Playboy Interview: Dick CheneyBy James Rosen
Dick Cheney likes lattes. Seated in his favorite brown-leather chair in the sunlit study of his home in McLean, Virginia, the former vice president of the United States can toss back two of the warm java blasts in an hour. They come from a stainless-steel machine in the kitchen and a slender, mustachioed housekeeper named Gus, who serves them in custom-ordered white Starbucks cups outfitted with cardboard Starbucks sleeves.
Behind a small desk sits the chair Cheney occupied for eight years as vice president in the White House, and above the white-trimmed fireplace hang three framed swords. One was a gift from the cadets at West Point when Cheney was secretary of defense; the second came from the U.S. Marine Corps commandant when Cheney was guest of honor at the Marine Corps ball two months after 9/11; the third belonged to Samuel Fletcher Cheney, the vice president’s great-grandfather, who fought for the Union in the Civil War—enduring 34 battles, some of the conflict’s bloodiest fighting—only to lose part of his left hand in a sawmill accident after the war’s end.
Hugging the walls are approximately 300 books, mostly military history and political biography, arranged in chronological order—the World War II books, proceeding clockwise, give way to the Eisenhower books, which yield to the Kennedy books and so on—with all the spines aligned neatly at shelf’s edge. Despite Cheney’s predilection for orderliness, however, his life has unfolded in anything but an orderly fashion.
Born in 1941 in Nebraska and raised in Wyoming the oldest of three siblings, Cheney was the son of Marjorie Dickey, a cheerful and athletic homemaker, and Richard Herbert Cheney, a quiet Navy veteran who spent three decades in the Soil Conservation Service. The former vice president has recalled his childhood as “utterly stable,” a carefree life of baseball, football and outdoorsmanship.
In 1958, at Natrona County High School, Cheney started dating Lynne Vincent, a pretty and intellectually ambitious blonde and the homecoming queen, in their senior year, to Dick’s class president; they would marry in 1964 and remain married today. When Cheney headed east to enroll at Yale University on a scholarship, however, things went awry. He fell in with what the dean called “a very high-spirited group,” prodigious consumers of beer in a common room Cheney and his housemates set up as a bar. His second DUI within a year landed Cheney in an overnight jail cell in Rock Springs, Wyoming, while consistently poor grades prompted his expulsion from Yale.
Cheney returned to Wyoming to build power lines and thereby paid his way through the University of Wyoming. After a series of internships and fellowships brought him to Washington, D.C., he fell under the tutelage of a young congressman named Donald Rumsfeld, who hired Cheney at the outset of the Nixon administration as an aide at the federal Office of Economic Opportunity.
When Gerald Ford became president, he tapped Rumsfeld to serve as White House chief of staff, and when Rummy headed for the Pentagon as secretary of defense, Cheney moved up, becoming the youngest chief of staff in history. Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976 sent Cheney packing, so he moved Lynne and their two daughters, Liz and Mary, back to Wyoming. There, in 1978, while campaigning successfully for the state’s lone House seat, Cheney suffered the first of five heart attacks, at the age of 37. Numerous surgeries, including a heart transplant, followed over the next few decades. While experts can point to other living patients who have suffered as many heart attacks, doctors know of no one besides Cheney who suffered his first cardiac event in the 1970s and is still around to talk about it.
A low-key lawmaker who did his homework and avoided grandstanding, Cheney in the 1980s quietly amassed one of the House’s most conservative voting records while rising swiftly through the GOP leadership ranks. When Senator John Tower’s nomination to be secretary of defense collapsed in March 1989 amid allegations of alcohol abuse and womanizing, President George H.W. Bush turned to Cheney to run the Pentagon. They, along with General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the country to victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War.
Cheney spent much of the Clinton presidency in Dallas as CEO of the energy firm Halliburton—a private-sector stint that made him, for the first time, a multimillionaire. In 2000 he agreed to lead the search for a ticket mate for Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush. “You’re the solution to my problem,” Bush told his discreet advisor, and over the next eight years Dick Cheney would emerge, by all accounts, as the single most influential vice president in American history. Amid the panic and confusion of the 9/11 attacks, with the president hopscotching the country on Air Force One, Cheney was the coolheaded senior figure who effectively ran the federal government from a White House bunker. In the traumatic weeks that followed, he worked behind the scenes to expand federal surveillance powers and shape U.S. policy toward detainees. He argued forcefully for the Iraq war and on behalf of the energy industry; critics dubbed him Darth Vader.
Six years after he left office, Cheney—whose preoccupations today revolve around the books in his study and the purchase of just the right gifts for his grandchildren—remains a figure of unique stature for the American right and, in a very different way, for the left. In the vitriol directed at him even today, he is surpassed in modern times perhaps only by the man he served in the White House a decade ago—to whom he refers, unsentimentally, as “43”—and by Richard Nixon. For the tumultuous and still-controversial era of 9/11 and Iraq, Cheney remains, to many minds, the malevolent power behind the throne, a locus of latter-day conspiracy theories.
Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen sat down with the former vice president. “For all the stress he’s endured over the past 40 years, medical and professional, Cheney is in amazingly good shape,” Rosen reports. “That said, he has aged somewhat since his heart-transplant operation in 2012: He has regained some of the 50 pounds he lost, his hair is whiter, his voice a bit raspier. In his views about the post-9/11 world, however, and in the dry, laconic style he uses to express them, Cheney remains defiantly unchanged.
“He is also a generous soul: While he agreed to conduct a lengthy interview with me that would span six hours over three days, we ultimately wound up recording nearly 10 hours together (roughly one tenth of which appears here). He knows that when the history of his time congeals, the Darth Vader caricature of him may well prevail, but he appears genuinely unfazed by that.
“Cheney embodies the maxim of the late nuclear theorist Herman Kahn, who famously said there are two types of people in the world: those who care what The New York Times says about them and those who do not.”At different points, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have suggested that racism is a factor in criticism of them. Is there any truth in that?I think they’re playing the race card, in my view. Certainly we haven’t given up—nor should we give up—the right to criticize an administration and public officials. To say that we criticize, or that I criticize, Barack Obama or Eric Holder because of race, I just think it’s obviously not true. My view of it is the criticism is merited because of performance—or lack of performance, because of incompetence. It hasn’t got anything to do with race.
Do you feel Obama, either intentionally or inadvertently, has undone your and President Bush’s work?Oh absolutely. Where do you start? I think with respect to the situation in Iraq, his precipitous withdrawal and refusal to leave any stay-behind forces, to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqis, was a huge mistake; we are paying a price for it now. He’s having to go back in now, and the guy who campaigned on the basis of bring the boys home and get out of Iraq is now redeploying forces to Iraq. I think his apology tour, when he went to Cairo in the summer of 2009 and said the U.S. overreacted to the events of 9/11, was a huge mistake. I don’t think he ever bought into the notion that we’re at war, in terms of a war on terrorism; I think he always wanted to treat it as a law-enforcement problem. I think he’s done enormous damage to the military. I think what’s happened to the military in terms of morale, in terms of financing, budget and so forth is just devastating. The way Obama is functioning now, he’s crippling the capacity of future presidents to deal with future crises. It takes a long time to build up that military force. And I am absolutely convinced there will be a future president—two or three times down the road, perhaps—who will be faced with a major crisis and will not have the military capability he needs to deal with it. We are limiting the options of future presidents because of what is happening to the defense budget today. I can go on for hours.
The Obama administration points to a number of things—the swift formation of an international coalition to combat ISIS, for example, or the multilateral effort to rein in Iran’s nuclear program—as evidence that this president has strengthened America’s alliances after the damage done to them by George W. Bush and the Iraq War.I came to town in 1968, and I have never seen people I have known in some cases for a quarter of a century—foreign leaders, especially in the Middle East—who are so terribly frustrated, angry, frightened. “Whatever happened to the United States?” There’s a conviction they can’t count on us, that our word doesn’t mean anything.
What was your reaction when President Obama backed off from launching air strikes in Syria, in August 2013, in response to Bashar al-Assad’s having crossed the president’s “red line” and using chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war?That’s a classic example, where Obama got everybody ready to do something about Syria and then at the last minute pulled the plug. I had a prominent Mideast leader talk to me when I was there last spring. First time I’d ever heard him say this; he’s always been very self-confident and very much in command. He said, “You assume there is no political price to be paid for those of us over here who support the United States—wrong assumption. It is sometimes a real question of leadership these days whether or not it’s smart, politically, for us, with our people, to be friendly to the United States.” General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the new president of Egypt, has been to Moscow; he hasn’t been to the United States. It’s not because he loves Russians; it’s because the political price he would have to pay domestically, inside Egypt, to come to the United States and be seen with Barack Obama would be very damaging for him. Our friends no longer trust us, and our adversaries no longer fear us. We’ve created a huge vacuum in that part of the world, and ISIS has moved in big-time. Now we have a caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
President Obama argues that under his leadership, “core Al Qaeda” has been “decimated.”We have had a massive spread in the number of Al Qaeda–type organizations. The RAND study that came out last summer said that between 2010 and 2013 there had been a 58 percent increase worldwide in the number of Al Qaeda–type organizations. We used to worry, at 9/11, just about Afghanistan; now it stretches from Mali and Nigeria in West Africa, across North Africa, through the Middle East, all around into Indonesia, where you’ll find potential sanctuaries and safe harbors for Salafi Islamists, the terrorists, the Al Qaeda types. It’s a very dangerous situation. I think the threat is growing steadily, and I think our capacity to deal with it is rapidly diminishing. I look at Barack Obama and I see the worst president in my lifetime, without question—and that’s saying something. I used to have significant criticism of Jimmy Carter, but compared to Barack Obama and the damage he is doing to the nation—it’s a tragedy, a real tragedy, and we are going to pay a hell of a price just trying to dig out from under his presidency.
You worked closely with both presidents Bush. What were the most significant differences you observed between them as men and leaders?Well, I liked them both. I was grateful for the opportunities they provided. I think of them as very different people. You know, we always talked about how 43 was a lot more like his mother in terms of personality and so forth, with a quick wit and a sharp tongue on occasion. Politically, in some respects, he was more successful than 41 because he got reelected. They were different, obviously; they came with very different backgrounds in the sense of their political experience. You know, 43 arrived as a successful two-term governor of one of our biggest states, with a heavy emphasis on the domestic side of the ledger. And from my standpoint, in part, that’s why he wanted me—because I brought my own background and experience on the international side. His dad, on the other hand, came with all the credentials of a guy who had been a naval aviator in World War II and director of the CIA and ambassador to the United Nations and ambassador to China, member of the House and so forth. So, totally different backgrounds.
Did you find one easier to work with than the other?You know, the experiences were so different.
Because you were secretary of defense for one and vice president for the other?Yeah, and there were other differences too. I always thought the national security team we had under 41 was especially effective, with Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, as well as the president, obviously, and myself; it was a group that worked well together. That wasn’t as smooth an operation by the time you got to 43. But again, my perspective on it was different, because in one case I’m the secretary of defense and the other I’m vice president. You know, everybody always wants to compare across administrations. After you have been there and spent time at it and worked in the different circumstances that I did, you find what strikes you is the differences, not the similarities.
Let’s discuss your relationship with George W. Bush. The account goes that you famously told Dan Quayle, “I have a different understanding with the president” about the role you would play as vice president. And when Quayle asked you, “Did you get that directly from Bush?” you replied in one word: “Yes.” Where and when, exactly, did you and George W. Bush hash out this understanding of the role you would play?It had grown over time. I can’t say, “Well, let’s see, at two o’clock on March 14.” No, it didn’t work out that way at all. What had happened, in effect, was he had asked me to help him find somebody to be vice president. And walking through that process over a period of months, talking about various individuals and the traits and attributes he was interested in and what he needed, I developed an understanding of what he was looking for. And when we got through that whole process he concluded by saying, “You’re the solution to my problem.” I think it was through that process, rather than saying there was one particular point in time when he said A, B, C and D.
One account quotes Bush 43 as having said at a certain point, “Dick is going to have the intelligence portfolio.” Was there ever a conversation between you, prior to Inauguration Day, when the two of you laid out what large areas you would tackle as vice president and how your authority would be structured?You’re overthinking it. You really are. It was the kind of situation where he wanted me because of my background in national security: secretary of defense, intelligence, on the House intelligence committee, in charge of a big chunk of the intelligence community as secretary of defense. I mean, you go through all that litany of credentials, and we began at the very beginning of the process. You know, he’s the one who sent me to Washington to start working on the transition, in terms of recruiting candidates for it. He obviously had firm ideas of what he wanted to do in some areas. But we talked about functions and so forth. There, from my perspective, one of the things I wanted to do and told him I planned to do—with his approval, obviously—was that as soon as I could, I wanted to dig back into the intelligence community, because I had been out of the loop for eight years. And so I spent those early weeks visiting the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, et cetera. Went through all of them, visited all of them, got to know the top leadership in all of them, spoke to groups of their employees, spent an awful lot of time getting back up to speed on intelligence at the outset of our time in office. That’s partly what he wanted me to do.
When you gaze upon the images coming out of Ferguson, Missouri, what do you see?Well [pauses], what I see is disturbing. It’s always a tragedy when there is a death involved and so forth. But it seems to me it’s a clear-cut case that the officer did what he had to do to defend himself. He was perfectly within his authorities to take action. That if you reach through the open car window and slap an officer upside the head and reach for his gun, you know, there is going to be a response. And I’ve been disappointed, I guess, in the Obama administration’s response. I think there should have been more people who were ready to stand up and say, “Look, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. The grand jury has reviewed it thoroughly. Here’s what we know. This is what happened.” And that we should not sort of throw it all over on the burden of race, or racial inequality or racial discrimination, as being responsible for this particular event. I think that would be wrong, and [pauses] it bothers me that that kind of an incident has generated that kind of response. I don’t think it is about race. I think it is about an individual who conducted himself in a manner that was almost guaranteed to provoke an officer trying to do his duty.
Do you think we’re going to see more Fergusons?I don’t know. I’m reluctant to generalize from it. I’ll leave it at that.
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