Chapter 1The Wind

Foreword

My shelf is presidents. For most of my working life I have written about the men who held the office — how they reached it, what it cost them to keep it, what they did with the machinery they inherited and the years they were given. I was drawn to the presidency because it is the one place in American life where ambition and procedure meet in public, where a man's private appetites become a matter of the federal register and the appropriations bill and the roll-call vote. I thought I understood where the power in Washington lived. It lived, I assumed, behind the desk in the Oval Office, in the hand that signed the thing.

Then I spent three years with a man who was never president, and I am no longer sure.

That was the reason I wanted him. My whole beat is built on the premise that the office is the prize, that the story bends toward the person who wins it. Dick Cheney spent half a century proving the premise incomplete. He understood something about the modern American state that the men I usually write about never had to learn, because they had the title and did not need the insight: that power in a bureaucracy is not a chair you sit in but a flow you control, that the person who decides what reaches the president's desk, and what does not, is frequently a more consequential figure than the president himself. He did not want the office. He wanted the paper that moved through it. I had spent twenty years writing about the chair. He made me look at the paper.

I did not find what I expected to find. I came to this book assuming I would be writing about an ideologue, or a villain of the Iraq War, and there is a version of that book, and it is not untrue, and it is not this one. What I found instead was a method — colder and more transferable than any ideology, and for that reason more unsettling. The One Percent Doctrine is not a belief. It is a procedure for eliminating the standard of proof. The torture memos are not an argument. They are armor, drafted to protect the men who would act, and Cheney understood the difference between the two the way an engineer understands the difference between a wall and a decoration. I had wanted a subject I could disagree with. I got one I had to learn to read.

The record I worked from was, in the main, the public one — the congressional testimony and the committee reports, the published memoirs of the men who served alongside him and against him, the court filings and the withdrawn legal opinions, the disclosure forms and the contract awards and the long paper trail of a career conducted almost entirely inside institutions that keep records. This is not a book of revelations whispered to me in confidence. Cheney gave nothing away in confidence; that was the whole discipline of the man. It is a book assembled from the documents he could not un-write, read against the grain, in the order that makes the method visible.

And underneath all of it, the wind. He came from a town in Wyoming that the federal government built and that taught its children to resent the government that built it — a place that gave him a contradiction he carried to Washington and never resolved, and an instinct for who should hold the power that he never had to defend against serious opposition because no one around him disagreed. The most interesting thing about Dick Cheney is not that he exercised power. It is that he did so having concluded, before he had the words for it, that the flow of information was the country's true architecture, and that a man who understood the plumbing did not need the house.

He is worth a book because he is the one who proved it. And because at the very end, after a lifetime of building the machinery, he stood up and warned the country that the machine had been captured — a warning that changes the framing of the record without erasing a line of it. I came to this a chronicler of the office. I leave it a student of the men who learned the office did not require you to hold it.

— Theodore Pemberton, Boston

Chapter 1 · The Wind

The wind in Casper, Wyoming, does not stop. It blows across the high plains from the northwest at an average of thirteen miles per hour, year-round, and in winter it does not average thirteen but gusts to fifty, sixty, seventy, driving the snow sideways across the sagebrush flats until the air itself becomes a white wall and the roads disappear and the schools close and the town hunkers down behind its brick and frame houses and waits. The wind shaped the town before anyone built it. It shaped the grass that fed the cattle that drew the ranchers. It shaped the buttes and the gullies and the dry creek beds. It eroded the sandstone into forms that looked, from a distance, like the ruins of a civilization that had never existed. The wind was the first fact of the place.

Casper sits at the base of Casper Mountain, elevation 5,150 feet, in the high desert of central Wyoming. The North Platte River runs through it, the same river that carried the Oregon Trail emigrants west in the 1840s and 1850s, the same river that watered the cavalry horses at the old Platte Bridge Station, the same river that would, by the middle of the twentieth century, irrigate the alfalfa fields and cool the oil refineries that were the town's economic reason for existing. The town was named for Lieutenant Caspar Collins, who died fighting Lakota and Cheyenne warriors at the bridge in 1865. Someone misspelled his name on the incorporation papers. The error was never corrected. The town kept the wrong spelling for a century and a half, which tells you something about the relationship between Casper, Wyoming, and the idea of looking back.

In 1941, the year Richard Bruce Cheney was born, Casper was an oil town. It had been an oil town since 1890, when the first well came in at the Salt Creek field forty miles to the north, and it would remain an oil town for the rest of the century, its fortunes rising and falling with the price of crude in a cycle so regular that the locals could read the future in the rig count the way farmers in other states read the sky. When the price was high, the roughnecks came. The bars filled. The trailer parks expanded. New schools went up. When the price dropped, the roughnecks left. The bars emptied. The trailers pulled out in the night, owing rent. The schools consolidated. Casper understood boom and bust the way coastal cities understood tides: as a natural force, morally neutral, that you prepared for but did not pretend to control.

The town had roughly eighteen thousand people in 1941. It had churches — Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and it had bars, lots of bars, and the two institutions coexisted with the uneasy mutual tolerance of neighbors who shared a fence but not a worldview. It had a single high school, Natrona County High School, and a single hospital, and a single newspaper, the Casper Tribune-Herald, which would later become the Casper Star-Tribune, and a single radio station. It did not have a university. It did not have a symphony orchestra. It did not have a bookstore that stocked anything east of Louis L'Amour. What it had was space, space and wind and sky and the sense, inescapable and defining, that the world was very large and you were very small and the forces that governed your life were not forces you had chosen.

This was the world that made Dick Cheney. Not the White House, not the Pentagon, not the bunker beneath the East Wing where he would spend the most consequential hours of his life. Casper, Wyoming, made him first, and Casper's lessons were the ones that lasted: that the world does not owe you comfort, that conditions change without warning, that the people who survive are the people who prepare, and that sentiment is a luxury the wind does not permit.

Richard Bruce Cheney was born on January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father was then posted with the Soil Conservation Service, the first child of Richard Herbert Cheney and Marjorie Lorraine Dickey Cheney. His father was twenty-five. His mother had just turned twenty-three. The family would move west when Dick was thirteen, and it was Casper, not the Nebraska of his early childhood, that made him.

Richard Herbert Cheney — Dick's father, whom everyone called Herb — worked for the United States Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service. The job was a New Deal creation, born from the Dust Bowl, and it carried the New Deal's assumptions: that the federal government had a role in managing the land, that soil erosion was a public problem requiring public solutions, that expertise deployed from Washington could improve the lives of people who lived far from Washington. Herb Cheney was, in other words, a federal employee: a government man in a state that distrusted government, a bureaucrat in a culture that used the word as an epithet. He drew a federal paycheck. He drove a federal truck. He spent his days visiting ranches and farms across Natrona County, advising landowners on terracing, contour plowing, windbreaks, and water management. The work was quiet, technical, unglamorous, and essential. Without it, the thin topsoil of the high plains would have blown away entirely, as it had blown away across Oklahoma and Kansas and the Texas Panhandle in the 1930s, turning day to night and farmland to desert.

The irony is considerable. Dick Cheney would spend his political career arguing that the federal government was too large, too intrusive, too expensive, and too confident in its own expertise. He would vote against federal programs, oppose federal regulations, champion the private sector, and build an ideology of executive power that paradoxically expanded the state's authority in the domains he cared about (war, surveillance, detention) while contracting it in the domains his father had served. The federal government that fed the Cheney family, that paid for the house on Elm Street, that provided the stability and the benefits and the pension that allowed Herb Cheney to raise three children in modest comfort: that government was, in the son's mature political philosophy, the problem.

But that was later. In 1941, the father simply went to work.

Marjorie Cheney was a homemaker, as the term was then used without apology, and she was also, by multiple accounts, the more forceful personality in the marriage. Where Herb was quiet, patient, methodical (the kind of man who could spend an afternoon measuring the slope of a drainage ditch and find it satisfying), Marjorie was direct, opinionated, and socially ambitious in the way that small-town women of her generation could be: she wanted her children to amount to something, and she did not leave the definition of "something" vague. She was active in the Methodist church, active in the PTA, active in the kind of civic life that small towns run on and that large cities have largely abandoned. She was, by the standards of her time and place, a strong woman, and her son absorbed her directness, her impatience with excuses, and her conviction that discipline was not a punishment but a structure.

Dick was the eldest of three children, with a younger sister, Susan, and a younger brother, Bob. The family lived in a succession of modest houses, the last of them on Casper's residential streets, small frame houses with small yards, three bedrooms, one bathroom, houses that America built by the millions in the postwar years and that carried, in their uniformity, an implicit promise: this is the floor, not the ceiling. You could rise from here. The question was where you would rise to, and how.

The boy was, by all accounts, unremarkable in his early years. He did not display the precocity that biographers usually look for when tracing the origins of a consequential life. He was not a prodigy. He was not a troublemaker. He was not a dreamer. He was a solid, quiet, physically sturdy kid who did what was expected of him, did it competently, and did not call attention to himself in the process. The neighbors remembered a polite boy. The teachers remembered a capable student. No one remembered a boy who seemed destined for anything in particular.

What he was, from an early age, was observant. Not observant in the way of artists or writers, who notice the color of the light or the texture of a voice. Observant in the way of people who study systems, who watch how things work, who notice who has authority and who does not, who track the unwritten rules that govern a group. In the schoolyard, there are children who play and children who watch the playing, and the watchers are learning something the players are not. Dick Cheney was a watcher. He watched the way the teachers managed the classroom. He watched the way the coaches managed the team. He watched the way his father managed the ranchers — never ordering, always advising, always framing the government's recommendation as the landowner's own idea. He watched, and he filed what he watched away, and he did not talk about what he had filed away, because talking about it would have given others access to an advantage he preferred to keep.

This quality, the capacity for patient observation combined with a strategic reserve about his own conclusions, would define his career. Colleagues in the Ford White House, in the House of Representatives, in the Department of Defense, and in the vice presidency would describe the same phenomenon using different words. "He listens more than he talks." "He's always the last one to speak in a meeting." "You never know what he's thinking until he's already decided." "He asks questions. He doesn't volunteer opinions." These descriptions, offered across five decades by people who often disagreed about everything else, describe the same boy who grew up watching the wind move across the high plains and learned, before he had a word for it, that observation is a form of power.

The high school years were the years that mattered.

Natrona County High School, known as NCHS or simply "NC," was the only high school in Casper, which meant it was the town's social sorting mechanism, its athletic program, its theater, and its first serious encounter with hierarchy. In the 1950s, when Cheney attended, the school had roughly a thousand students, and the culture was what you would expect in a Wyoming oil town in the Eisenhower era: football was king, academics were respected but not celebrated, and the social order was legible and enforced.

Dick Cheney played football. He was not the most talented athlete on the team. He was strong but not fast, tough but not gifted, and he was not, despite later campaign biographies, a star. What he was, and what mattered more, was a captain. He was elected co-captain of the football team his senior year, in 1958, and the election tells you what his peers saw in him. They did not see charisma. They did not see inspiration. They saw reliability, judgment, and an absence of panic. They saw a person who could be trusted to make the right call when the situation was unclear. These are not glamorous qualities. They are the qualities that organizations select for when the stakes are real, and they are the qualities that would carry Cheney further than talent or charm or ideology ever could.

He was also, in these years, senior class president, which meant he was twice chosen by his peers for leadership — once on the field, once off it. The pattern would repeat throughout his career: he would be chosen, again and again, not by voters in competitive elections but by small groups of people who needed someone they could trust to manage a situation competently and without drama. Gerald Ford chose him. George H. W. Bush chose him. George W. Bush chose him. In each case, the selection was made by a man who was looking not for brilliance but for reliability, and who found in Cheney exactly what the football team and the senior class had found: a person who did not seek the spotlight, did not need the crowd's approval, and could be counted on to execute.

He was dating Lynne Ann Vincent, and this, too, was a choice that revealed something. Lynne was the best student in the school. She was the state baton-twirling champion, a detail that sounds quaint until you understand what it meant in Wyoming in the 1950s, which was visibility, discipline, and the kind of poised public performance that Casper valued. She was smart in a way that Dick was not: verbally dexterous, intellectually ambitious, interested in books and ideas and the wider world in a way that the taciturn, system-watching boy was not. She would go on to earn a doctorate in English literature, write novels, chair the National Endowment for the Humanities, and become, in the estimation of many who knew the couple well, the more intellectually formidable of the two.

They were, in the high school taxonomy, the power couple, the football captain and the brightest girl in the class, and the pairing was not accidental. Dick Cheney was drawn to competence. He was drawn to people who were the best at what they did, regardless of the domain. This pattern, too, would recur. He would attach himself to Donald Rumsfeld, the most effective bureaucratic infighter of the Nixon administration. He would attach himself to Gerald Ford, a president who valued competence over ideology. He would serve George H. W. Bush, a president whose foreign policy team was, by common consensus, the most capable of the postwar era. He would choose to work with people who knew what they were doing, and he would learn from them systematically, extracting knowledge they possessed and storing it for later use. The marriage to Lynne was the first instance of the pattern.

Lynne Ann Vincent had grown up in Casper, where her father, Wayne Vincent, was an engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation. She was not merely intelligent — she was intellectually driven in ways that the town's culture did not especially encourage and that she pursued anyway, with the focused energy of someone who had already decided that the world she was born into was not the limit of what she could inhabit. She would earn a bachelor's degree from Colorado College in 1963, a master's degree from the University of Colorado in 1964, and a doctorate in English literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1970, completing her education while Dick rebuilt his. The symmetry was not coincidental. They were, in their different ways, remaking themselves from the same raw material of Casper's practicality and Wyoming's insistence on self-reliance, and the remaking was more successful for both of them than either could have predicted.

They would marry in 1964 and remain married for the rest of his life. In a city, Washington, where political marriages are often transactional arrangements that dissolve under pressure, the Cheney marriage endured. It endured through the DUI arrests, through the years of heavy drinking, through the White House years, through the heart attacks, through the vice presidency, through the public contempt that followed the Iraq War, through the family rupture over same-sex marriage, and through the political isolation that followed Liz Cheney's break with the Republican Party. Whatever else could be said about Dick Cheney, the marriage was real.

But the high school years also produced a quality that the football captaincy and the class presidency obscured, a quality that would define Cheney's exercise of power as much as his observational intelligence: an extraordinary comfort with secrecy.

Casper in the 1950s was not a place that encouraged introspection or emotional disclosure. The culture was Western in the specific sense: stoic, laconic, suspicious of feelings expressed publicly, admiring of people who kept their own counsel. Men, in particular, were expected to be competent and quiet. A man who talked too much about what he felt or what he thought was a man who had revealed a weakness, and weakness, in a landscape defined by wind and cold and the indifference of the natural world, was not forgiven easily.

Dick Cheney absorbed this culture so thoroughly that it became indistinguishable from his personality. He did not merely practice reserve; he inhabited it. The reserve was not a mask over a warmer, more expressive self. It was the self. Interviewers who spent hours with him across decades (journalists, historians, documentary filmmakers) came away with the same impression: they had been given precisely the information Cheney wanted them to have, precisely when he wanted them to have it, and not a syllable more. The silences were not awkward. They were strategic. He understood that in any exchange of information, the person who reveals less has the advantage, and he treated every conversation, including conversations with friends, as an exchange in which the balance of information mattered.

This is not a psychological diagnosis. It is an observation about method. Cheney operated throughout his career on the principle that information is power, that controlling the flow of information is the primary mechanism of institutional control, and that the person who determines what others know, and, more critically, what others do not know, is the person who determines outcomes. He learned this principle early. He refined it in the Nixon White House, where the control of information was the administration's obsessive preoccupation. He perfected it as Ford's chief of staff, where he managed the flow of paper to the president's desk with the care of an engineer managing the flow of water through a dam. And he deployed it as vice president, when the control of information (the selective release of intelligence to Congress, the classification of documents that might embarrass the administration, the assertion of executive privilege over materials that other branches of government demanded) became method of his office.

The wind teaches you to keep your head down. Casper taught him that.

To understand what Casper produced, you must understand what Casper lacked.

It lacked the dense social fabric of an Eastern city, where a young person of intelligence and ambition would have encountered, as a matter of course, competing ideas, competing traditions, competing claims on loyalty. In Boston or New York or Philadelphia, a boy like Cheney would have been exposed to the friction of a pluralistic culture, to people who disagreed with him not because they were wrong but because they had been shaped by different experiences and different assumptions. In Casper, there was no such friction. The town was overwhelmingly white. It was overwhelmingly Protestant. It was overwhelmingly Republican, although the Republicanism of Wyoming in the 1950s was a practical, nonideological thing: a preference for low taxes and limited regulation and being left alone, not a crusade. The Democratic Party existed, but it existed the way the Episcopalian church existed: as a minority institution that provided a social identity for its members without seriously contesting the prevailing order.

The homogeneity mattered. It meant that the boy who grew up in Casper did not have to defend his assumptions, because everyone around him shared them. It meant he did not have to articulate his worldview, because articulation is something you do when your worldview is challenged, and his was not. It meant he could proceed through his formative years with a set of unexamined premises (about the role of government, about the nature of threats, about the relationship between order and freedom, about who deserved to exercise authority and who did not) and arrive in Washington carrying those premises intact, never having been required to test them against serious opposition.

This is not a deficiency peculiar to Casper or to Wyoming. It is a deficiency common to any environment, geographic, social, or intellectual, that does not generate internal disagreement. But in Cheney's case it had specific consequences. He arrived in Washington in 1969 as a congressional fellow with a graduate student's training in political science and a small-town Republican's assumptions, and those assumptions were never subsequently revised. The assumptions changed in expression. They became more sophisticated, more doctrinally articulated, more layered with the vocabulary of constitutional theory, but they did not change in substance. The Cheney of 2001, constructing the legal architecture of the War on Terror, operated on the same premises as the Cheney of 1958, watching the football coach enforce discipline on a team that needed to execute in the wind: that authority must be concentrated to be effective, that dissent is a luxury that conditions may not permit, and that the people at the top of the hierarchy see things that the people below them cannot, and must be trusted to act on what they see.

The question the rest of this book will pursue is what happens when those premises encounter a world more complicated than the one that produced them: when the hierarchy is wrong, when the intelligence is fabricated, when the authority that was concentrated to meet a genuine emergency is used to wage a war that the emergency did not require.

There is one more thing Casper gave him, and it may be the most important.

Casper gave him a relationship with the federal government that was intimate, dependent, and unacknowledged.

The Soil Conservation Service paid Herb Cheney's salary. Federal highway money built the roads that connected Casper to the rest of Wyoming. Federal dam projects on the North Platte controlled the floods that would otherwise have destroyed the town's low-lying neighborhoods every spring. Federal oil and gas leases on public lands generated the royalties that funded Wyoming's schools. Federal military spending at the Casper Army Air Base during World War II had been the single largest economic stimulus the town had ever received. The state of Wyoming, which had fewer than three hundred thousand residents in 1941, received more federal money per capita than almost any state in the union, and it received it because the state was too sparsely populated and too economically marginal to generate sufficient revenue on its own.

Dick Cheney grew up in a household sustained by the federal government, in a town sustained by the federal government, in a state sustained by the federal government, and he grew up to become one of the federal government's most articulate critics. This is not hypocrisy in the simple sense. It is something more interesting. It is the American capacity to benefit from a system while constructing an ideology that denies the system's necessity: to draw the salary and then argue that the agency should be abolished, to drive on the federal highway and then vote against the highway bill, to accept the premise of public investment as a personal reality while rejecting it as a political principle.

Wyoming produced this contradiction in concentrated form because Wyoming was, more than almost any other state, a creation of the federal government. The federal government surveyed it, mapped it, fought the Indian wars that cleared it for settlement, built the railroads that connected it, established the military posts that protected it, created the national parks and forests that defined its landscape, managed the public lands that constituted nearly half its total area, and subsidized the ranching and mining and oil extraction that gave it an economy. Wyoming's fierce attachment to individual liberty and limited government was not a contradiction of its federal dependence. It was a product of that dependence, the psychological compensation of a place that could not exist in its present form without the very institution it claimed to oppose.

Dick Cheney carried this contradiction to Washington and never resolved it. He carried it into the House of Representatives, where he voted against Head Start, against the Clean Water Act, against funding for the Department of Education, and against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, one of one hundred seventy-six members of the House to cast that vote. He carried it into the Department of Defense, where he managed the largest discretionary budget in the federal government. He carried it into Halliburton, where he earned $44 million running a company whose profits depended on federal contracts. He carried it into the vice presidency, where he expanded executive power to dimensions that would have astonished the framers of the Constitution he claimed to revere.

The contradiction was Casper's gift. The wind stripped away the decorative and left the structural. What was structural in Cheney was not a consistent philosophy of government but a consistent instinct for power, an understanding, absorbed before it was articulated, that the question was never whether government would be powerful but who would control the power, and that the answer, if you were Dick Cheney, was always the same: the people who could be trusted to use it, by which he meant the people who thought the way he did.

He left Casper in 1959, eighteen years old, bound for Yale University on a scholarship. He did not know it yet, but he was leaving for good. He would return to Wyoming to live only briefly, to reestablish residency, to maintain the political base that would send him to Congress for ten years and to the vice presidency for eight. But the return was always strategic, never sentimental. Casper made him, and he used what Casper made, and he did not look back.

The scholarship was from Yale's then-prevailing system of awarding financial assistance on the basis of academic standing and demonstrated need, and it represented, in the most literal sense, the federal-era expansion of opportunity that the G.I. Bill and its successor programs had normalized in the postwar years. In 1959, Yale's entering class was drawn overwhelmingly from the East; very few of its freshmen came from west of the Mississippi. Cheney was one of the regional exceptions, a scholarship student from the high plains competing for space with the sons of Eastern money, and the gap between his formation and theirs was wide enough to drive a truck through. He carried with him the assumptions of a Wyoming Republican, the stoicism of a town shaped by weather and boom-and-bust, and a belief, never fully articulated but always operative, that the world could be managed if you understood its mechanics and did not allow sentiment to cloud your assessment of what the mechanics required.

The scholarship sent him east. The east rejected him. And the rejection sent him back to Wyoming to rebuild, which is the story of the next chapter, and the story of the rest of his life: the repeated encounter between Dick Cheney's formation and the institutions that could not contain it, and the repeated emergence of the man from whatever had tried to limit him, harder and more certain than before.

The wind was still blowing when he left. It is blowing there now.