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Institutional
Affiliations
Project for the New American Century: Signed PNAC's founding statement of principles (1997)
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA): Advisory Board Member, 2000 (3)
American Enterprise Institute: Senior Fellow, January 1993-October 1995 (1)
American Political Science Association: Congressional Fellow, 1968-1969 (4)
Government
Service
Vice Presidential Selection Committee: Head, 2000 (4)
Defense Department: Secretary of Defense, March 1989-January 1993 (5)
House of Representatives: Minority Whip, 1988 (5)
House Republican Conference: Chairman, 1987 (5)
Republican Policy Committee: Chairman, 1981-1987 (5)
House of Representatives: Representative for State of Wyoming, 1978-1989 (2)
White House: Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, 1975-1977 (2)
White House: Deputy Assistant to President Gerald Ford, 1974-1975 (2)
Cost of Living Council: Assistant Director, 1971-1973 (2)
White House: Staff Assistant, 1971 (2)
Office of Economic Opportunity: Special Assistant to Director Donald Rumsfeld, 1969-1971 (2, 4)
Corporate
Connections/Business Interests
Halliburton, Inc.: President and Chief Executive Officer, October 1995-July 2000 (1)
Education
University of Wisconsin: Graduate studies (2)
University of Wyoming: B.A., 1965, and M.A. in Political Science, 1966 (1, 2)
Caspar College: Undergraduate classes (1)
Yale University: Three undergraduate semesters on scholarship (2)
Right Web Connections
John Bolton
Stephen Hadley
I. Lewis Libby
John Negroponte
Condoleezza Rice
Project for the New American Century
American Enterprise Institute
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs |
Highlights
& Quotes
In his first four years as vice president, Dick Cheney revealed a remarkable proclivity for doing the wrong thing. He was lurking in a bunker during the country’s greatest national security emergency since the Cuban Missile Crisis, fanning conspiratorial flames by holding secretive meetings with corporate execs to design energy policy, scaring the heck out of the public during each of his appearances by just seeming to be a mean bastard, lying about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities or its ties to al-Qaida, or hyping the threat posed by Iran.
Like the president, Cheney is perfectly unwilling to admit when he gets things wrong--a position that may have cost him in the popularity column, but one that apparently did little to hurt President Bush’s reelection campaign. If anything, Cheney has proved how little an impact the VP can have on public views of the White House--a fact made all the more remarkable when one considers that Cheney might be one of the most influential VPs in U.S. history.
A case in point is Cheney’s 2004 campaign debate with Democratic Party candidate John Edwards. Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt wrote of the debate: “Cheney was ... every inch the snarling, hunch-shouldered golem that has made him one of the least popular politicians in recent memory. He seldom looked up at moderator Gwen Ifill, or at the cameras facing him, choosing instead to speak into his own chest for the entire night. Cheney appeared, overall, to cut quite the frightening figure, the dark night to Edwards' optimistic day. The other problem for Cheney, of course, was the way he lied with nearly every word that passed his curled lips. It was a virtuoso performance of prevarication, obfuscation, and outright balderdash. On Thursday night, George W. Bush played the part of a man who couldn't possibly defend his record. On Tuesday night, Cheney acted as though that record did not exist.” (9)
Edwards scored an overwhelming victory in the polls after the debate. (10) But Cheney won the more important battle--the struggle to bury the record. When voters went to the polls last November, they voted for the Bush-Cheney ticket based largely on their view of the administration’s ability on national security issues. (11) Few people may like Cheney or even believe what he says, but a large number of Americans seem to feel secure in knowing that a “snarling, hunch-shouldered golem” is defending the country.
The early signs are that Cheney is consolidating his grip over much of administration policymaking in the second term. While his neocon collaborators seem to be diminishing, their hawkish fellow-travelers--like Condoleezza Rice, John Negroponte, and Stephen Hadley--are being promoted. In one case, it seems that Cheney himself may have intervened to make sure that one of his guys didn’t get passed over. When Rice became secretary of state, she failed to immediately give John Bolton--Colin Powell’s undersecretary of state--a new portfolio, signaling that the hardline, anti-UN ideologue had fallen out of favor.
But then Secretary of State Rice, out of the blue, nominated Bolton to be ambassador to the UN. Commented one writer: “M any were shocked, not only because Bolton ’s beliefs are antithetical to the very position for which he was tapped, but because the move appeared so inconsistent with the hopeful direction in which the second Bush term began. Beltway watchers have speculated that Vice President Cheney engineered this dramatic U-turn. After all, the administration still owes Bolton a political debt for his role in halting the Florida recount in the 2000 elections. Cheney, who consistently voted to cut funding for the United Nations while a member of the House, perhaps saw Bolton as an ally in opposing the new multilateralism of Bush’s second term.” (12)
Cheney’s record of government service--beginning with his stint as chief of staff to President Ford--shows a fairly stable conservative trajectory. But it was as a member of the House of Representatives in the 1980s that Cheney earned the conservative credentials that would propel him to the head of the Pentagon under the first President Bush. As a House member, he opposed the ban on selling armor-piercing bullets, opposed sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa , and voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. On the education front, Cheney voted for a constitutional amendment that would ban school busing and voted against Head Start. Cheney opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, voted against extending the Clean Water Act, and was one of four representatives to oppose the ban on guns that can escape detection through the metal detector. (7)
Although Cheney continued his hawkish ways after becoming secretary of defense under the first President Bush--including overseeing the drafting of the controversial 1992 Defense Policy Guidance--it wasn’t until he became vice president that the full force of Cheney’s views on defense and foreign policy were felt. The public and media did not adjust well, and Cheney’s image as a bull-headed, secretive, behind-the-scenes manipulator began to grow. On any given day during George W. Bush’s first administration, a leading national newspaper might have carried a number of separate articles on controversial issues connected to Cheney. The September 17, 2003, the Washington Post, for example, had an article on the VP's decision to appeal to the Supreme Court a lower court's order that the government turn over documents related to Cheney's secretive energy task force; an article about Cheney's financial ties to Halliburton, a contractor formerly headed by the VP that has been granted lucrative government contracts to help with Iraqi reconstruction; and a letter to the editor (titled "Mr. Bush's Artful Dodger") lambasting Cheney for using a rare public interview (reported on earlier that week in the Post) to stubbornly defend administration policies and contentions regarding Iraq long after they had proved to be misguided. (Wrote the letter writer: "[Cheney] casually accepts factual inaccuracies over what the military calls 'ground truth.' ... The administration's unwillingness to confront reality borders on dishonesty--and it is troubling.")
An egregious example of Cheney's refusal to sincerely deal with the facts was his repeated assertion that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. In an effort to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and the hijackers, Cheney repeated on various occasions before and after the Iraq war that the two had met in Prague in early 2001, despite the Czech Republic's admission that it could not verify the meeting took place and U.S. intelligence agencies' inability to prove that Atta was out of the United States at the time of the alleged meeting. According to a Washington Post article on September 29, 2003 , Cheney, working with two key advisers--Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis Libby--worked hard to make sure references to the alleged meeting appeared in speeches and policy briefings even after the intelligence regarding the event had been discredited.
This effort apparently alienated some officials in the Bush administration. Reports the Post: "Behind the scenes, the Atta meeting remained tantalizing to Cheney and his staff. Libby--along with deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, a longtime Cheney associate--began pushing to include the Atta claim in Powell's appearance before the UN Security Council a week after the State of the Union speech. Powell's presentation was aimed at convincing the world of Iraq 's ties to terrorists and its pursuit of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. On January 25, 2003 , with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. 'We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, "Wow! Here we go again," ' said one official who helped draft the speech. 'You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again.' ... [Some] officials present said they felt that Libby's presentation was over the top, that the wording was too aggressive and most of the material could not be used in a public forum. Much of it, in fact, unraveled when closely examined by intelligence analysts from other agencies and, in the end, was largely discarded."
As late as September 2003, Cheney was still repeating the Atta contention, saying in an interview on "Meet the Press," "With respect to 9/11, of course, we've had the story ... the Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming or discrediting it." ("Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked by Cheney," Washington Post, September 29, 2003 ).
Cheney has been affiliated with a number of influential neoconservative organizations, including the Project for the New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
He is married to Lynne Cheney, an AEI fellow and former head of the National Endowment for Humanities; and he is the father of Elizabeth Cheney, currently the deputy assistant secretary of state for near east affairs, and Mary Cheney, a board member of the Republican Unity Coalition (an organization that seeks to build bridges between gay and straight Republicans). (6) |
