In My Time (49 page)

As the transition drew to a close, I felt very good about all we had accomplished and the team we had put together. I couldn’t have imagined then the trials and challenges we would face together or the relationships that would be strained—some to the breaking point—during the eight years ahead.

T
he first draft I saw of inaugural events listed “A Tribute to Vice President–Elect Cheney.” Having people say nice things about me for an hour or two sounded pretty good, but I had a better idea—to honor America’s veterans. On January 19 we gathered together men and women who had served in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm in the Smith Center at George Washington University, and among those we saluted were nearly a hundred Medal of Honor recipients. One of them, Nicholas Oresko, had single-handedly taken out a German machine-gun bunker during the Battle of the Bulge, and then, despite being wounded, had charged ahead and wiped out a second bunker. He had attended every inauguration since Eisenhower’s, I read later. “They’ve all been wonderful,” he said. “But today was one of the greatest because the president and the vice president and the secretary of defense all came by and
shook our hands
.” It was my honor to shake the hands of men like Nicholas Oresko.

The next morning a twelve-car motorcade lined up in the narrow street in front of our McLean town house. Our neighbors came outside
to wish us luck and wave goodbye as we pulled away at 8:50 a.m., headed for St. John’s Church, across Lafayette Park from the White House. According to protocol, Lynne and I and our family sat in the front pew to the left in the small, historic Episcopal church. President-elect George Bush, Laura, and their daughters were to the right. We sang and prayed and listened to a sermon given by the Reverend Mark Craig, pastor of the Bushes’ church in Texas. When the service ended, we climbed back into the motorcade for the two-minute drive to the White House, where we were scheduled to have coffee with the outgoing president and vice president. But instead of pulling away from the curb, our motorcade idled in front of the church. Then it idled some more. We were doing the Inauguration Day equivalent of circling an airport in a holding pattern.

I leaned forward in the limo to ask Tony Zotto, my lead Secret Service agent, what was going on. “President Clinton isn’t ready, sir,” he said. I knew that President Clinton had a habit of running late, but it was hard to imagine he’d be tardy on this of all days. The clock was ticking, and whether he was ready or not, he would no longer be president in about two hours.

We finally arrived at the White House, and the Bushes, Clintons, Gores, and Cheneys made small talk as we sipped our coffee in the Blue Room. Lynne and I spent time visiting with Hillary Clinton, who had recently been sworn in as the junior senator from New York, and we were both impressed with Chelsea Clinton, who was particularly gracious and warm.

At 10:45 a.m. our motorcade left the White House for the Capitol. As we began the drive up Pennsylvania Avenue, I thought back thirty-two years to September 1968, when I’d traveled nearly the same route on foot my first day on the job as a congressional fellow. And now, here I was, riding up Pennsylvania Avenue in a long black limousine about to be sworn in as the forty-sixth vice president of the United States.

Al Gore rode with me to the Capitol, and he seemed relaxed and in good humor. Looking at his watch, he explained that we’d been kept
waiting because President Clinton was signing last-minute pardons. He smiled and wondered aloud, “How many more do you think he can get signed before noon?”

Our motorcade pulled under the portico on the east front of the Capitol. I met Lynne, who had been riding with Tipper Gore, and we walked down the hallway together to room S-106, where we would wait until it was time to walk to the inaugural platform. Our movements at the Capitol were tightly scripted. The schedule for the morning reads, “11:18: Mrs. Cheney and Mrs. Bush announced at Platform Door; 11:20: Vice President–Elect departs Hold Room en route Platform. 11:25: Vice President–Elect is announced at Platform Door.”

It is hard to describe the emotion I felt as the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President–Elect, Richard Bruce Cheney.” I thought of my parents, neither of whom lived to see this day. My mother, who was the family archivist, had documented every important family event for years, taking photos and carefully pasting news clippings into the family scrapbooks. If she had been on the platform, she would have had her camera, and I knew how proud she would have been. My father was a man of few words and a lifelong Democrat, until he switched parties to vote for me in my first Republican congressional primary. He would have taken immense pride—and probably enjoyed a chuckle of disbelief—at seeing his son sworn in as Vice President of the United States.

Four brown leather armchairs were arranged in a semicircle near the podium for George Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and me. The morning was cold and drizzly, and we had space heaters at our feet. Lynne, Laura Bush, and the Bush girls were seated directly behind us. Mary and Liz were two rows back, seated with Laura Bush’s mother, Jenna Welch, and the president’s parents, Barbara Bush and President George H. W. Bush.

The family Bible we had chosen for the occasion belonged to my grandfather, Thomas Herbert Cheney, who had signed the first page in pencil, “T. H. Cheney, Sumner, Nebraska 1895.” It was a very large Victorian Bible, the kind you could imagine a mother or father reading from as the whole family gathered around a fireplace together. It was
so large, in fact, that when Barbara Bush saw Liz holding it on her lap before the ceremony, she said, “Boy, you guys are serious about this, aren’t you?”

Shortly before noon I joined Chief Justice William Rehnquist at the podium, raised my right hand, placed my left hand on the Bible, and surrounded by my wife and daughters, became the vice president. It was an emotional moment for all of us, made even more so by the battle of the thirty-seven-day recount. I saw the tears in my daughters’ eyes and felt my own emotions well up. We’d been through an election like no other, but here we were. And here was America, once more showing the world the way we peacefully transfer power.

AFTER AN INAUGURAL LUNCH in the Capitol, Lynne and I rode in the inaugural parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, then got out of the car and walked the last few blocks to the White House.

With Lynne, Liz and Mary in the presidential reviewing stand at the inaugural parade, January 20, 2001 (Official White House Photo/Karen Ballard).

Still in our winter coats, we visited my new office in the West Wing. It had been stripped bare. The furniture was gone, the carpets had been pulled up, and the walls were getting a fresh coat of paint. By the next day it would be ready for me to move in. Twenty-four years earlier, on January 20, 1977, I had walked through the West Wing hours before power transferred to a new president. It was nice to be back, on the incoming team this time. My new office stood next door to the one I’d occupied as President Ford’s chief of staff when I was just thirty-four. Now I was nearly sixty, and as a helpful staffer pointed out, the oldest guy in the West Wing.

On my sixtieth birthday my family threw a surprise party for me in the vice president’s ceremonial office, a beautiful space in the Old Executive Office Building. Each new vice president learns that there is a special drawer in the desk in this office. Pull it open, and under a sheet of Plexiglas you’ll find the signatures of every vice president since Harry Truman. On top of this desk, on January 30, 2001, my family unrolled my birthday gift, a hand-painted map showing the battles my great-grandfather Samuel Fletcher Cheney had participated in during the Civil War. For the eight years of my vice presidency, this map
would hang behind my desk, surrounded by the American flag, my vice presidential and secretary of defense flags, and the flag of the state of Wyoming.

IN ADDITION TO BEING the oldest guy in the West Wing, I was also the only one the president couldn’t fire. As vice president, having been elected and sworn in, I carried my own duties as a constitutional officer. There were only two of them: succeeding the president if he was unable to complete his term and serving as president of the Senate, where I got to cast tie-breaking votes. Beyond that, my role depended on George W. Bush. I had no line responsibility. I wasn’t technically in charge of anything. I could only give advice. And the impact of my advice depended first and foremost on my relationship with the president. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t have mattered how many years of experience I had or how many other offices I’d held, if the president wasn’t interested in what I had to say.

From day one George Bush made clear he wanted me to help govern.

With President Bush in the Oval Office. In 2000, George W. Bush told me he wanted a vice president who would play an important role in governing the nation, and he was true to his word for the entire 8 years we served together. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

He had given a tremendous amount of thought, time, and attention to the issue of what his vice president would do. To the extent that this created a unique arrangement in our history, with a vice president playing a significant role in the key policy issues of the day, it was George Bush’s arrangement. For all the eight years we served together, he kept his word that I would have a major role, and I will always be grateful to him for that.

As I think back on what made the relationship work, several things come to mind. First, I made clear early on that I would not be running for president myself in four or eight years. The president never had to worry that I was taking a position with an eye toward how it might be perceived by voters in Iowa or New Hampshire. I also decided to limit my exposure to the press. When I’d been White House chief of staff and secretary of defense, I’d spent a fair amount of time backgrounding reporters and granting interviews, but as vice president I wanted a much lower profile. Members of the press were most often interested in what advice I had given the president on a particular issue, and he needed
to know that I wasn’t walking out the door of the Oval Office to brief reporters on what I’d just said.

In addition, from the transition onward, there were media stories that I was somehow in charge. They weren’t true, and stepping out too much too publicly would only have fed them. I did do a number of memorable and important press interviews, including one with Tim Russert on the Sunday after 9/11, but I was generally much less accessible to the press than I had been in the past. I soon discovered that this was not a strategy for enhancing my image or reputation. For one thing, it limited my response to false charges made against me. But I decided then and believe now that the best way for me to serve the president and the country was to do so without briefing the media every step of the way.

When trouble develops between a president and vice president, it often begins with staff conflict. To avoid that, we decided to integrate our staffs in key areas. Mary Matalin, my communications director, wore two hats. She served as my assistant and as an assistant to the president. This was also true in national security, where Scooter Libby carried both titles. In legal matters, my general counsel, David Addington, worked closely with the lawyers in the White House counsel’s office every day. My speechwriter, John McConnell, was also one of the president’s top speechwriters. Staff meetings and the policy processes were very well integrated. There were disagreements, of course, but the system worked pretty well most of the time.