Steve Hayes: Interviewed about his biography of Dick Cheney
FP: Steve Hayes, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Hayes: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be back.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Hayes: The longer I covered the Bush Administration the more surprised I was that there was no full-length biography of Dick Cheney. When I started the project in the fall of 2004, it was already clear just how influential Cheney had been during George W. Bush’s first term.
Just as interesting to me, was Cheney’s long history working at the highest levels of the U.S. government. He was the youngest White House chief of staff in history when he took that job with Gerald Ford, and with just a few short breaks, he has been “in the room” for the shaping of U.S. policy over much of the last half century. My thought was that if I could get him to share some of those stories, I’d have a pretty good book.
FP: Let’s talk about Cheney’s intellectual journey a little bit. How did Cheney become a conservative?
Hayes: One of the things that surprised me as I researched and reported the book was just how late Cheney developed his political identity. His parents were FDR Democrats and Cheney’s first experience with the Republican Party – an internship with the Wyoming State Legislature – came as an accident. (The other young man who had the internship wanted to work for the Democrats and Cheney, having no preference, ended up with the GOP.)
Even after he came to Washington, Cheney did not have strong views about the role of the government. His experience writing the regulations for Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls – and later enforcing those rules – gave him a firsthand look at the limits of government power and the deleterious effects of good intentions. (Cheney served as the typist for the group that pulled an all-nighter drafting the regulations that would govern huge aspects of the U.S. economy.)
But I think Cheney’s experience growing up in Wyoming helped shape his worldview, too. Wyoming is sort of a throwback to the rugged individualism that defined the Old West. Wyomingites believe that they should be left alone to solve their own problems and they are very skeptical of federal government intervention. Cheney would come to personify those values later in his political career.
FP: Why does Cheney tend to decline prestigious jobs in favor of drudge work?
Hayes: As your question implies, Cheney did this several times over his long career. Cheney has always been someone who preferred to do his work out of the spotlight. During his congressional fellowship in the mid-1960s, he opted to do policy work for a young member of the House of Representatives rather than taking a more glamorous position doing press relations for a prominent senator.
One time in the Nixon Administration, Cheney turned down an opportunity to work on the 1972 Nixon campaign in favor of remaining on the staff of the Cost of Living Council. Cheney had been doing some work for the Nixon reelection effort after he finished his days working on economic issues. As something of a reward, both Cheney and a colleague were given an opportunity to move full-time to the Campaign to Re-elect the President (CREEP). Cheney passed, which was a good thing for his career.
Even as a member of Congress, Cheney preferred the low-profile, behind-the-scenes work of the Intelligence Committee to the committees and assignments that would have given him more publicity.
The reason for this is simple: He prefers the substance of policy issues to the glad-handing of campaign-style politics. If some politicians run for office for the fame and (sometimes) adulation that such a job offers, Cheney does not. Sometimes I think he would have been just as happy working as one of the powerful but anonymous bureaucrats that shape the national agenda.
FP: Can you talk a bit about the two "near misses" that could have brought an early end to Cheney’s political career?
Hayes: Sure, one of them was Cheney’s decision to pass on a job with the Nixon re-elect in 1972. His colleague, Bart Porter, went on to work for CREEP and eventually spent time in jail for his role in the Watergate cover-up.
Two years later, when Donald Rumsfeld brought Cheney into the Ford White House as deputy chief of staff, the FBI raised some concerns about two DUI arrests Cheney had gotten in the 1960s. Rumsfeld, who was the incoming chief of staff to Ford, called Cheney to his office to ask him about his scrapes with the law. Rumsfeld was less concerned with the actual offenses – he’d known Cheney for several years at that point – than he was with Cheney’s honesty in completing the FBI paperwork about his background. He wanted to know whether Cheney had disclosed the arrests on the forms. Cheney said that he had volunteered the information. Rumsfeld told me that he walked down the hall to the Oval Office for a “long conversation” with President Ford with the goal of keeping Cheney in the job. It worked, and a year later Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff and his career took off from there.
FP: In what way did Cheney transform a traditionally inconsequential office?
Hayes: Most of us have heard John Nance Garner’s description of the vice presidency as no better than a “warm bucket of spit.” In terms of his capacity to influence policy from that position, Garner, who was vice president under FDR, was right.
In 1996, Dick Cheney was asked whether he’d consider an offer to be Bob Dole’s runningmate. He said no. The vice presidency, he told a gathering in Casper, Wyoming, is “a cruddy job.”
A lot has changed since then, obviously. Much of Cheney’s power can be traced to two decisions he made early in the administration: his unwillingness to talk to the news media and his decision not to run to succeed Bush. When I interviewed President Bush, he mentioned those things specifically. Here’s how he put it, in a passage I didn’t include in the book: “You've never read a story where the Vice President's Office is concerned about the recent presidential decision, what it may do for the X, Y, Z. And that even keeps Richard Cheney -- Dick Cheney closer. It makes it much easier. I am blessed to have a guy who is smart, capable, and tells me what's on his mind, and doesn't have a political bone in his body. In other words, I can safely say that Vice President Cheney has left the comforts of his home to serve his country and not serve himself.”
FP: What are Cheney’s views on executive power?
Hayes: Since his days in the Ford Administration, Cheney has believed in a strong executive branch. In Cheney’s view, the country needs a president with the power and the flexibility to conduct national security affairs without having his hands tied by Congress. Some in the mainstream media and on the left would have us believe that his advocacy of a strong executive function as vice president is nothing more than a power grab. It’s nonsense. One day after Cheney was elected to congressional leadership in 1980, he appeared on panel discussion at a Washington, DC, think tank to argue that Congress had too much power relative to the executive branch. Smart people disagree with Cheney – Newt Gingrich did in that session more than 25 years ago – but it’s disingenuous to suggest that these are new views aimed simply to enhance his own power.
FP: In what ways did Cheney help shape the America's global war on terror?
Hayes: In virtually every conceivable way. Condoleezza Rice told me that Cheney’s greatest influence as vice president was his “intellectual contribution to the conceptualization of the war on terror.”
When lawyers with the National Security Agency proposed new measures to track terrorist communications, Cheney took the proposal to President Bush and served as its chief proponent from that point forward. He presided over the highly-classified briefings of congressional leadership – briefings that would later become controversial as Democrats quickly disowned the efforts after they were exposed.
Cheney also defended the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” designed to extract information from hardened terrorists. Cheney critics insist the programs are tantamount to torture; Cheney disputes this characterization. Very little is known about the actual practices, but according to George Tenet, no Cheney partisan, they have been more effective than just about anything else the intelligence community has done since 9/11. As Tenet put it: “This program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. . . . I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together, have been able to tell us.”
FP: Cheney opposed removing Saddam Hussein from power after the first Gulf War. Why?
Hayes: Good question. There is a myth perpetrated by those on the left that Cheney’s real motivation in removing Saddam Hussein in 2003 comes from his unfulfilled desire to have done so in 1991. I recently heard of a prominent cable news talk show host making that argument. It’s not true. At the time, Cheney thought removing Saddam would go beyond the limited mission laid out by George H.W. Bush and would present far too many risks. When he got specific, Cheney cited the difficulties of street-to-street fighting, the potential for ethnic tensions among Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, and the likely casualties to American troops. Cheney was not quiet about his defense of that policy, either. In a 1992 speech I cite in the book, Cheney gives a very long and detailed defense of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. He continued to defend this position throughout the 1990s.
FP: Why was the Iraq War necessary? What role did Cheney play in launching it?
Hayes: After 9/11, Cheney saw Saddam Hussein as an unacceptable risk. The Iraqi dictator’s long history of WMD possession and his many connections to terrorists posed an inherent risk to the United States. It was this combination of factors – deadly weapons and support for terror – that made the previous policy of “containing” Saddam Hussein a nonstarter for Cheney. In fact, in an interview in May 2001, Cheney said: “I think we have to be more concerned that we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some of it inspired by terrorists external to the United States – the World Trade towers bombing, in New York. The threat of terrorist attacks against the U.S. eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction – bugs or gas, biological or chemical agents, potentially even someday, nuclear weapons.”
Interestingly, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Cheney wanted us to focus our efforts on al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He did not agree with others who sought to include Iraq as part of the opening campaign in the War on Terror.
Cheney played a major role in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. In public, he was one of the most aggressive proponents of removing Saddam Hussein. In private, he said the same thing to President Bush. In fact, President Bush gave me a fascinating in-depth look at Cheney’s influence on his decision to target Saddam Hussein in the opening hours of the Iraq War.
FP: What were some of mistakes made during and after the Iraq war? What were their consequences? In what ways was Cheney responsible?
Hayes: Cheney was quite candid about some of the things he views as mistakes in postwar Iraq. Most significantly, he told me that the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority – the entity created to help govern postwar Iraq in the all-important first year – was a “waste of time.” President Bush told me that Cheney had been in favor of surging more troops into Iraq and called Cheney a “more-troops man.”
He also pointed to mistakes made in the first Gulf War and their lasting consequences: “There are other things, too, that I think are important, that we didn't fully understand. The Shia, for example, had been treated for centuries as second-class citizens, governed by the Sunnis, and in recent decades the Bathists, under Saddam Hussein. They had been encouraged, in '91, to rise up, and did, and were slaughtered for their troubles; nobody came to their assistance.”
Cheney added: “We're clearly going to learn an awful lot, are learning an awful lot from this whole exercise. And one of the key lessons, obviously, is don't underestimate the difficulty of what it is we're attempting here. It's very hard stuff to take a society like Iraqi society that had been governed by a very heavy hand for 30 years by Saddam Hussein, who had violently and brutally suppressed all political opposition.”
FP: Cheney and the CIA?
Hayes: Cheney has a long and complicated history with the CIA. He served as a member of the Intelligence Committee during much of his time in Congress and told me it was his favorite assignment – most of its work was conducted out of the spotlight and as a result it was less partisan than other congressional committees.
As a member of Congress and later as Secretary of Defense, Cheney used to bring in the ground-level analysts to brief him. He took his regular briefings, too, but liked to get analysts to provide more details than they had included in their written reports. Analysts reported that they liked the interaction with senior policymakers and looked forward to such sessions.
As vice president, Cheney took many trips out to the CIA for similar briefings. But some CIA officials complained (anonymously) about the trips to The Washington Post and other news outlets, claiming that Cheney was pressuring them to shape their intelligence assessments to meet his policy goals. A bipartisan study by the Senate Intelligence Committee in July 2004 found no real evidence to substantiate the claims, but the damage was done. Administration critics used the allegations to charge Cheney with warping – even fabricating – prewar intelligence on Iraq. While it’s true that Cheney’s public statements reflected a worst-case scenario on the threat from Iraq, CIA assessments, particularly on WMDs, were not significantly different.
As a result of the criticism, Cheney says he is “gunshy” about asking tough questions of intelligence officials. When I asked him whether this was a detriment to national security, he responded: “It is.”
FP: Why is Cheney so powerful and why he is so controversial?
Hayes: He’s powerful because President Bush trusts that Cheney has no agenda other than President Bush’s agenda. And he’s controversial because he’s powerful. If Dick Cheney had the power of a traditional vice president, no one would care what he says or what he does. It’s precisely because he is so influential that people have such strong feelings about him.
FP: Steve Hayes, it was a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Hayes: I enjoyed it, as always.