Cheney a Man of Big but Limited Ambitions--the Perfect No. 2

By RICHARD T. COOPER

Oct. 19, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

Listening to former House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel describe how Dick Cheney became a member of the Republican congressional leadership back in 1981, you’d think the man who’s now the GOP vice presidential candidate had been practicing magic--or hypnosis.

“I was very conservative and the others in the leadership were very conservative. I wanted a moderate to balance things,” says Michel, who now practices law here.

Michel says he was astonished to learn, in the aftermath of Cheney’s selection in July for the Republican presidential ticket, that the former House member from Wyoming had compiled one of the most relentlessly conservative voting records in Congress--a record so ideologically unbending he had opposed banning “cop-killer” bullets and plastic guns that could evade metal detectors.

“I had no idea he was that conservative,” Michel says.

Adds GOP political consultant Douglas Bailey, a longtime Cheney friend: “I don’t know anybody who knows him who wasn’t surprised by that voting record. You could spend 24 hours a day with the man for weeks and never imagine that.”

How could these savvy political practitioners, not to mention other GOP colleagues who had worked with Cheney for years, fail to notice his voting record?

The answer is that, while Cheney’s life in many ways offers a textbook example of how the Washington game is played, it is also the story of a man wrapped in paradox.

He is a deeply conservative and partisan Republican. Yet he first made a name for himself in Washington and then went on to become a congressional leader and a key Cabinet member because he was known as a pragmatic problem-solver, not an ideologue.

During a political career that stretched from the tumult of the late 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet Union and war with Iraq in the 1980s and ‘90s, Cheney carried out sensitive assignments under President Nixon, ran the White House staff for President Ford, rose almost to the top of the House GOP leadership and was ringmaster at the Pentagon for President Bush during the Persian Gulf War.

Along the way, he built a reputation as one of the strongest, most effective leaders in government. He can be tough, even brutal, when he thinks the occasion demands it. Yet he’s famous for never raising his voice, for changing his position when good sense demands it and for being a good listener.

“That may not seem like a big thing, except in Washington, where everybody has a better idea,” says former Bush administration Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, who worked with Cheney during the Gulf War.

Adds GOP political consultant John Deardourff: “Cheney is able to present his point of view without a lot of drama or histrionics. There’s no ugly ‘You’re not only wrong, but you’re a horse’s [backside] for having that point of view.’ ”

Perhaps most paradoxical of all, at least in the power-hungry capital, Cheney is a man of large but ultimately limited ambition--a perfect No. 2.

He spent his adult life climbing the power ladder, yet something inside Cheney sets limits on his ambition. If he has labored to win and exercise power, he lacks the ceaseless hunger that drives many of his Washington peers.

That, say many who have worked with him, explains why Cheney is qualified to occupy the Oval Office himself but is a candidate for vice president instead. Before the 1996 presidential campaign, he strongly considered a run for the White House. But even backers concluded he lacked the proverbial “fire in the belly.”

Today, many of those admirers would like him to look a little hungrier as he seeks support for the Republican ticket.

“I wish Cheney looked more like he enjoys campaigning,” says William H. Webster, the former FBI director and CIA chief who has worked closely with Cheney. “If you get him to talking about fishing and hunting, it’s almost like he wishes he were doing that rather than being out in the field campaigning.”

Cheney’s Youth One of Ordinariness

Richard Bruce Cheney entered the world on Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Neb., the first of three children--two boys, one girl--born to Richard and Marjorie Cheney. When he was 13, the family moved to Casper, Wyo., where his father was assigned by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service to instruct area farmers in the virtues of preventing erosion and preserving topsoil.

Lincoln was both the state capital and home to the University of Nebraska. Casper was an oil boomtown of only 17,000 souls beside the North Platte River. What is most striking about Cheney’s youth, however, is not so much the regional influences as the sheer ordinariness of it, the normalcy. That, and his contentedness with life as he grew up.

U.S. political history is marked by men who grew up in backwater eddies of the countryside and achieved greatness by seizing opportunities to escape. Not Dick Cheney.

Yes, a childhood friend named Tom Fake has told reporters that Cheney was competitive, even in fishing. “It was, ‘I caught seven fish and you only caught six.’ ”

Yes, Cheney was achievement-oriented--he was co-captain of the Natrona High School football team and class president his senior year in 1959. (The homecoming queen was Lynne Vincent, his future wife.)

And yes, Cheney received a scholarship to go to Yale University, which could have opened the door for a boy from Casper--just as attending Georgetown University, winning a Rhodes scholarship and going to the Yale Law School helped Bill Clinton transcend a humble Arkansas childhood.

But what friends remember about Cheney is not outsized talent or the determination to make a lasting mark on the world. Instead, what stands out is Cheney’s passion for hunting and fishing, camping, playing ball; in short, he enjoyed life in Casper with the inventive but contented appetite of a Tom Sawyer.

And when Cheney was handed his opportunity at Yale, he showed little interest in what it offered. He attended classes off and on for most of two years, but poor grades showed his heart wasn’t in it and the Yale door soon closed.

“I wasn’t interested in school,” Cheney said later. “I was more interested in going to work. I wasn’t a serious student. I never buckled down.”

In that, he resembles the man who picked him for the Republican ticket, George W. Bush, who graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School but put little emphasis on studies.

By 1962, Cheney was back in Casper, seemingly adrift. He worked as a lineman for the power company and hung out with his buddies, a chapter in his life that led to two citations for driving while intoxicated.

What seems to have set him back on track more than anything was the increasing seriousness of his relationship with Lynne Vincent, who had moved briskly through college and was going to graduate school. Cheney enrolled first in Casper College, then the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

He settled into his studies this time, and in 1965, the year after he and Lynne were married, Cheney earned his bachelor’s degree, followed by a master’s.

The Cheneys’ first child, Elizabeth, was born in July 1966, shortly before Dick and Lynne enrolled in doctorate programs at the University of Wisconsin.

Vietnam was ablaze and Madison, Wis., became a hotbed of anti-war protest, but Cheney was not part of it. He had obtained a series of student deferments from the draft, claimed exemption as a parent and by 1967 was beyond draft age.

Years later, at his confirmation hearing to become Defense secretary, Cheney said, “I don’t regret the decisions I made. . . . I had other priorities than military service in the ‘60s.”

In 1968, he won an American Political Science Assn. congressional fellowship. That meant moving to Washington and halting work on a doctorate. It was a move that would transform the course of his life.

A Rapid Education in Washington

If Cheney lacked focus before, he got it now.

In Washington, he was assigned to help Rep. Donald H. Rumsfeld (R-Ill.), a member of the House GOP power structure who was leaving Congress to shake up the government’s anti-poverty efforts for the newly elected Nixon administration.

Rumsfeld liked what he saw in the new intern so much that he took him along as a deputy. The result for Cheney was a series of increasingly important assignments and a rapid education in the political and bureaucratic realities of Washington.

Early in 1973, Rumsfeld got himself named NATO ambassador, which took him safely out of the country as the Watergate scandal began to blossom. He asked his right-hand man to go along. Instead, Cheney chose a lucrative job at Bradley, Woods & Co., a Washington firm that counsels corporate clients on politics and federal policy.

A stint with Rumsfeld at NATO headquarters in Brussels would have broadened Cheney’s education, but Bradley, Woods offered him a chance to make money for the first time in his life. (His ties there would continue to pay off, in the form of hefty honorariums collected for addressing client meetings during his future career in Congress.)

Cheney was not out of government long. By the late summer of 1974, Nixon had resigned in disgrace and Gerald R. Ford was president. Rumsfeld had been a trusted lieutenant during the new president’s career in Congress, and Ford asked him for help.

One of Rumsfeld’s first calls, as he prepared to fly home from Europe, was to Cheney: Meet me at the airport, Rumsfeld said. Cheney did, and was soon back in the White House--again as alter ego to Rumsfeld, who became chief of staff.

Just more than a year later, Rumsfeld left the White House to become secretary of Defense and Cheney got the staff chief’s job. He was only 34 years old.

Cheney’s youth and his newness to Ford’s inner circle reduced his influence at first, but by many accounts, his rise to the challenge was one of the few good things that happened to Ford.

“He came close to saving the Ford presidency,” says political analyst David Gergen, who served under Cheney. He “gradually won the confidence of the president and others, and by the end . . . he could really crack the whip and the place was hitting on all cylinders.”

How he did it goes to the heart of Cheney’s gifts: He was courteous, nonthreatening and a truly honest representative of differing views when a presidential decision was needed. He was a quick study and politically shrewd as well.

Beneath the amiable facade, Cheney was also ready to exercise power. “He was a very relaxed chief of staff,” remembers Brent Scowcroft, then Ford’s national security advisor. “But at the same time, he wanted people to know who was in charge. And when people knew, he was relaxed and let people do their jobs.”

A revealing incident occurred soon after Cheney took over. Previously, all members of the White House senior staff had been required to have deputies who could speak and act for them.

James Cannon, who served in the Ford White House, asked Cheney who his new deputy would be. “I’m not going to have one,” Cannon recalls Cheney answering.

“He didn’t want a backup,” Cannon says. “It was all going to be in his hands. He was going to be the man.”

Ford’s Defeat Means Loss of Job and Patron

When a president is defeated, as Ford was by Jimmy Carter in 1976, many apple carts are upset. One was Cheney’s.

By election day, he had done so well in the White House that some thought he would be a Cabinet secretary in a future Ford presidency. Instead, he was left without a job or a patron. He and Lynne and their two daughters (their second girl, Mary, had been born in March 1969) headed back to Casper to start over. Cheney had political hopes but an uncertain future.

Then, in October 1977, Democrat Teno Roncallo announced he was ending his long career as Wyoming’s lone congressman. A road back to Washington appeared open for Cheney.

He faced several opponents in the GOP primary, but that turned out to be the least of his worries. In June, less than four months before the primary, he suffered a heart attack. He recovered, but when he came out of the hospital six weeks later, a seemingly comfortable lead had shriveled.

Bob Gardner, who handled advertising for Cheney’s campaign, blunted the health issue by producing television spots reminding folks that such statesmen as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson had continued to serve despite medical setbacks.

And to combat carpetbagger charges, Gardner deluged voters with highlights of Cheney’s glory days at Natrona High. “The great thing was that his mother was a pack rat and had saved every clipping” from his football career, Gardner says.

Cheney won both the primary and the general election. He would suffer two more heart attacks, in 1984 and 1988, and undergo bypass surgery, but his grip on Wyoming’s House seat would be unshakable in five reelection contests.

Some wondered how, after holding one of the most powerful positions in Washington, he could be content as the sole representative of a politically insignificant state. In part, it was because he liked the freedom it offered.

“When you’re in a staff job, you’re never yourself,” he later said. “You’re just somebody’s hired gun. And even if that somebody happens to be the president of the United States, there’s not much you can do on your own.

“Congress is different. You’re responsible for your own decisions. You act for yourself.”

Back in Washington, Cheney ignored the path commonly taken by congressmen from states such as Wyoming. Instead of making himself indispensable to the home folks by digging into a subject dear to their pocketbooks--oil, for example, or coal--he set out to become a leader in the House as a whole.

Again, the way he went about it was telling. He made himself available as a sympathetic ear and sometime-soulmate of frustrated Young Turks--such as Newt Gingrich of Georgia--whose firebrand conservatism and confrontational tactics made them anathema to traditional GOP conservatives such as Michel.

At the same time, Cheney’s White House experience, political savvy and disarmingly practical manner made him a valuable resource for mainstream GOP leaders. Indeed, Senate Republican Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee took to sending an aide over to sound out Cheney when he wanted a candid appraisal of House sentiment on a pending issue.

By the start of his second term, the “moderate” Cheney was chairman of the Republican Policy Committee. By 1987, he was chairing the House Republican Conference. The following year, he became minority whip, standing just behind Michel.

Along the way, Cheney was named to the House Select Committee on Intelligence, where his relationship with Scowcroft deepened. The national security expert had recognized the Wyoming congressman as a comer and had begun inviting him to the small, unofficial study sessions that are used to shape and deepen the education of future leaders in Washington.

As events unfolded, it was not in the House that Scowcroft’s tutorials would pay off.

Tower’s Troubles Lead to Opportunity

Though he stood to succeed Michel as GOP leader in the House, by the time President Bush was inaugurated in 1989, Cheney was restless. House Republicans had been in the minority for decades and at the time there appeared little chance of that changing. He talked to his wife about positions he might accept in the new administration. And in March, opportunity blew in on an ill wind:

The Democratic Senate had rejected Sen. John Tower of Texas as secretary of Defense, partly because of womanizing and drinking, partly because many of his peers detested him.

With the Soviet Union tottering, says Scowcroft, who had become Bush’s national security advisor, “we’d been two months without a secretary of Defense at a time when we were trying to put new policies in place. We needed somebody fast.” Scowcroft successfully pushed Cheney.

At a private, pre-confirmation meeting with Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Cheney’s youthful drunken driving citations came up. The nominee urged that they be made public--a potentially explosive revelation, given the role drinking had played in Tower’s downfall. Nunn, the ultimate insider, said the committee had decided no public disclosure was necessary. Confirmation was a done deal.

Cheney’s predecessor at Defense, Casper W. Weinberger, had occupied himself with fighting the State Department over strategic policy and had left the actual running of the Pentagon largely to the generals. With major new policies and huge post-Cold War budget cuts looming, that had to change, and Cheney wasted no time.

What he did reminded Cannon, his colleague from the Ford White House, of what one canny old political operator used to say about how to establish your authority in Washington. “The way to make your mark in Washington is to kill somebody,” Cannon recalls the old pro saying. “You come down here and you pick out somebody. You circle him and do a war dance. . . . Then you kill him. Nothing establishes you in Washington like a high-profile killing.”

What Cheney did just eight days after becoming secretary of Defense, though he had no real background in military affairs, was give the Air Force chief of staff a career-ending public rebuke for allegedly talking out of turn to Congress.

The tongue-lashing hit the armed services like a thunderclap. It violated their cherished rule of praising in public, criticizing only in private. Worse yet, many thought the Air Force general had gotten a bum rap. No matter. “It was useful to do that,” Cheney told a colleague.

Establishing his authority “was doubly important for Cheney,” says Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. “Everybody knew he was the president’s second choice, after Tower. And he had no real background in defense.”

To further strengthen his grip on a notoriously unmanageable defense establishment, Cheney installed trusted aides as a palace guard. And he cultivated back-channel sources inside the Pentagon, a tacit warning to the generals to respond to him or risk being bypassed.

Most important, when the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff came open soon after he took office, Cheney ignored seniority and reached down the list of ranking generals to find a candidate of his own: the Army’s Gen. Colin L. Powell. Bush knew Powell but resisted jumping him over senior officers. Scowcroft was also concerned about stirring up the brass.

But “Cheney was adamant--and persuasive,” Bush wrote later. The secretary got his man, and it proved an inspired choice. When it came to military action, especially in the Gulf, Cheney and Powell could deliver exceptionally smooth, well-tested operations. The inter-service rivalries and glitches that had marred earlier operations were kept to a minimum.

Cheney also closed unneeded military bases, killed some sacred-cow weapon programs, including a pet Navy airplane, and administered overall cutbacks that added up to a whopping 25%.

Only in the field of global strategy did Cheney seem to stumble; it was one place his ideological core got in the way. He was slow to grasp the profound nature of the changes occurring in the Soviet Union. That led him, for example, to oppose Bush’s arms control initiatives so stubbornly that Scowcroft finally had to give him a talking-to.

And some defense experts think Cheney lacked the vision to see how the nation’s military needed to be reshaped for the post-Cold War era.

These problems point to what seems to be an important characteristic of Cheney’s mind: Faced with an immediate, concrete problem, he usually responds with clear-eyed pragmatism; when the issue is more abstract and distant, his conservative bent may take over.

Certainly there was nothing ideological about Cheney’s approach to the greatest test of his tenure: the Persian Gulf War. “As always, he was very collected, very calm, unflappable, reasonable and thoughtful,” Scowcroft says.

Within the Pentagon, Cheney prodded a reluctant military to prepare for decisive action. As the crisis developed, he and Powell tested and retested the evolving blueprints. When the time came to attack, Cheney stepped back, let field commanders run the war and shielded them from micromanagement.

It was a textbook performance.

Equally important was Cheney’s performance as a member of the White House war council.

“It was a case where nine of us met almost every day from August to January [1990-91],” says Fitzwater, then Bush’s press secretary. “He was the fairest honest-broker of ideas I’d ever seen in a Cabinet officer.”

“I always thought he was smart in this sense: He had a quick grasp of situations. He could see a course of action. He was quick to see the pressures brought to bear on that course of action. And he made sure all of them were discussed.”

In the end, the Gulf War was a tactical triumph of almost matchless proportions. Whether it was a strategic success, as critics have since questioned, is an imponderable of history.

Whatever its ultimate meaning, the end of the Gulf War brought a resurgence of domestic politics. With voters worried about the state of the economy, and unconvinced that Bush shared their concerns, they turned his administration out of office in 1992. For Cheney, that meant deciding once again what he wanted to do with his life.

With Bush gone, it was unclear who the GOP’s next standard-bearer would be. For most of 1993, Cheney explored the possibility that it might be him. He raised more than $1 million and traveled the country testing the waters, as well as the level of his own desire.

In the fall of 1994, Cheney, his wife and 20 or so trusted supporters gathered for dinner in a private home outside Washington to talk about whether he should go forward as a candidate in 1996.

It had been a long year, Cheney told the group. He and Lynne were going home to Wyoming to think about it.

“When I listened to what he was going through on the decision on what to do, I felt a friend should tell him . . . there was no room for any doubts,” says one of those who had strongly encouraged his presidential ambitions.

“I said to him, ‘For God’s sake, don’t do it if you want to spend your time with your family. . . . You can only do it if, after three or four hours’ sleep, you can pick yourself up and say, “Back to the crusade.” If you’re thinking you’d rather go fishing, it’s hard to do.’ ”

Says another Washington admirer: “Every politician I’ve known who wanted to run for president . . . has had a pretty towering ego. I don’t think Dick does.”

He is “not driven by the kind of ambition it takes to run for president.”

Cheney apparently reached the same conclusion.

He opted for business instead. His likable personality and the experience he had gained in Washington combined to hand him a golden opportunity.

On a salmon fishing trip to British Columbia soon after he left government, Cheney had regaled a small group of business executives with tales from the Gulf War and his dealings with the Saudis. The retiring chief executive officer of Halliburton Co. was impressed.

Halliburton was then a well-established oil services firm stuck behind bigger competitors. With the oil action shifting overseas, the outgoing CEO thought Cheney might be just what the Dallas-based company needed to get into the bigger game. Halliburton’s board agreed.

So did Cheney. Beginning in 1995, armed with a wealth of high-level contacts, he led the firm into a period of rapid growth, including expansion into logistical supply for the U.S. military in places such as Kosovo.

Small wonder that, when George W. Bush persuaded him to become his running mate this summer, the Halliburton board dealt generously with its departing leader. In addition to more than $10 million in salary he had already received, Cheney would get some $1 million in bonuses for 2000, a pension and special permission to keep tens of millions of dollars in stock options that would mature before and during the time he would serve as vice president if Bush were to win.

Eventually, media scrutiny of the deal made Cheney forego the future options. But if critics complained he had been too slow to act, Cheney seemed unperturbed. Playing the national campaign game had never been his thing.

On the stump, as in the recent vice presidential debate, he has sometimes seemed more dutiful than impassioned. And he was, after all, the man who once told friends over dinner that he would love to hold the presidency itself but considered the process of getting there perhaps more than he could bear.

After all, says old friend Gardner, “fishing is still important.”

On Friday, The Times will profile the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, Joseph I. Lieberman.

Visit The Times’ Web site for previously published profiles of presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush: https://www.latimes.com/goreprofile and https://www.latimes.com/bushprofile.

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The Cheney File

Born: Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Neb., son of Richard and Marjorie Cheney.

Education: Attended Yale University for almost two years. Received bachelor’s degree from the University of Wyoming, 1965; master’s degree in political science, 1966. Did doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin.

Experience: White House chief of staff under President Ford, 1975-76; Wyoming representative, 1979-89, eventually becoming House minority whip; secretary of Defense under President Bush, 1989-93; chairman and CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., a worldwide engineering and construction company for the petroleum industry, 1995-2000.

Family: Married 36 years to Lynne Anne Vincent. Two daughters: Liz, 34, and Mary, 31. Three granddaughters.

Religion: Methodist

Residences: Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Highland Park, Texas; McLean, Va.

Voting Record

A look at Dick Cheney’s voting record as a House member from Wyoming, 1979-89:

Abortion Rights

Voted against abortion rights numerous times, in many cases supporting measures that prohibited women from abortions even in cases of rape, incest or life endangerment

Education

Opposed creating a new Department of Education

Taxes

Voted to reduce individual income taxes

Busing

Opposed busing to achieve racial desegregation in public schools

Equal Rights

Opposed the Equal Rights Amendment

Environment

Opposed funding for the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act

Social Security

Favored raising the Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67