www.nybooks.com/articles/19376
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, with Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views Government Printing Office, 690 pp.
Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this guy." The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave. "He was in with the freshman football players, whose major activity was playing cards and horsing around and talking a lot," his freshman roommate told the Yale Daily News, not exactly addressing the enigma. "Wasn't gonna go to college and buckle down" and "I didn't like the East" are two versions of how Cheney himself failed to address it. As an undergraduate at the University of Wyoming he interned with the Wyoming State Senate, which was, in a state dominated by cattle ranchers and oil producers and Union Pacific management, heavily Republican. This internship appears to have been when Cheney began identifying himself as a Republican. He never wrote a dissertation ("did all the work for my doctorate except the dissertation," as if the dissertation were not the point) and so never got the doctorate in political science for which he then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. When, in 1968, at age twenty-seven, a no-longer-draft-eligible "academic" with a wife and a child and no PhD and no clear clamor for his presence, he left Wisconsin for Washington, he managed to meet the already powerful Donald Rumsfeld about a fellowship in his House office. Cheney, by his own description and again failing to address the enigma, "flunked the interview." He retreated back to the only place at the table, the office of a freshman Republican Wisconsin congressman, Bill Steiger, for whom Cheney was said to be not a first choice and whose enthusiasm for increased environmental and workplace protections did not immediately suggest the Cheney who during his own ten years in Wyoming's single congressional seat would vote with metronomic regularity against any legislation tending in either direction. The potential rewards of Washington appear to have mobilized Cheney as those of New Haven and Madison had not. Within the year, he was utilizing Steiger to make another move on Rumsfeld, who had been asked by Richard M Nixon to join his new administration as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Cheney, James Mann wrote in Rise of the Vulcans, noticed a note on Steiger's desk from Rumsfeld, looking for advice and help in his new OEO job. Over a weekend, he wrote an unsolicited memo for Steiger on how to staff and run a federal agency. Rumsfeld hired Cheney, and, over the next few years, as he moved up in the Nixon administration, took Cheney with him. Again, in 1974, after the Nixon resignation, when Rumsfeld was asked to become Gerald Ford's chief of staff, he made Cheney his deputy. In Cheney, Rumsfeld had found a right hand who took so little for granted that he would later, by the account of his daughter Mary, make a three-hour drive from Casper to Laramie to have coffee with three voters, two of whom had been in his wedding. In Rumsfeld, who would be described by Henry Kissinger as "a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly," Cheney had found a model. In the Ford White House, where he and Rumsfeld were known as "the little Praetorians," Cheney cultivated a control of detail that extended even to questioning the use in the residence of "little dishes of salt with funny little spoons" rather than "regular salt shakers." Together, Cheney and Rumsfeld contrived to marginalize Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president and edge him off the 1976 ticket. They convinced Ford that Kissinger was a political liability who should no longer serve as both secretary of state and national security adviser. They managed the replacement of William Colby as CIA chief with George HW Bush, a move interpreted by many as a way of rendering Bush unavailable to be Ford's running mate in 1976. They managed the replacement of James Schlesinger as secretary of defense with Rumsfeld himself. Cheney later described his role in such maneuvers as "the sand in the gears," the person who, for example, made sure that when Rockefeller was giving a speech the amplifier was turned down. In 1975, when Ford named Rumsfeld secretary of defense, it was Cheney, then thirty-four, who replaced Rumsfeld as chief of staff. In May, during a commencement address at Louisiana State University, Cheney mentioned this long relationship with Rumsfeld by way of delivering the message that "gratitude, in general, is a good habit to get into": I think, for example, of the first time I met my friend and colleague Don Rumsfeld. It was back in the 1960s, when he was a congressman and I was interviewing for a fellowship on Capitol Hill. Congressman Rumsfeld agreed to talk to me, but things didn't go all that well.... We didn't click that day, but a few years later it was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work and offered me a position in the executive branch. Note the modest elision ("it was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work") of the speaker's own active role in these events. What Cheney wanted to stress that morning in Baton Rouge was not his own dogged tracking of the more glamorous Rumsfeld but the paths one had possibly "not expected to take," the "unexpected turns," the "opportunities that come suddenly and change one's plans overnight." The exact intention of these commencement remarks may be unknowable (a demonstration of loyalty? Nor did it seem accidental that the President and the Vice President were taking equally stubborn and equally inexplicable lines on the matter of Rumsfeld's and by extension their own grasp on the war in Iraq. "I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation," George W Bush said in response to a reporter's question during a Rose Garden event. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense." The question of where the President gets the notions known to the nation as "I'm the decider" and within the White House as "the unitary executive theory" leads pretty fast to the blackout zone that is the Vice President and his office. It was the Vice President who took the early offensive on the contention that whatever the decider decides to do is by definition legal. "We believe, Jim, that we have all the legal authority we need," the Vice President told Jim Lehrer on PBS after it was reported that the National Security Agency was conducting warrantless wiretapping in violation of existing statutes. It was the Vice President who pioneered the tactic of not only declaring such apparently illegal activities legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their behalf. "Bottom line is we've been very active and very aggressive defending the nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that," the Vice President advised reporters on a flight to Oman last December. It was the Vice President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S Addington, that supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the...
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