In real life, no matter what the media portrayal of him was, Dick Cheney was no Darth Vader.
Cheney, the former vice president, White House chief of staff, Defense Secretary, and House Minority Whip who died Monday at age 84, was not only one of the greatest American statesmen since World War II, but also a good and decent man.
Let’s start with Cheney’s decency. In my years in Washington, D.C. journalism I heard repeatedly from those who worked both for and with Cheney that he was likable and reasonable, and that he cared deeply about his staff and treated them well.
I got two glimpses of the somewhat more private Cheney at small, invitation-only lunches at the vice president’s mansion in the Januaries of 2008 and 2009, the first off the record but the second largely on the record. Apart from the substance of those discussions (available if you Google my name and Cheney’s at the Washington Examiner), what struck me about Cheney’s style was the light and easy relationship he had with daughter Liz – who was at both lunches, years before launching her own political career – and the respect with which he treated his chief of staff David Addington.
Yes, Cheney was direct and businesslike, but frequently with a wry, attractive half-smile.
His demeanor changed, though, when asked about his former chief of staff Scooter Libby, who later was found to have been wrongfully convicted of perjury in a famous spy-related case. Cheney showed a fierce and admirable loyalty to his former staffer. He made absolutely clear not just that Libby was “his man” but that he believed entirely in Libby’s innocence. He clearly cared about Libby not as a pawn but as a person.
Of local interest, Cheney through the years worked with Louisiana’s longtime congressman Bob Livingston both on the committee that cleaned up the ABSCAM bribery mess in the late 1970s and on the Intelligence Committee.
“He was honest and straightforward, and very thoughtful,” Livingston said upon hearing news of Cheney’s death.
Those ties played an important role years later when Livingston was running a lobbying group. After the destruction of dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the Libyan government approached Livingston to represent them in matters before Congress. As Libya long had been a pariah, Livingston was wary, so he called Vice President Cheney.
Cheney’s team strongly encouraged Livingston to take the work, for very good national-security reasons. What resulted, as part of the whole interaction, was that Libya turned over huge stores of weaponry, dismantled its surprisingly advanced and dangerous nuclear program, and finally paid generously to compensate families of victims of the 1988 Pan Am 103 terrorist bombing.
And there was more.
When Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi eliminated his own nuclear program, he also provided extensive documentation and intelligence about the entire, international, clandestine nuclear proliferation regime of Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan. The Bush administration dismantled Khan’s network, and Khan was put under house arrest by the Pakistani government led by President Pervez Musharraf, whom Cheney personally enlisted to crack down on al-Qaeda.
There is no telling how many tens of thousands of lives might have been destroyed if Khan’s black market in nukes had not been stopped.
That was par for the course for Cheney, who spent an entire career defending the American people and American interests. When President Gerald Ford steadied the nation’s ship of state after the nightmare of Watergate, chief-of-staff Cheney was his chief navigator. When President Ronald Reagan was winning the Cold War, Representative Cheney was (as Reagan’s diaries show) one of his most trusted congressional allies on national security. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Defense Secretary Cheney performed brilliantly as his reorganized military evicted Saddam’s army and crushed Iraq’s supposedly elite Republican Guard.
Meanwhile, Cheney himself insisted to all who would listen that he was far less a director of action in G.W. Bush’s presidency than he was Bush’s loyal deputy; but, to the extent that Cheney was adding heft to the implementation of Bush’s decisions, which clearly he was, he and the administration deserve far more credit for the bombs that didn’t explode, the terrorism that never occurred, the thousands of Americans who weren’t murdered.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, almost every American alive would have said it would be crazy to predict that no more major attacks on our homeland would occur in the following seven years. Instead, apart from ten people killed by two home-grown snipers on the Washington, D.C. Beltway, a grand total of only three Americans were killed domestically by terrorists during the remainder of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Volumes could be written to refute allegations saying Cheney did things that he didn’t actually do. Much more should be written about all the wise and effective things he really did, to keep this nation safe.
