In My Time - Dick Cheney [273]
ON OCTOBER 22, LYNNE and I joined President Bush and Laura for a dinner in the White House residence in honor of the Supreme Court. It was a very special evening. The president and Laura gave everyone a tour of the second floor of the residence. They were impressive guides and had both clearly spent a good deal of time reading the history of the house and its previous occupants. I had been in the rooms many times before, but I always learned something new when I joined a tour given by the Bushes. They would walk through and describe each room—the Lincoln Bedroom, the Queen’s Bedroom—and what the house had looked like in past administrations.
Over the course of the last few years we had had some serious disagreements with a number of the Supreme Court’s decisions, particularly as they related to the War on Terror. But on this evening those disputes were not in view. It was a wonderful evening of camaraderie, and Justice John Paul Stevens spoke for all of us when he congratulated the president on making two great appointments to the court—Justices Roberts and Alito. Lynne made a special toast to Laura at the dinner, thanking her for all she had done to restore and maintain the beauty of the White House and of Camp David. We were especially grateful, Lynne said, for her work at Camp David, which had so often been our “undisclosed location.”
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. I called Senator Joe Biden, congratulated him, and offered to do whatever I could to help ease his transition into office. Lynne and I were pleased to host the vice president–elect and his wife, Jill, at the Naval Observatory. We showed them around what would soon be their home and introduced them to some of the outstanding people who work there.
As an administration, we worked hard to conduct a smooth and helpful transition. I had been part of a number of them through the years, incoming and outgoing, and this was the best I had seen. I think all of us on both sides of this one understood the stakes. With a nation at war, it was particularly important to put politics aside and hand over power and policies smoothly. In some ways, though, I’m not sure it’s really possible to prepare someone to take office. One of my former national security staffers, Eric Edelman, who was serving as the undersecretary of defense for policy at the end of our administration, pointed out how much the velocity of issues a policymaker had to face daily had changed. Some of those coming into office had served during the Clinton years, and though any experience was helpful, the sheer volume and speed of decisions had increased exponentially since then. The best we could do was offer our assistance, provide briefings, and maybe venture a little advice along the way.
Josh Bolten decided to host a unique session for the incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, during our last weeks in office. Josh gathered all the living former chiefs of staff, about a dozen of us. Don Rumsfeld was there, Howard Baker, Jack Watson, John Sununu, and Leon Panetta, among others, and we met around the table in the office we had all once inhabited. Josh went around and asked each of us to give Rahm our most important piece of advice. By this time, of course, there’d been years of stories about how I was the evil genius controlling the Bush administration from