In My Time - Dick Cheney [275]
He had made some decisions I didn’t agree with, but he had paid me the high honor of listening to my views, which, of course, he did not have to do. History is full of examples of vice presidents who were kept far from the center of power. Indeed, I’ve known a few personally. But at the beginning George W. Bush had said that I would be part of governing. He had been—as I had known he would be—a man of his word.
For all of us who gathered at Andrews Air Force Base on January 20, it was the kind of event that completes one time in our lives and signals that another has begun. And except for a veteran reporter or two, the Cheneys had to be the only ones at Andrews that afternoon who could remember being in the same place to see off another president thirty-two years earlier. Back then our daughters were little girls, and the president I had served had been voted out of office. Now Liz and Mary had children of their own, and this time the president was departing on his own terms, after eight years in office.
Being vice president certainly had its benefits, but I liked picking up where our family had left off in normal life. I got a new car, and it was good to be a driver again. I wanted to drive all the way to Wyoming, just as I had done in 1993 after leaving the Pentagon, but Lynne didn’t think that was such a great idea. I acquired a BlackBerry, began to do a little emailing, and even sent a text message or two. Instead of the intelligence briefings that used to begin the day, I had to make do again with the morning newspapers. As it turned out, they were still filled with stories and commentaries critical of the Bush administration’s national security record. I could read all of this and accept it in silence, but only for so long.
On his second full day in office, President Obama signed an executive order directing that the detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be closed within a year. He also ordered an end to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, all of this in keeping with his many repeated and categorical pledges on the matter during the 2008 campaign. As a candidate, he had cast the issue in terms of constitutional imperatives, basic American values, and elementary standards of human rights—often in a tone suggesting that we in the Bush administration had not considered any of these, or, indeed, had violated them. Senator Obama had not really been challenged on such assertions during the presidential race. His opponent, Senator John McCain, actually agreed with Obama on some crucial points. And John’s preference, in any case, was that President Bush and I lie low and let him frame the election in his own way. Personally, I felt that a straightforward defense by the president and me would be better than no rebuttal at all from the White House, but it was John’s campaign and he deserved to run it the way he wanted.
Even so, in those early days of the Obama administration, my first instinct was to let the criticism pass. But the subject kept coming up, and the president and members of his administration were making assertions about the program and its value that were inaccurate. I remembered two documents in particular that I had seen as vice president. They were CIA reports, one of which specified what we had learned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after he had been subjected to enhanced interrogation. The other reported on the pivotal role that detainee questioning had played in our battle against