In My Time - Dick Cheney [84]
Surrounded by my family and my congressional staff, I repeated after Doc Cooke the oath I had taken as a congressman and would later take as vice president, to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Accompanied by military aides and a newly assigned security detail, I left my congressional office for the last time, walked down the marble halls of the Cannon House Office Building, and went out the door and into an armored limousine. It was a moment of real transformation—and it felt like it. I had arrived at work that morning as the lone congressman from the state of Wyoming, responsible really only for my own vote. I was leaving that afternoon as the secretary of defense, in charge of the world’s most formidable military and the roughly four million men and women, military and civilian, who make up the Department of Defense. Fifteen minutes later, when I walked into the secretary’s suite at the Pentagon, a nameplate had already been placed on the desk that read, “Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense.”
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SATURDAY, MARCH 18, WAS my first full day on the job, and I had the limousine pick me up early. Accompanied by my military aide and security, I took the elevator from the Pentagon garage directly into my new office in the Pentagon E-ring, the outermost of the five concentric rings that make up the building. Inside the spacious office was a huge and ornate desk designed for General “Black Jack” Pershing, famed World War I commander, that the Pentagon inherited after Pershing’s death in 1948. On the wall across the room was a large world map, one of many maps I would have in this office over the next four years. Behind the world map was a small bedroom where later I would spend nights during Desert Storm.
Next to my desk was a small round table, where a lot of important decisions would be made during my time in office. At the end of every day, when we were all in town, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Don Atwood, deputy secretary of defense, and I would meet, often with our military assistants, to go over the key issues we were facing. Sometimes we’d kick out the aides, so it was just the three of us. This was where we did the heavy lifting.
As I settled in behind Pershing’s desk, Kathie Embody buzzed in to tell me that I was expected at a meeting in the White House residence later that morning. As the appointed hour approached, I got in the elevator to go down to the garage and pushed the wrong button, ending up in the basement of the Pentagon instead of in the garage. This would have been an easy mistake to remedy, except, as I discovered after I had gotten off and the doors had closed behind me, there was no button to call the elevator back to the basement. Someone had made a perfectly sensible security decision that people shouldn’t be able to ride from the basement straight into the secretary’s office, but what this meant for me was that the president of the United States was waiting, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to get to the garage and my limo.
I wandered around until I found some stairs headed up. At the top I could look through a glass window in a door out to where my limousine was parked and see a number of very upset aides running around, yelling, I was sure, “Where the hell’s the secretary?” I straightened my tie, walked out, and got in my limousine,