care from Lynne, Liz, and Mary. The mind is an amazing thing, and during the weeks I was unconscious, I had a prolonged dream, more vivid than any I’ve ever had, about a beautiful place in Italy. It was in the countryside, a
little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there. I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of newspapers. It was a lengthy and very pleasant stay, far preferable to a daily awareness of where I really was and what was really happening.