Takeover

1

Inside the Bunker

1.

As the United States of America reeled, Vice President Dick Cheney took control.

At a quarter past ten o'clock on the morning of September 11, 2001, a choking cloud of debris and death, once the south tower of the World Trade Center, engulfed lower Manhattan. Flames and black smoke poured from the upper stories of the north tower. In northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington, the Pentagon's western wall crumbled into its own blaze. Three miles away, the aboveground portions of the White House complex stood empty, evacuated just minutes earlier by the Secret Service as hijacked American Airlines flight 77, bound for the military headquarters, had barreled toward the nation's capital with its target yet unknown.

Three stories into the bedrock beneath the White House's East Wing, behind body armor–clad guards holding shotguns and MP5 machine guns, loomed a sealed vault door—the entrance to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.¹ Originally built as an air-raid shelter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, the cramped bunker had never before been used during a crisis. It had a few days' food and supplies, bunk beds, and a conference room with televisions, secure phones, and video links to key federal agencies and military installations. Inside, Cheney sat at a conference room table with a handful of other top officials. As they looked from one television screen to another, a military aide approached the vice president. The bunker had received reports of a second plane headed toward the capital. United Airlines flight 93, a Boeing 757, had veered off course over Ohio, banked sharply back over Pennsylvania, and was now believed to be just eighty miles away. The military had put fighter jets on patrol a few minutes earlier. The officer wanted to know whether the interceptors should shoot down the airliner, sacrificing the forty-four people aboard to prevent a potentially larger disaster from taking place.

Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was sitting next to the vice president at the table, taking notes. Libby later described Cheney's decisive answer to the aide: "In about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing," Libby said, the vice president authorized the military to destroy United 93. Five days later, Cheney would describe the order as the toughest decision made that day, but one that was necessary. "Now, people say, you know, that's a horrendous decision to make. Well, it is. You've got an airplane full of American citizens… and are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board? And you have to ask yourself, 'If we had had combat air patrol up over New York and we'd had the opportunity to take out the two aircraft that hit the World Trade Center, would we have been justified in doing that?' I think absolutely we would have."²

Shortly after Cheney gave the order, the military aide returned and said the aircraft, now believed to be sixty miles out, had just been confirmed as a hijacking. The aide wanted to make sure that the military had the authority to attack the plane. As Joshua Bolten, later the White House chief of staff but then just one of several deputies, later recalled, "The vice president said yes again. And the aide then asked a third time. He said, 'Just confirming, sir, authority to engage?' And the vice president—his voice got a little annoyed then—said, 'I said yes.' "³ The aide left and the conference room went quiet as the enormity of the exchange fell upon all who had heard it. Then, from down the table, Bolten broke the silence. Boldly, he suggested that Cheney call President George W. Bush to "confirm" the shoot-down order Cheney had just given.⁴

At that moment, the commander in chief was aboard Air Force One as it rapidly ascended into the atmosphere above Sarasota, Florida. Bush had been reading to children that morning at a photo-op at Booker Elementary School. When the second plane hit the World Trade Center, it became clear that the country was under attack. After a brief delay, Bush and his entourage had headed for the airport.

The president and Cheney had spoken at 9:55 a.m., just before Bush's plane took off. Cheney, standing at a secure phone just outside the vault doors of the White House bunker, had urged Bush not to return to Washington until the situation was stabilized. "Basically I called to let him know that we were a target and I strongly urged him not to return to Washington right away, that he delay his return until we could find out what the hell was going on," Cheney later recalled.⁵

Bush had taken Cheney's advice. The president had hung up and strapped himself in aboard Air Force One, which had gotten safely off the ground with its ultimate destination—Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, as it would turn out—not yet chosen. Back in the tunnel, Cheney had hung up and entered the bunker, where he then learned that the military had just scrambled fighter jets around Washington.

Now Cheney took Bolten's advice. He called Bush back at 10:18 a.m. Aboard Air Force One, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was with his boss and, like Libby, taking notes. Two minutes later, according to Fleischer's notes, Bush hung up the phone and said he had just authorized the military to shoot down any remaining planes.⁶

2.

Amid the initial turmoil, Cheney believed that the shoot-down order had been carried out. In a teleconference with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at 10:39 a.m. Cheney said he believed that two planes had just been shot down. But, as it turned out, the question of whether to shoot down hijacked airliners was moot. Investigators would later determine that United 93, the last of the four hijacked planes, had already nose-dived into a Pennsylvania field at 10:03 a.m. amid a passenger uprising against the hijackers.⁷ Confused officials had been looking at a computer-projected track of where United 93 would have been had the flight still been airborne, not at an actual radar image. Moreover, military commanders had never passed the shoot-down authorization on to the fighter pilots because, as they told the 9/11 Commission, "they were unsure how the pilots would, or should, proceed with this guidance" coming from the vice president. (As the 9/11 Commission report noted, "In most cases, the chain of command in authorizing the use of force runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense, and from the Secretary to the combatant commander.")⁸ The shoot-down order, then, ended up a minor and inconsequential footnote on a morning full of hugely complex and important events. Yet the sequence leading to the shoot-down order would later become the subject of a pointed dispute between the White House and the 9/11 Commission. This conflict would sharply illustrate Cheney's willingness to exercise extraordinary executive power, Bush's penchant for deferring to Cheney, and their administration's efforts to control the flow of information about their actions to Congress and the public.

More than two years after the attacks, on April 29, 2004, Cheney and Bush met with the 9/11 Commission in the Oval Office on the condition that they would not be placed under oath, that no recording or transcript would be made, and that Cheney would sit beside Bush the entire time so that they could answer questions together. During the meeting, Cheney insisted that the president had given him permission to authorize shooting down hijacked passenger jets some ten minutes or so before Cheney first gave the order at 10:15 a.m. Cheney claimed that he had called Bush back immediately after entering the bunker conference room, when he was first told there were fighters in the sky, and during this earlier call, Bush had given him authorization to issue a shoot-down order if it became necessary. The president backed Cheney's account.⁹

In an extraordinary and largely overlooked passage of its findings, the bipartisan commission sharply scrutinized the president and vice president's account. It reported that it found "no documentary evidence for this call"—and the commission had had plenty of evidence to look through. "Others nearby who were taking notes, such as the Vice President's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who sat next to him, and Mrs. Cheney, did not note a call between the president and Vice President immediately after the Vice President entered the conference room," the commission report said.¹⁰ Nor had Fleischer, who was keeping detailed notes of events aboard Air Force One, recorded any earlier call. Bolten told the commission that he had spoken up to tell Cheney to call Bush to confirm the shoot-down order because "he had not heard any prior conversation on the subject with the president." Tucked away in the footnotes of the commission report was further evidence casting doubt on whether there had been an earlier call. In order to reconstruct the events that occurred in the bunker that morning, the commission reported, it also obtained the White House secure switchboard log, Secret Service and White House Situation Room logs, the White House "President's Daily Diary" record, and four separate White House Military Office logs that tracked significant events and communications in the bunker.¹¹ None of these sources recorded the alleged earlier call that Cheney, much later, insisted he had placed. If Cheney and Bush were telling the truth, then their most trusted aides, Cheney's wife, and eight White House and military log keepers all somehow missed the single-most potentially momentous call of that morning.¹²

3.

The dispute over the existence of the phone call was no small detail. It embodied the central role that Cheney played in the second Bush presidency. The most powerful vice president in American history, Cheney literally called the shots for the administration on 9/11. He did not hesitate to take command, and Bush acquiesced to his vice president's actions. As the war on terrorism unfolded, Cheney would continue to play a central role in guiding Bush's policies. Cheney, after all, was one of the nation's most experienced vice presidents when he and Bush were sworn in on January 20, 2001. He had been a midlevel Nixon-administration official, a White House chief of staff in the Ford administration, an influential congressman for ten years, and a secretary of defense under the first President Bush. By contrast, the second President Bush was a term-and-a-half state governor thrust to national prominence by elements of his father's old political network. Bush's father had been a member of Congress, an ambassador to the United Nations and to China, a chairman of the Republican National Committee, a director of the Central Intelligence Agency for ten months, and a vice president for eight years. His son shared the first President Bush's name but had been none of those things. George W. Bush was one of the least experienced presidents ever to take the oath.

The upper ranks of the new administration quickly filled with two types of people. There were Bush People—mostly personal friends of the new president who shared his inexperience in Washington. These included Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers, Bush's first and second White House counsels, each of whom was a corporate lawyer in Texas before becoming attached to the governor's political network. And then there were Cheney People—allies from Cheney's earlier stints in the federal government who were deeply versed in Washington-level issues, a familiarity that would allow their views to dominate internal meetings. These included Rumsfeld and other cabinet secretaries, key deputies throughout the administration, and David Addington, Cheney's longtime aide who would become a chief architect of the administration's legal strategy in the war on terrorism.¹³

Given the stark contrast in experience between Cheney and Bush, it was immediately clear to observers of all political stripes that Cheney would possess far more power than had any prior vice president. William Kristol, the neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, said in early 2001 that Cheney would play the role of "Bush's number one adviser" and "super chief of staff," giving him "unprecedented" influence. "The question to ask about Cheney," Kristol said, was, "will he be happy to be a very trusted executor of Bush's policies—a confidant and counselor who suggests personnel and perhaps works on legislative strategy, but who really doesn't try to change Bush's mind about anything? Or will he actually, substantively try to shape administration policy in a few areas, in a way that it wouldn't otherwise be going?"¹⁴

By the Bush-Cheney administration's second term, Kristol's question had been decisively answered. Cheney had used his influence to shape policy in hugely substantive ways. To be sure, some of the administration's signature domestic issues—such as establishing national school-testing standards, pushing to reform the immigration system by turning illegal aliens into guest workers, blocking gay marriage, and creating faith-based initiatives throughout the federal bureaucracy—were a natural fit for Bush, the born-again Christian who had run a state that shared a border with Mexico, and who had tried to reform the Texas public education system. But in other key areas, the administration's policies emerged from Cheney's own experiences and interests. Indeed, while most of the media's attention was devoted to Cheney's influence in pushing the administration to invade Iraq, the vice president was also immersed in another, far less visible effort. This second project was rooted in an agenda he had been developing for thirty years, stretching back far longer than his interest in toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein, and if successful would mark American politics for generations to come.

Cheney was determined to expand the power of the presidency. He wanted to reduce the authority of Congress and the courts and to expand the ability of the commander in chief and his top advisers to govern with maximum flexibility and minimum oversight. He hoped to enlarge the zone of secrecy around the executive branch, to reduce the power of Congress to restrict presidential action, to undermine limits imposed by international treaties, to nominate judges who favored a stronger presidency, and to impose greater White House control over the permanent workings of government. And Cheney's vision of expanded executive power was not limited to his and Bush's own tenure in office. Rather, Cheney wanted to permanently alter the constitutional balance of American government, establishing powers that future presidents would be able to wield as well.

Cheney made no secret of his agenda of expanding—or "restoring"—presidential power. He repeatedly declared that one of his goals in office was to roll back what he termed "unwise" limits on the presidency that were imposed after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. "I clearly do believe, and have spoken directly about the importance of a strong presidency," Cheney remarked at an awards ceremony for the Gerald R. Ford Foundation in June 2006. "I think there have been times in the past, oftentimes in response to events such as Watergate or the war in Vietnam, where Congress has begun to encroach upon the powers and responsibilities of the President; that it was important to go back and try to restore that balance."¹⁵

Cheney was not the first person to try to consolidate governmental authority inside the White House. Others had helped lay the groundwork for expanding executive power during the preceding thirty years, especially during the Reagan and Bush-Quayle administrations. Many of these "presidentialists" joined the Bush-Cheney administration. But as vice president, Cheney became the most important of the believers.

To understand what happened to presidential power during the Bush-Cheney administration, it is necessary to start by examining Cheney's own beginnings in public life, from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon administration, to his first taste of real power in the Ford administration amid the fallout from Vietnam and Watergate, to a decade he spent defending the Reagan administration from inside a hostile Congress, and to his tenure as a wartime secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush. The 9/11 attacks would reinforce Cheney's view on the need for centralizing strong powers in the presidency. The war on terrorism's climate of perpetual emergency provided a vehicle for turning his vision of an unfettered commander in chief into a reality. But Cheney's agenda was forged years before Al Qaeda attacked the United States. His agenda's origins date to 1969, when a former congressman named Donald Rumsfeld hired Cheney, then a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student in political science, to be his aide inside the Nixon administration.