David Bromwich: The Co-President at Work
[David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic and editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform. (November 2008).]
... The shallowest charge against Cheney is that he somehow inserted himself into the vice-presidency by heading the team that examined other candidates for the job. He used the position deviously, so the story goes, to sell himself to the susceptible younger Bush. The truth is both simpler and more strange. Since 1999, Cheney had been one of a group of political tutors of Bush, including Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz; in this company, Bush found Cheney especially congenial—not least his way of asserting his influence without ever stealing a scene. Bush, too, resembled Cheney in preferring to let others speak, but he lacked the mind and patience for discussions: virtues that Cheney possessed in abundance.
As early as March 2000, Bush asked him whether he would consider taking the second slot. Cheney at first said no. Later, he agreed to serve as Bush's inspector of the qualifications of others; his lieutenants were David Addington and his daughter Liz. Some way into that work, Bush asked Cheney again, and this time he said yes. The understanding was concluded before any of the lesser candidates were interviewed. It was perhaps the first public deception that they worked at together: a lie of omission—and a trespass against probity—to give an air of legitimacy to the search for a nominee. But their concurrence in the stratagem, and the way each saw the other hold to its terms, signaled an equality in manipulation as no formal contract could have done. It is hardly likely that an exchange of words was necessary.
The vice-presidential search in the spring of 2000 was characteristic of the co-presidency to come in one other way. It involved the collection of information for future use against political rivals. In this case, the rivals were the other potential VPs, among them Lamar Alexander, Chuck Hagel, and Frank Keating. They had been asked to submit exhaustive data concerning friends, enemies, sexual partners, psychological vicissitudes (noting all visits to therapists of any kind), personal embarrassments, and sources of possible slander, plus a complete medical history. Each also signed a notarized letter that gave Cheney the power to request records from doctors without further clearance.
All this information would prove useful in later years. Barton Gellman reveals in Angler that soon after Frank Keating was mentioned as a likely candidate for attorney general, a story appeared in Newsweek about an awkward secret in his past: an eccentric patron had paid for his children's college education. No law had been broken, and nothing wrongly concealed; but the story killed a chance for Keating to be named attorney general; and the leak could only have come from one person. Doubtless most of the secrets in Cheney's possession were the more effective for not being used.
heney by nature is a high functionary and inside operative, ready to learn and eager to ferret out the background of people and events, both the things he is supposed to know and the things he is not. It is symptomatic that in the Ford administration, when Cheney served as White House chief of staff, he declined a generous offer of cabinet status: higher visibility, he believed, would only diminish his actual potency. By the end of his time in that office, he had narrowed down access to the President to the people he himself preferred; and at his retirement, Cheney's staff gave him, as Stuart Spencer recalls, "a bicycle wheel with all the spokes busted out except for one—his."
A now forgotten aberration of the Republican convention in 1980 may have helped to crystalize his thinking about the advantages of a recessive stance. For a few frantic days that summer, it looked as if Ronald Reagan would need someone with demonstrable experience on the ticket if he was to have a chance in November; and there were serious discussions of a co-presidency to be shared between Reagan and Ford. Cheney, a close adviser to Ford, was an interested witness, and he saw how the excess and literalness of Ford's "wish list" for vice-presidential powers caused the negotiations to break down. Still, this ended up a tantalizingly close call; and it could only have left Cheney thoughtful about future possibilities. Suppose one day the Republican Party nominated another charmer, cut out, like Reagan, for the getting of votes but as fundamentally uninterested as Reagan was in the actual running of government....
Read entire article at New York Review of Books
... The shallowest charge against Cheney is that he somehow inserted himself into the vice-presidency by heading the team that examined other candidates for the job. He used the position deviously, so the story goes, to sell himself to the susceptible younger Bush. The truth is both simpler and more strange. Since 1999, Cheney had been one of a group of political tutors of Bush, including Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz; in this company, Bush found Cheney especially congenial—not least his way of asserting his influence without ever stealing a scene. Bush, too, resembled Cheney in preferring to let others speak, but he lacked the mind and patience for discussions: virtues that Cheney possessed in abundance.
As early as March 2000, Bush asked him whether he would consider taking the second slot. Cheney at first said no. Later, he agreed to serve as Bush's inspector of the qualifications of others; his lieutenants were David Addington and his daughter Liz. Some way into that work, Bush asked Cheney again, and this time he said yes. The understanding was concluded before any of the lesser candidates were interviewed. It was perhaps the first public deception that they worked at together: a lie of omission—and a trespass against probity—to give an air of legitimacy to the search for a nominee. But their concurrence in the stratagem, and the way each saw the other hold to its terms, signaled an equality in manipulation as no formal contract could have done. It is hardly likely that an exchange of words was necessary.
The vice-presidential search in the spring of 2000 was characteristic of the co-presidency to come in one other way. It involved the collection of information for future use against political rivals. In this case, the rivals were the other potential VPs, among them Lamar Alexander, Chuck Hagel, and Frank Keating. They had been asked to submit exhaustive data concerning friends, enemies, sexual partners, psychological vicissitudes (noting all visits to therapists of any kind), personal embarrassments, and sources of possible slander, plus a complete medical history. Each also signed a notarized letter that gave Cheney the power to request records from doctors without further clearance.
All this information would prove useful in later years. Barton Gellman reveals in Angler that soon after Frank Keating was mentioned as a likely candidate for attorney general, a story appeared in Newsweek about an awkward secret in his past: an eccentric patron had paid for his children's college education. No law had been broken, and nothing wrongly concealed; but the story killed a chance for Keating to be named attorney general; and the leak could only have come from one person. Doubtless most of the secrets in Cheney's possession were the more effective for not being used.
heney by nature is a high functionary and inside operative, ready to learn and eager to ferret out the background of people and events, both the things he is supposed to know and the things he is not. It is symptomatic that in the Ford administration, when Cheney served as White House chief of staff, he declined a generous offer of cabinet status: higher visibility, he believed, would only diminish his actual potency. By the end of his time in that office, he had narrowed down access to the President to the people he himself preferred; and at his retirement, Cheney's staff gave him, as Stuart Spencer recalls, "a bicycle wheel with all the spokes busted out except for one—his."
A now forgotten aberration of the Republican convention in 1980 may have helped to crystalize his thinking about the advantages of a recessive stance. For a few frantic days that summer, it looked as if Ronald Reagan would need someone with demonstrable experience on the ticket if he was to have a chance in November; and there were serious discussions of a co-presidency to be shared between Reagan and Ford. Cheney, a close adviser to Ford, was an interested witness, and he saw how the excess and literalness of Ford's "wish list" for vice-presidential powers caused the negotiations to break down. Still, this ended up a tantalizingly close call; and it could only have left Cheney thoughtful about future possibilities. Suppose one day the Republican Party nominated another charmer, cut out, like Reagan, for the getting of votes but as fundamentally uninterested as Reagan was in the actual running of government....