The American Vice Presidency (81 page)

Selecting his running mate, Gore broke new ground by choosing Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a dedicated moderate and champion of the state of Israel, as the first member of the Jewish faith to serve on a national ticket. The Republican nominee, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, meanwhile asked the former congressman and defense secretary Richard Cheney to find the best running mate for him, and Cheney wound up being chosen himself, as described in the next chapter.

In emulation of the Clinton-Gore bus tours, Gore and Lieberman kicked off their campaign on a Mississippi riverboat but failed to replicate the magic of the earlier romp; their chemistry was just not there. Gore set a populist tone for the campaign by declaring, “The difference in this election is, they’re for the powerful, we’re for the people.”
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In saying so, Gore appeared to be casting his lot more with the old FDR and Truman Democrats than with the New Democrats of Clinton, a matter that in time came to be a bone of contention with the cantankerous Lieberman.

In what was developing into an extremely close race between Gore and Bush, the vice president joined the first of three debates with high expectations against the Ivy Leaguer–turned–Texan son of a former president, known for often wrestling with the English language and getting pinned. In the first meeting Gore came off as a bullying know-it-all, to his detriment
in postdebate analyses. Some of Bush’s answers brought smirks, audible sighs of impatience, and incredulity and raised eyebrows from the superior-posturing Gore.

The campaign ended with polls indicating a very close race but with no indication of the astonishing and unprecedented outcome. Although Gore had won the national popular vote by more than half a million ballots, neither candidate had a majority in the electoral college. After weeks of recounting and appraising a relative handful of votes in the single state of Florida, Bush was awarded its twenty-five electoral votes and the presidency in a split decision of the United States Supreme Court. In a battle of lawyers and political wits between the Gore and Bush campaigns, the highest federal court, of Republican majority composition at the time, voted to intervene in a state election against the court’s own longstanding precedent to leave such matters to the lower courts.

And so Albert A. Gore Jr. was obliged to decide whether this shattering blow to his lifelong aspiration would end his political career or whether he would try a third bid. He was only fifty-two years old and had plenty of time to seek the presidency again in 2004, or 2008, or even beyond. Instead, Gore turned away from politics altogether and created for himself a distinguished career as a groundbreaking thinker and innovator in the field of global environment. In 2007, he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work and wrote an award-winning book alerting the world to the perils of climate change,
An Inconvenient Truth
. He became, among other things, the founder and chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection and Current TV but seemed destined to be remembered in the history books as the victim of perhaps the single-most significant political decision ever handed down by the highest judicial body in the land.

RICHARD B. CHENEY

OF WYOMING

M
any leading American public figures in the early years shunned the vice presidency as a political dead end. But as time passed, many others looked to it as the best stepping-stone to presidential nomination. In 2000, Richard Cheney had no such expectation as a man whose history of multiple heart attacks seemingly disqualified him. Instead, he agreed to assist a presidential nominee in finding a running mate, vetting a number of prospects on their qualifications, and in the end finding—himself. He then disavowed any intention to reach higher, content to focus on defending and enhancing the power of the office to which he vowed not to aspire.

Yet it fell to Cheney, in the first hours of the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks on American soil, to assert ultimate presidential powers in directing the nation’s first responses to the crisis. It was Cheney who, shortly after the first two hijacked aircraft struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, in New York, learned of another seized plane heading toward Washington and issued the order to shoot it down. He said later he had acted after conveying the situation to President George W. Bush. But there was, and has remained, conflicting testimony and evidence of any such notification. There was also the question of whether, beyond the imperative of immediate action, any authority ever existed for a vice president to issue such an order. Nevertheless Dick Cheney unhesitatingly filled
the breach in behalf of the president and thereafter functioned more in the nature of an assistant president than any of his forty-five predecessors.

Indeed, one perceptive analyst of the Bush-Cheney relationship has argued convincingly that although Cheney was “the most powerful vice president in U.S. history,” his real legacy is “his role as co-president.” Shirley Anne Warshaw, a professor of political science at Gettysburg College, has written that he took advantage of Bush’s inexperience in dealing with Congress and foreign policy to carve out for himself, with Bush’s full acquiescence, a clear “division of labor” in the running of his administration. At the start, with Bush more interested in and occupied with a faith-based agenda popularized as “compassionate conservatism,” Warshaw wrote, Cheney was able to take control of the key policies in the fields of energy, national security, and, eventually, the extension of presidential power that were at the heart of the George W. Bush White House years. And when the 9/11 terrorist attacks intruded, the response and the subsequent pivot to the invasion of Iraq naturally fell to Cheney’s assigned area of responsibility, with Bush again relying on him with his superior experience and aggressive assertion of that extended power.
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Still, critics charged that in his actions Cheney flirted with long-term damage to both the presidency and the vice presidency, claiming he usurped the first and made the second the instrument of great constitutional mischief. As a result, future presidents may become warier about how they delegate to their presidents-in-waiting, keeping them on a shorter leash than Bush allowed Cheney.

The man who generated such musings came from solid American stock, reaching back to ancestors who arrived from England in the 1630s, when the first of his Puritan ancestors sailed to the New England coast. There they and their descendants took part in the building of a new nation, and eventually his great-grandfather Samuel Fletcher Cheney was engaged in its preservation. In the mid-1800s, Samuel moved his family west to Defiance, Ohio, and when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter he joined the Union army, serving for the duration of the Civil War. He survived thirty-four battles in that time and also marched with General William Tecumseh Sherman from Atlanta to the sea and later with him past the White House, where they received and returned the salute of President Andrew Johnson.

Richard Herbert Cheney, the father of the future vice president, was
working for the Soil Conservation Service in Syracuse, Nebraska, when in 1940 he met and married Marjorie Dickey, daughter of the owner of the café where bachelor Cheney took his meals. On January 30, 1941, the young Cheneys had a son, also named Richard, born in Lincoln. After Pearl Harbor the elder Richard worked for the Department of Agriculture and in 1944 joined the navy. On his return he went back to Lincoln and the Soil Conservation Service and later was transferred with his family, now including another son, Bobby, and a daughter, Sue, to Casper, Wyoming. Both parents, beneficiaries of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, were loyal FDR Democrats.
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Young Dick became an avid fisherman and a football player at the local high school, where he met Lynne Vincent, a top student who also excelled as a baton-twirling majorette, and began his courtship of her. In 1958, Dick Cheney, selected for Wyoming Boys State, attended an academic summer camp at Northwestern University. A local independent oilman offered Cheney a full scholarship to the oilman’s alma mater, Yale, for which he was a regional recruiter.
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It was quite a culture change for the boy from the plains and mountain states to be thrown in with many graduates of elite prep schools. Later, he wrote about his study habits: “I found some kindred souls, young men like me, who were not adjusting very well and shared my opinion that beer was one of the essentials of life.”
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After his freshman year, he lost the scholarship but was allowed to return with a student loan, but he “continued to accumulate bad grades and disciplinary notices.” In the spring of 1962, he was kicked out of Yale.
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Returning to Wyoming, he joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as a ground man, laying power transmission lines there and in Utah and Colorado. After work, he would join fellow crew members in local bars, later writing about that time, “I managed to get arrested twice within a year for driving under the influence.”
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Aware he was on the wrong course and told by his girlfriend, Lynne, that he would have to change his ways or lose her,
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Cheney then stayed out of the bars. He moved to Laramie and enrolled at the University of Wyoming, and in 1964 they were married in Casper. Under a grant, half of which was paid by the state Republican Party, he worked as an intern at the State of Wyoming Legislature in Cheyenne, leading to a Ford Foundation fellowship and work in the Madison
office of the Republican governor Warren Knowles of Wisconsin, where he and Lynne continued graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. He traveled with the campaigning Knowles, further whetting his appetite for practicing politics.

Earlier, upon attaining draft age at eighteen, Cheney had registered and twice thereafter was classified 1-A, but over the next eight years he applied for and received four student deferments and a fifth in 1966, when Lynne was pregnant.
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He later wrote that had he been called up in the draft he “would have been happy to serve,”
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but years later in 1980, at the time of his Senate confirmation hearings to be secretary of defense, he acknowledged, “I had other priorities in the 1960s than military service.”
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In 1968, Cheney received an American Political Science Association fellowship in Washington and was interviewed for a job by the freshman Republican congressman Donald Rumsfeld of Illinois. He apparently didn’t impress Rumsfeld and signed up to work for Wisconsin congressman Bill Steiger.
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Subsequently he was hired to handle congressional relations for the Office of Economic Opportunity, the anti-poverty agency. He came under, of all people, Don Rumsfeld, drafted by President Richard Nixon to downsize the agency. When Rumsfeld was made Nixon’s director of the Cost of Living Council, Cheney went with him.
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Upon Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, chose Rumsfeld to head his transition team, bringing Cheney along. When Ford made Rumsfeld his White House chief of staff, Cheney became Rumsfeld’s deputy at age thirty-three, without ever having met Ford. In a subsequent shakeup in November 1975, Ford sent Rumsfeld to the Pentagon as secretary of defense and put Cheney in the top White House staff job at age thirty-four.

Through all this time, Dick Cheney had been regarded as essentially a mild-mannered, hard-working bureaucrat of little-revealed ideological cast. The Secret Service code name for Cheney was “Backseat,” and it seemed appropriate. When Ford suggested that his chief of staff be given cabinet status, he demurred, observing later, “The top staff guy is still a staff guy.”
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In advance of Ford’s bid for a full term in 1976, Cheney and Rumsfeld, aware of conservative dissatisfaction with the liberal vice president Nelson Rockefeller as next in the line of presidential succession, urged Ford to
drop him as his running mate. They wrote Ford a detailed memo and attached their signed letters of resignation. “This wasn’t a matter of saying unless you accept our recommendations, we will quit,” Cheney wrote later. “Rather, we were telling Ford that if his idea of changes included moving us, we’d make it easy for him.”
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In any event, Ford finally got Rockefeller to step aside while publicly saying otherwise, but the Republican ticket lost anyway to Democrats Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

Four years later at the national convention in Detroit, as a lowly freshman congressman from Wyoming, Cheney joined former Ford administration officials in weighing the prospect of having Ford as the retired president become Ronald Reagan’s running mate—the fanciful “copresidency.” Both Ford and Reagan eventually rejected the idea.

Cheney climbed rapidly in the Republican congressional leadership, in 1986 serving on the House committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, wherein the Reagan administration illegally traded arms in return for financial aid to the anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. On this committee, the Cheney staff aide David Addington argued that as commander in chief the president had unchallengeable executive powers. Cheney joined him in declaring that the Constitution “does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power” and that any such laws “should be struck down.”
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He also wrote a long paper attacking “congressional overreaching in foreign policy,” and he called for repeal of the War Powers Resolution, saying he could not accept “such a limited view of the president’s inherent constitutional powers.”
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