In My Time - Dick Cheney [83]
Some weeks earlier, about the time the Tower nomination’s troubles were becoming apparent, President Bush had attended a meeting with the House Republican leadership in the Capitol. As the meeting was breaking up, the president had crossed the room to speak to me. “How are you doing, Dick? How are you feeling?” he asked. It had been eight months since my bypass surgery, and I told him I was feeling fine, fully recovered, and had spent a week skiing in Vail during Christmas. As I entered the president’s private office that day, it occurred to me he might already have been thinking about me as a possible replacement for Senator Tower when he’d made those inquiries into my health.
President Bush began by talking about the importance of the job of secretary of defense, about what he was looking for in a defense secretary, about his priorities, and about some of the problems the next secretary would face. We discussed issues like Central America, arms control, and procurement reform. During the course of our conversation, I raised two issues I thought he needed to be aware of. The first was my academic record at Yale, and, in particular, the fact that I’d been kicked out twice. Second, I wanted him to know that I had a police record, that I’d been arrested twice for driving under the influence in my twenties. The president assured me that he didn’t believe my misspent youth would cause any trouble for a potential confirmation. Governor Sununu and Brent Scowcroft joined us for the last part of what I thought was a very good meeting, but I left and headed for my office on Capitol Hill without having been offered the job.
Back at the Cannon House Office Building, I went ahead with my schedule and was being interviewed by an assistant professor from the University of Georgia, John Maltese, about my experiences as White House chief of staff, when Kathie Embody buzzed in to tell me the president was on the phone. I asked Maltese to excuse me, and when he was safely out the door, I picked up the phone.
“Dick,” the president said, “I want you to be my secretary of defense. Will you take the job?” I said, “Yes, sir, Mr. President.” “All right,” he said, “get yourself back down here and we’ll announce it right now.” Not wanting word to get out about my new assignment before the president had a chance to announce it, I proceeded as though nothing extraordinary was going on and finished up my interview with Maltese. Then I headed downtown, and at 4:06 that afternoon walked into the briefing room with the president and became the secretary of defense–designate.
My loyal and longtime congressional staffers may have begun to suspect something was up because of my repeated trips to the White House, but most of them found out I was about to become secretary of defense from CNN, just like the rest of America. Then the phones started ringing off the hook, and the FBI showed up to begin a full-field background investigation on me.
My confirmation hearings started the following Tuesday, March 14, and the whole process was one of the speediest on record. The background investigation, committee hearings, and unanimous Senate vote to confirm me all took only seven days. The issue of my arrest record was handled in a closed session of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I had submitted the information in my written answers to committee questions, and Sam Nunn said he didn’t see the need to bring it up in open session. Senator John Glenn of Ohio asked me in the closed session how I had managed to “clean up my act.” I replied, “I got married and gave up hanging out in bars.”
My official swearing-in ceremony was scheduled for the following week at the Pentagon. In the meantime, so that I could begin work right away, I needed to take the oath of office the day