February 03, 2003 -- Cheney's role in Bush Iraq, bioterrorism policy


New York Times, January 31, 2003

Cheney, Little Seen by Public, Plays a Visible Role for Bush


Cheney, Little Seen by Public, Plays a Visible Role for Bush

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 - As the White House buzzed with preparations for
the State of the Union address and some allies protested the
administration's march toward war in Iraq, President Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney pulled up their chairs on Monday for their
weekly lunch.

Their privacy was sacrosanct, administration officials said: No one
but the steward was allowed in the small dining room off the Oval
Office. Afterward, as usual, Mr. Cheney refused to tell even his top
aides what had occurred.

The vice president has largely disappeared from public view since his
high-profile campaign appearances last fall. But he is hardly
invisible to the president, the man Mr. Cheney's aides call his only
constituent. At the start of the third year of the Bush
administration, White House officials and outside advisers say Mr.
Cheney is ever more powerful. In the last three months, he has
immersed himself in three critical areas: national security, the
economy and domestic defense.

Mr. Cheney was a driving force behind the administration's Project
Bioshield, a plan to protect the nation against biological attack that
Mr. Bush announced in his State of the Union address. He was central
to the creation of the president's $674 billion economic package. He
is wired into the White House plans for a postwar Iraq.

And today, Mr. Cheney opened a public relations offensive to sell the
nation on action against Saddam Hussein. In a speech here before the
Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Cheney echoed the
themes Mr. Bush laid out on Tuesday night, and closed with a sober
warning: "We will not permit a brutal dictator with ties to terror and
a record of reckless aggression to dominate the Middle East and to
threaten the United States."

Administration officials say Mr. Cheney's largely secretive role -
and the fact that he is viewed as not having designs on the presidency
himself - are important explanations for his deep influence.

"The vice president is not looking to be president," Andrew H. Card
Jr., the White House chief of staff, said in an interview. "Do you
know how unusual that is? He is here to be an adviser and counselor to
the president."

While Mr. Cheney spends almost no time on social issues like
education, Social Security or prescription drugs, aides said, he did
serve as mediator between warring factions in the Justice Department
and the White House counsel's office over the president's denunciation
of the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies.

"He was involved like he always is: deeply involved," said Alberto R.
Gonzales, the White House counsel. Mr. Cheney, as is often the case,
has not made his position known on the Michigan policies. He declined
to be interviewed for this article.

One of Mr. Cheney's biggest concerns is bioterrorism, an issue his
advisers say he has studied and worried about for years.

When Mr. Cheney made an unannounced trip last summer to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, administration
officials said, he asked intensive questions about the vulnerability
of the United States to biological attack. Dissatisfied with what he
heard about the agency's plans for responding to a widespread outbreak
of smallpox, the vice president returned to Washington and set up
dozens of meetings, some at his home, with scientists, Central
Intelligence Agency officers and other specialists to figure out what
needed to be done.

Within months, officials said, President Bush had accepted almost all
of Mr. Cheney's suggestions except for one: a call for every single
American to be vaccinated for smallpox. To the president, the idea
seemed excessive.

But the episode illustrates how Mr. Cheney immerses himself with
great secrecy in the most momentous issues before the Bush
administration, then quietly drives his tough views across the
landscape of government. "When he does a deep dive," Mr. Card said,
"he gets down into the weeds."

Mostly, administration officials said, Mr. Cheney wins.

"He's not the only reason that people are focused on this," said one
senior official who works with Mr. Cheney on bioterrorism. "What he
has excelled at is pushing the system because of who he is."

Mr. Cheney's influence has expanded even as the president has become
a more confident, steadier leader than he was in early 2001, with less
need for the vice president's stature to prop him up. Administration
officials say Mr. Bush has developed more confidence in Mr. Cheney,
who turned 62 today.

At the White House, officials say, Mr. Cheney's aggressive support
for an attack on Iraq has prevailed, along with that of Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, over the months of caution of Secretary
of State Colin L. Powell. He takes one of the hardest lines at the
White House against North Korea, and has long been the
administration's most outspoken critic against Yasir Arafat.

The job, Mr. Cheney's friends say, suits him. He can both counsel
the president and plunge into the subjects that interest him, using
the full powers of his office to assemble facts and marshal his
arguments, without feeling any pressure to justify himself to voters.

Steady, solid and opaque, with a history of heart problems that his
friends say will keep him from ever seeking the presidency, Mr.
Cheney seems dismissive, if not disdainful, of the traditional view
about the public obligations of his job. The vice president rarely
gives interviews, infrequently gives policy speeches and spends blocks
of time - much of December, for example - at his mountain home in a
gated community in Jackson, Wyo., where he kept in touch with the
White House via videoconference.

Mr. Cheney has rarely used his secure, undisclosed locations in the
past year, but for security reasons he still limits the amount of time
he and Mr. Bush are together outside the White House.

Mr. Cheney has dodged all questions about his conduct as chief
executive at Halliburton, the energy company under investigation by
the Securities and Exchange Commission for its accounting practices.
He has also repeatedly declined to identify the people who were
consulted by his energy task force in 2001.

Both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush have said that the vice president will
be on the ticket again in 2004, barring complications with his health,
which his doctors have said is good: Mr. Cheney is still down 20
pounds from his weight before he became vice president. Aides say he
works out most mornings on a treadmill or stationary bicycle .

He is also described as watching his diet, or at least careful to eat
salads at his lunches with Mr. Bush, a fitness enthusiast. But
unlike the early-to-bed, teetotaler president, Mr. Cheney makes
occasional forays to the dinner tables of establishment Washington,
like a party he attended last spring at the Georgetown home of Sally
Quinn and Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington
Post.

Mr. Cheney and the president, aides say, do not socialize together
much, and Mr. Cheney is not a regular weekend visitor to Camp David.
Since mid-November, Mr. Cheney has slipped away for a weekend day of
pheasant hunting in Pennsylvania and another day of duck hunting in
Arkansas. Tonight, Mr. Cheney joined Mr. Bush at a White House
dinner for the military's senior worldwide commanders.

On national security, Mr. Cheney has been consumed by planning for
the political reconstruction of a post-Hussein Iraq. The plan, so
far, is for an American military commander to run the country
alongside a civilian administrator, with an eventual transition to an
Iraqi-led government. Toward that end, Mr. Cheney met for 45 minutes
in his office in mid-January with Barham Salih, the prime minister of
the eastern Kurdish zone in Iraq and one of several potential future
leaders of that country.

"He asked questions that signaled to me he's deeply involved in this
process," said Mr. Salih. "We talked about the issues of
transition."

On domestic defense, Mr. Cheney's office has become a mini-research
center on bioterrorism. (I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of
staff, is called "germ boy" by other White House aides.) In December,
Mr. Cheney spent two hours in an unannounced visit to the National
Institutes of Health, where he is said to have become absorbed by
research into the development of a vaccine for the ebola virus, a
potential weapon of bioterrorists. He is now pursuing a plan to offer
government incentives to drug companies to develop better smallpox and
anthrax vaccines.

On the economy, Mr. Cheney was a forceful advocate of the centerpiece
of the president's economic plan, the elimination of the dividend tax.
Aides said he delved into in the kind of detail that the president
avoids.

"I've seen him go and look at charts of quarter-by-quarter progress of
consumption and investment on G.D.P. charts," said one adviser.
"He's got his little pencil in hand and he's working through the
charts, saying `What does this mean?' "

In coming months, Mr. Cheney is scheduled to criss-cross the country
promoting a plan that has run into major objections from voters and
Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

"When the administration is in treacherous waters, they'll send the
vice president out," said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.

But at a speech earlier this month at the United States Chamber of
Commerce, Mr. Cheney read his lines in such a Cheney-esque monotone
that he lulled some members of his audience to sleep. Mr. Cheney's
advisers acknowledged that his speech on the economy will need
punching up before the vice president takes it on the road.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Cheney, a former Wyoming congressman, is the
administration's chief schmoozer and enforcer, and often gives counsel
on national security. Two months ago, Senators Pat Roberts,
Republican of Kansas, and Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, sought Mr.
Cheney's advice about traveling to Baghdad to meet with Mr. Hussein
about the fate of Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot shot
down in the 1991 Persian Gulf war whose remains were never recovered.

"The vice president weighed in and said now was not the time to go,"
Mr. Roberts said. The senators wrote a letter to Mr. Hussein
instead.

Just before Christmas, Mr. Cheney quietly invited the House speaker,
J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, and Representative Tom DeLay of Texas,
the new Republican majority leader, to talk with a few other lawmakers
about Medicare reform and Mr. Bush's economic package.

"You feel when you've talked to the vice president you've talked to
the president," said Representative Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican
who attended the White House meeting.

In 2004, White House aides say that Mr. Cheney will be dispatched
frequently around the nation, where he is a superstar among the
Republican faithful.

"This is someone who is an incredibly effective retail politician,"
said Ken Mehlman, the White House political director.

Friends note that Mr. Cheney, who dislikes the backslapping of the
campaign trail, dislikes losing a lot more.

"One of the formative experiences of his life was being chief of staff
during the Ford presidency when they lost the White House," said
former Representative Vin Weber of Minnesota, now an influential
lobbyist, who served with Mr. Cheney in the House. "If you've been
through that experience, you don't want to go through it again."