Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [171]
In general, Cheney tended to keep his counsel during NSC meetings, taking notes quietly. He was the opposite of the often boisterous Nelson Rockefeller and the seemingly disinterested Spiro Agnew. A careful listener, he would sharpen the discussion by asking questions to provide the President and others with additional information or a perspective that had not yet been discussed or possibly considered. His broad experience added considerable value around the conference table.
In meetings, Cheney would not differ with the President, even when he might not have been entirely in agreement. He attached high importance to preserving the President’s options. That argued for keeping any difference of view he might have with the President a private matter between the two of them. Dick did not share with me his private conversations with the President. Nor did I ask about them. The combination of keeping his opinions to himself, and yet being influential, gave Cheney an air of mystery. And for people who concluded that they did not like the substance of his views—or concluded they did not like the views attributed to him by others—this could make him seem to be a negative influence.
I realize that it is hard to overcome a personal bias about a friend I’ve known for more than four decades. But the caricature of Cheney as the man wielding the reins of power, playing his colleagues and even the President as marionettes, is utter nonsense. Perhaps to his detriment, Cheney seemed not to feel a compelling need to rebut the criticism or improve his popularity. In part this was because he was the rare vice president who did not aspire to his boss’ job or seek glory for himself. But what he gave up in not clarifying his views or correcting misinterpretations publicly, he made up for with outsized influence. President Bush knew he could trust Cheney to give him advice that wasn’t colored with any personal or political ambition.
The third full member of the NSC in George W. Bush’s first term was Secretary of State Colin Powell. I had met then Colonel Powell twenty-five years earlier, when as secretary of defense I visited the army base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. In the early 1970s, the Army’s officer corps was overwhelmingly white, and Powell proved himself to be a barrier breaker. His poise, confidence, and leadership skills made him one of the Army’s most promising younger officers. I followed his career with interest through the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. Powell was reported to have considered the idea of running for president himself in 1996. By that time, he was admired by a great many Americans. I counted myself among them.*
Because of his popularity, Powell brought political heft to a new administration led by a relatively young and untested president. I felt that Powell, with his stature and bipartisan support, might be in a unique position to lead the State Department to serve the President, as Shultz had for Reagan and Kissinger had for Nixon and Ford.
He got off to a fast start in his remarks in Crawford on December 16, 2000, when Bush named him as his nominee for secretary of state. Powell took clear aim at what I believed was one of the most critical national security issues facing the country: the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction.
As much as I applauded Bush’s choice of Powell and Powell’s comments during their first appearance together that December, there was an uneasy subtext to the announcement. The appointment brought to my mind an event that had occurred twenty-six years earlier. In August 1974, hours after Richard Nixon had told the country he would resign the following day, Vice President Gerald Ford went out on the lawn of his Alexandria, Virginia, home and announced that Henry Kissinger would stay on as secretary of state and national security adviser. Like George W. Bush, Ford was facing questions about who he was, the breadth of his foreign policy experience, and even his legitimacy. In Bush