In My Time - Dick Cheney [72]
Some years later Bob Michel confirmed that he had asked Walt Kennedy to suggest that I run for policy chairman. One of his rationales was that my candidacy would attract support and energy among my fellow freshmen and thereby lessen their fervor for Vander Jagt. He was also thinking about putting together a leadership team that he could count on and work with in the years ahead.
When the voting was over in that 1980 caucus, Michel was the GOP Leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi was the newly elected whip, Jack Kemp of New York was Conference chairman, and I was policy chairman. It was an effective team, and we worked well together throughout the 1980s, the Reagan years.
Because of the way the House is organized and its rules are written, individual members of the minority typically have little impact on the overall work of the House, but being in the leadership took me into the meetings where legislative and political strategy were decided and the relationship with the administration was managed. From my personal standpoint, being in the leadership made a world of difference.
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MY FIRST TERM IN the House coincided with the last half of President Carter’s administration. The 1976 campaign had not left me a fan of President Carter, nor had his first two years in office. I found his administration singularly unimpressive.
Despite the fact that the Democrats had an overwhelming margin of more than one hundred House seats during 1979 and 1980, the Carter White House found it difficult to achieve legislative successes. In 1979, faced with serious shortages in fuel, partly as a result of the Iranian Revolution and other unrest in the Middle East, President Carter pushed hard to enact energy legislation in the Congress. At the end of a House debate on one of the administration’s energy-related initiatives, Tip O’Neill made the dramatic gesture of coming down from the Speaker’s chair—where custom prohibited him from taking a position for or against any piece of legislation—in order to speak from the well of the House on behalf of the administration’s bill. On this day Tip was particularly eloquent in his remarks. He talked about how, as a young man visiting Washington, he had been sitting in the gallery of the House on the day in the fall of 1941, not long before Pearl Harbor, when the House was asked to extend the Selective Service System. He argued that now, in 1979, we were faced with a crisis of similar magnitude, and the stakes of the vote were no less high.
It was an extraordinary performance, and when he finished, all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, rose and gave the Speaker a standing ovation. Then we voted—and beat him decisively. Tip O’Neill was much loved and highly respected, but he couldn’t transfer either of those sentiments to the president, and he couldn’t translate them into votes when we were considering the president’s proposals.
President Carter encountered difficulties as well in trying to project American power. When the Shah was toppled in Iran and the Saudis asked for a demonstration of U.S. commitment to the Kingdom, President Carter responded dramatically by sending a squadron of F-15 fighter aircraft to the Persian Gulf. Then, when the planes were in the air, he announced that they were unarmed. The Iranian hostage crisis plagued him for his last year in office. A bungled and failed attempt to rescue the American hostages—code-named Desert One—seemed to symbolize his administration’s ineptitude.
His difficulties with Congress stemmed in part from a lack of understanding about how to manage relations with Capitol Hill. Speaker O’Neill, after being treated cavalierly by the president’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, took to referring to him as “Hannibal Jerkin,” and the Georgians never achieved any kind of détente with the powers that be at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Carter made a big