In My Time - Dick Cheney [216]
In 1992, after investigating for six years and spending more than $40 million, Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel for Iran-Contra, indicted former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger for not mentioning notes he had on file in the Library of Congress. Walsh brought the indictment on the eve of the hotly contested 1992 presidential election. The following month I observed on Meet the Press that the Weinberger indictment was a “travesty.” Noting that I had been the senior House Republican on the Iran-Contra committee, I pointed out that Weinberger had been opposed to the Iran-Contra operation. “Now, six years after the fact...,” I said, “on a fairly slim reed, the special prosecutor who has yet really to nail anybody, and who’s spent millions of dollars, is out trying to prosecute Cap Weinberger.” I concluded by calling the indictment an “outrage.”
After the 1992 election I was among those whom President George H. W. Bush consulted about issuing pardons for individuals involved in Iran-Contra. He summoned James Baker and me into the private study next to the Oval Office in the closing days of 1992 and asked our opinion. Jim and I both supported the idea of pardons. I believed that the individuals in question were good men who hadn’t thought they were doing anything wrong. They were CIA and administration officials who’d gotten in the way of the independent counsel juggernaut, and in the case of Weinberger, politics was clearly at work. Pardons were the right thing, and the president issued them on Christmas Eve 1992, putting the matter to rest.
President George W. Bush commuted Scooter’s sentence so he would not have to go to prison. While that was appreciated, I felt strongly that Scooter deserved a pardon, and I broached the subject on numerous occasions with the president. We talked about what the president’s father had done before he left office, and I was of the impression that the president agreed with me that Libby should be pardoned, although he made no commitments. We had small meetings with a group of senior staff members in the Oval Office near Thanksgiving and Christmas 2008 to discuss cases that were pending and pardons that would be issued then. The president said he planned to do some of the more controversial pardons nearer to the end of his term.
Just before George W. Bush and I left office, we had the last of our private lunches, and he told me he had changed his mind about an additional round of pardons. There were not going to be any more, which meant there would be none for Libby. I was deeply disappointed. I understood that a pardon for Libby was unlikely to be well received in the mainstream media and that it wouldn’t be of short-term help to those around the president who were focused on generating positive press about his last days in office. But in the long term, where doing the right thing counts, George W. Bush was, in my view, making a grave error. “Mr. President,” I said, “you are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”
George Bush made courageous decisions as president, and to this day I wish that pardoning Scooter Libby had been one of them.
ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2003, I flew to New York for a political fund-raiser. As Air Force Two landed at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh around 3:30 in the afternoon, I got word that I should call President Bush. We connected at 3:43 p.m. and he said, “Dick, it looks like we’ve captured Saddam Hussein.” He explained