The American Vice Presidency (83 page)

Furthermore, the legal framework was classified, protected from congressional or public scrutiny. The practical effect was to leave the direction of what the administration called “the war on terror” in the hands of the president and of this uncommonly powerful vice president. Without seeking required congressional authorization for warrantless domestic spying, Cheney brought to Bush a simple presidential “signing statement” drafted by Addington, creating the new Terrorist Surveillance Program, and he signed it three weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Captured and detained prisoners were sent to a prison facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, posing more questions as to their status under international law. Cheney had Addington draw up a draft stipulating that captured terrorists had no right to any American court procedure and could be held indefinitely. If they were to be tried at all it would be by military commissions run by the Pentagon.

When the concerned secretary of state Colin Powell initiated a panel to consider the matter, Cheney ignored it, and when Attorney General John Ashcroft went to the White House to object, Cheney and Addington told him they had already run the military commissions by their man in the Office of Legal Counsel. Cheney declared that no terrorist deserved to be “treated as a prisoner of war” protected by the Geneva Conventions, which among other things prohibit the use of torture to extract information.
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In
making the decision public, Bush used Addington’s artful guideline: that they would be dealt with “humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions.”
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Cheney subsequently insisted in an interview, “We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties.”
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Meanwhile, Cheney urged Bush to press the United Nations on Iraq’s repeated violations of UN resolutions against the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and to plan for possible military action. In October 2002, Congress authorized the use of military force against Iraq, and in November the UN Security Council voted unanimously to give Saddam Hussein “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations” by providing immediate and unrestricted access to UN weapons inspectors.
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In late January 2003, with sixteen words in his State of the Union address to Congress, Bush unwittingly triggered accusations that, to justify military intervention, he was using false information about an Iraqi quest for uranium required to manufacture WMDs. “The British government,” he said, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” which turned out not to be the case.
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Cheney got further involved after seeing in his classified daily intelligence briefing a Defense Intelligence Agency report that the government of Niger had signed an agreement to sell five hundred tons of the rare material a year to Baghdad. He asked the CIA for clarification. Unknown to Cheney at the time, Valerie Plame Wilson, an agent of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Center, had volunteered that her husband, Joseph Wilson, familiar with Niger as a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, might be willing to go and investigate. He did so and found no evidence of any such sale.

Meanwhile, the administration’s prime premise for the urgency in invading Iraq was coming under increasing doubt. Cheney paid several visits to the CIA, ostensibly to press for more proof. The president finally sent a reluctant Colin Powell to the UN armed with what Powell insisted was an air-tight indictment against the Iraqi regime. He spent nearly three hours before television cameras offering “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” that, in his contention, established the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the means to make and hide them. But Powell
offered only diagrams and sketches of such alleged equipment rather than actual photos from an administration famed for its high-altitude, highdefinition technology. Later, Powell’s own tardy skepticism led him to say that the presentation was “the lowest point in [his] life” and a “blot” on his distinguished military and diplomatic career. When the Security Council appeared unwilling to approve a further use-of-force resolution, Bush decided to act without one.
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On the night of March 19, 2003, on intelligence that Saddam Hussein might be at a certain site in Iraq, Bush got Cheney alone and asked him whether he should go after the Iraqi strongman. Cheney advised him to do so, and so began the U.S. invasion. The air attack failed to hit its prey, but Operation Iraqi Freedom was underway.

That summer, Cheney found himself embroiled in a dispute over the false report of Iraq’s quest for uranium in Niger and Joseph Wilson’s trip there rebutting the claim. All hell broke lose when columnist Robert Novak identified Wilson’s wife, Valerie, as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction,” attributing the information to “two senior administration officials.” She was thereby deprived of the anonymity of her classified status, leaving the CIA with much egg on its face. Democratic legislators jumped all over the story, and on July 30 the agency quietly asked that the FBI investigate the leak.

The eventual upshot was a special prosecutor’s 2005 indictment of Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on one count of obstructing justice, two of perjury, and two of making false statements, followed by his 2007 conviction on four of those charges. He was not charged with leaking classified intelligence, apparently because two years earlier Bush had signed an executive order extending to the vice president, for the first time in U.S. history, the power to classify and declassify documents. According to the author Charlie Savage, this made Cheney “the full equal to the president” in terms of releasing such information.
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Hence, if Cheney told Libby to inform reporters that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative, as alleged in grand jury testimony, his action in Addington’s view amounted to a declassification.
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The columnist Novak, who died in 2009, never named his sources, but Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a close lieutenant to Secretary Colin Powell, acknowledged to the Justice Department that he had
told Novak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA job. Bush commuted Libby’s sentence of jail time but, to the outspoken disappointment of Cheney, declined to pardon his chief of staff. The vice president wrote later, “In the long term, where doing the right thing counts, George W. Bush was, in my view, making a grave error. ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘you are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.’ ”
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Later, Cheney said in an interview that the matter was “probably the most tense aspect of our relationship,” but that he “appreciated the fact that [Libby] did not have to do any prison time.”
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Another casualty of the whole affair was the relationship between Cheney and Colin Powell. After a cabinet meeting on October 7, 2003, reporters asked Bush who had leaked Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment at the CIA, and he said he didn’t know but wanted the truth. Cheney wrote later, “Thinking back, I realize that one of the few people in the world who could have told him the truth, Colin Powell, was sitting right next to him.”
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But one other person who might have been able to tell Bush the truth was Cheney himself. In front of the grand jury, Libby said he did not recall Cheney’s telling him to inform reporters about Wilson’s wife but that it was possible.
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In a later interview for this book, Cheney said, “The leaker was not in my office,” adding that the leaker was Armitage.
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The most heated controversy surrounding Cheney as the 2004 presidential campaign approached was his unsubstantiated contention of a possible link between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Saddam Hussein regime. It finally raised some speculation about Cheney being dropped from the Republican reelection ticket. Cheney reported later that on three occasions he suggested to Bush that he might consider replacing him, but Bush said each time he wanted to stick with his vice president.
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In the campaign, Cheney kept a relatively low profile. The election was close, with Bush and Cheney winning with 51 percent of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes compared with 48 percent and 251 votes in the electoral college for Kerry and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, his running mate. There was insufficient sentiment for changing horses during wartime.

In the second term, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and obliterated much of New Orleans, Bush asked Cheney to head up a cabinet-level relief task force, but he declined, insisting, “It would put me in a role
that was primarily symbolic … a figurehead without the ability really to do anything about the performance of the federal agencies.”
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Bush didn’t hesitate to call Cheney out for his refusal. According to an aide at the meeting, Bush said, “I asked Dick if he’d be interested in spearheading this. Let’s just say I didn’t get the most positive response.” Then, turning to Cheney, Bush asked, “Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?” Cheney replied, “That’ll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise.”
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In the war in Iraq, the capture of Saddam Hussein provided a balm to impatience at home for a time, but Cheney only left himself open to charges of false optimism by declaring in May 2005 that the war was “in the last throes.”
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By late 2006, as the war in Iraq dragged on, Bush finally decided, against Cheney’s strenuous objections, to remove Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and replace him with Robert Gates, a man of strong resolve but of more pliable and diplomatic manner. Concerned about a drift in determination to see the fight through, Cheney lobbied hard and successfully for a major troop increase, which Bush finally embraced, sending a surge of twenty thousand more troops into Iraq. Also, significantly for Cheney, the American detention center at Guantánamo remained open, and by 2007 the course of American policy in Iraq was essentially set for the rest of the Bush presidency. Although in 2005 Congress approved limits on the interrogation of detainees complying with the Geneva Conventions, Bush subsequently signed an executive order basically endorsing Cheney’s advocacy of harsh methods, drawing a line only against unspecified “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
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In the 2008 presidential campaign, both Bush and Cheney took a back seat, and upon the defeat of the Republican ticket of Senator John McCain of Arizona and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, Cheney returned to Wyoming, where he regularly expressed criticism of Democratic efforts to end the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the summer of 2010, he again underwent a successful implant of an electronic device to assure the proper functioning of his heart.

Of all other American vice presidents up to Cheney’s time, none had made more of the office, both in affecting policy and in defending and expanding the power of the executive branch of the government. Cheney and his chief aides authored more muscular rules for dealing with enemy
combatants than ever set before under a concept of unlimited presidential power, especially in time of war. Yet his zeal in cementing the vice presidency’s stature and influence in high executive policy also drew much bitter and angry opposition, escalating, for good or ill, the public profile of the office to a record high and the powers delegated to or seized by him as well.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR
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OF DELAWARE

B
y the time two vice presidents—Al Gore and Dick Cheney—had enjoyed significant roles in the administrations in which they served, the office had finally begun to lose its reputation as a political dead end. Still, some politicians who already held influential positions were not sure they wanted to serve in a job whose prime constitutional role was to wait in the wings as a standby for the president.

One such man was Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee and before that chairman of its Judiciary Committee. In both positions, Biden had been intricately engaged in the nation’s most critical involvements in international and legal affairs. In 2008, at age sixty-five when the Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama approached him about being his running mate, Biden’s prospects for succeeding to the presidency after four or eight years of an Obama administration seemed slim.

Biden had already run twice for the presidency himself without success, in 1987 for the 1988 Democratic nomination and then in early 2008. Both times he had returned to the Senate, where he had comfortably and contentedly served for thirty-six years. So when speculation first started about his possible selection as vice president, he denied interest, as well as in being secretary of state in the next Democratic administration. “They are the only two things that would be of interest to anyone,” he said in April. “I’ve made
it clear I don’t want either one of them.… I’m satisfied where I am right now.” When Obama asked him whether he would agree to be vetted for the vice presidency, he reported, “I said I’d have to think about it.”
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