Shirley Warshaw on Bush and Cheney

Shirley Anne Warshaw, a professor of political science at Gettysburg College, has studied the presidency and the ways of the White House closely. She is the author of eight books, including The Clinton Years. She began her latest book, The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney, four years ago. “The more invested I became in writing a book on how the Bush White House worked, I realized how deeply Cheney was involved in all aspects of White House decision-making,” Warshaw said. “The book did not start out being about Cheney, but it quickly became a book about Cheney.” Below, Warshaw explains exactly how much power Vice President Cheney exercised during his eight years in the office.

Q. What do you mean by co-presidency, what defines it?

A. The title of my book is not very exciting. We wanted a more explosive book. We came up with titles such as Hijacked and Stolen Power. But in both of those cases the titles did not reflect that Bush did in fact hand over power to Cheney. It was not stolen and it was not hijacked.

After much reflection we decided on the title of The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney because that title most accurately reflected the role that Cheney played in this administration. He had responsibility for economic policy, energy policy, environmental policy, national security policy, and, as the director of the transition, he hired most of the senior people in the administration.

Q. When and how did the co-presidency take shape? Did it start right at the transition?

A. Yes it did. In April of 2000 Bush asked Cheney to find him a vice president. Cheney vetted a whole slew of people, and in July 2000, he sat down with George W. in Crawford and said, “I can’t find anyone that is acceptable,” and George looks at him and says, “Well why don’t you do it?” What’s interesting, however, is there was no vetting of Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney had vetted all of these people – their personal lives, their financial lives, their political lives – and found problems with each of them. Yet nobody vetted Dick Cheney. When Karen Hughes, a Bush communication aide and later a senior member of the White House staff, was asked point blank who vetted Cheney, she said that Cheney vetted himself. It’s a remarkable story.

During the election he was very low-key. Bush took the lead in everything. Karl Rove managed everything. Beginning on election night, though, and this is an interesting story, they were sitting in Austin at the Four Seasons Hotel. George and Laura were in one suite with his parents, her mother and their two daughters. In the other suite were Dick Cheney, David Addington, and Scooter Libby, Alan Simpson and Jim Baker, many of the power players in the campaign.  Later that night Bush went home – remember that the election was a toss-up, but at 11 o’clock that night he decides to go home, he doesn’t stay to see what happened. The next morning he goes to Crawford, but Cheney stays in the hotel room and starts running the Bush administration from that day forward. He says, “I’m going to act as if we won,” even though they hadn’t won. He set up a headquarters in Virginia with private money and started hiring everyone in the administration. That’s when the co-presidency begins, when he gains control of the hiring process.

Let me tell you one more thing that’s absolutely critical…. We know that there is a presidential office and also a vice presidential office. We see that with Obama and Biden. But as transition director, Cheney did not do that. He created what he called the single executive office in which the president’s and vice president’s staffs were merged. There were  White House staff with the title Assistant to the President, and a Vice Presidential staff whose titles were Assistant to the Vice President. Cheney created mirror staffs. They were clearly separate staffs, but in the single executive office which Cheney created, all routing slips went to both staffs, every meeting that was held had people from the president’s staff and the vice president’s staff. What, in my view, this did for Cheney is to allow him to know what President Bush was focusing on. Bush did have an extensive agenda: faith-based initiatives and No Child Left Behind and the tax cuts, and that’s pretty much it. Once Vice President Cheney knew the issues that Bush was focusing on (because his staff was in all those meetings), it allowed him operating room to become invested in everything else and essentially control everything else.

Q. Earlier, you mentioned Cheney’s influence on the Iraq war in particular. Can you discuss that further?

The Co-Presidency of Bush and CheneyA. Let me mention two things. Cheney had been the presidential chief of staff under Gerald Ford, had 10 years experience in the House of Representatives on the Intelligence Committee, was Secretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush, and had run an international energy conglomerate, Halliburton. He was certainly more knowledgeable in international affairs than George W. Bush or anyone within the senior ranks of the White House staff. As a result, he sought to control the people who held the senior jobs in national security, and the Department of Defense was the most important executive department dealing with national security policy. He inserted his boss and mentor from the Ford administration, Donald Rumsfeld, to lead the Department of Defense. He then added Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and later Stephen Cambone, to key Defense-related positions. When Bush named Condoleezza Rice as his National Security Advisor, Cheney put in his own person, Stephen Hadley, as her deputy, and then Hadley became the National Security Advisor. So the road to Iraq is crafted by people who are very close to Cheney. They were all old friends, and many held a very clear view of the importance of oil and access to oil in Iraq.

The other important point within national security that needs to be discussed is that the issue of harsh interrogation is part of Cheney’s view of presidential power – it is more than simply a national security issue. Cheney supported a strengthened interpretation of presidential power, and he believed that after the Nixon Administration, the presidency had largely been unconstitutionally constrained by Congress by a series of actions and laws. He felt that this administration needed to recapture the rightful constitutional role of the presidency in our governmental system. He believed, for instance, that if we needed to get information from prisoners captured in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if harsh interrogation was important, that the president was constitutionally empowered to direct the military and the CIA in such actions. He could not be constrained by congressional statute. When Congress did attempt to constrain the use of torture with the Detainee Act in 2005, President Bush signed the law with a signing statement that said the Congress of the United States could not tell the president how to manage the executive branch.

This interpretation of presidential power was supported by key lawyers in the administration, nearly all of whom were handpicked by Dick Cheney and David Addington during the transition. Most of these appointees were members of the Federalist Society, who support an expansive constitutional interpretation of presidential power. It is by design, for example, that the key players of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice were members of the Federalist Society.

Q. To what extent was Bush aware of all that Cheney was doing, and how much power had been transferred?

A. I would not call it a transfer. It was a delegation of policy-making responsibility, which President Bush supported and approved. Bush was fully aware of what was going on. He was the president and he had the final authority to make decisions. In most cases he delegated that authority to Cheney. I argue in my book that it is a division of labor. Bush wants to focus on faith-based initiatives – he called it building a moral and civil society. He was deeply religious and policies regarding a moral and civil society were central to his campaign for the presidency. Bush did not have an extensive agenda for using the tools of government. He was perfectly willing to delegate to Cheney a wide range of policy issues.

Q. How have Barack Obama and Joe Biden worked within their office? Have they rolled back the co-presidential aspects?

A. Obama has already said that the Bush/Cheney interpretation of presidential power was questionable. A particular issue that has been discussed is the issue of signing statements. According to the Bush administration, in a position largely crafted by Cheney, the president has the right to sign a bill, but if he thinks any part of the bill is unconstitutional, he can send it back with a signing statement declining to enforce that part which he deems to be unconstitutional. The Obama administration has challenged this questionable view of presidential power.

Q. Just to play devil’s advocate for a moment, are there any advantages to the co-presidential structure?

A. It’s a very good point, and it doesn’t have to be devil’s advocate. Demands on the federal government increase every year. These demands will continue as we grow as a country. It is the president and the White House staff who have to oversee 15 cabinet departments, numerous agencies and commissions, and a workforce of 3.5 million people. So I think your point is important. Doesn’t it make sense that the vice president should become part of this large decision-making process? It does. The trouble is that when Dick Cheney did it, he had his own agenda and he built the largest vice presidential staff in history. His staff actually paralleled that of the White House. It was its own bureaucracy. I think what President Obama has done, which is what most presidents do, is assign his vice president special tasks…. It makes more sense to give the vice president a specific portfolio.

Q. What’s the political strategy or purpose behind limiting the vice president’s role in this way?

A. Historically, presidents did not give their vice presidents significant power or independent authority because they didn’t like them. The only reason they were put on the ticket is for political advantage. Kennedy picked Johnson because he was from Texas, and Kennedy needed that vote. The team of Bill Clinton and Al Gore was the first time that we saw a president and vice president who liked each other. Gore wasn’t picked because he could bring Tennessee electoral votes. Gore and Clinton were the same age and worked together and liked each other. That was case with Bush and Cheney as well. Cheney brought Wyoming’s three electoral votes, but Bush was going to get those anyway. Cheney also said he would not run for president in 2008, and therefore would not spend eight years trying to build his own political base and do things that would benefit him and not Bush. Vice President Biden, I believe, told President Obama the same thing. This is somewhat of a new wrinkle in vice presidential selection.

I want to mention one other thing to put this in perspective. In 1978, Cheney was elected to Congress. He’s there for the next 10 years, until George H. W. Bush brings him in as Secretary of Defense. During his tenure in Congress during the 1980’s, Cheney is on the House Intelligence Committee and it is during this time frame that the Iran-Contra scandal emerges. After a series of hearings, Congress chastises Reagan for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, including selling arms to Iran (through Israel) and for continuing to support the Nicaraguan Contras in spite of the Boland Amendments prohibiting that support. But a number of Republicans, led by Cheney, disagree with any attempt to chastise Reagan for his actions and prepare the Minority Report in 1987. The Minority Report supports Reagan and argues that presidents cannot be constrained by congressional action in their constitutional role to “protect and defend” the nation. This sense of presidential power articulated in 1987 becomes the roadmap for Cheney during his tenure as vice president. The principles outlined in the Minority Report guide the view of presidential power within the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.

*Photos courtesy Stanford University Press.


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