CHAPTER 1

WHERE WAS DICKCHENEY?

At 8:54 a.m. somewhere over Ohio on September 11, 2001, oneof the four hacked airliners on scheduled flights from theEast Coast to the West Coast strayed off course, turned backeast and headed for, you could say, two of the most significantbuildings in, or symbols of, America: the White House and thePentagon. Presumably no one but those two hacking pilotswould decide whether to strike one or the other or both whenthey got closer to their targets. About ten minutes before thefirst two hacked planes of the morning, AA 11 and UA 175,destroyed the World Trade Center, the third plane, AA 77,swooped down over Washington D. C. and hit the Pentagon,killing 125 people inside. The fourth plane, UA 93, turned offcourse about thirty-five minutes later, and, after a group ofbravely resisting passengers attempted to take control, forcedthe plane down in a field in Shanksville, Pa. They were moreheroic than they or anyone knew at the time, as they probablysaved the lives of the soon-to-be de facto leader of the UnitedStates and the others not evacuated from the White House.And the White House itself.

It is now clear that from the time of the first hacking thatmorning the United States government committed a series ofmonumental national-security failures. The major immediatefailure was Cheney's in that he appeared at the emergencycontrol bunker beneath the White House some fifty-fiveminutes after the time he later implied. Where he was in themeantime, as the third and fourth hacked planes streakedtoward the nation's capital, no one seemed to know. Both heand Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were desperately needed:with the president away in Florida, they were the only two nowauthorized by military protocol to order the shooting downof the attacking commercial planes with civilian passengersaboard. But Rumsfeld was also missing. Cheney's second majorfailure, and in this case Bush's as well, was in ignoring theCIA, the FBI and counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's,warnings that a catastrophe such as 9/11 could happen at anytime.

The first failures were that the Boston FAA flight controllerswho violated protocol by not notifying the military andrequesting Air Force assistance when the first hacking, of AA11, occurred at 8:19 that morning, according to the final reportof the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the events leadingup to and including 9/11. Nor, apparently, did the Cleveland orIndianapolis FAA controllers inform the military of the coursechanges of both the second and third planes, AA 77 and UA 93.Those were "alarming" occurrences indicating a "catastrophicsystem failure," and the FAA should have asked for immediatemilitary assistance; the 9/11 commission report suggested theyhad not. As a result of these and other failures, AA 77 was ableto reach Washington, swoop low right through what one wouldhave expected to be a swarm of Air Force jet fighters. But it wasnever made clear precisely how long they were delayed beforethey were able to scramble and take to the sky. In any case,AA 77 was able to penetrate the center of the largest nationaldefense system in the world without a shot being fired.

After the second World Trade Center Tower was hit, at 9:03,the entire world, including the vice president, seemed to realizethat the United States was under terrorist attack. Cheney saidhe was lifted right off his feet by Secret Service and carried tothe bunker. But the 9/11 Commission, which investigated theattacks, concluded that he did not arrive until fifty-five minuteslater. Why? Where was he? No one then seemed to know. Nowwe do know, thanks in large part to Jane Mayer's reportingfor The New Yorker and her book, The Dark Side, which willbe treated in detail in chapter 5: "9/11 The Cheney Version.As for Rumsfeld, Brigadier General W. Montague Winfield ofthe Pentagon's command center said, "For thirty minutes wecouldn't find him."

During this critical time the emergency-operationsbunker was without its acting commander-in-chief of themilitary or its secretary of defense to direct the defense of thenation at the height of the new wave of attacks. And WhiteHouse counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke had warnedCheney that more attacks should be expected. During his andRumsfeld's absence, at 9:38, AA 77 crashed into the Pentagon.Perhaps they could have successfully ordered it shot downand saved the lives of 125 people in the building. The fateof the passengers aboard AA 77 had probably already beensealed, as with the passengers aboard UA 93, which crashedwhen its passengers staged a revolt and forced it down in afield in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Few seem to have realizedthat those brave passengers may well have saved the lifeof the Acting President of the United States and the othersstill in the White House by leaving only one plane to attackWashington DC, whose pilot, for whatever logistical reason,decided to hit the Pentagon, which had not been evacuated,instead of the White House.

CHAPTER 2

TWO GUYS

What did we expect?

Two such different guys, George W. Bush and RichardB. Cheney, with such vastly different pasts, characters,backgrounds, interests, attitudes, temperaments. Yet they gotalong beautifully. That may have been part of the problem.Perhaps they got along too beautifully. Perhaps it would havebeen better, especially during their first term in office, whenthe principal damage was done, had George stood up to Dickmore—at least on the small things (to paraphrase Woody Allen)like the war in Iraq. But each man's particular characteristicsand skills might have made this impossible. Certainly, had thetables been turned, it's hard to believe, if Bush wanted to go towar in Iraq and Cheney did not, it seems that we would havenot gone to war in Iraq.

The president was a trim, neat, nice-appearing chap, asthe landed gentry of his grandfather's generation in NewEngland liked to say. The Bush family was socially prominentand very rich, having begun to build the family fortune in thenineteenth century and augmented it in the 1930s on ties toand investments in oil and German armaments. But George W.himself seemed cut from a somewhat slightly different cloth. Heliked to lift weights and work out regularly at the White Housegym and then strut with some pride about his musculature.Although he became titular head of the most powerful nationon earth, he happened to have little interest, according to thosein the White House then, in the principles and policies of thenation he was elected to run, as the Supreme Court ruled thathe had been. Bush's idea of governing was to charm otherworld leaders, look into their eyes, and make judgments onthat basis about their trustworthiness and value—as he said ofhis meeting with President Putin of Russia. Like Willie Loman,what he wanted above all was to be well-liked.

He was not strong in resolve but was easily manipulated.He was a Connecticut Yankee who had transplanted to Texas, aYalie without portfolio—that is, without the requisite intellect.He would express such profound economic lamentations,for example, as "most of our foreign imports now come fromoverseas." Grandson of a United States senator, and sonof a former president, once in the White House, George W.worshipped a new master. A born-again Christian, he believedhis job was to complete God's mission to win victory in theMiddle East, though neither he nor Cheney ever managed toarticulate coherently what victory meant.

Cheney, unlike Bush, could be a really mean-appearingchap, depending on which side of the smile/sneer you focusedon. He was highly self-confident, highly intelligent, blunt, andplain-spoken, but in the end not your taciturn Western cowboy.He could talk for hours, becoming charming, persuasive, deadsure of the words he spoke, himself a leader, a manipulator,obsessive about policy—his own unapologetic, antiquatedimperialist policy. In that, he knew precisely what he wanted,though perhaps only once did he honestly reveal it in public.Even if what he wanted happened to be morally, legally,strategically, philosophically wrong, he was the take-chargeguy who believed what he wanted was best for his country and,not incidentally, for himself, and he was brilliant in carrying itout. As he said in his secret report in 1992, he wanted Americato dominate the world militarily to gain continued access to itsmaterial assets and natural resources (oil and natural gas inparticular) and to maximize the nation's international influence.Cheney wanted this whether it meant crossing the border of aforeign country to obtain such access or not, whether it meantcommitting war crimes in the process or not. And he knewhow to turn President Bush around almost immediately in2001, once they were in office, on the Bush election-campaignvows against nation-state building and becoming the world'spoliceman or controlling carbon emissions.

Bush was the jolly, jokey nice guy with the obvious strains ofa superiority–inferiority complex and without an evident carein the world now except to place his faith in his God, which wasduck soup for Dick Cheney and their private weekly luncheonstogether. Yet here they were together in a relationship theframers of the Constitution did not envision: with George W.off praying for victory in the Middle East and working out inthe White House gym, Cheney was getting almost everythinghe wanted as de facto president.

Most of what they had in common were negatives. Both haddrunk-driving convictions in their youth; both avoided servingin Vietnam; both had really undistinguished records at Yale.Cheney, much the smarter of the two, got his act together as ayoung man, clearly with the help of the woman her married—"oneof the best decisions I ever made was asking her [LynneVincent] out on our first date" on January 30, 1958—and wason his way to a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin andcareer as a political science professor when, at the invitationof Robert F. Kennedy, of all people, he attended a weekendseminar on politics and decided he'd rather be in politics thanteach it.

As teenagers both had a keen interest in football. Bushwas a cheerleader at the exclusive New England prep school,Andover Academy. He "tagged along in his letter sweaterbehind the cool members of the football team thinking he wasone of them, which he definitely was not," as one of his formerclassmates told me. Cheney loved football as well, though therewas a difference: he was a highly aggressive and popular high-school player.

But the differences outweighed the vague similarities.From a background very different from Bush's, Cheney wasborn in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a moderately paidFederal soil-conservation agent. After leaving a forty-yearcareer in public service, he had spectacular success in hisfirst venture into large corporate business—if money-makingfor his company and himself was the measure—becomingCEO of Halliburton, one of the largest oil-based corporationsin the world, and his net worth and annual income rosedramatically along with the earnings of the company. Thiswas far different from Bush's business experience, with itsrepeated failures: His appropriately named oil-explorationcompany, Arbusto, lost money and was bought out bySpectrum 7 Energy, which hired Bush to run it, and it wasa near failure. It too was acquired, this time by HarkenEnergy, and he was given shares of stock and a directorship.But in 1991 the SEC said he had violated federal securitieslaw four times while servicing as a director. Bush's fatherwas the American president at the time of the investigation,and the case was dropped. One cannot put too fine a pointon the differences in the business experiences of Bush andCheney. There is a question about how well Dick Cheney ranHalliburton; some contend that its accounting practices werechanged under his five-year reign to make the companylook more successful than it was. Nevertheless, Cheney'sgreatly increased earnings along with Halliburton's contrastsignificantly with George W.'s failures.

By far the greatest difference between these two men wastheir health. George W., with his regular workouts, seemed ashealthy as a Texas horse, but he had no desire to use his will tostay fit for other things, like keeping his country defensivelyfit, and following through on it. The overweight Cheney hada long history of serious health problems, like several heartattacks, a pacemaker, a defibrillator, aneurysm, a by-pass, anexternal blood pump, a heart transplant, and a number ofvisits to hospitals for monitoring and observation. But hisill health only seemed somehow to have strengthened hisresolve to get what he wanted accomplished. He had a cast-ironconstitution, a will of steel. He once drove 1,770 miles to acceptthe fellowship in Washington offered by Robert Kennedy, rentan apartment for his young family and be back by Mondaymorning cramming for preliminary graduate exams at theUniversity of Wisconsin. He passed the exams.

Some four decades later, on July 14, 2010, Dick Cheney issueda statement that he was entering a new phase of "increasingcongestive heart failure," saying that his heart had stoppedpumping enough blood into the body. Increasing congestiveheart failure is a serious matter. Even then he did not giveup. He chose, on the advice of his doctors, to try the newlydeveloped external pump, which was not designed to lastindefinitely. Dick Cheney continued to believe he could andwould go on and "resume an active life."

Indeed, the heart pump plus extensive help from hisdaughter, Liz, enabled him, after he retired, to write a veryinteresting and detailed 700-page memoir. Large sections ofit read as if they were dictated from his total recall in detailof events decades earlier, details that seemed to conform tothe historical record. The exceptions seemed to occur whereideological paths crossed, in which cases he tended to lie orcover up, sad to say, like a politician.

At any rate, Cheney surely was a great politician, in thesense of getting done most of what he believed was best forthe country. Still, it seems clear that in so doing he lied moreoften and more seriously more than most. Why did we go towar in Iraq? Not, as he said over and over again, to free the Iraqipeople, who did not want us there to free them. Not becauseSaddam was tied to 9/11 or because he had or was seekingweapons of mass destruction. None of these statements weretrue, and Cheney knew or should have known they were nottrue.

Several of his friends or acquaintances believe that hispersonality changed dramatically after the open-heart surgery.Perhaps the most brutal comment comes from John PerryBarlow, a fellow Wyomingan, an Internet privacy advocateand former Grateful Dead lyricist who worked on Cheney'sfirst congressional campaign. Barlow e-mailed Todd S. Purdumof Vanity Fair that Cheney's "dark intellect has become oneof the most dangerous forces in the world; he has become aglobal sociopath, a creature of enormous power and intellectcombined with all the empathy of a HAL 9000"—referring tothe computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The late James M. Naughton, a former New York Timescolleague who became managing editor of the PhiladelphiaInquirer, told me not long before he died, that he was simplybaffled by the change in Cheney since he had first known himand mentioned how much fun he had with Cheney in the 1970sas a fellow practical joker at the White House during the GeraldFord presidency. Naughton portrays a side of Cheney that onewould never then have suspected. Cheney was the chief of stafffor President Ford. Back then, according to Naughton, Cheneyinvolved himself in several jokes, both together with Naughtonand at his expense.

At one point Naughton had brought a huge costumechicken head for $100, and it was Cheney who urged himto wear it to one of Ford's press conferences. Then he daredNaughton to move right up front—calling him chickenif he didn't. There, the man from The Times, dressed in achicken head, could be photographed by the press and TVcameramen. After the press conference, Cheney insisted thatFord stand up close to the chicken, and the next morning inthe nation's newspapers and television networks, there wasthe laughing president of the United States, face to beak,with the head of a serious chicken. "What have I done?"Naughton said to himself immediately afterward, suddenlyfearing that his career at the august Times was over. Butno one criticized him. In fact, the then publisher, ArthurSulzberger, after saying he found the story very funny, askedNaughton if he had put the chicken head on his expenseaccount. Naughton said he had not. But the word got outand he was reimbursed the $100. In later years Cheney'srelationship with The New York Times was not so cordial. Infact he banned The Times reporters from Air Force Two forthe duration of the 2004 presidential campaign.

(Continues...)