In My Time - Dick Cheney [158]
I introduced George Bush to another old friend when Paul O’Neill joined us for lunch at the Madison hotel in downtown Washington. Paul and I had worked together in the Ford administration when Paul was deputy director of OMB, and now we were considering him to be secretary of the Treasury. He knew more about the budget and the budget process than just about anybody else and was one of the most capable and competent people I’d ever worked with. After a stint in government, Paul went into the private sector, and we’d crossed paths when I was at Halliburton and he was chairman of Alcoa. He also came highly recommended by former Secretary of State George Shultz and by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. I was key in recruiting Paul to take the job, and I would be the one to call him two years later when the president decided to make a change.
The other top job, of course, was secretary of defense. The president-elect and I interviewed several top candidates. The interviews covered general topics and discussion, but we also asked specific questions—how would you handle a crisis in Taiwan, for example. We had a number of excellent candidates to choose from, but Don Rumsfeld outperformed the others in his interview. Having had the job before and having clearly spent time thinking about what should be done to transform the military into a modern fighting force, he was very impressive in our small meeting. Don would become both the youngest and the oldest man ever to be secretary of defense, and his competence, intelligence, and dedication would serve him and the president well.
We had discussions about bringing in a new director of central intelligence, but decided to leave George Tenet in place. In 1977 Jimmy Carter had replaced George H. W. Bush as CIA director, and I’ve always assumed that Bush 41 disagreed with that decision, not because it affected him personally, but because he believed that the position should be nonpartisan and shouldn’t shift when the presidency changes hands. I imagine that this experience informed President Bush 43’s decision to leave George Tenet in place.
We wanted to make sure our cabinet was bipartisan, and we reached out to former Wyoming Governor Mike Sullivan, a Democrat, to see if he would be interested in serving as secretary of interior. Mike had a good record as governor and knew the range of issues the department dealt with very well. When I called to gauge his interest, however, he seemed less than enthusiastic. I don’t know if he didn’t want to serve in a Republican administration, or perhaps he just wasn’t prepared to leave Wyoming and move to Washington. Whatever the reason, we ended up selecting Gale Norton, who was the attorney general of Colorado. She became the first woman to serve as the interior secretary, and she did a terrific job for us at Interior.
One Democrat who served in the cabinet with great distinction was Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta. On September 11, Norm sat with me in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House and supervised the unprecedented operation of bringing every single commercial airliner out of the sky.
Governor Bush and I had our first intelligence briefings together as president-elect and vice president–elect on December 18 and our first meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon Tank on January 10. I also spent a good deal of time during the transition on Capitol Hill. I would be the only person in the Bush 43 West Wing initially who had previously been a member of Congress, and I enjoyed the chance to renew old friendships. In addition, I knew that we would need good relations on the Hill. As vice president, my constitutional duties—in addition to being prepared to take over should something happen to the president—included breaking tie votes in the U.S. Senate. And the U.S. Senate was split