Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage

Slide 1 of 8

The first meeting, 1987: In June, George W. Bush goes to Capitol Hill to garner support for his father’s presidential campaign. Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, tells him he won’t endorse anyone for fear of jeopardizing his own House leadership ambitions.

Credit...Illustration by Zohar Lazar
  • Slide 1 of 8

    The first meeting, 1987: In June, George W. Bush goes to Capitol Hill to garner support for his father’s presidential campaign. Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, tells him he won’t endorse anyone for fear of jeopardizing his own House leadership ambitions.

    Credit...Illustration by Zohar Lazar

In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring into the distance as two White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of I. Lewis Libby.

“Do you think he did it?” Bush asked.

“Yeah,” one of the lawyers said. “I think he did it.”

In March 2007, Libby, who had served as Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was convicted of lying to federal officials who were investigating the leak of the identity of a C.I.A. officer. For the past two months Cheney had been pushing the president to grant Libby a full pardon before they left office. He would not let it go. Cheney brought it up again and again, first before Thanksgiving, then again around Christmas and finally throughout January 2009 as they prepared for the transition to the incoming Obama administration. His lobbying was so intense that the president made clear to his aides that he did not want to talk with Cheney about it anymore.

Troubled by the decision hanging over him, Bush had asked the White House lawyers to re-examine the case to see if a pardon was justified. Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.

“If I were on that jury,” Burck told Bush, “I would probably have agreed with them. You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.”

The case had its origins in the politically fraught summer of 2003, when American troops had just invaded Iraq but were unable to find the unconventional weapons they had been told were there. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, suggested that the White House ignored contrary evidence about Iraq’s nuclear program in the months before the invasion, a charge Cheney would deny. When the news media reported that Wilson’s wife worked at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether her identity was illegally divulged.

Libby testified that he first learned Valerie Plame Wilson was a C.I.A. official from Tim Russert, the NBC journalist. If true, this would mean he did not disclose secret information he learned as Cheney’s chief of staff — which would undercut the common theory that the leak came from Cheney’s office and that Cheney was trying to take retribution against Wilson by blowing his wife’s cover. Libby’s story clashed not just with Russert’s version, but also with those of eight other people, including fellow administration officials, who testified that they talked with Libby about Wilson before his conversation with Russert. When Russert disputed Libby’s depiction of events, Libby said simply that he must have misremembered what had transpired, hardly an indictable offense.

“All right,” the president said when the lawyers concluded their assessment. “So why do you think he did it? Do you think he was protecting the vice president?”

“I don’t think he was protecting the vice president,” Burck said.

Burck figured that Libby assumed his account would never be contradicted, because prosecutors could not force reporters to violate vows of confidentiality to their sources. “I think also that Libby was concerned,” Burck said. “Because he took to heart what you said back then: that you would fire anybody that you knew was involved in this. I just think he didn’t think it was worth falling on the sword.”

Bush did not seem convinced. “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney,” the president said. If that was the case, then Cheney was seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself on his behalf.

“Now I am going to have to have the talk with the vice president,” Bush said. That was the sort of unpleasant business that for eight years he had left to Cheney. It was the vice president who delivered the bad news, for instance, to Paul O’Neill and Donald Rumsfeld when they were fired.

Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff, was also in the room, and he volunteered to handle it.

“Nah, nah,” Bush said. “I can do it.” But as several people close to him would later attest, the president was dreading it.

Not since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had two Americans in public office collaborated with such lasting effect as George Bush and Dick Cheney. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, they confidently steered America through its most traumatic years since Vietnam, erecting a national-security apparatus that their successors have largely adopted and prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that, members of the administration take pains to emphasize, toppled two brutal regimes. The continuing effects of their tenure are evident in some of the most vexing issues of today — what to do with the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, how to balance the need for surveillance with the rights of private citizens and whether to use even a modest amount of force in Syria when the American public is tired of the costs of two long wars.

But if it was a partnership of enduring and controversial consequences, it was also one that was widely misunderstood. That their final hours together would be consumed by a private argument over the pardon of Scooter Libby underscores the distance the two men had traveled. Over the course of conducting hundreds of interviews with key players in the Bush White House, including Cheney, and examining thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos and other internal documents, I came to see a relationship that differs substantially from the commonly accepted narrative. Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned No. 2, Cheney was hardly the puppeteer that critics imagined. To the extent that the vice president exerted outsize influence in the first term, he became more marginalized over the course of the second, as Bush sought new paths to right his troubled presidency.

Bush and Cheney were never quite friends. They did not see each other out of the workplace. Cheney did not spend social weekends at Camp David. On election night in 2000 and again in 2004, they watched the returns separately at first, coming together only late in the evening when they thought they could publicly claim victory. “They weren’t personally close,” said Ari Fleischer, the president’s first White House press secretary. “Cheney didn’t go jogging with George Bush. He was everything that Bush designed when he chose Dick Cheney to be counselor” — meaning a veteran Washington hand who would give him straight advice.

“It was professional, more than personal,” Cheney told me after leaving office, as he sat sipping coffee in a small library in his Virginia home. “We weren’t buddies in that sense.”

Some Bush advisers objected even to the word “partnership,” since that implied equality. Cheney said he never forgot that he was the vice president, and by all accounts he made a point of showing deference to Bush. While Bush called him “Dick,” Cheney always called Bush “Mr. President” and with others referred to him as “the Man.” (Karl Rove, though, reportedly referred to Cheney as “Management” — as in, “Better check with Management” — suggesting an influence not generally associated with vice presidents.)

Cheney is just five years older than Bush, but he carried himself with the gravitas of a much more experienced man, and the president treated him with more respect than anyone else in the inner circle. In any meeting, though, it was clear who was in charge: Bush led the discussion, asked the questions and called on people to speak, while Cheney largely remained quiet. Still, that silence seemed to connote a power all its own; everyone else in the room understood that when they left, Cheney stayed behind, offering advice when nobody could rebut him. What Cheney actually thought often remained a mystery outside of these one-on-one conversations. “He was a black box to a lot of us,” Peter Wehner, the director of the White House office of strategic initiatives, told me.

Cheney found the image of him as the dark controller of a weak-minded president, crystallized by books with titles like “The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney” and “Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency,” to be absurd. Gen. Richard Myers, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was on hand for some of the most critical moments, agreed. “This whole notion that the vice president was the puppet master, I find laughable,” Myers said. “He was an active vice president because I think he was empowered, but he wasn’t a dominant factor. The alpha male in the White House was the president.”

But Cheney also came to embrace the reputation. Once his friend David Hume Kennerly greeted him teasingly by saying: “Hi, Dick. Have you blown away any small countries this morning?” Without missing a beat, Cheney replied, “You know, that’s the one thing about this job I really love.” At another point, he tried on a Darth Vader mask his aides had bought and posed for a picture. When he later tried to put the picture in his memoir, his wife, Lynne, talked him out of it.

“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he once said. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”

The president’s closest friends and advisers do not recall him ever complaining that Cheney had pushed him to do something he would not have done otherwise. And Cheney “never did anything in his time serving George W. that George W. didn’t either sanction or approve of,” said Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming and a close friend of Cheney’s.

Cheney was unquestionably the most influential vice president in American history, but that influence was in large part a function of his deference, as much as any overt exertion of power. Because he had no aspiration to ever run for president himself, he was able to focus on making Bush’s presidency successful — though on terms that he helped define. In return, Bush gave him access to every meeting and decision, a marked contrast to many of his predecessors. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointment calendar shows only two meetings with Vice President Harry Truman after they were inaugurated. When asked in 2002 how many times he had met privately with Bush, Cheney reached into his suit pocket and pulled out his schedule. “Let me see,” he said. “Three, four, five, six, seven — seven times.” Then he added: “Today.”

Bush put him on the ticket in 2000 to balance his own inexperience. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the choice seemed prescient. Cheney’s calm hand in the bunker that day and in the war cabinet in the weeks that followed gave Bush confidence that he could depend on seasoned counsel as he began to confront a changed world. Cheney operated in tandem with Donald Rumsfeld, his longtime mentor who gave him his first White House job under Richard Nixon and was now serving as defense secretary. Together, they shared a vision of a world of threats that required a strong executive branch and an unapologetic assertion of American power. “He never came over to me and organized against some decision or said we have to marshal support for this or that,” Rumsfeld later told me. But he never had to. They were almost always on the same page, executing the same vision.

By the second term, though, as that vision came under fire with the deterioration of Iraq and the failure to find the weapons that led to the invasion, Bush moved away from Cheney and turned increasingly toward Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who supplanted Cheney as the president’s most influential lieutenant. No one in the White House had the relationship with Bush that Rice had. She worked out with him, talked sports with him, dined with him and Laura in the residence and spent weekends with them at Camp David. Over lunch one day in the first term, Rice told Christine Todd Whitman, then the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, “I can count on one hand the days when I have not spoken to the president over the last three years.” As Whitman later reflected: “She didn’t have a life. Her life was all about that.”

Bush turned to Rice to help repair the damage done by the administration’s aggressive response to the Sept. 11 attacks. “We had broken a lot of china,” Rice told me. “But at that point, you have to leave something in place. That is true with allies. It is true with the Middle East. It is true in putting together an international consensus on North Korea and international consensus on Iran. And I don’t think that is how the vice president saw it. I think he would have liked to have kept breaking china.”

Only by the end of his sixth year did Bush finally conclude that Rumsfeld had to go, a decision that represented the most fundamental break with Cheney, who was informed, not consulted. “It wasn’t open for discussion by the time he came to me,” Cheney told me. Cheney managed to preserve much of the national-security architecture he helped create, but he was now on defense more than offense, fending off changes that he thought would weaken the country or unravel the policies he had urged. “Perhaps my clout was diminished,” Cheney said in a 2011 television interview. “That’s possible. I wouldn’t quarrel about that.” Indeed, by the time they left office, Bush and Cheney disagreed on a long list of significant issues and policies. Where Bush was willing to pursue international diplomacy, empty secret C.I.A. prisons, sign an agreement to withdraw from Iraq and cut deals with Congress on military tribunals and warrantless eavesdropping, Cheney resisted any compromise as a sellout of the principles they once shared.

And then there was the Scooter Libby pardon.

A few weeks before Barack Obama’s inauguration, Joshua Bolten invited all of his predecessors to his office in the West Wing to meet with his successor, Rahm Emanuel. Thirteen of the living 16 men to have served as chief of staff attended, including Cheney, who was Gerald Ford’s top assistant. They went around the table one by one, offering advice. When Cheney’s turn came up, a devilish look crossed his face. “Whatever you do,” he said, “make sure you’ve got the vice president under control.”

As Bush’s final days in the White House approached, he did not exactly have his vice president under control. Cheney’s lobbying campaign on behalf of Scooter Libby had become deeply disconcerting to the president. To Cheney, it was a simple matter of justice. As he saw it, Libby had been pursued by an unprincipled prosecutor bent on damaging the White House. Neither Libby nor anyone else had been charged with the actual leak that precipitated the investigation, only with not testifying truthfully about how he learned about Wilson’s identity. Years later, it would be revealed that the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, knew from nearly the start that Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy, was the original source of the leak, not Libby. Cheney believed that Fitzgerald’s relentless investigation in spite of this fact was proof that Cheney was the real target, and that Libby was caught in the cross-fire. Libby had loyally served his country, Cheney argued, only to be made into a criminal. And Powell and Armitage stayed quiet as it happened. “The Powell-Armitage thing was such a sense of betrayal,” Cheney’s daughter Liz told me. “They sat there and watched their colleagues in the White House — Scooter and everyone else — go through the ordeal of the investigation, and all that time they both knew Armitage was the leaker.” Armitage and Powell said they were simply following investigators’ instructions to keep silent.

As Cheney pressed Bush for the pardon, the president put him off by saying he would wait to issue controversial pardons until near the end of his term, which the vice president took as an indication that Libby would be among them. Bush had already commuted Libby’s prison sentence of two and a half years after it was handed down in 2007. As a result, Libby never had to spend a minute behind bars, a decision that inflamed critics on the left, who argued that Bush was interfering with justice, and on the right, who felt he had not gone far enough in quashing a bogus prosecution.

At the time, Bush said publicly that he was not substituting his judgment for that of the jury. So how would he explain a change of mind just 18 months later? That was the argument Ed Gillespie, the president’s counselor, made to Cheney when he came to explain why he was advising Bush against a pardon. “On top of that, the lawyers are not making the case for it,” Gillespie told Cheney, referring to the White House attorneys reviewing the case for Bush. “We’ll be asked, ‘Did the lawyers recommend it?’ And if the lawyers didn’t, it’s going to be hard to justify for the president.”

The favoritism inherent in the clemency process had long been a source of frustration for Bush. “This process is broken,” he railed to aides. “It doesn’t make any sense.” He suffered some embarrassment when, after a Christmas pardon of a Brooklyn developer convicted of mail fraud, the media revealed that the developer’s father had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republicans, leaving the White House in the awkward position of taking back the clemency order.

It irritated Bush even more that he was coming under pressure from all directions. His lifelong friend Joe O’Neill wrote him a letter on behalf of a bank officer who served time for falsifying documents. Another childhood friend from Texas, Charlie Younger, pressed him to pardon a fellow doctor who served time on child-pornography charges. Clay Johnson, a Yale friend and White House aide, was lobbying Bush to commute the sentence of David Safavian, an administration official convicted in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Bush granted the first request but rejected the other two.

Now it was time to deliver bad news to Cheney. Bush invited the vice president into the small private dining room off the Oval Office for their final lunch on Jan. 15. There would be no pardon for Libby, Bush said. It was a hard choice, but that was his decision.

“You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle,” Cheney snapped.

It might have been the harshest thing Cheney had ever said to him.

“The comment stung,” Bush wrote in his memoirs. “In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this, or even close to this. I worried that the friendship we had built was about to be severely strained, at best.”

To Cheney, this was the final proof that Bush had lost his will. The president had been buffeted by critics for so long that he would not stand up for what was right and jeopardize the relatively positive attention he was receiving for a smooth transition with Barack Obama. Perhaps it was even one last attempt to show who was actually in charge after all.

“Scooter was somebody — you know, he didn’t have to be there,” Cheney told me years later. “He came to serve. He worked for me before at the Pentagon. He had done yeoman duty for us.” The conviction was a deep scar, Cheney said. “He has to live with that stigma for the rest of his life. That was wrong, and the president had it within his power to fix it, and he chose not to. It is obviously a place where we fundamentally disagree. He knows how I felt about it.” Cheney suggested that the president did not want to take the heat. “I am sure it meant some criticism of him, but it was a huge disappointment for me.”

Famed for never second-guessing himself, Bush began to doubt his decision after his encounter with Cheney. Libby, aware that his chances were grim, contacted Joshua Bolten, who considered Libby a friend, to ask to meet with the president directly.

“I’m sorry, Scooter,” Bolten told him. “In fairness to the president, I can’t permit that.”

Then Cheney went to Bolten. “Scooter would like to visit with the president.”

“I know,” Bolten said. “I’ve already told him no.”

“I’d like you to ask the president directly,” Cheney said.

“I wish you wouldn’t ask me to do that,” Bolten said. “But obviously the president would not want me screening him from any request of yours.”

Bush still refused. Bolten suggested to Libby that he meet with Fielding and Burck, the two White House lawyers who reviewed his case. On the final weekend of the administration, Libby sat down with the two men in a booth at McCormick & Schmick’s, a chain seafood restaurant a few blocks from the White House. It was just after 11 a.m., and for the next 90 minutes, Libby made his case. He complained that the prosecution had suppressed expert testimony about the unreliability of memory, which Libby was sure would have exonerated him.

Fielding and Burck knew that pardons were typically issued not to people claiming innocence but to convicts who had paid their debts to society and were seeking forgiveness. Under Justice Department guidelines at the time, the pardon attorney who prepared recommendations for the president did not even accept requests until at least five years after applicants had completed their sentences. They asked Libby if he would be willing to admit guilt and ask for forgiveness to obtain a pardon.

No, Libby said. “I am innocent. I did not do this.”

On the final frigid weekend of his presidency, Bush was at Camp David with his family and a few friends and advisers, including Bolten and Rice. The president was stewing over Libby. While the rest of the group was in another room, Bush called his former adviser Dan Bartlett, who was back in Texas.“This sucks,” Bush said. “Here I am, supposed to be trying to have a great weekend with my family, last weekend, and here I am knowing what a difficult decision it is going to be.” Bartlett reassured him that he was making the right call.

Rice pulled him aside. “Don’t let this be a pall over your last days,” she urged him.

Finally, it was Laura Bush who pressed him to stop dwelling on it. “Just make up your mind,” she said. “You’re ruining this for everyone.”

The following Monday, Bush had his final, definitive meeting with the White House lawyers, ending any possibility of reconsideration. There would be no pardon for Libby.

The next morning, Inauguration Day, Cheney showed up in a wheelchair, explaining that he had thrown his back out packing boxes at the vice-presidential mansion over the weekend. “Joe, this is how you’re liable to look when your term is up,” Cheney joked to his successor, Joseph Biden.

Bush and Cheney separated as they left the White House, each joining his successor for the short motorcade trip to the Capitol. Bush climbed into an armored car with Obama. As the two men settled in and the vehicle began its slow, circuitous path past the barricades and out of the White House grounds, Bush took the opportunity to offer one last piece of advice. Whatever you do, Bush told Obama, make sure you set a pardon policy from the start and then stick to it. There Bush was, in the final minutes of his presidency, and foremost on his mind was the rift with his vice president.

Bush retreated to Texas, where he resolved not to pass judgment on Obama, while Cheney became a fiery critic of the new president. What set him off was a decision to reopen an investigation into C.I.A. interrogations of terror suspects. “Threatening to prosecute C.I.A. officials was indefensible,” Liz Cheney told me. “It was just so far beyond what you could stay silent and watch.”

Cheney’s public battle with Obama, though, seemed like a proxy for his private battle with Bush. Out of his deep respect for protocol, he could say only so much as he watched Bush compromise in their final years. But now he could lash out at a Democrat. For Cheney, the betrayal of the C.I.A. officers became, in effect, an extension of the betrayal of Scooter Libby. They were all men doing a job for their country and now had to pay for it. “Dick was terribly upset that he didn’t pardon him, get him off the hook,” Cheney’s friend Bernie Seebaum told me. “The man did what he was expected to do, and then he got in trouble for it. Nobody came to his rescue.”

Bush, on the other hand, was through with politics. He told visitors in Dallas that he felt liberated on the day of Obama’s inauguration. “When I saw his hand go up, I thought, Free at last,” Bush said. When Rove regaled a dinner party at Bush’s home with his analysis of forthcoming Congressional elections, the uninterested former president paid little attention, cracking jokes instead with a guest sitting next to him.

The passage of time has tempered some of the harsh judgments of Bush’s administration. By this past summer, 49 percent of Americans now viewed him favorably, compared with 46 percent who disapproved, the first positive balance in eight years.

As for Libby, still barred from practicing law despite the commutation, he has largely stayed out of the political debates of the last several years. Only recently did he co-write a scathing critique of Obama’s foreign policy for The Wall Street Journal.

Bush and Cheney see each other infrequently. Last spring, they reunited for the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University, outside Dallas. While Bush took a seat onstage with his fellow presidents, Cheney stepped down into the audience to sit with cabinet members and the Bush children. Condoleezza Rice had a speaking role; Cheney did not. Aware that many were wondering about their relationship, Bush made a point of praising Cheney’s “loyalty, principle and strength” from the lectern. “I’m proud to call you friend,” Bush said.

But inside, the new library suggested a different reality. There were exhibits featuring the first lady and their daughters, videos narrated by Rice, Bolten and Andy Card, and even statues of the presidential dogs. There was little sign of Dick Cheney.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times and a contributing writer for the magazine. This article is adapted from his new book, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.”

Editor: Joel Lovell

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 28 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Don't Go Away Mad. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT