In My Time (52 page)

FROM MY TIME IN Congress participating in continuity-of-government exercises, I knew how important it was to ensure we had a
plan in place for leadership succession and survival. We had a duty to make sure an enemy attack could not result in decapitation of our government. I asked my general counsel, Dave Addington, to review the formal procedures in place.

With David Addington, my general counsel and later chief of staff, at the vice president’s residence in the summer of 2006. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

What happens, for example, if the president becomes ill or is incapacitated? What happens if the vice president can no longer perform his duties? Who should be notified and what steps should be taken to ensure the government can continue to operate in the wake of a national disaster or act of war? These were matters that Addington and I had worked on together before, and we both knew they needed to be addressed before a crisis was at hand. Early in 2001, I asked him to work closely with the White House counsel’s office to provide advice and guidance as our administration began its own review.

A few weeks later, David came to see me with a problem he had uncovered. “Mr. Vice President,” he said, sitting in the chair next to my desk in my West Wing office, “if you were to become incapacitated, if you were unable to discharge your duties, there is no mechanism by which you could be removed.” And there was a second level of complication, he explained, which had to do with the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It provides that “whenever the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the president is unable to discharge the powers or duties of his office, the vice president shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.” A vice president is required in order to carry out the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, in other words, and if I were incapacitated, I might stand in the way of the removal of a president unable to discharge his duties—or I might become an incapacitated acting president. Neither of these was a good outcome for the country.

As David and I were discussing succession, I was mindful of my health. I had a long history of coronary artery disease, and although the doctors had concluded that I was strong enough to serve as vice president, I couldn’t discount the possibility of a stroke or another serious
heart attack that would leave me unable to function. The example of Woodrow Wilson came to mind. He had suffered a stroke that incapacitated him for the last year and a half of his presidency.

What was needed was a way to remove me from office should I be unable to fulfill my duties, and so I took the extraordinary step of writing a letter of resignation as vice president shortly after I was sworn in. The resignation letter would be effective, as provided by federal law, upon its delivery to the secretary of state. As I signed the letter, I thought about adding instructions concerning when it should be delivered. After all, this was my formal, signed resignation, and it seemed natural that I should set forth the circumstances under which it could be delivered. Addington advised otherwise. He was concerned that any additional notations I made on the letter would muddy the waters should it ever have to be used.

Instead, I took out a piece of my official stationery with the words “The Vice President” written across the top. I wrote the date—March 28, 2001—and then this:

Dave Addington—You are to present the attached document to President George W. Bush if the need ever arises.

—Richard B. Cheney

“Okay, David,” I said, looking over the top of my glasses. “I won’t give specific instructions about when this letter should be triggered.” I pointed at him, still holding the pen I’d used to sign the letter. “But you need to understand something. This is not your decision to make. This is not Lynne’s decision to make. The only thing you are to do, if I become incapacitated, is get this letter out and give it to the president. It’s his decision, and his alone, whether he delivers it to the secretary of state.” “Yes, sir, Mr. Vice President,” David said.

I did not want a situation where, should I become incapacitated and there was an effort to remove me from office, my family or my staff stood in the way. The only one who had the right to make that decision
was the president of the United States. And he was the only person other than Addington with whom I discussed the letter. I thought it was important that he be aware of it.

Addington double-wrapped the letter in two manila U.S. government envelopes, took it home, and put it in his dresser drawer. He had made a conscious decision not to keep it in his safe at work because he didn’t want to find himself unable to get to it in the event the worst did happen and the White House was in crisis mode. When a fire destroyed his home a few years later, David grabbed two things after he got his family out of the house—the folder with his family’s financial documents and birth certificates in it and the envelope containing my letter of resignation.

ONE OF THE MOST enduring decisions a president makes is choosing a nominee for the Supreme Court. With lifetime appointments, Supreme Court justices can impact American life long after the president who nominates them is gone from office. The first time I observed a Supreme Court nomination from up close was when President Gerald Ford selected John Paul Stevens, who served on the court for thirty-five years. He is a fine man and a well-regarded jurist, but his record on the court was consistently liberal. The same thing was true of Justice David Souter, appointed by George H. W. Bush. He is a man whom I respect, but he was a predictably liberal vote on the Court.

As we took office we did not know whether there would be a vacancy on the Court during our term, but President Bush wanted to be prepared. He wanted to begin a process to review potential candidates, and I convened a group that included Attorney General John Ashcroft; White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales; Chief of Staff Andy Card; my chief of staff, Scooter Libby; and the president’s counselor Karl Rove. When Al Gonzales became attorney general, Harriet Miers joined the group as White House counsel. Gonzales and Miers took the lead in preparing large briefing binders with information about potential candidates that included their experience, their records, how they had ruled on important cases, and how they were viewed by their fellow judges.
We cast our net widely, beginning with appellate court judges, then looking at some district court judges, as well as a small number of state court judges and some lawyers who hadn’t served on the bench before, but our focus was certainly on appellate court judges. Other factors such as age also entered into our recommendations. It would be better, all other things being equal, to go with someone in his or her fifties rather than sixties, simply because the younger candidate would be likely to serve longer on the Court.

When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement on July 1, 2005, we were able to move quickly to bring in some of the leading candidates we’d considered for interviews. We conducted these sessions at the Vice President’s Residence and in the wardroom of the White House Mess. We covered a broad range of topics with each candidate, trying to learn as much as possible so that we could get a good idea of what kind of justice he or she would be. Track records were important because we believed these were the best indicators of how a judge would rule in the future.

After we’d interviewed the candidates, our group made recommendations to the president, and he conducted interviews with the leading contenders. The preparation we’d done enabled the president to name Judge John Roberts of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit less than three weeks after Justice O’Connor’s retirement announcement.

While Roberts’s nomination was working its way through the Senate, Chief Justice Rehnquist, who had been valiantly fighting cancer, passed away. The president decided to withdraw Roberts’s nomination and renominate him to be chief justice. The president then needed to nominate a second individual to fill the O’Connor seat.

Diversity in hiring, both for women and minorities, was an issue about which George Bush cared deeply. He did not just talk the talk. I watched on many occasions as he told the White House personnel team that he wanted to see candidates who reflected the diversity of the nation, and he meant it. When it came time to fill the second Supreme Court slot, the fact that he was replacing the first woman ever to serve on the Court contributed to his commitment to identifying a qualified
woman nominee. He decided the best candidate was someone he knew well, his White House counsel, Harriet Miers.

I have a good deal of admiration and respect for Miers. She is an excellent lawyer who served the president well as staff secretary and as White House counsel. She is talented, organized, competent, and no-nonsense. She is completely down-to-earth, something that is sometimes underappreciated in Washington, and she is a pleasure to work with. But she had not been on the list of candidates our group produced for the Supreme Court position.

In late September 2005, the president pulled me aside in the Oval Office to tell me about his decision on the second nominee. “You probably aren’t going to agree with this, Dick,” he said, “but I’ve decided to go with Harriet.” “Well, Mr. President,” I said, “that’s going to be a tough sell.” But it was his decision to make, and I set about trying to sell it.

Miers ran into trouble with liberals, as any nominee of the president was likely to, but she also ran into trouble with conservatives who felt very strongly that the president should name a justice with a proven track record of judicial conservatism. No matter how much we in the White House made the point that we knew Harriet was conservative, we were not able to convince a number of people on our side of the aisle.

The president later said he was sorry he had put his friend through such a meat grinder. Miers realized this was not a fight we were likely to win and asked that her name be withdrawn. A few days later, on October 31, 2005, President Bush nominated Judge Samuel Alito to the Court. He was confirmed the following January.

President Bush deserves real credit for both the quality of the process he put together to vet nominees and the caliber of the people he named to the Court—Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Thinking back over my forty years in Washington, it is fair to say this was the best method of selecting Supreme Court nominees I’d ever seen.

THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972, put limits on the research and deployment
of missile defenses. The treaty was of advantage to the Soviets. They were a superpower because of their offensive capability, and the ABM Treaty prevented the kind of defensive development that could neutralize that advantage. We had been willing to sign the ABM Treaty because in the sometimes strange world of arms control, it was regarded as “stabilizing.” The linchpin of Cold War arms control theory was mutually assured destruction, or MAD, meaning that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would launch a first strike because each side knew they would suffer a devastating counterstrike if they did. A defensive capability played havoc with the idea of MAD. Both sides had to be vulnerable to attack in order for it to work.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, America faced new threats. The number of nations with ballistic missile technology was growing and among them were rogue regimes willing to pass on and potentially use their capabilities. We had to be able to build systems that could intercept incoming missiles if we were to keep the country safe, but the ABM Treaty wouldn’t permit us to do it.

I’d been an advocate for a long time of abrogating the ABM Treaty, which we had the right to do, but during the Bush administration’s first months it became clear that the State Department had another view. There was concern that withdrawing from the treaty would put unnecessary strain on our relations with Russia, which led Secretary Powell to argue that we should stop short of abrogation and negotiate loopholes in the treaty for developing missile defenses. As I saw it, the State Department had it backward. Rather than compromising on policies that were in our national interest out of concern that we would offend other nations, we should do what served our security best, while undertaking diplomatic efforts to bring our allies and partners along.

President Bush had promised during the campaign to develop and deploy defenses against missiles, and he was good on his word. After lengthy consultations that included the Russians and our European allies, he called Vladimir Putin in December 2001 to formally give six months’ notice of our intent to abrogate. All the dire warnings about an adverse Russian reaction turned out to be wrong. Putin accepted
the president’s decision and reassured him that any negative reaction in Russia would be manageable.

It was during discussions about the ABM Treaty in June 2001 that Presidents Bush and Putin met for the first time. After this meeting President Bush praised Putin and talked about looking into his eyes and getting a “sense of his soul.” The president was criticized for the remark, but I think it reflected the hopes of the time that Putin would be a different kind of Russian leader, one who would put his nation on a path to greater freedom. I must say I was never too optimistic about Putin. When I looked into his eyes, I saw an old KGB hand. I didn’t trust him and still don’t, but then I’m not much given to trusting Russian or Soviet leaders.