In My Time - Dick Cheney [171]
After we’d interviewed the candidates, our group made recommendations to the president, and he conducted interviews with the leading contenders. The preparation we’d done enabled the president to name Judge John Roberts of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit less than three weeks after Justice O’Connor’s retirement announcement.
While Roberts’s nomination was working its way through the Senate, Chief Justice Rehnquist, who had been valiantly fighting cancer, passed away. The president decided to withdraw Roberts’s nomination and renominate him to be chief justice. The president then needed to nominate a second individual to fill the O’Connor seat.
Diversity in hiring, both for women and minorities, was an issue about which George Bush cared deeply. He did not just talk the talk. I watched on many occasions as he told the White House personnel team that he wanted to see candidates who reflected the diversity of the nation, and he meant it. When it came time to fill the second Supreme Court slot, the fact that he was replacing the first woman ever to serve on the Court contributed to his commitment to identifying a qualified woman nominee. He decided the best candidate was someone he knew well, his White House counsel, Harriet Miers.
I have a good deal of admiration and respect for Miers. She is an excellent lawyer who served the president well as staff secretary and as White House counsel. She is talented, organized, competent, and no-nonsense. She is completely down-to-earth, something that is sometimes underappreciated in Washington, and she is a pleasure to work with. But she had not been on the list of candidates our group produced for the Supreme Court position.
In late September 2005, the president pulled me aside in the Oval Office to tell me about his decision on the second nominee. “You probably aren’t going to agree with this, Dick,” he said, “but I’ve decided to go with Harriet.” “Well, Mr. President,” I said, “that’s going to be a tough sell.” But it was his decision to make, and I set about trying to sell it.
Miers ran into trouble with liberals, as any nominee of the president was likely to, but she also ran into trouble with conservatives who felt very strongly that the president should name a justice with a proven track record of judicial conservatism. No matter how much we in the White House made the point that we knew Harriet was conservative, we were not able to convince a number of people on our side of the aisle.
The president later said he was sorry he had put his friend through such a meat grinder. Miers realized this was not a fight we were likely to win and asked that her name be withdrawn. A few days later, on October 31, 2005, President Bush nominated Judge Samuel Alito to the Court. He was confirmed the following January.
President Bush deserves real credit for both the quality of the process he put together to vet nominees and the caliber of the people he named to the Court—Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Thinking back over my forty years in Washington, it is fair to say this was the best method of selecting Supreme Court nominees I’d ever seen.
THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972, put limits on the research and deployment of missile defenses. The treaty was of advantage to the Soviets. They were a superpower because of their offensive capability, and the ABM Treaty prevented the kind of defensive development that could neutralize that advantage. We had been willing to sign the ABM Treaty because in the sometimes strange world of arms control, it was regarded as “stabilizing.” The linchpin of Cold War arms control theory was mutually assured destruction, or MAD, meaning that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would launch a first strike because