Cheney Speaks

On January 20, 2001, Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne accompanied George and Laura Bush to worship services at historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. The weather was dismal, cold and rainy. When the service ended, they climbed into limousines for the one-block trip across Lafayette Park to the White House, where, according to the schedule, they were to have coffee with the Clintons and Gores before the inaugural ceremony.

Clinton wasn’t ready.

“We got in the cars and we had to wait,” says Cheney. “And then we had to wait some more, and then we had to wait some more, and then we had to wait some more.” The famously unpunctual Clinton was finishing his term in signature style. “We must have waited about half an hour before we could go over there.”

Once they got to the White House, the couples passed some time in the kind of small talk Cheney typically avoids. “We got over there and made nice-nice and so forth,” he says, “waiting to go up to the Hill.” Bush and Clinton rode to the ceremony together, while Cheney joined Gore and several members of the congressional leadership for the short drive down Pennsylvania Avenue.

The conversation on the way to the Capitol was more substantive than the one at the White House. Gore joked about the last-minute presidential maneuvering that required Bush and Cheney to wait for their host. “We were laughing,” Cheney recalls, “because Gore was explaining the reason we’d been delayed and they hadn’t been ready to receive us on time was Clinton had been upstairs pardoning people.”

Cheney felt a sense of familiarity as he arrived at the Capitol. He had taken many oaths of office before–as White House chief of staff, six times as a member of Congress and later, as secretary of defense–and he had been on the platform for the inaugural ceremonies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“Vice President Cheney, an old, old Washington hand,” said ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, as the cameras captured Cheney joining the ceremony. “Sometimes said, particularly among the skeptical about George W. Bush here, that he’ll be the one with real influence in the city. It’s not to say that George W. Bush hasn’t had experience here, but Dick Cheney knows this town extremely well. Served in the House of Representatives, served as the secretary in various cabinets, and certainly knows that this town is not–not always paved with goodwill.”

“It’s a terrorist act”

Shortly before 7:00 A.M., September 11, 2001, Cheney sat for his regular CIA briefing in the small, first floor library of the vice president’s residence. The session was unremarkable. On a typical day, Cheney gets into the car waiting to take him to the White House at 7:30. In a six-car motorcade that races across downtown Washington, D.C., blowing through stoplights, it takes five minutes to cover the three miles from Cheney’s home at One Observatory Circle to the White House. When he arrives, he joins President Bush for his intelligence briefing at 7:45.

Cheney’s solo briefing is more detailed than Bush’s because the vice president asks for more material; Bush is the big picture guy, Cheney wants details. The vice president will sometimes ask questions in his briefings with Bush to make sure the president is exposed to in-depth treatment of issues Cheney deems important.

On this day, with Bush on the road, there was no intelligence briefing at the White House.

Cheney met briefly in his West Wing office with Scooter Libby, his chief of staff. Cheney was wearing a grey pinstriped suit, a crisply pressed white shirt, and a black tie with a silver, linked-chain pattern. The vice president has offices in both the White House and the Eisenhower (Old) Executive Office Building, with most of his staff located in the latter–what President Bush calls “The Ike.”

When Libby returned to his office in the Old Executive Office Building, Sean O’Keefe, the number two official at the Office of Management and Budget, stopped by Cheney’s office for an unscheduled visit. O’Keefe, a tall, slender man whose graying hair and push-broom mustache give him a striking resemblance to Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther, had worked closely with Cheney at the Pentagon as the military’s chief financial officer and comptroller. Though he considered Cheney a friend, he knew better than to drop in for an idle chat. Cheney was accessible–he deliberately left gaps in his schedule for “staff time”–but his White House colleagues quickly learned to keep their impromptu sessions with the vice president short and to the point.

Nonetheless, O’Keefe spent more than twenty minutes in Cheney’s office, discussing a matter that seemed urgent at 8:30 A.M. on Tuesday, September 11. In time, neither man would be able to recall what it was that had been so important.

Also waiting to speak to Cheney that morning was John McConnell, the vice president’s chief speechwriter. McConnell had arrived early at his office in the Old Executive Office Building, as usual. McConnell is an unassuming and erudite man from Bayfield, Wisconsin, a town of 625 on the northern tip of the state, with a square jaw that is softened by his prominent dimples and easy smile.

The previous day, McConnell had casually mentioned to Cheney’s assistant Debbie Heiden that he wanted to see the vice president. He was preparing for a series of upcoming speeches and needed to discuss the broad themes with his boss. McConnell, who likes to keep a low profile, figured he would just try to catch Cheney in his office for a brief chat as the vice president read the morning papers; instead, he was surprised to find he had been given a one-on-one appointment for 8:30 that morning. Arriving shortly before his designated time, McConnell found Cheney and O’Keefe deep in discussion, so he waited just outside Cheney’s office.

Cheney’s office is quite spacious–longer than it is wide, with high ceilings–particularly for the cramped West Wing. His large, mahogany desk sits opposite the entrance to the room, beneath a map depicting the Battle of Chickamauga, one of several Civil War battles that his great-great grandfather survived. In the far left corner of the room is a small television perched on a walnut-stained stand that matches the desk. Four flags sit on either side of a thin table behind Cheney’s chair: the American flag and the Wyoming state flag on the left; the secretary of defense’s flag and the vice president’s flag on the right. The table is filled with photographs of Cheney’s wife, his children and their partners, and his grandchildren. The white walls are spare, with only two gold-framed oil paintings–portraits of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams–and a map of the world as decorations. Two windows on the left side of the room provide light, and the royal blue sofa in front of Cheney’s desk matches the carpet exactly. Two chairs on each side of the sofa form a semicircle. Sewn into the carpeting directly in front of the fireplace is the seal of the vice president of the United States.

As McConnell waited for Cheney to finish his conversation with O’Keefe, he chatted with the Secret Service agent posted at the door and with Heiden, whose desk sits just outside the office. Their conversation was interrupted by a bizarre news report on the television over Heiden’s desk. An airplane had struck the World Trade Center. No one knew what to make of it. An inexperienced pilot? A wrong turn? Bad weather? The last of these seemed unlikely; it was a beautiful day in New York City, as it was in Washington.

“There wasn’t any kind of alarm,” says McConnell. “It was just kind of, ‘Oh man, look at that.'”

As they watched the television, the Secret Service agent received an urgent call from “the I.D.”–the intelligence division. He listened for a moment and then hung up.

“He put the phone down and told me: passenger jet. And that’s when you go, Geez. And then you start getting a sick feeling. Because a passenger aircraft is not going to crash into the World Trade Center.”

As O’Keefe came out of Cheney’s office, McConnell gestured to the television. O’Keefe nodded, they had been watching the reports inside. McConnell walked in through the door with a stack of papers under his arm and took a seat along the left side of Cheney’s desk. The small television on the other side of the desk was tuned to ABC News. The two men watched the fiery scene without saying a word.

In the Old Executive Office Building, Scooter Libby’s young assistant Jennifer Mayfield was also monitoring the developments in New York on her television. Libby had just begun a meeting with John Hannah, a top national security adviser to Cheney. President Bush had decided to support the creation of a Palestinian state, a major change in U.S. policy. The vexing details of the coming announcement had been in discussion for weeks without resolution. Libby wanted desperately to come up with a policy guidance for the vice president by the end of the day. Before the meeting started, he had given Mayfield strict orders: Do not interrupt this meeting.

As soon as she saw that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, Mayfield charged into her boss’s office. Libby and Hannah listened to her report. “Unless it’s terrorism,” Libby responded, “don’t interrupt me again.”

Back at the White House, Cheney watched the screen as thick, gray smoke poured from the hole in the north tower. He, too, noticed that it was a clear day in New York. “How in the hell,” he asked himself, “could a plane hit the World Trade Center?”

Seconds later, he had his answer. Cheney and McConnell watched as a second plane appeared on the right hand side of the screen, banked slightly to the left, and plunged into the south tower. “Did you see that?” Cheney asked his speechwriter.

In the ABC News picture, the north tower largely blocked their view of the plane hitting the south tower. Still, they were able to see a massive blast of smoke behind the north tower and debris from the explosion falling to the ground below.

“We knew then it was terrorism,” Cheney recalls.

Jenny Mayfield raced back into Libby’s office and told him: “It’s terrorism.” Within seconds, Libby received a call from Cheney asking him to return to the White House.

Moments after the second plane hit, Cheney “popped out of his chair,” says McConnell, and walked across the hallway to the office he had occupied as chief of staff in the Ford administration. The current occupant, Andy Card, was traveling with President Bush in Florida. Cheney told Card’s secretary that he wanted to speak with Card when he called back to the White House and returned to his office.

Libby hurried back across West Executive Avenue–the alleyway between the White House and the Old Executive Office Building–to rejoin his boss. He carried an oversized black briefing book under his right arm. Cheney sat behind his desk, leaning back in his large black chair.

Libby’s eyes shifted between his boss and the TV to Cheney’s left. The chyron across the bottom of the screen read simply: “ABC News Live Coverage. World Trade Center. New York.” The picture–from a different angle now–showed perhaps the top 50 floors of the towers, both engulfed in smoke. The tower on the left-hand side of the screen had a higher point of impact and there were flames licking skyward from the top of the building.

The morning newspapers, now completely irrelevant, sat on the left side of Cheney’s desk, next to a thick rubber band. A coffee mug was on the desk in front of Cheney, the television remote control just to his right.

Mary Matalin, Cheney’s top communications adviser, joined the small group around the television. “Is this terrorism?” she asked. Cheney told her that it was.

Liz Cheney, having heard about the first plane hitting the north tower on her car radio, called her father on his private line.

“A plane has hit the World Trade Center,” she told him.

“Two planes have hit,” he responded. “It’s a terrorist attack, I’ve got to go.”

Cheney picked up a phone with a direct line to Bush. “I need to talk to the president,” he said, and immediately hung up.

The view from “the bunker”

Much of the U.S. government response to the attacks was run from the conference room in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House, colloquially known as the bunker. In the middle of the room is a rectangular wood table, long enough to seat 16 people comfortably. At several places around the table, drawers contain a white telephone for secure communications. A second row of chairs along the wall provides room for support staff. Built into the wall closest to the entrance are two large television screens. For most of the day, one was tuned to CNN and the other to the Fox News Channel.

Cheney consulted with Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, a California Democrat who had worked alongside Cheney in Congress. He had served as secretary of commerce in the final months of the Clinton administration and Bush, who came to office on a promise to “change the tone” in Washington and eager to have a Democrat in his cabinet, asked Mineta to serve as secretary of transportation.

Mineta spent much of the morning at Cheney’s side, scrawling notes on a white legal pad with a blue, felt-tip pen. Together with Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, he spent the morning trying to track planes by their tail numbers to determine how many might have been a part of the plot. Eventually, Mineta directed that all aircraft be grounded. “Screw pilot discretion,” he would later recall saying, “Bring ’em all down.” At 9:49 A.M.–11 minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon–the Federal Aviation Administration carried out Mineta’s order.

Cheney took his place at the center of the table, just below the presidential seal. Not long after he sat down, at 9:58 A.M., the small group in the bunker watched as the south tower crumbled, floor after floor, sending a massive cloud of smoke and debris that chased terrified New Yorkers throughout lower Manhattan. One of the signature landmarks of the New York City skyline was gone, and with it, hundreds or perhaps thousands of lives. In the chaos of the previous hour, it had never crossed Cheney’s mind that the towers would crumble. He remembers being surprised. “I think everybody was,” he would say later. “I think Osama bin Laden was.”

Moments later Cheney spoke to Bush for the third time. The Secret Service had told Cheney that another aircraft was rapidly approaching Washington, D.C. The combat air patrol had been scrambled to patrol the area. We have a decision to make, Cheney told the president: Should we give the pilots an order authorizing them to shoot down civilian aircraft that could be used to conduct further attacks in Washington? Cheney told Bush that he supported such a directive. The president agreed.

Within minutes, Cheney was told that an unidentified aircraft was 80 miles outside of Washington. “We were all dividing 80 by 500 miles an hour to see what the windows were,” Scooter Libby would later say. A military aide asked Cheney for authorization to take out the aircraft.

Cheney gave it without hesitating.

The military aide seemed surprised that the answer came so quickly. He asked again, and Cheney once again gave the authorization.

The military aide seemed to think that because Cheney had answered so quickly, he must have misunderstood the question. So he asked the vice president a third time.

“I said yes,” Cheney said, not angrily but with authority.

“He was very steady, very calm,” says Josh Bolten, then deputy White House chief of staff. “He clearly had been through crises before and did not appear to be in shock like many of us.”

Cheney says there wasn’t time to consider the gravity of the order he had just communicated. It was “just bang, bang, bang,” says Cheney, one life-or-death decision after another.

The entire room paused after Cheney had given the final order as the gravity of his order became clear. At 10:18 A.M., Bolten suggested that Cheney notify the president that he had communicated the “shoot-down” order. Shortly after Cheney hung up, the officials in the bunker were advised that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.

Everyone had the same question, says Rice. “Was it down because it had been shot down or had it crashed?” Rice and Cheney were both filled with “intense emotion,” she recalls, because they both made the same assumption. “His first thought, my first thought–we had exactly the same reaction–was it must have been shot down by the fighters. And you know, that’s a pretty heady moment, a pretty heavy burden.”

Both Rice and Cheney worked the phones in a desperate search for more information. “We couldn’t get an answer from the Pentagon,” says Rice. They kept trying.

“You must know,” Rice insisted in one phone call to the Pentagon. “I mean, you must know!”

Cheney, too, was exasperated. We have to know whether we actually engaged and shot down a civilian aircraft, he said, incredulously. They did not. For several impossible minutes, Cheney believed that a pilot following his orders had brought down a plane full of civilians in rural Pennsylvania. Even then, he had no regrets.

At 10:28, the north tower collapsed. The frenzy in the bunker came to a halt and, but for an occasional whisper, the room went silent. On the television, one floor after another gave way, a bit of order amidst the catastrophe. The building must have been charged, thought David Addington, counsel to the vice president, who was standing against the outer wall of the bunker.

Cheney, seated at the conference table, stared at the screen. Bolten and Mineta stood behind him to his left, Libby and Rice to his right. All wore virtually the same stunned expressions.

But the group in the bunker had little time to reflect on the tragedy. Two minutes later came yet another warning: An unidentified aircraft was in flight less than 10 miles out. Cheney again gave the order to shoot it down.

They waited for news. None came.

At 10:39 A.M., Cheney spoke to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for the first time. He reviewed the events of the past hour.

“There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington,” said Cheney. “A couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the president’s instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out.”

There was quiet on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

“Yes, I understand,” Rumsfeld came back. “So we’ve got a couple aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?”

“That is correct,” said Cheney. “And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple aircraft out.”

“We can’t confirm that,” Rumsfeld told his former aide. “We’re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it.”

It was mid-morning before Cheney finally spoke to Dennis Hastert, an old friend now serving as speaker of the House. Hastert had been moved some twelve miles to Andrews Air Force base despite citywide traffic gridlock. Cheney briefed his friend. “We talked, but it wasn’t a long conversation,” says Hastert. “You know, Dick never talks for very long about anything. So he gave me the facts and what I needed to know and he gave me a review of what planes they thought might be still in the air that they thought might be dangerous.”

Cheney talked to Hastert about presidential succession. “You had the president on the ground in Florida and then in the air in Florida,” recalls Hastert, “so the Constitutional line had to be kept in order.”

Bush had left Florida almost immediately after his first brief statement to the press at 9:30 A.M. White House staffers aboard Air Force One were not told where they were going. Reporters traveling with the president calculated that the plane was flying in circles because the televisions on board received a strong enough signal that the passengers could watch the local Fox affiliate for almost an hour with good reception.

In reality, Bush flew west to Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana. He spoke to Cheney several times on a secure line, reiterating his desire to return to Washington. Cheney, backed by other senior officials and the Secret Service, continued to advise against it.

The attempt to keep Bush away from Washington would be one of the few decisions that day to draw immediate criticism. “President Bush made an initial mistake,” presidential historian Robert Dallek told Susan Page of USA Today. “The president’s place is back in Washington.”

In an interview two months later, Cheney dismissed the criticism. “That’s crap,” said Cheney. “This is not about appeasing the press or being the macho guy who is going to face down danger. You don’t think in those personal terms. . . . This is about preserving and protecting the presidency. His importance lies in the office he holds.”

The president addressed the nation again at 12:36 P.M. His first statement, some three hours earlier, had come off as limp and inadequate. “Terrorism will not stand,” he had said, before promising an investigation to find “those folks who committed this act.” Much had happened since–the attack on the Pentagon, the plane crash in Pennsylvania, the collapse of both World Trade Center towers.

Back in the White House, the national security team watched from the bunker as Bush spoke. His forceful two-minute speech early that afternoon gave the American public its first hint of the broader war to come. “The United States,” he declared, “will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.” Several officials continued to monitor the TVs after Bush was finished.

The television reporting throughout the day proved invaluable. For much of the day, the team in the bunker experienced 9/11 as much of America did: through TV. Watching the uninterrupted coverage not only provided new and timely information, it also allowed officials in the bunker to understand what exactly the American people were seeing as they designed their public response. The TVs also were the source of considerable frustration. Although the two televisions on the wall could be tuned to different channels, only one of them was processing audio. On several occasions, the officials could see notices of “breaking news” without being able to hear the details. According to one official in the room, Cheney was “cranked up” about the technical problems and repeatedly demanded that they be fixed. They weren’t.

Shortly after Bush’s speech, the White House operator sent a call from the Federal Reserve to the communications team in the bunker: Alan Greenspan, Cheney’s good friend from the Ford administration, was stuck in Switzerland. The chairman of the Federal Reserve had been on his way home from a meeting of central bankers in Basel when all aircraft bound for the United States were rerouted. So it was back to Basel. Cheney wanted Greenspan back home as soon as possible. The panic following the terrorist attacks could spell disaster for the U.S. economy, and Greenspan was widely considered a calming influence on the markets. Cheney asked Addington to make arrangements with the Pentagon to have Greenspan flown back to the United States the next day.

The conference table in the bunker became cluttered with pens and paper, platters of sandwiches and cookies, a thermal coffee dispenser and cups, bottles of water, and cans of Diet Coke.

As the afternoon wore on, Condoleezza Rice noticed that Cheney hadn’t eaten anything. “You haven’t had any lunch,” she said to the vice president. As soon as she said it she realized that it probably sounded odd. “I thought, ‘Where did that come from? What a strange thing to say in the middle of this crisis.'”

A “secure, undisclosed location”

Shortly after 10:00 P.M., Cheney, along with his wife and top two aides–Libby and Addington–walked back upstairs from the bunker and out the diplomatic entrance of the White House to the South Lawn, where Marine Two, the vice president’s helicopter, was waiting. Joined by three Secret Service officials, a military aide, a communications expert, and Cheney’s doctor, they took off under cover of darkness, an unusual precaution. The departure itself was a violation of longstanding protocol: No one takes off from the South Lawn other than the president. Their destination was kept from all but a handful of the most senior White House officials.

Cheney had been aboard many such helicopter flights over the course of his long career, but this was the first time he had flown without a president aboard. With those small changes would come bigger ones.

The helicopter flew over the Pentagon. Dozens of mobile light towers illuminated the deep gash across the façade of the massive building. Smoke continued to billow out of the hole. “The headquarters of the U.S. military is still smoking, and we’re flying over on our way to hide the vice president,” Addington thought. “My God, we’re evacuating the vice president from Washington, D.C., because we’ve been attacked.”

Addington and Libby, sitting across from one another, exchanged a knowing look. “We’d both had these important government jobs over our career, and part of the job was paying attention to doomsday scenarios,” says Addington. The unthinkable was suddenly reality.

Less than thirty minutes later, another tradition was discarded when Cheney and his family settled into the Aspen Lodge at Camp David, the facility typically reserved for the president. It would be the first of many nights Cheney would spend in a series of “secure, undisclosed locations.” That phrase was used so frequently in media reports on the vice president’s whereabouts that it became a staple of late-night television humor. In reality, “secure undisclosed location” was the generic description for anywhere Cheney stayed. Most often, this was Camp David, the heavily forested presidential retreat in the mountains of western Maryland. But there would be other locations over the next several months. From day to day, only a handful of senior White House officials knew where Cheney would be hidden.

Liz Cheney and her young family joined her father and mother at Camp David. Mary, who had been scuba diving in the Caribbean with her partner Heather Poe, was under the protection of her Secret Service detail.

Liz and her parents gathered in the living room of the Aspen Lodge. For several hours, into the early morning of Wednesday, they sat quietly around the television and watched again the images from the day. For Cheney, it was his first opportunity to reflect.

“Having spent all day in the bunker, watching the towers fall and so forth, the president comes back, NSC meeting, president speaks, getting on the helicopter and flying out, looking down on the Pentagon as we left, smoking, lights on it and so forth, and then flying up to Camp David and going to Aspen. And I remember sitting in the living room there, turning on the television, watching the reruns, and I suppose that was the moment, as much as any, that it really hit home what the country had been through that day.”

Mistakes in Iraq

In Iraq, in the fall of 2003, the teams assigned to find and secure Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpiles had little to show for their efforts. That failure was eroding domestic support for the war and beginning to chip away at the credibility of the U.S. government overseas. The insurgency, once understood as a small number of “dead-enders,” was proving particularly stubborn in its efforts against U.S. troops and, more frequently, Iraqis themselves.

The vice president had grown increasingly concerned about the level of violence in Iraq over the eight months since the U.S. invasion. As usual, he said little in National Security Council meetings and saved his advice for one-on-one meetings with the president. Occasionally, however, other meeting participants or members of his staff got a window into his thinking on an issue. Sometimes it would be the way he phrased a question or framed an issue. At other times he would simply share his views in the course of a conversation. Those instances were rare, however, particularly in discussions about postwar Iraq. The NSC and principals committee (the top members of the war cabinet) conducted regular video teleconferences with Baghdad to assess the progress and the difficulties.

“Cheney’s style, at least insofar as I saw it in those meetings, was to ask questions and not–he didn’t really reveal his hand,” says L. Paul Bremer, who served as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq after the invasion. “He did not very often say, ‘This is what I think we should do.’ It’s not his style. His style is more Socratic.”

Cheney broke character in a conversation with Bremer in early November, after a bloody end to October. On October 26, 2003, terrorists fired 40 French and Russian anti-tank missiles at the al Rashid Hotel, temporary home to many senior CPA officials and, on that night, to Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. Wolfowitz narrowly escaped injury, but others in the building were not as lucky. There were several serious injuries and Lieutenant Colonel Charles H. Buehring Jr., a top communications adviser to Bremer, was killed.

The next day, insurgents conducted simultaneous bombings of four buildings in Baghdad, three police stations and the headquarters of the Red Cross. The attackers used decoy vehicles ahead of trucks carrying 1,000 pounds of explosives, as was characteristic of al Qaeda attacks. Less than a week later, insurgents brought down a Chinook helicopter near Falluja, killing 17 U.S. soldiers and wounding several others. The number of daily attacks had tripled from 12 to 36 since the spring. There would be nearly as many casualties in October and November as there had been in the preceding four months combined.

On November 6, Bremer called from Baghdad for Scooter Libby. Cheney’s chief of staff was not available and Bremer was surprised when the vice president himself picked up the phone. Bremer shared his concerns about the deteriorating security situation.

“Mr. Vice President, in my view we do not have a military strategy for victory in Iraq,” he said. “It seems to me that our policy is driven more by our troop rotation schedule than by a strategy to win.” Bremer said he was particularly concerned about the talk of lowering troop levels and replacing American soldiers with poorly trained Iraqis. “The impression may well be growing among the insurgents that we won’t stay the course,” he warned.

According to Bremer’s notes from the call, Cheney agreed. “I’ve been asking the same question,” he said. “What’s our strategy to win? My impression is that the Pentagon’s mindset is that the war’s over and they’re now in the ‘mopping up’ phase. They fail to see that we’re in a major battle against terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere.”

Cheney doesn’t remember the conversation with Bremer. But his concern is consistent with the recollections of his staff. The vice president regularly asked why the bureaucracies–the CIA and the Pentagon–were not devoting more resources to understanding the insurgency and coming up with new ways to defeat it. He was rarely happy with the answers.

The vexing security problems contributed to the political difficulties of postwar Iraq. But there were other reasons for those political problems, Cheney thought, including some that he traced back to decisions he had supported more than a decade earlier.

On February 15, 1991, George H.W. Bush had urged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein. “There’s another way for the bloodshed to stop,” Bush had said. “And that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and to comply with the United Nations resolutions and then rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.” Shortly afterwards there had been an abortive uprising of Iraq’s Shiites, brutally wiped out by Saddam.

Those comments and the subsequent failure of the United States to support the rebellion would have lasting consequences. “The Shia had been treated for centuries as second-class citizens, governed by the Sunnis, and in recent decades the Baathists, under Saddam Hussein. They had been encouraged, in ’91, to rise up, and did, and were slaughtered for their troubles. Nobody came to their assistance,” Cheney says.

Many Iraqis assumed that the United States refused to remove Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf war because the United States wanted him to remain in power. Americans, in that view, were the willful enablers of the man who brutalized them for decades. “I think there are many Shia who still, to this day, aren’t convinced we’re going to stay the course, that we’re going to get the job done.”

Earning their trust would be critical to American success in Iraq. From the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks Cheney had spoken of the importance of “getting the locals into the fight.” Sometimes he meant it literally–the Northern Alliance battling the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Other times it was figurative–the willingness of the Saudi regime to get serious about fighting Islamic radicals following a bombing in Riyadh in May 2003.

In Iraq, Cheney thought it important to establish Iraqi political legitimacy as soon as possible. Before the war, Pentagon planners had discussed bringing a government-in-waiting to Iraq to run the country after Saddam Hussein had been removed from power. The idea met stiff resistance at the State Department and the CIA, who worried that the Iraqi people would be skeptical of leaders handpicked by the United States, and consisted mainly of Iraqi exiles. Cheney understood their concerns but the idea still held a certain crawl-before-you-walk appeal. A provisional Iraqi government, even an imperfect one, could help convince Iraqis that the U.S. government was serious when it promised to send a liberating force, not an occupying one.

But if Cheney was skeptical of the CPA while it was operating, Bremer never saw it. “He was generally supportive of my view on how we had to go forward. I didn’t get a sense that he was sort of working in a different direction. I don’t know–there’s all kinds of stories around all the time about how the people on his staff were working with the neocons at the Pentagon,” he says. “I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of that. It’s possible. I never saw it from Cheney. He was always very supportive of what we were trying to do.”

On June 28, 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority handed power to an interim Iraqi government in a secret ceremony announced only after the transfer was completed. Although the handover marked the official end of American rule in Iraq, it would not mean an end to the violence that had beleaguered the country for more than a year.

For Cheney, the handover did not come soon enough. He had been concerned that a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq would breed resentment among the Iraqi populace, and by the summer of 2004 his concerns had been realized.

In retrospect, he says, the mechanism for U.S. governance in postwar Iraq was a failure. “I think we should have probably gone with the provisional government of Iraqis from the very outset, maybe even before we launched. I think the Coalition Provisional Authority was a mistake, wasted valuable time.”

Was Iraq tougher than he had thought it would be?

“The ones who were lost”

September 11, 2006, brought the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that had shaped the Bush administration. President Bush was in New York for much of the day, so the vice president represented the administration at commemorations at the White House and the Pentagon.

In all of his interviews after 9/11, Cheney had refused to talk about how those attacks had affected him personally. In some cases, he deflected queries about his own emotions by providing a policy response. In others, he simply ignored the question.

The day started the same way Inauguration Day had started almost six years earlier: with a church service at St. John’s Episcopal Church. On this day, like that one, a cool rain fell. Streets were closed for blocks. Bomb-sniffing German shepherds inspected the outside of the small yellow building. One by one, cabinet secretaries strode by the small pool of reporters and photographers, most wearing somber expressions for the remembrance: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Rob Portman. In an odd moment of incongruity, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings smiled for the cameras and waved as if she were arriving at the Academy Awards.

The vice president and Mrs. Cheney arrived shortly before the service began. The vice presidential limousine was led by a policeman in full rain gear riding a Harley-Davidson and followed by three oversized black SUVs. They looked appropriately somber.

The service opened with readings by Attorney General Gonzales, the Reverend Kathleene Card, wife of White House chief of staff Andy Card, and Navy Commander David Tarantino. Tarantino, who had been in his office at the Pentagon when the plane crashed into the massive building, rescued a civilian trapped under debris in the Navy Command Center.

After the small congregation sang “Be Thou My Vision,” the Reverend Luis León offered his personal recollections of the day, five years earlier. “All of the female staffers coming down 16th Street were running in high heels,” he remembered. “And guys who haven’t run since the high school track team were sprinting down the street.” When he finished, the congregation joined him in singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”

From there, Cheney made his way back to the White House to participate in a moment of silence at 8:46:26 A.M. Eastern Standard Time on the South Lawn, five years to the minute after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. As the Marine Corps Band played “Amazing Grace,” the White House staff formed two lines arcing out from the doors to the South Lawn. In one line stood well-groomed cabinet secretaries and their spouses, most of them wearing expensive-looking black suits and coats. In the other, facing this collection of the nation’s most powerful, were National Park Service groundskeepers who had probably worked overtime to prepare the grounds for the short ceremony. They were a disheveled bunch, with dirt visible on their olive green uniforms even from a distance. One man nervously combed his tousled hair with his hands after he removed his cap out of respect for the flag. They stood tall and seemed to be proud of their contributions. Journalists looking for a poignant moment on this solemn day had found one.

Cheney escorted his wife and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher down the aisle created by the two lines. Lady Thatcher had been in town for another event and asked the White House to include her in the commemoration ceremonies. Cheney regarded Thatcher as a hero and was eager to accommodate her request. As the United States contemplated military action after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Thatcher had famously told George H.W. Bush not to go “wobbly” in his response. Now, at 80, Thatcher seemed unsure of her footing as she walked slowly down the grass pathway, clinging tightly to Cheney’s arm. Finally, everyone was in place.

Then, silence.

After one minute, a lone bugler played “Taps.” The ceremony was over.

Cheney was rushed off to his waiting limousine and his entourage–Secret Service, staff, photographers, and reporters–scrambled to keep up. A long line of black vehicles snaked its way from the White House along the Mall, past the Washington Monument and over the Potomac River, zipping past traffic left over from the morning rush hour that had been blocked to allow the vice president to pass.

The ceremony on the Pentagon’s River Parade grounds began at precisely 9:37 A.M. The proceedings were marked by a solemnity befitting the occasion. Many in the audience looked skyward as an airplane roared overhead on its departure from Reagan National Airport, just two miles away, a powerful if unintentional reminder of the attacks. A massive American flag was unfurled from the roof of the Pentagon, released by the men who famously did the same thing five years earlier.

Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke first. Rumsfeld followed, and Cheney spoke last. A light rain began to fall as the vice president opened his remarks.

“The ones who were lost,” he said, had begun their day “busy with life.”

Cheney stopped briefly. He was obviously moved.

As Cheney spoke these words, he looked out at the families of the ones who were lost. Many of them, holding and comforting one another, looked back at him, their faces streaked with tears. A burly Army Ranger stood alone next to the holding area for the press, crying silently as he listened.

We will always understand the pain of their families. And our nation will forever look with reverence upon their place–this place where there lives ended.

And then Cheney paused, his words and his emotions tangled in his throat. He started to speak and then, choking back tears, stopped again. Reporters exchanged quick glances as if to confirm that they were seeing what they thought they were seeing.

For the man who had repeatedly evaded questions about how those attacks affected him personally, this was his answer.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. This article is adapted from his new biography Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins).