WASHINGTON, 28 October 2003 — Vice President Richard B. Cheney has a very smooth and pleasant demeanor. A survivor of three heart attacks and a friend of the senior George Bush for more than two decades, Cheney looks like a kindly grandfather. It’s easy to forget that he’s only five years older than President George W. Bush.
Born Jan. 30, 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney and his family moved 13 years later to Casper, Wyoming, where Cheney was co-captain of his high school football team and senior class president. His high school sweetheart, Lynne, became his wife in 1964.
Cheney received a scholarship to Yale University. Unlike his current boss, however, he was forced to leave because of poor grades. Returning to Wyoming, he earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in political science. At a time when student draft deferments were easy to acquire, Cheney obtained five, thus avoiding the Vietnam War. Although well on his way to a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, he did not complete that degree. By that time, however, the first of his two daughters had been born, so Cheney no longer had to fear induction into the military.
Lynne Cheney did earn a Ph.D., in English literature, and began working as an editor. She subsequently had a regular column in Washingtonian magazine, authored two books, and served as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993. She currently is a senior fellow at the notorious neocon bastion the American Enterprise Institute.
Not surprisingly, the Cheneys are considered a Washington “power couple.”
When he first entered the world of politics, Dick Cheney worked for Gerald Ford, who named Cheney his chief of staff upon becoming president in the mid-1970s, following the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. In 1978 Cheney was elected to Congress, where he served as Wyoming’s representative until 1989. During that time he ascended to the position of House Republican whip.
Even in those days, Cheney was known as a fixer and promoter. According to Kathy Kiely of USA Today, while serving in Congress “he and some congressional colleagues had taken advantage of a cozy relationship that allowed members to float checks on the House bank when they didn’t necessarily have sufficient funds to back them.”
(The other blots on Cheney’s record are two youthful arrests for drunken driving and a fine for fishing out of season.)
By the time of the first Gulf War, in 1991, Cheney was then-President Bush’s secretary of defense, and is credited with negotiating a deal with King Fahd allowing US troops and equipment to operate out of the Kingdom. Although his colleagues Gens. Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf garnered most of the headlines, all three worked amicably together throughout that conflict.
Cheney seriously considered running for the Republican presidential nomination against incumbent President Bill Clinton in 1996. But after visiting 46 states to assess his fund-raising prospects in 1995, Cheney decided he would not be able to raise the money necessary for a campaign.
Following Clinton’s re-election, Cheney accepted the position of chief executive officer at Dallas-based Halliburton Industries. During his tenure there, from 1995-2000, he specialized in obtaining government contracts. Prior to his stewardship, Halliburton had received $1.2 billion in contracts, according to The Guardian. Five years later, the company had won $2.3 billion in contracts.
Now, according to a May 30 BBC News “World Edition” report, Cheney is facing a lawsuit filed by Washington, DC-based Judicial Watch, accusing him of defrauding Halliburton shareholders by overstating profits, thus inflating the price of shares. The BBC reported on another lingering controversy, the $368,000 Cheney received in deferred compensation from his former company, which was awarded $3.1 billion in contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. The fact that the Bush administration did not seek competitive bids on the Iraq contracts casts a further shadow on the deal.
Cheney also is still seeking to live down his involvement in a promotional video for the disgraced and defunct Arthur Andersen accounting firm. In the video Cheney describes the firm, which was convicted of obstructing justice and shredding documents in the Enron scandal, as providing advice “over and above” that normally expected from auditors.
By the time the extent of these corporate scandals became apparent, however, Cheney had resigned from Halliburton in order to work on the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. Assigned to vet Republican vice presidential hopefuls, Cheney was busy compiling a roster of possibilities. Very early in the process, however, it became clear that Cheney himself was Bush’s first choice.
Within a year of George W. Bush’s inauguration the Sept.11 catastrophe took place. At the urging of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a Cheney chum, Bush decided to initiate what he called “regime change” in Iraq, regardless of whether the rest of the world agreed. When the US attacked Iraq in March of this year, it had virtually no allies except for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The war itself was over in less than three weeks. It has been succeeded, however, by a guerrilla war that up to now shows no sign of abating. To make things worse, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the ostensible casus belli, have yet to be found.
As the administration’s first term draws to a close and the 2004 elections near, the president is facing a severe loss of credibility, and there is no shortage of Democrats vying to replace him. One of their strategies is to use Cheney’s association with Halliburton to strengthen their argument that Bush is a candidate of Big Oil. In addition, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) believes that Cheney’s “far right” voting record will work against him. As a congressman, Cheney opposed regulating business and the environment, voting against the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Act and the Endangered Species Act. He also opposed federal funding for abortions, including cases of rape, incest or where a woman’s life was endangered, and voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, as well as a range of gun-control measures.
More recently, the vice president has repeated the charge that Saddam Hussain had links to Al-Qaeda. The American public has been very slow to understand that there was no connection between the former Iraqi leader and the events of Sept. 11. Finally — almost certainly at the behest of Secretary of State Colin Powell — the president made it clear. Just days later, however, Cheney again implied a connection.
Perhaps hoping to take advantage of the American public’s extraordinary confusion over the whole matter, the vice president may intend to continue reiterating this misrepresentation in the hope of making it stick. This is a tactic right out of the copybook of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: To repeat a lie so often that people come to believe it. Nor would this be an unprecedented move on the vice president’s part. Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney and his chief-of-staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, began appearing regularly at CIA briefings. Time and again they raised the subject of Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction — despite CIA briefers’ insistence that there was no connection between Sept. 11 and Iraq.
At the moment, then, it appears that the American people will continue to be subjected to more unsubstantiated lies — at least until the 2004 elections are over.
— Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (www.wrmea.com).
