In My Time (68 page)

As I got ready to debate the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, I got my old debate prep team back together, with then Congressman Rob Portman of Ohio again serving as my sparring partner.

With Rob Portman, who played Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in my vice presidential debate preparation sessions in 2000 and 2004, watching video of John Edwards at our house in Wyoming, summer 2004. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

All the buildup around Edwards and his skill as a trial lawyer led me to expect a formidable opponent when we met on October 5, 2004, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. I came away from our session that evening feeling he hadn’t done much to prepare for the most important event either of us would participate in during the 2004 campaign.

There was one subject on which he had clearly done some planning. A little over halfway through the debate, moderator Gwen Ifill asked us about the president’s proposal for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages. Edwards opened his answer this way: “Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It’s a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children.” I was furious with his response. What gave him the right to make pronouncements about my family? But you never want to let the other guy get under your skin, so I kept my anger in check. When Ifill asked me if I’d like to respond, I said, “Well, Gwen, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.” “That’s it?” Gwen said. “That’s it,” I said.

My favorite line of attack on Edwards was to call him “Senator Gone,” which is what his hometown newspaper had dubbed him since he was so frequently absent from the Senate. I further observed:

In my capacity as vice president, I am president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

I later found out that I had crossed paths with Edwards once before, at a prayer breakfast in downtown D.C. in 2001. But our meeting clearly hadn’t left much of an impression and didn’t take the edge off my charge: This guy was a less than serious senator.

I enjoyed listening to the after-debate commentary. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who usually turns red in the face and starts shouting at the mere mention of my name, paid me a compliment, describing the debate between Cheney and Edwards as the howitzer versus the water pistol. Mike Barnicle of the
Boston Herald
was also kind. The only thing that surprised him, he said, was “that at the end of the debate, at the end of ninety minutes, Dick Cheney did not turn to John Edwards and say, ‘By the way, give me the car keys too.’”

At the presidential debate a week later, moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS asked John Kerry, “Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?” Kerry answered, “We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.”

Now it was obvious that there was a concerted effort by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to remind viewers that my daughter Mary was gay, to bring her into the debate and into the campaign. I don’t recall another instance of a candidate for the presidency attempting to use the child of an opponent for political gain. Later that evening, when Fox’s Chris Wallace asked Kerry’s campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, about the remark, she replied that my daughter was “fair game.”

Lynne was furious. She hadn’t been scheduled to speak at the post-debate rally we were attending, but she took the podium anyway, and let John Kerry have it. “The only thing I can conclude,” she said, “is that he is not a good man. I’m speaking as a mom. What a cheap and tawdry political trick.” She was exactly right, and I told the crowd I sure was glad she was on our side.

Most of America reacted the same way we had. It didn’t matter where you came down on the issue of gay marriage or whether you identified yourself as a Republican or Democrat. Seeing a candidate for
president be so obviously opportunistic did not inspire feelings of confidence. In fact, it had quite the opposite effect, and the Bush-Cheney campaign got a bump in the polls. We all started referring to it as the “Mary Cheney bounce.”

We ended the campaign with a huge swing that took us to Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, Hawaii, Colorado, Nevada, and finally to Jackson, Wyoming, on November 1, where an airport hangar full of friends greeted us. The next morning Lynne and I voted at the fire station near our home in Jackson and headed back to Washington, D.C. The exit polls were bad; so bad, in fact, that I knew they were wrong. I was sure we were going to win.

On the campaign trail with Lynne in 2004 (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

We didn’t have our victory celebration that night, but the next afternoon instead, in the auditorium of the Reagan Building. Screaming Bush-Cheney supporters were hanging over railings and maybe even from the rafters. We had won 51 percent of the popular vote to Kerry’s and Edwards’s 48 percent and 286 electoral votes to their 251. Wednesday, November 3, 2004, was a very nice day.

Being sworn in for the second time as vice president of the United States, January 20, 2005, with Lynne, Liz and Mary. My good friend, Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert administered the oath of office. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

AS WE GOT READY for the second term, it was clear the president wanted to make big changes in personnel. Although I tended to get involved in personnel matters with less frequency than I had at the beginning of our time in office, I felt strongly that major change was needed in the national security team. Getting a new secretary of state was a top priority.

Like the president I had believed that Colin Powell would be an effective secretary of state. I had long admired his talents and had personally selected him for appointment by George H. W. Bush to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was superb in that job. But it was not the same when he was at the State Department. I was particularly disappointed in the way he handled policy differences. Time and again I heard that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. Indeed, I continue to hear it today. But never once in any meeting did I hear him voice objection. It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government.
I’d been sorry in 1992 when Bill Clinton’s election brought an end to my working relationship with Powell at the Pentagon, but when President Bush, after his reelection in 2004, accepted Powell’s resignation, I thought it was for the best.

IN DECEMBER 2004 LYNNE and I traveled to Afghanistan for the inauguration of Hamid Karzai, the nation’s first democratically elected president.

With Hamid Karzai in Kabul, Afghanistan for his inauguration as Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

Before the ceremony, we had breakfast with U.S. troops stationed at Bagram Air Base, outside Kabul. When I spoke to the men and women who were gathered, I reflected on the fact that we were meeting that morning in a nation that had just held the first free elections in its five-thousand-year history:

Just eight months earlier the United Nations hoped that six and a half million Afghans would register to vote. The number turned out to be more than 10 million, and on election day, they showed up at twenty-two thousand polling stations across the country. Near one of these stations, a coalition officer told of seeing a line of people two miles long, all walking down a road on their way to the polls. He spoke of old people walking and being ferried in goat carts, amputees on crutches, droves of people moving toward the polling booths, and then, late in the evening, aged adults running to beat the deadline to get in line in order to vote.

It was a time of great promise and hopefulness in Afghanistan, and I thanked the American soldiers and airmen at Bagram for the enormous part they had played in defending America and securing freedom for the Afghan people.

A few hours later, Lynne and I arrived at Afghanistan’s presidential palace, which still bore the marks of the years of fighting the Afghans had lived through. President Karzai and I met to discuss the ongoing military operations and his work to set up a new government. At our press conference immediately afterward, he made clear his gratitude to the American people:

Whatever we have achieved in Afghanistan—the peace, the election, the reconstruction, the life that the Afghans are living today in peace, the children going to school, the businesses, the fact that Afghanistan is a respected member of the international community—is from the help that the United States of America gave us. Without that help, Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists—destroyed, poverty-stricken, and without its children going to school or getting an education. We are very, very grateful, to put it in simple words that we know, to the people of the United States of America for
bringing us this day
.

After the press conference, Lynne and I headed to another building in the presidential compound for the inauguration itself. President Karzai arrived with Afghanistan’s last king, the elderly Mohammad Zahir Shah, who had been living in exile. The ceremony was both solemn and joyful. Prayers were followed by songs from schoolgirls wearing colorful embroidered robes. When Karzai, in a coat of green and blue, rose to speak, there was enthusiastic applause. One official in the crowd of turbaned Afghan men recognized me. Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, chairman of the Loya Jirga, the assembly that had approved Afghanistan’s 2003 constitution, remembered we had met eighteen years earlier. In 1986, he was one of the mujahideen fighting the Soviets, and I was a member of the House Intelligence Committee. We’d had dinner near the Khyber Pass, and here we were now, eighteen years later, and he, like me, was a gray-haired public servant.