Richard Cheney is widely considered one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, having played an instrumental role in everything from expanding presidential war powers to pushing an aggressive war on terror that has included overturning unfriendly Mideast regimes and indefinitely detaining without charge terrorism suspects. Closely aligned with the neoconservative political faction, Cheney, along with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, supported advocacy efforts to invade Iraq long before the 9/11 terror attacks occurred. After 9/11, the vice president and his coterie of neoconservative advisers (sometimes termed a "cabal" by his critics) helped implement an aggressive war on terror that had as a centerpiece ousting Saddam Hussein from power. (For more on Cheney's staff members, see "All the Vice President's Men," Right Web News, January 26, 2007.) Despite the spiraling violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasions, during President George W. Bush's second term Cheney became the point person in an increasingly divided administration for expanding the range of U.S. targets in the war on terror to include Iran and potentially Syria. His efforts, however, have been hampered by the large number of departures of like-minded hardliners from the administration (see "The Departed, A Special Section," Right Web News, May 11, 2007) and the growing influence of a realist-minded State Department under Condoleezza Rice.
One of the hallmarks of Cheney's tenure as vice president has been secrecy. He has continually fought to keep his office records from official scrutiny and fended off a number challenges to get records from his meetings publicly released. The most famous example of this was the records of his meetings with energy industry executives that were aimed at helping formulate the Bush administration's energy policies, which became the focus of a drawn-out lawsuit spearheaded by the conservative group Judicial Watch (see Judicial Watch press release, May 10, 2005). Summarizing this aspect of Cheney's tenure, the Washington Post opined: "Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar, and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that 'the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch,' and is therefore exempt from rules governing either" (June 24, 2007).
Cheney, a former fellow of the influential American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has also stridently fought off attempts to report on his office's classification activities, despite an executive order from Bush requiring every agency "within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information" to do so (Chicago Tribune blog, May 26, 2006). Commenting on Cheney's refusal to comply with the order, Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said: "It undermines oversight of the classification system and reveals a disdain for presidential authority. It's part of a larger picture of disrespect that this vice president has shown for the norms of oversight and accountability" (Chicago Tribune, May 26, 2006).
In late June 2007, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) disclosed that in response to repeated requests for compliance by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which is charged with reviewing agency classification activities, Cheney and his staff, led by his chief of staff David Addington, proposed abolishing the ISOO. Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote in a letter to Cheney that the proposal to abolish the ISOO "could be construed as retaliation" (Waxman letter to Cheney, June 21, 2007). Regarding Cheney's actions, Waxman told the New York Times (June 22, 2007), "I know that the vice president wants to operate with unprecedented secrecy. But this is absurd. The [executive order] is designed to keep classified information safe. His argument is really that he's not part of the executive branch, so he doesn't have to comply."
Cheney's governmental obfuscations are broad-ranging. He has repeatedly contradicted other officials about issues in the Middle East and consistently made misleading allegations both before and after the invasion of Iraq regarding that country's weapons arsenal and connections to terrorist groups. Two days before the United States invaded Iraq, for example, the vice president lambasted comments made by International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, who had stated that there was "no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program [in Iraq]." In response, Cheney repeated the discredited notion that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons: "We know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong" (Meet the Press, March 16, 2003).
Some observers saw Cheney as playing a key role in pushing allegations that emerged in mid-2007 claiming that Iran is responsible for arming groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that military officers in the field have expressed deep skepticism about the charges. Asked about the allegations—which were also aired by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns—Dan McNeill, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, said: "What we've found so far hasn't been militarily significant on the battlefield." McNeill also said that more likely sources for the arms are drug traffickers, black market dealers, or al-Qaida groups (Inter Press Service, June 20, 2007).
For many, that Cheney, who was defense secretary under the senior George Bush and chief of staff to Gerald Ford, became the central player in the drive to the Iraq War signified a remarkable about-face. During the 1991 Gulf War, Cheney was eager to get out of Iraq and not press the fight after Hussein had been driven out of Kuwait. As Henry Rowen, who was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs at the time, told James Mann: "As the war was coming to an end, I went to Cheney and said, 'You know, we could change the government and put in a democracy.' The answer he gave was that the Saudis wouldn't like it" (Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 192).
Commenting on Cheney's transformation into a leading advocate for an Iraq War, Brent Scowcroft, a close friend of Cheney's and the national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, said: "The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney. I consider Cheney a good friend—I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore. ... I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is okay, but it's not sufficient'" (New Yorker, October 24, 2005).
Regardless of whether Cheney is a "neocon," he is intimately associated with the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, notably including his efforts to push policies that are one-sidedly in favor of Israel. For example, in the wake of the Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006, allegations emerged that Cheney and his administration allies were involved in supporting Israeli bombing plans. According to an unnamed U.S. government consultant "with close ties to Israel" interviewed by Seymour Hersh, Israel had put together bombing plans long before Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, which set off the conflict. As they developed their plans early in summer 2006, said the consultant, Israeli officials went to Washington "to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear. ... Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council." A second unnamed official, a former intelligence officer, claimed, "We told Israel, 'Look, if you guys have to go, we're behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office'" (New Yorker, August 21, 2006).
Scowcroft has argued that Cheney's transformation into a Middle East hawk was due in part to the influence of Bernard Lewis, a Princeton Middle East scholar who was consulted by Cheney and other administration figures after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As Jeffrey Goldberg reported: "Lewis, Scowcroft said, fed a feeling in the White House that the United States must assert itself. ... Cheney, in particular, Scowcroft thinks, accepted Lewis's view of Middle East politics." Said Scowcroft: "It's that idea that we've got to hit somebody hard. ... And Bernard Lewis says, 'I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power'" (New Yorker, October 24, 2005).
But Cheney's hardline tendencies date back some 30 years, to his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when he rose through the ranks to become the youngest White House chief of staff in history. Upset by the politics of détente pursued by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Cheney, together with Rumsfeld, who was then serving as Ford's chief of staff, helped convince Ford, upon taking over the White House after Nixon's resignation, that it was necessary to purge the administration. Veteran journalist T.D. Allman recounted the episode: "Having turned Ford into their instrument, Rumsfeld and Cheney staged a palace coup. They pushed Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job, and remove Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser. Rumsfeld was named secretary of defense, and Cheney became chief of staff to the president. The Yale dropout and draft dodger was, at the age of 34, the second-most-powerful man in the White House" (Rolling Stone, August 25, 2004).
Cheney's alliance with core neoconservatives, including the likes of I. Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, also began long ago. Both Wolfowitz and Libby worked under Cheney when he was defense secretary during the George H.W. Bush administration. The three oversaw the drafting of the notorious Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) in 1992, the first draft of which, although immediately rejected when it was leaked to the press, is often regarded as an early blueprint for what would be become the Bush Doctrine in the wake of 9/11. The scholars Chris Dolan and David Cohen write: "While the realists, most members of Congress, and the Clinton administration rejected the 1992 DPG draft, it would later be used by the neocons as a policy foundation from which to initiate the Bush doctrine in response to 9/11" (Politics & Policy, March 2006).
Among its more salient points, the draft DPG, which was meant to serve as a policy platform for how to respond to the collapse of the Soviet Union, called for massive increases in defense spending, the assertion of lone superpower status, the prevention of the emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive—or preemptive—force, and the idea of forsaking multilateralism if it didn't suit U.S. interests.
Five years after the draft DPG was produced, Cheney joined his neoconservative friends in launching the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). PNAC's founding statement of principles, issued on June 3, 1997, repeated many of the same goals laid out in the draft DPG, including the use of preemptive force, arguing that "the history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." It set out four additional elements of what it termed a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity:" "We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future; we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Signatories to this statement included Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, and a cast of other core neoconservatives and right-wing Republicans.
All of these themes would again be revived in the 2002 National Security Strategy, the seminal statement of the so-called Bush Doctrine. As described by leading international relations scholar Robert Jervis, the Bush Doctrine is composed of "a strong belief in the importance of a state's domestic regime in determining its foreign policy and the related judgment that this is an opportune time to transform international politics; the perception of great threats that can be defeated only by new and vigorous policies, most notably preventive war; a willingness to act unilaterally when necessary; and, as both a cause and a summary of these beliefs, an overriding sense that peace and stability require the United States to assert its primacy in world politics" (cited in Dolan and Cohen, Politics & Policy).
In his first four years as vice president, Dick Cheney became the key figure in the White House on foreign policy issues, as well as an intimidating presence in the nation's media. Like President George W. Bush and his other closest advisers, Cheney has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the many mistakes made by the administration in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
On any given day during George W. Bush's first term, a leading national newspaper might have carried a number of separate articles on controversial issues connected to Cheney. The September 17, 2003, Washington Post, for example, published separate articles on: Cheney's decision to appeal to the Supreme Court a lower court's order that the government turn over documents related to his 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 for Iraqi reconstruction; and a letter to the editor ("Mr. Bush's Artful Dodger") lambasting Cheney for using a rare public interview to stubbornly defend administration policies and contentions regarding Iraq long after they had proved to be misguided.
An example of Cheney's refusal to sincerely deal with the facts was his repeated assertion that 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. The Post reported: "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 dubious 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" (Meet the Press, September 14, 2003).
Although his aggressive stance at times seemed to hurt him in the popularity column, it appeared to work to Bush's benefit during the 2004 presidential election. A case in point was Cheney's 2004 campaign debate with Democratic Party candidate Sen. John Edwards. The blogger 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" (Truthout, October 6, 2004).
Edwards scored a clear victory in the polls after the debate. But Cheney won the more important battle—the struggle to place the election on his terms. When voters went to the voting booths in November 2004, they voted for the Bush-Cheney ticket based in large measure on their view of the administration's ability on national security issues.
Early in Bush's second term, it became clear that Cheney had succeeded in consolidating his grip on administration foreign policy. While his neoconservative collaborators diminished in ranks, their hawkish fellow travelers during the first term—like Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley—were 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. Rice then surprised observers by supporting Bolton to be the next ambassador to the UN. One writer commented: "Many 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" (Tompaine.com, April 11, 2005).
Although Cheney began his government career in the Nixon administration, it was as a member of the House of Representatives in the 1980s that he solidified 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 (see "Inside Politics," CNN Transcripts, August 2, 2000, and Cheney's voting profile at On The Issues, http://www.ontheissues.org/Dick_Cheney.htm).
Dick Cheney 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, who has served a number of posts in the State Department during the two George W. Bush terms, and Mary Cheney, a board member of the Republican Unity Coalition (an organization that seeks to build bridges between gay and straight Republicans).
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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
American Enterprise Institute: Senior Fellow, 1993-1995
American Political Science Association: Congressional Fellow, 1968-1969
Government Service
Vice Presidential Selection Committee: Head, 2000
Department of Defense: Secretary of Defense, 1989-1993
House of Representatives: Minority Whip, 1988
House Republican Conference: Chairman, 1987
Republican Policy Committee: Chairman, 1981-1987
House of Representatives: Congressman (R-WY), 1978-1989
White House: Vice President, 2001-current; Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, 1975-1977; Deputy Assistant to President Gerald Ford, 1974-1975; Staff Assistant, 1971
Cost of Living Council: Assistant Director, 1971-1973
Office of Economic Opportunity: Special Assistant to Director Donald Rumsfeld, 1969-1971
Private Sector
Halliburton, Inc.: President and Chief Executive Officer, 1995-2000
Education
University of Wisconsin: Graduate studies
University of Wyoming: B.A., 1965, and M.A. in Political Science, 1966
Caspar College: Undergraduate classes
Yale University: Three undergraduate semesters
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