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DICK CHENEY / AMERICA'S MOST DANGEROUS AND SHAMELESS UNINDICTED CRIMINAL
By Allen L Roland (about the author) Page 3 of 4 page(s)
Those in the old elitist wing of the party thought the decision to dump Rockefeller was both stupid and wrong: "I think Ford lost the election because of it," one of Kissinger's former aides says now. Ford agreed, calling it "the biggest political mistake of my life."
Back in Wyoming, Cheney used his connections to skim along to yet another success. "Some fellows from Casper called me," recalls former Sen. Alan Simpson, "told me they had found this amazing young man and were going to promote him for Congress. They gave a big to-do for him. I went to take a look. It was the first time I set eyes on Dick Cheney. You could tell right away he was a smart cookie." In the 1978 election, Cheney became Wyoming's sole member of the House.
"The top people had decided it would be Dick, so that basically settled it," recalls John Perry Barlow, a fourth-generation Wyomingite who campaigned for Cheney. "Dick had been chief of staff to a president. That made everyone assume he knew what he was doing."
In an overwhelmingly Republican state, Cheney now had a safe seat in Congress for as long as he wanted. On Capitol Hill, he combined a moderate demeanor with a radical agenda. People who find Cheney's extremism as vice president surprising have not looked at his congressional voting record. In 1986, he was one of only twenty-one members of the House to oppose the Safe Drinking Water Act.
He fought efforts to clean up hazardous waste and backed tax breaks for energy corporations. He repeatedly voted against funding for the Veterans Administration. He opposed extending the Civil Rights Act. He opposed the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in South Africa. He even voted for cop-killer bullets.
"I don't believe he is an ideologue," says former Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado. "But he is the most partisan politician I've ever met."
Many weekends, while Congress was in session, Wirth and Cheney would take the same flight to Chicago, where they'd change planes for Colorado and Wyoming. "I spent a lot of time waiting for planes with Dick Cheney," Wirth, a Democrat, says. "He never talked about ideology. He talked about how the Republicans were going to take over the House of Representatives." Wirth adds, "It seemed impossible, but that's exactly what happened."
Cheney knew precisely who should lead the GOP takeover. "Dick and Lynne had their eyes on the speakership," says Professor Fred Holborn of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "He and Lynne wrote a book on the speakership." As the subtitle of Kings of the Hill indicates, it is about how "powerful men changed the course of American history" through control of the House.
Cheney's strategy for gaining power was the same one he and Rumsfeld had foisted on Ford: making sure no one in the Republican Party outflanked him to the right. This was a deeply divisive approach, because it involved pandering to racial and religious extremists and using complex matters of national security as flag-waving wedge ssues. "Dick's votes against civil rights and the environment were parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing his own power," says Barlow, his former supporter.
In 1988, Cheney was named House minority whip, the second-ranking post in his party's hierarchy. Had he stayed in the House, it is possible that he would have become speaker. But the following year, another powerful person decided to confer great nonelective power on Cheney. When President George H.W. Bush named him to head the Defense Department, the Senate unanimously confirmed the choice. Not a single senator seems to have considered it anomalous that control of the strongest armed forces on earth was being conferred on a person who had gone to notable lengths to avoid service in those same armed forces.
Appointed to another powerful position, Cheney promptly went about screwing it up. He pushed to turn many military duties over to private companies and began moving "defense intellectuals" with no military experience into key posts at the Pentagon. Most notable among them was Paul Wolfowitz, who later masterminded much of the disastrous strategy that George W. Bush has pursued in Iraq.
In 1992, as undersecretary of defense, Wolfowitz turned out a forty-page report titled "Defense Planning Guidance," arguing that historic allies should be demoted to the status of U.S. satellites, and that the modernization of India and China should be treated as a threat, as should the democratization of Russia. "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role," the report declared. It was nothing less than a blueprint for worldwide domination, and Cheney loved it. He maneuvered to have the president adopt it as doctrine, but the elder Bush, recognizing that the proposals were not only foolish but dangerous, immediately rejected them.
By the end of the first Bush administration, others had come to the conclusion that Cheney and his followers were dangerous. "They were referred to collectively as the crazies," recalls Ray McGovern, a CIA professional who interpreted intelligence for presidents going back to Kennedy. Around the same time, McGovern remembers, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft counseled the elder President Bush, "Keep these guys at arm's length."
In November 1992, when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Cheney had his second president shot out from under him. He knocked around Washington at various neoconservative think tanks for two years, and the old pattern repeated itself: Powerful benefactors once again gave Cheney a big break. As Dan Briody recounts in his book The Halliburton Agenda, Cheney was on a fishing trip in New Brunswick, Canada, with a group of high-powered corporate CEOs. "The men were discussing the ongoing search for a CEO at Halliburton," Briody reports. "Cheney was asleep back at the lodge and, in his absence, the men decided that Cheney would be the man for the job, despite the fact that he had never worked in the oil business."
Halliburton was Cheney's first real chance to get rich; he grabbed it with both hands. His principal action was his acquisition of a subsidiary called Dresser Industries. Dresser struck lucrative deals with Saddam Hussein; Halliburton did business with Muammar el-Qaddafi and the ayatollahs of Iran. By the time Cheney left in 2000, Halliburton's stock was near an all-time high of fifty-four dollars a share. Then it turned out that Dresser had saddled Halliburton with asbestos lawsuits that could cost the company millions, and the stock plummeted to barely ten dollars a share. Even with the bounce Halliburton stock has received from the war, an investor who put $100,000 into the company just before Cheney became vice president would have less than $60,000 today. Cheney, meanwhile, continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton, even though he is supposed to divest himself of all conflicts of interest. The company has been awarded $8 billion in contracts by the Bush-Cheney administration for its work in Iraq.
http://www.allenroland.com
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$5.95
Number of pages: 2
Publisher: Americans United for Separation of Church and State
$5.95
Number of pages: 2
Publisher: Americans United for Separation of Church and State
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