In My Time (82 page)

“Trust me,” she said. “If you get your granddaughters a meeting with the Jonas Brothers, they’ll think you’re the coolest grandfather in history.” Apparently, though, the boys were in such high demand that the only way this would happen is if I made the request myself. Although I was frankly unsure what I was getting myself into, if it would make my granddaughters happy I was willing to give it a shot. I buzzed my assistant, Debbie Heiden, and asked her to call over to Mrs. Bush’s office and tell them I’d like to meet some people called the Jonas Brothers. “And I’m going to need some bios,” I added.

The next day, my delighted granddaughters helped me show the Jonas Brothers and their family the West Wing. They were impressive and polite young men, who hid well whatever surprise they might have felt at hearing that Dick Cheney wanted to see them.

IN SEPTEMBER, LYNNE AND I left on a trip that included stops in several former Soviet republics, including Georgia. We arrived in the capital of Tbilisi on September 4, just a few weeks after a cease-fire had
been negotiated to put an end to a conflict between Georgia and Russia. The fighting had been centered initially in two “breakaway” republics inside Georgia: South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These territories, though part of Georgia geographically, had large Russian populations and had been trying to assert their independence. In August South Ossetian forces under the command of Russian commanders, fired on Georgian villages in South Ossetia. Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, had ordered a response, which seemed to give Russian leader Vladimir Putin the excuse he’d been looking for to launch an aggressive military action against the Georgians.

After first moving to defeat Georgian forces inside the two republics, Russian forces began moving into Georgia proper, first to Gori, a major transportation hub, and then toward Tbilisi. They moved with the kind of speed that strongly suggested significant advance planning, leaving the impression that Putin had been planning such an attack for some time. That, together with the fact that the Russian response was far in excess of what was required if the goal was simply to protect Russians in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, suggested to me and many others that Putin was intent on reasserting Russian influence in its former republics.

For some time, there had been growing tension between the government in Moscow and President Saakashvili’s government in Tbilisi. Saakashvili, who had studied in the United States and wanted to orient Georgia toward the West, made no secret of his view that Georgia should join NATO. Putin viewed this as a direct threat to Russia inside what he considered Russia’s sphere of influence.

As we discussed these developments in National Security Council meetings in the days just after the Russian invasion, I suggested that we needed to view this as more than a question of the independence of South Ossetia or Abkhazia. This was Putin trying to reverse the trend of the last twenty years. He now had the forces and the wealth—primarily from oil—to be able to begin to re-exert Russian influence not just in Georgia, but across the “near abroad,” countries such as Moldova, Ukraine, the Baltic nations, and the former Central Asian republics. He
had been quoted saying that he regarded the demise of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” which couldn’t have been further from my point of view. I viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest forward step for human liberty in the last sixty years. As I analyzed the situation, Putin wanted to turn back the clock and do whatever possible to restore Russian power and influence.

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Georgia, Poland had agreed to host missile interceptors, one part of a defense system that we had designed to stop missiles fired from the Middle East from hitting either Europe or the United States. Senior Russian military officials let the Polish government know that if it went ahead with the deployment of the missile defense system, Poland could expect to become a nuclear target. The Czechs had agreed to host the radar component of the defense system, and about the time the announcement was made, Russia cut back on oil deliveries to the Czech Republic.

I always felt in my dealings with Putin that it was important to remember his background. He was part of the Soviet KGB, and in many ways his actions as the leader of Russia reflected that. One Russian economist who used to work for Putin and then had a falling-out described it to me this way: “All authoritarian regimes have security services. But today’s Russia is really the first state where the security service has become the state.” While America and Western Europe had moved beyond the divisions of the Cold War,
Putin seemed to long for them
.

During my visit to Georgia, I voiced American support for Georgia’s sovereignty. I also announced that the United States would provide over $1 billion in economic and humanitarian assistance. Before returning to the United States, I attended the Ambrosetti Forum, an annual economic conference held in Italy, where I denounced Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its heavy-handed dealings with Poland and the Czech Republic. As for Georgia and Ukraine, the time had come, I said, to begin action to
make them members of NATO
.

I was disappointed to see the Obama administration in its early months decide to halt the missile defense project with Poland and the Czech Republic. I suspect the Russians put the same kind of pressure on
them as they had put on us. I was glad to see my successor, Vice President Joe Biden, endorse the idea of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, but progress in achieving that has been disappointingly slow.

In the end, we need to make clear to the Russians and our friends and allies that we will be aggressive in expanding the borders of the free world and that the Russian government has to make a choice. It cannot continue to reap the benefits of a free world economy while simultaneously blackmailing other governments, attempting to use military force to unilaterally redraw sovereign boundaries, and imprisoning anyone who poses a threat to Putin’s leadership. For our part, we have to be careful not to let our desire for a changed Russia color our analysis of what’s actually happening. In 1982, when Yuri Andropov became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, I recall getting reports that he liked jazz and drank scotch, both supposedly signaling that he was a reformer. Similarly, when Vladimir Putin transferred authority to Dmitri Medvedev, some Russia analysts saw this as heralding a new day of openness and increased commitment to reform and democracy. It wasn’t true of Andropov, and it wasn’t true of Medvedev. We need to be very careful on whom we pin our hopes.

ON OCTOBER 22, LYNNE and I joined President Bush and Laura for a dinner in the White House residence in honor of the Supreme Court. It was a very special evening. The president and Laura gave everyone a tour of the second floor of the residence. They were impressive guides and had both clearly spent a good deal of time reading the history of the house and its previous occupants. I had been in the rooms many times before, but I always learned something new when I joined a tour given by the Bushes. They would walk through and describe each room—the Lincoln Bedroom, the Queen’s Bedroom—and what the house had looked like in past administrations.

Over the course of the last few years we had had some serious disagreements with a number of the Supreme Court’s decisions, particularly as they related to the War on Terror. But on this evening those
disputes were not in view. It was a wonderful evening of camaraderie, and Justice John Paul Stevens spoke for all of us when he congratulated the president on making two great appointments to the court—Justices Roberts and Alito. Lynne made a special toast to Laura at the dinner, thanking her for all she had done to restore and maintain the beauty of the White House and of Camp David. We were especially grateful, Lynne said, for her work at Camp David, which had so often been our “undisclosed location.”

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. I called Senator Joe Biden, congratulated him, and offered to do whatever I could to help ease his transition into office. Lynne and I were pleased to host the vice president–elect and his wife, Jill, at the Naval Observatory. We showed them around what would soon be their home and introduced them to some of the outstanding people who work there.

As an administration, we worked hard to conduct a smooth and helpful transition. I had been part of a number of them through the years, incoming and outgoing, and this was the best I had seen. I think all of us on both sides of this one understood the stakes. With a nation at war, it was particularly important to put politics aside and hand over power and policies smoothly. In some ways, though, I’m not sure it’s really possible to prepare someone to take office. One of my former national security staffers, Eric Edelman, who was serving as the undersecretary of defense for policy at the end of our administration, pointed out how much the velocity of issues a policymaker had to face daily had changed. Some of those coming into office had served during the Clinton years, and though any experience was helpful, the sheer volume and speed of decisions had increased exponentially since then. The best we could do was offer our assistance, provide briefings, and maybe venture a little advice along the way.

Josh Bolten decided to host a unique session for the incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, during our last weeks in office. Josh gathered all the living former chiefs of staff, about a dozen of us. Don Rumsfeld
was there, Howard Baker, Jack Watson, John Sununu, and Leon Panetta, among others, and we met around the table in the office we had all once inhabited. Josh went around and asked each of us to give Rahm our most important piece of advice. By this time, of course, there’d been years of stories about how I was the evil genius controlling the Bush administration from behind a curtain, so when it came my turn I advised Rahm, “Whatever you do, make sure you’ve got the vice president under control.” It was one of my better lines.

There were lots of goodbyes over the following weeks, as we thanked so many people who had done so much for us and for the country over the last eight years. One group that worked largely in anonymity was the White House Medical Unit. For eight years, Dr. Lewis Hofmann had been by my side. He’d spent countless hours in hold rooms, on airplanes, and in vans. He’d spent so much time in the back end of a fishing boat that he’d taken up fly-fishing with a passion. My family and I will always be grateful to Lew for his friendship and for all he did for us. The president and I gathered the group together in the Rose Garden for one last goodbye after the election. The president put it this way: “You all have been just great. Miracle workers, actually. When I picked the vice president I never expected him to survive, but you pulled him through.” While I’d had more optimism about my outlook, I couldn’t argue with his gratitude for the docs.

JANUARY 20, 2009, DAWNED cold and sunny. We joined the Bidens, Bushes, and Obamas at the White House for the traditional pre-inaugural coffee. I was in a wheelchair, having strained my back moving boxes over the weekend, and as my successor, Joe Biden, and I greeted each other that morning, I warned him, “Joe, this is how you’re liable to look when your term is up.”

With President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden on Inaugural morning, 2009 in the Blue Room at the White House. I had strained my back moving boxes into our new house. “Joe,” I told Biden, “this is what you’re going to look like when your term is up.” (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

Then we made the drive up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, and I took my seat on the inaugural platform. As I looked out over the massive crowds gathered that morning, I thought back to my first days in Washington in 1968. I had arrived a few months after a section of the city had been in flames, engulfed in the race riots that followed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
murder. Now, here we were, united as Americans, inaugurating our first African-American president. Barack Obama had not been my candidate, and I would disagree deeply with many of the decisions he would make as president, but I, like most Americans, felt tremendous pride that morning at the historic nature of this moment.

I could never have imagined when I first came to Washington that I would be leaving as vice president so many years later. I thought about all I had seen and been a part of during a span of time when Americans had seen great change and sadness, joy and triumph. And yet for all the life that filled those forty years, they seemed to have passed in the blink of an eye.

The path I had traveled was partly due to the circumstances of my birth. Not that I had been born into a powerful or privileged family; I wasn’t. But I was born an American, a blessing surely among life’s greatest. I had parents who loved me and taught me the importance of sacrifice and hard work. I was privileged to have chances—and second chances—of the kind that may be possible only in our great nation. On that inaugural morning, as the wheel turned and it was time for us to go, I thought finally of my grandchildren.