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INTERVIEWER: Are we ready to start?
CREW MEMBER: We are, the sound is ready.
CHENEY: Let me get rid of this.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, take your time.
And I guess I'm the only one on camera,
or are they gonna shoot you some?
INTERVIEWER: Oh, no, just you. Just me, okay.
[♪]
INTERVIEWER: What's your favorite virtue?
Integrity.
INTERVIEWER: What do you appreciate most in your friends?
Honesty.
INTERVIEWER: Your idea of happiness?
A day on the south fork of the Snake with a fly rod.
INTERVIEWER: Your idea of misery?
Loss of a family member.
INTERVIEWER: What's your favorite food?
Spaghetti.
INTERVIEWER: What do you consider your main fault?
My main fault...
Umm... Hm. Well, I don't spend a lot of time
thinking about my faults, I guess would be the answer.
Uh...
INTERVIEWER: When was the first time you went fishing
after your heart transplant?
CHENEY: This is it.
Haven't been on the river since last summer.
[♪]
CHENEY: It's an important part of my life, fly-fishing.
It requires intense concentration to do it well.
It's one of the few things I was able to do over the years
that let me put everything else out of my mind.
It didn't matter what else was happening.
If I was out on the stream I was out on the stream,
that's what I was focused on.
REPORTER 1: There is panic on the street, thousands of people running--
WOMAN: We saw the plane on the other side of the building,
and there was smoke and people are jumping out the windows--
REPORTER 2: The second building has just collapsed--
REPORTER 3: Huge explosion now raining debris on us.
We better get out of the way!
FIREMAN: Let's go, let's go, let's go!
[SIRENS BLARING]
CHENEY: People say, well, you know, how did you feel?
That's not the way I think about it,
I had a job to do.
A secret service agent came in.
He said, "Sir, we have to leave immediately"
and propelled me out of my office and down the hall.
I got on the telephone with the president,
who was in Florida,
and told him not to be in one location
where we could both be taken out.
We had a list of six aircraft that had been hijacked.
We could account for three of them,
two in New York and one in the Pentagon.
But we had three more out there,
and we didn't know where they were.
There had been a report of a plane outside Washington
80 or 90 miles away, headed for Washington
at a high rate of speed.
You know you could wring your hands
and be worried and get emotional about it,
but then you can't function.
Under those circumstances, you gotta act, you know,
you've got to deal with the situation as it arises,
you've got to anticipate difficulties.
That's the nature of conflict.
A plane 80 miles out,
traveling at a high rate of speed to Washington
is a matter of minutes, before it, uh,
arrives over the city.
I gave the instructions that we'd authorize our pilots
to take it out.
JO BECKER: Dick Cheney unquestionably
is the most powerful vice president in history.
He changed the course of history
in a way that no vice president has.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: He didn't see his role as galvanizing public opinion.
He wasn't a vice president that went out with a new initiative
and tried to build public support.
BOB WOODWARD: He did not want to be flexible.
He just felt you had to get in the face of the terrorists
or the potential threats and use extreme measures.
STEPHEN HAYES: It wasn't just about protecting American power,
it was about projecting American power.
RON SUSKIND: Almost any man can stand up under adversity,
but if you want to really know a man's character,
give him power.
CHENEY: The ones who spend all their time
trying to, uh, be loved by everybody
probably aren't doing much.
If you're not prepared to, uh, to have critics,
and to be subject to criticism,
then, uh, you know, wrong line of work.
If you wanna be loved, uh, you know, go be a movie star.
NARRATOR: [THE Richard Bruce Cheney(LIFE grew up in Casper, Wyoming.
The dramatic landscape of his home
made a lasting impression on him.
CHENEY: There's something just very special about it,
in the sense of...of space.
A sense of freedom, and sense of possibilities.
We loved to fish, Dad got us actively involved in fishing.
Dad was very much aware his whole life
of the possibility that, you know, economic disaster
could be around the next corner.
They were diligent, hardworking,
and both sides of the family were, uh, lifelong Democrats.
If somebody had asked me was I a Democrat or Republican
I probably would have said,
"Well, you know, my family's all Democrats."
High school was a good time.
Played football, played baseball,
was senior class president.
Everybody knew who Lynne was... She was a star.
She was state champion baton twirler,
and she was very attractive.
You couldn't miss her.
LYNNE CHENEY: He wasn't flashy,
but as I got to know him better I found him
one of the most thoughtful people I'd ever known.
CHENEY: It was before the advent of the 60s.
Nobody ever saw drugs in Casper in the 1950s.
The most potent thing that was out there was a can of beer.
We didn't face the kinds of problems and challenges
that later generations did.
NARRATOR: Upon Cheney's graduation from high school,
a local oilman arranges a scholarship
for him to attend Yale University.
CHENEY: Totally different environment from what I was used to.
Trees and buildings and people everywhere.
I was all hemmed in.
I didn't work at my academics.
I found a bunch of friends who, uh,
consumed a lot of beer, just as I did.
NARRATOR: Cheney feels powerless,
in an environment that favors the elite.
RON SUSKIND: He can't measure up. These kids are too smart.
They're maybe too privileged,
they are too well nourished educationally.
NARRATOR: Cheney fails out of Yale in his freshman year.
He is allowed to return, but his scholarship is taken away.
In his sophomore year, Cheney is asked to leave for good.
JOE MYER: You gotta realize, we didn't have to work
that hard in high school in Casper.
I think we had good grades, but it may not have been
a consequence totally of all our hard work.
LYNNE CHENEY: I was stunned, I was very surprised.
His parents had a letter from the Dean
that said he'd become involved with a spirited group of men.
INTERVIEWER: Were they disappointed in you at that time?
CHENEY: Uh, I'm sure they were.
I gave them reason to disapprove
back when I was 19, 20, 21 years old.
NARRATOR: Cheney gives up on his college education
and returns to Wyoming.
He finds work as a manual laborer,
laying electrical cable.
CHENEY: I lived pretty much day to day,
paycheck to paycheck.
There were times when it was a, be a gap between jobs,
but then you could probably get credit at the local bar
and they'd run a tab for you until you got a paycheck.
When you came in at night or after work,
you'd go to the bar and down large quantities of Coors beer.
NARRATOR: Cheney is arrested twice in the span of nine months
for drunk driving.
CHENEY: When I was arrested for the second time
for driving under the influence in Rock Springs,
that was very sobering.
My friends and classmates at Yale were all graduating,
Lynne had graduated the previous year, early,
from Colorado College.
And I was in jail in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
The real question is, you know, what are you gonna do now?
NARRATOR: At the age of 22, Cheney is an itinerant lineman,
who has flunked out of Yale twice,
with a growing arrest record and a drinking problem.
He has hit bottom.
He fails again and again in the early part of his life,
all the way up until Lynne
basically takes him and shakes him.
She says, "I am not going to be married to a lineman,
so step up buddy."
INTERVIEWER: What did Lynne say to you? What was that conversation?
Uh... Uh, that's still private.
[CHUCKLES]
There's a...a... It was clear she disapproved.
I needed to get my act together, I needed to go back to school
and get an education.
NARRATOR: From now on, Cheney will control his own fate.
He begins classes at the University of Wyoming,
majoring in Political Science.
Turned out when I went back and applied myself
I was a pretty good student.
A year later, Lynne finally agreed to get married.
NARRATOR: After getting his Bachelor's degree,
Cheney enters the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Once he has his Doctorate, the former college dropout
plans to be a Professor of Political Science.
PROTEST LEADER: The time to act is now,
clearly and decisively against the war in Vietnam.
we won't go!
NARRATOR: Student protests against the Vietnam War
are growing in numbers.
On the east coast, the center of the movement
is Columbia University.
On the west coast, it's Berkeley.
And in the midwest, it's the University of Wisconsin.
CHENEY: Wisconsin had a reputation of being a pretty radical campus,
riots and protests of various kinds.
National Guard was called out to restore order.
I can remember the mime troupe meeting there,
and the guys that ran around in white sheets
with the entrails of pigs, dripping blood.
I basically supported what the administration
was doing at that point,
so I was not an opponent of war.
STEVEN HAYWARD: The country's deeply divided
in a way you really almost hadn't seen since the civil war.
We were trying very hard to get on with our lives,
to complete our educations and start a family and so forth.
A period of time when I think probably a lot of us
made judgments or ended up having our political philosophy
shaped and developed by what we saw happening in the society,
and it certainly moved us in a conservative direction.
[♪]
NARRATOR: In 1968, a 27 year-old Cheney moves to Washington
to participate in a fellowship that pairs graduate students
with members of Congress.
He wants to spend a year
experiencing the political process up close
before returning to his studies.
CHENEY: There was an orientation session for those of us
in the Congressional Fellowship program.
One of the early speakers was a guy named Don Rumsfeld,
I'd never heard of.
He was young and dynamic, he was very impressive.
So there are different ways that someone could do it.
The task is there, the problem's there.
The problem is to reduce the rate
of increasing the cost of living.
I had agreed to interview
individuals that they'd selected,
and one of those individuals turned out to be a young fellow
from the University of Wisconsin graduate school.
CHENEY: That's probably the worst interview I ever had in my life.
It's the only time I can recall I got thrown out of the office.
If you're looking for warm and fuzzy,
Rumsfeld's not the right place to go.
Couple of months later, President Nixon announced
that Rumsfeld then was being nominated
to be Director of the Anti-Poverty program
at the old office of Economic Opportunity.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Sit down, please.
Don Rumsfeld today is making what, for him,
may be his hardest and most important political decision.
He's giving up one of the safest seats
in the Congress of the United States to take on
one of the most important agencies,
one of the most controversial agencies
in the entire government.
CHENEY: I sat down one night, unsolicited,
and wrote a 12-page memo
telling Rumsfeld what he should do
in terms of confirmation hearings
and how he should conduct himself.
I ended up liking the memo and remembering Dick Cheney
and asking him if he'd come to work with me.
CHENEY: He looked up when I came in and said,
"You're Congressional Relations,
now get the hell outta here."
I went down the hall, moved in and took over.
We had offices over in the West Wing.
That's prime real estate,
especially for a young guy in Washington.
RUMSFELD: The tougher things got, the better he got.
He didn't ever get skittish or back off.
He would decide what needed to be done,
and then go about and do it.
JAMES MANN: Rumsfeld is a very combative bureaucratic player.
Wherever he is, he's pushing for more turf for himself,
so Cheney watches all that, learning at Rumsfeld's feet.
And this is the beginning of Cheney's sort of growth,
his first role as the guy right behind him, the number two.
The guy who's gonna stay up twice as late as you,
the guy's thinking of things before you even think of them.
INTERVIEWER: How much exposure did you have to President Nixon,
during those years when you were...?
He was probably the first president
I ever met and shook hands with.
Rumsfeld took some of us into the oval office one day
on sort of a morale booster,
different cabinet members would bring their key staff in.
NARRATOR: As the 1972 election draws near,
Chen is offered a job working for Nixon's committee
to re-elect the president.
But Rumsfeld wants to keep his trusted deputy.
I made a good decision, I went with Rumsfeld
so I was not near when the train wreck happened.
HARRY REASONER: A federal grand jury indicts seven former aides
and campaign associates of President Nixon's.
NARRATOR: With Nixon's approval,
a group of government-paid operatives
spies on the president's political enemies.
Nixon's men are caught during a burglary
at the Watergate complex.
The president himself then participates
in the attempt to cover up their crimes.
Watergate obviously was absolutely devastating.
Having known some of the people involved,
and watching that whole thing unfold,
it was...a political scandal of major proportions.
NEW REPORTER: More than 50,000 telegrams
poured in on Capitol Hill today, so many,
Western Union was swamped.
They just say, "Impeach Richard Nixon,
or force him to resign."
NARRATOR: As Watergate shakes the country,
Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew,
is charged with bribery and forced from office.
NIXON: The vice president of the United States,
Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
NARRATOR: Nixon chooses house minority leader Gerald Ford
as his new vice president,
the first unelected vice president
in United States history.
Through '73 and on into the summer of '74,
those were sort of the crucial 18 months of Watergate.
STEPHEN HAYES: He did have a front row seat.
He could see everything evolve sort of
at every step along the way.
And in all of my years of public life,
I have never obstructed justice.
How can you talk about blackmail and bribery
and keeping witnesses silent?
This is the Presidency of the United States.
Congress became very aggressive
at trying to reassert some balance of power
in the federal government.
The Congress sort of felt their oats.
When you've got the president in your sights
and you've got the prospects of impeachment,
that, you know, radically shifts the balance
between the two branches.
The meeting will come to order,
for the House of Representatives
to exercise its Constitutional power
to impeach Richard M. Nixon.
I have never been a quitter.
To leave office before my term is over is abhorrent
to every instinct in my body.
REPORTER 1: Vice President Ford
will become the nation's 38th president tomorrow.
REPORTER 2: Indications are Ford will ask the entire Nixon cabinet
to stay on.
Ford's choice for vice president,
Nelson Rockefeller.
NARRATOR: On August 9th, 1974, Gerald R. Ford is sworn in
as the 38th president of the United States.
RUMSFELD: He became the only man in our history
to become President having never run for vice president
or president, so he didn't have a campaign team.
He didn't have a policy team, he didn't have a platform.
GERALD FORD: My fellow Americans,
our long national nightmare is over.
NARRATOR: Within days of taking office,
President Ford's approval ratings reached 71 percent.
But one month later, Ford squanders the good will.
REPORTER: Today, in a move
which caught just about everybody by surprise,
President Ford made the most controversial decision
he has made since assuming office
just one month ago tomorrow.
FORD: Now therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford,
have granted a full, free, and absolute pardon
onto Richard Nixon,
for all offenses against the United States which...
RUMSFELD: It came as a stunning action,
a...a shock to the American people.
REPORTER 1: This means Mr. Nixon cannot be prosecuted
for any possible Watergate crimes.
REPORTER 2: Do you think the Nixon pardon
really serd to bind up the nation's wounds?
The decision has created more antagonism
than I anticipated.
REPORTER 3: Do you think that there is any evidence
there was a deal made between Mr. Nixon and Mr. Ford?
I think we have to say
there are a lot of unanswered questions tonight.
Just how much damage has this done
to the president's relations with Congress?
I would predict rough going for Mr. Ford
from now on in his dealings with Congress.
NARRATOR: Ford needs help.
He brings in Donald Rumsfeld as his new Chief of Staff.
Rumsfeld then hires a 33 year-old Dick Cheney
as his second in command.
CHENEY: I'd gone from being the assistant to Rumsfeld,
and all of a sudden I'm the number two
and the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House.
I'm 33 years old.
Based on Rumsfeld's word,
Gerry Ford immediately gave me his approval.
Working for Ford I got a much closer post
from which to observe the presidency
and all the pressures that are exerted on a president
and decisions that needed to be made.
HAYES: One day Ford would have a note sent to Cheney
that said, "Can you schedule my haircut?"
And the next day it would say,
"What's the status on our nukes?"
NARRATOR: The first task Cheney and Rumsfeld face
is restoring the authority of the president.
Congress is demanding that Ford appear on Capitol Hill
to explain his pardon of Nixon.
Rumsfeld and other staffers plead with Ford
not to go to Congress.
INTERVIEWER: What was the risk of his going to Congress?
Uh, precedent it sets.
Um... One of the things you have to be aware of
and sensitive to, I think, as president
is that the things you do, um...are important
not only for the here and now,
but they oftentimes can have an impact long-term.
DEFRANK: You would not expect a leader of the executive branch
to go, in effect, hat in hand
to the legislative branch and answer their questions,
but Ford thought that was important
and he overruled Rumsfeld and he overruled Cheney.
NARRATOR: Just one month after joining the Ford White House,
Cheney watches from the gallery as the president
is humbled by Congress.
CONGRESSMAN: I'm wondering, if after all that has happened
and with further opportunity for reflection,
if you do not now feel that you perhaps acted too hastily
in this case.
FORD: I was absolutely convinced then,
as I am now, that if we had had
an indictment, a trial, a conviction,
that the attention of the president, the Congress,
and the American people would have been diverted
from the problems we have to solve.
MANN: Ford's testimony is one of the very first instances
where Cheney sees the impact of and objects to
Congressional intrusions on presidential power.
CHENEY: I think there's no question that those days after Watergate
the presidency was in a weakened condition.
Congress sort of moved aggressively into the vacuum
that had been filled by that.
SUSKIND: Rumsfeld and Cheney develop a kind of autonomy
and also a kind of leverage over others.
NARRATOR: Behind their backs, members of the administration
begin calling Cheney and Rumsfeld
the Praetorian Guard,
referring to elite soldiers in ancient Rome
who protected the emperor but also wielded
tremendous power themselves.
RUMSFELD: There was a lot of tension between the Ford staff
and the, uh, Nixon White House staff
which President Ford had decided to keep.
Rumsfeld and Cheney often knocked heads
with Henry Kissinger.
Henry had two hats.
He was the Secretary of State
and he was the National Security Advisor.
DEFRANK: Kissinger was larger than life and Ford deferred to him.
NARRATOR: But Cheney and Rumsfeld distrust Kissinger
because they consider him soft on the Soviet Union.
DEFRANK: Rumsfeld and Cheney were also maneuvering
against several other people.
CHENEY: I did not have a close relationship
with Vice President Rockefeller,
he and I were hostile, I was the young kid,
uh, half his age.
DEFRANK: There was a feeling Rockefeller was probably
too liberal for Republicans.
HAYWARD: He had lots of ideas for new social programs
like the ones that he had done in New York as governor.
CHENEY: Rockefeller believed I was the guy shooting down his proposals,
which to some extent I was.
NARRATOR: The internal conflicts come to a head
just as the presidential primary campaign begins.
All governments are going to have to reduce
government's appetite,
and let the people have a little more of their own money
in their pockets to spend as they see fit,
or this system of ours isn't going to work any longer.
NARRATOR: Ford, still reeling from his pardon of Nixon,
is vulnerable to a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan,
the popular and deeply conservative
former governor of California.
And you don't discipline an irresponsible Congress
by putting an indulgent friend in the White House.
NARRATOR: Rumsfeld and Cheney are determined to shore up
the Republican base by pushing the moderate president
further to the right.
RUMSFELD: We thought the president needed to make some changes
that he had been slow in arriving at.
CHENEY: Rumsfeld and I,
we wrote a lengthy memo to the president,
that recommended a lot of changes.
NARRATOR: Over the course of three days,
Cheney and Rumsfeld engineer what comes to be known
as The Halloween Massacre.
SUSKIND: They knock out the core staff of the Ford administration.
NARRATOR: Henry Kissinger is forced to give up his duties
as National Security Advisor.
CHENEY: You got a guy who's dominant in the Nixon administration
and who had survived all that,
but he's running your foreign policy so you needed to,
to mix things up a bit there. So he went down.
SUSKIND: They as well kneecapped Nelson Rockefeller,
the vice president.
NARRATOR: Rockefeller announces he will not run for election in 1976.
Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger
is removed from office.
REPORTER: Were you fired or did you quit?
SCHLESINGER: I have no comment to make.
NARRATOR: Cheney and Rumsfeld have two more moves to make.
Ford names Rumsfeld as the new Secretary of Defense.
And at the age of 34,
Dick Cheney becomes the youngest White House Chief of Staff
in American history.
INTERVIEWER: Pretty sophisticated series of chess moves.
Mm-hm.
Right.
That first, you know, major turning moment
in my life was the summer of '63.
12 years later I'm Chief of Staff,
the youngest one in history.
So that was a... It was a major transformation obviously
from, uh, where I had been 12 years before.
HAYES: He said to me he didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it,
that he had a job to do and things were in front of him,
but one would imagine
if you're Chief of Staff of the White House,
and you're in your mid 30's,
that's a moment where you do take some time to stop
and sort of reflect and say,
you know, this is a big moment.
NARRATOR: But Cheney's rise to power is just beginning.
[♪]
After serving in the Ford White House,
Cheney goes on to represent Wyoming in Congress
for ten years.
Mr. Speaker, this bill is a turkey
and I would urge its defeat.
NORMAN ORNSTEIN: It didn't take a lot of insight
to figure that Dick Cheney was gonna make his mark.
In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it
and Mr. Cheney is elected Minority Whip.
[APPLAUSE]
NARRATOR: He quickly ascends
to the Republican Congressional Leadership.
As a member of the Intelligence Committee,
he masters the complexities of national security
and international relations.
And when Ronald Reagan comes under fire
for the covert operations known as Iran Contra,
Representative Cheney's
expertise in the intelligence world,
helps him gain the position of ranking member
of the committee investigating the president's actions.
CHENEY: In my opinion there is no justification
for further restrictions on the power of future presidents.
NARRATOR: The Iran Contra hearings make Dick Cheney a household name.
In 1989, after George H. W. Bush is elected president,
he asks Cheney to serve as his Secretary of Defense.
There are 92 yayes and no nays,
the nomination of Richard B. Cheney
to be Secretary of Defense is confirmed.
NARRATOR: Two years later, Cheney leads efforts
to build a multinational coalition to fight Iraq
in the Persian Gulf War.
CHENEY: We did exactly what we set out to do.
We liberated Kuwait, and we destroyed the vast bulk
of Saddam Hussein's offensive military capability.
MARIO CUOMO: Mr. Secretary,
you managed an immense enterprise
with startling success,
a military and civilian defense system
without equal in history.
[CHEERING]
BILL CLINTON: On this day,
the American people have voted to make a new beginning.
NARRATOR: When George H. W. Bush loses his bid for re-election,
Cheney finds himself out of a job.
But he has his eye on a new one.
President of the United States.
He drives thousands of miles crisscrossing the country,
trying to drum up support.
CHENEY: I spent a lot of time on the road.
I thought that I was qualified by background and experience
to do the job. I mean, I believed I,
that I could function effectively as president.
DEFRANK: He did all the things you're supposed to do.
You raise a little money,
you form a political action committee,
you put out feelers.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, Dick Cheney.
CHENEY: Part of that was to assess
that basic question about my willingness to do
what I would have to do, and no guarantee you're gonna--
You can't just say "I'm gonna run"
and expect to get elected.
REPORTER: Are you testing the Iowa waters?
I'm out all across the country this year,
because it's a campaign year, helping the party,
helping candidates and tonight I have the--
BARTON GELLMAN: He is not good at retail politics,
and more importantly he doesn't like it.
NARRATOR: Cheney never garners more than three percent support
in pre-election polls.
His fundraising lags far behind other contenders,
like Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander,
and the eventual nominee, Bob Dole.
CHENEY: I put out about a one word, two word press release,
uh, thanking my supporters for their interest
and saying I'd made a decision
not to be a candidate, thank you very much.
NARRATOR: Cheney realizes he will never be elected president.
He retires to private life, accepting a job as CEO
of Halliburton, a multinational oil company.
CHENEY: I did that for five years and I was very happy doing it.
We had over 100,000 employees over 100 countries
around the world,
and we were involved in a wide range
of basically energy-based activities.
Dad was a religious consumer of information about the company.
He said to my brother one day, showed him the annual report
and said, "Look at that, can you imagine what
they're paying the kid?"
That's...that was his take on my time at Halliburton.
Cheney really never extinguished
his political ambitions.
He always said he did, maybe in his own mind he did.
But, you know, once you're a political animal,
you know where the big seat in the zoo is
and it's being president of the United States.
CROWD [CHANTING]: We want Bush! We want Bush!
ANNOUNCER: We are proud to introduce you today to the future president
of this great nation, Governor George W. Bush.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 2000,
Texas Governor George W. Bush becomes the presumptive
Republican nominee for president.
GEORGE W. BUSH: I'm looking forward to working my heart out
for the next four months.
Four months till we rid this nation of Clinton-Gore.
Four months.
NARRATOR: Bush faces a tough election against incumbent
vice president Al Gore.
Questions are being raised about the Governor's
foreign policy experience.
REPORTER: Prime Minister of India?
Uh, the new Prime Minister of India is uh...uh, no.
NARRATOR: Bush needs to reassure voters
worried about his limited resume.
His choice of a running mate is a chance to put
those concerns to rest.
Former Secretary Dick Cheney
is gonna head my vice presidential
search committee.
NARRATOR: Bush asks Cheney to be considered
as a vice presidential candidate.
Cheney says no.
CHENEY: I had seen the unpleasantness.
A number of other vice presidents had
had negative experiences.
Gerry Ford always told me, he said,
the worst job he ever had in his life,
the worst eight months of his life
was when he was vice president
of the United States, he hated the job.
Cheney was happy in his new life at Halliburton,
he had lots on his mind, lots still to do,
uh, and was not looking for the job.
NARRATOR: But Cheney does agree to help Bush
with the vice presidential search.
I'm honored he would take time out of his busy life to do so.
I can't think of a better person to do it,
he's a man of enormous experience,
and I'd be glad to answer a few questions on him.
REPORTER: Does this mean he is not a candidate?
Assume, rule him out?
That's a very interesting question.
CHENEY: It started with a list of dozens of people,
all the Republican governors and all the Republican senators.
Virtually anybody that you could conceive of
as a prospective candidate and then we narrowed that down.
GELLMAN: He began devising what everybody involved described as
the most comprehensive, most intrusive
vetting process ever used.
CHENEY: We wanted ten years of tax returns,
we wanted, uh, their health records.
We wanted to know if they'd ever been involved in any kind
of scrape that might be an embarrassment to the president.
GELLMAN: Since he didn't trust anyone to give all the records,
he made them sign waivers and powers of attorney.
It was a pretty exhaustive proposition.
I'm not sure I would have gone through all of that
if I'd been asked.
GELLMAN: He would meet from time to time with Bush,
tell him, here's what we found on Lamar Alexander,
here's what we found on Frank Keating.
Pretty much every time,
you're coming up with something that raises an eyebrow
and makes you worry a little bit.
NARRATOR: During these meetings,
Bush describes what he wants from a running mate.
He knew what he wanted and what he was looking for
and that was somebody who could be a part of the team
to help him govern.
GELLMAN: I can't tell you for sure when he started seeing
a vice president in the mirror,
but one of the key things that Cheney did
was to tell Bush stories about problems
between presidents and vice presidents.
And the key feature that he described was a conflict
involving the ambition of the number two guy.
He painted a portrait of ambition as sort of
latent disloyalty.
If you get a guy who wants the job,
he's already halfway disqualified.
And at the same time Cheney is telling Bush,
"No, I don't want it."
Uh, the more he runs away, the more Bush is pursuing him.
CHENEY: We got all through, we ended up down in Texas.
We'd evaluated everybody,
we'd reviewed all the candidates.
He looked up at me, he said,
"You're the solution to my problem."
The reason I finally said yes was because I was convinced
he was deadly serious about it being a consequential position.
I, uh, took him seriously in terms of the reasons why
he said I was the guy he wanted,
my background in national security and defense.
There was no piece of paper at all, but that he'd make certain
that I played a significant role in his administration.
GELLMAN: Cheney did not submit himself to the vetting,
he did not produce business records from Halliburton.
He gave a substantial set of financial documents
for vetting, and he gave them to George Bush
and George Bush only.
NARRATOR: Cheney has amassed a long history of cardiac problems.
He has suffered three heart attacks,
his first one at age 37.
But he does not provide Bush
with a thorough medical evaluation.
CHENEY: I'd been through several crises,
we'd managed each one.
I'd adjusted to the fact that I was mortal.
I'd sort of pursued a policy when I had a problem,
another heart attack or crisis of some kind, um,
you go do what you gotta do to fix it,
get the best help and advice you can,
and then you get on with life.
GELLMAN: George Bush, he calls his Dad
and says, "I'm thinking about this guy, what do you think
about his health?"
His father advises him to get a second opinion.
George Bush calls up a guy named Denton Cooley,
he's a well-known heart surgeon in Houston.
He says, "I'd like you to give
a second opinion, let's see what you think
of Cheney's heart health."
Well, Cooley gets on the phone
and talks to Cheney's own doctor.
He did not actually meet Cheney.
He did not see any of his paper records.
Uh, and actually, since he's a surgeon,
he wasn't the right guy to ask in the first place.
Should have been a medical cardiologist
who reviewed those files.
ANNOUNCER: Please welcome the Governor and Mrs. Bush
and Secretary and Mrs. Cheney.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
I believe you're looking at the next vice president
of the United States.
NARRATOR: Bush's selection of Cheney as his running mate
immediately changes public perceptions
of the presidential candidate.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Cheney was not a flashy candidate,
but yet he was experienced and as a senior statesman
he would add gravitas to the ticket.
ANNOUNCER: Decision 2000, election month.
All eyes on Florida at this hour, Tim.
NARRATOR: On election night,
Bush and Cheney are on the brink of victory.
CHENEY: Election night was sort of the ultimate contest
in terms of probably being the closest election
in American history.
NEWS ANCHOR 1: Here we are at 99 percent of the vote in.
NEWS ANCHOR 2: 11... That means automatic recount.
NEWS ANCHOR 1: Yeah.
That isn't under, no.
Well, I'm seeing nothing on these.
It's... It's slightly detached.
CHENEY: They kept recounting,
but every time they recounted we still won.
Ultimately it got into the courts.
NARRATOR: While the legal battles and the recount drag on,
Cheney takes action.
CHENEY: We finally went back to Washington
and we announced that I was gonna be in charge
of the transition.
CROWD: Let us in! Let us in!
JO BECKER: We will all remember these times
as some of the most critical and defining moments
in our nation's history.
During the deadlocked 2000 election,
one would think that Vice President Cheney
would be glued to the television
because there were literally developments every day.
Instead, actually, he was at his home in Virginia
and what he was doing was putting together the government
in the event that the recount turned out in their favor.
It's not only unusual that Cheney ran this transition,
it's unprecedented.
Vice presidents, they don't run things.
CHENEY: One of your most important responsibilities
is to put together a government, to pick really good people.
An awful lot of presidents find that very difficult to do.
And government's so big, and they've got
so many relationships, that they, um,
sometimes they like to hang on to old relationships
that are no longer relevant.
GELLMAN: George Bush is very limited in his Washington experience.
He doesn't know the kinds of people
who are going to fill jobs like Office of Legal Counsel.
Cheney knows those people.
Most of the friends of George did not make the cut.
Cheney didn't say to Bush, "You can't have that,"
it's just that he started bringing him other people.
NARRATOR: Cheney names Scooter Libby, his former aide
at the Defense Department, as his Chief of Staff.
GELLMAN: He shares Cheney's philosophy.
He is able to cut to the heart of issues.
He is sometimes described as Cheney's Cheney.
NARRATOR: Cheney taps David Addington, who has worked with him
since the Iran Contra investigation,
as his legal counsel.
ADDINGTON: Having worked with him before,
he could be confident in my abilities,
and importantly with Dick Cheney, my discretion.
NARRATOR: And Cheney persuades his mentor and dear friend Donald Rumsfeld
to take the job of Secretary of Defense.
It was a surprise, no one was more surprised
than Don Rumsfeld that he ended up back in government
and at that advanced age.
CHENEY: We'd kept up over the years
and when it was time to pick a Secretary of Defense,
I was convinced Rumsfeld was the...the right guy.
DEFRANK: The protege became, in effect,
the mentor to the mentor.
GELLMAN: He doesn't stop there, he goes to the deputies,
he goes to the assistant secretaries,
he goes three, four levels down.
BECKER: There were people in the Interior department
at sort of these more mid-level kind of jobs.
MASSIMO CALABRESI: It made him very influential and powerful
throughout the bureaucracy,
in particular when decisions came to the level
of the president.
SUSKIND: Did George W. Bush know what he was getting?
How thoroughly overmatched he was
by the team that was assembled around him?
PETER JENNINGS: Good evening. I'll make it quick and simple,
the Supreme Court of the United States
has reversed the decision of the Florida Supreme Court.
This effectively ends the election.
It has ended the election and literally...
NARRATOR: Six weeks after the election,
the Supreme Court puts an end to the recount in Florida.
Bush and Cheney win.
CHENEY: There were a lot of people who didn't like the outcome.
Gore had won the popular vote,
but we'd won the Electoral College,
and, uh, that's what the Constitution provides for.
INTERVIEWER: So do you remember walking into the White House
as vice president on January 20th, 2001?
I do.
When I'd first arrived there back in 1968,
I was one of the youngest people in the West Wing,
and this time around I was the oldest.
BECKER: When the vice president first came in,
they were sort of contemplating what role would he take,
and they were sort of, well, you know
Vice President Gore had a specific kind of portfolio
involving government innovation and some other things.
Cheney was not particularly warm to that kind of idea.
He had the, the "Walk-In Rights"
you might call them, he could walk into any project,
any meeting, and do whatever he wanted.
BECKER: If you are a vice president who is able to sit in
on every meeting in all of the kind of lead-up
when that policy is shaped,
you know, you're not only the last word,
last piece of advice, but you've also shaped
all of the options that are being presented to him
even before they get to his desk.
He was quite disciplined, though.
He picked what Mary Matalin, one of his advisors called
"The Iron Issues."
The economy, national security,
the core sort of areas any president would care about.
CHENEY: Some would suggest Cheney had his own agenda,
Cheney was getting ready to manipulate the process
so he could be president of the United States. Not true.
POLICE [YELLING]: Move! Let's go!
[SIRENS]
Move it! Get back!
REPORTER: Let's just get back!
JAMES MANN: On 9-11, it's Cheney who's in charge.
Bush has the humiliating experience of being
in a primary school classroom,
he is physically out of it.
CHENEY: I was thinking about the threat we were faced with,
I was thinking about what we had to do,
on one hand, to preserve
the legitimacy of the government,
to make certain there were successors in line
ready to go if the president and I were taken out.
There was an incoming aircraft from the northwest,
it was after the other three had already struck.
The question you had to ask yourself was,
if we had been able to take out one of those airplanes
headed for the World Trade Center,
would we have done it?
And the answer was absolutely yes.
After I'd given the, uh, order...it was pretty quiet.
Everybody had heard it,
and it obviously was a significant moment.
There was sort of this collective groan in the room,
and...but people who looked over to see him
said he was so controlled and contained.
CHENEY: Later in the afternoon, Lynne and I went out
and got on a helicopter on the south lawn at the White House
and flew off to a secure undisclosed location.
ADDINGTON: The only time that the vice president
has ever flown in a helicopter
off the south lawn of the White House.
Presidents fly off the White House lawn,
vice presidents don't do that.
CHENEY: Everything I'd seen up till that point had been
over television and so forth.
Um, but when you fly over the Pentagon
and there's a big hole in the side of it
and all the signs of the attack,
and it's still smoking from the damage
that was done that morning,
was a dramatic sort of reinforcement
of what we knew was happening.
I started thinking about how we should respond,
how can we bring to bear the power and influence
of the United States to take down
whoever had launched this attack against us.
CHENEY: We all have to work the dark side, if you will,
we're going to spend time in the shadows
in the intelligence world.
A lot of what needs to be done here
will have to be done quietly without any discussion,
using sources and methods that are available
to our intelligence agencies.
So it's going to be vital for us
to use any means at our disposal, basically,
to, uh, to achieve our objective.
I see 9-11 as a hinge of history for Dick Cheney.
I went to interview him a month after 9-11,
and it was a changed Dick Cheney.
ORNSTEIN: You see an increasing conviction that you cannot
leave decisions that could be existential ones
for the United States in the hands of Congress.
In the face of a threat of this sort,
you couldn't have some of the niceties
or the same boundaries that existed before.
CHENEY: It is a wartime situation,
and it does require tough programs and policies
if you're gonna be successful.
And it was more important to be successful
than it was to be loved.
NARRATOR: Less than a month after 9-11, the U.S. launches attacks
against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies
in Afghanistan.
CHENEY: We began to capture members of Al Qaeda
with important information.
BECKER: As we began rounding up suspects,
the question was, well, what do we do with them?
We looked at all kinds of options,
and ended up recommending Guantanamo Bay be used.
NARRATOR: The military base at Guantanamo Bay
is entirely on the territory of Cuba, a hostile country.
REPORTER: Why use it, why is it the best place?
I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, um,
as the least worst place we could have selected.
CHENEY: We needed some place to hold terrorists,
we didn't want to bring them to the United States.
Once they were on U.S. soil,
they obtained many of the same basic rights
that American citizens do.
I think it was March of '03 we actually captured
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11.
He had a wealth of information if he were willing to share it.
BECKER: There was a significant amount of consideration about,
how could we interrogate prisoners in such a way
as to not run afoul of these Geneva Conventions.
MOVIE NARRATOR: The Geneva Convention of 1949
authorizes inspection of camps by neutrals, yet in...
BECKER: The Geneva Conventions are a protocol
which specifies how prisoners of war
should be treated, and most importantly
it prohibits the cruel
and inhumane treatment of prisoners,
and in addition to prohibiting torture.
NARRATOR: Cheney's attorney, David Addington
drafts an order stating that these prisoners
are not subject to the Geneva Conventions.
CHENEY: The basic proposition here is that somebody
who conducts a terrorist operation,
killing thousands of innocent Americans,
they don't deserve to be treated as a prisoner of war,
they don't deserve the same guarantees and safeguards
that would be used, uh, for an American citizen
going through the normal, uh, judicial process.
BECKER: His office takes the lead in getting the President
to essentially sign on to an order in which he says,
"Well, we will treat prisoners as much possible
in accordance with the Geneva Conventions."
Which of course, leaves, you know,
a huge hole that you can, you know, run a truck through.
CHENEY: Isolation in the cell,
or, um...loud music.
A face slap was allowed, and had to be open-handed.
Um, you could push him up against a wall,
there were certain things like that.
Putting the individual on an incline,
their head down lower than their feet,
uh, putting a towel, a towel over their face
and then pouring water slowly on the towel.
It creates a sensation of drowning.
RUMSFELD: We've had successive
Central Intelligence Agency Directors say that
the information gained from those interrogations
produced a major amount of the information
that we had about Al Qaeda.
DAVID COLE: When you use these kind of tactics
against a, an individual, uh, he will talk.
Whether he'll tell you the truth or not is another matter.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed did not reveal any information
about an operational plot coming to fruition,
and indeed the CIA Inspector General
found that nobody interrogated
under the enhanced interrogation plans,
uh, coughed up information that allowed us
to stop any ticking time bomb.
CHARLIE SAVAGE: The idea of inflicting suffering on a human being
in order to force them to speak against their will,
was before 9-11, uh, an anathema of the United States.
INTERVIEWER: When you talk about drawing the line,
uh, you don't consider a prolonged period
of creating the sensation of drowning,
you don't consider torture?
I don't.
Tell me what terrorist attacks is that you would have
let go forward,
because you didn't want to be a mean and nasty fellow.
Are you gonna trade the lives of a number of people
because you want to preserve your honor?
Or are you gonna do your job,
do what's required, first and foremost,
your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America
and the lives of its citizens.
Now, given a choice between doing what we did,
or backing off and saying, "Yeah, we know you know
the next attack against the United States,
but we're not gonna force you to tell us what it is,
because it might create a bad image for us."
That's not a close call for me.
NARRATOR: Cheney's desire to protect America at all costs
leads him to formulate a new national security philosophy
to deal with the threats faced by the United States.
He says if there's even a one percent chance
that terrorists have gotten their hands
on weapons of mass destruction,
we need to treat it as a certainty.
CHENEY: 100 percent effective defense
against further mass casualty attacks by the terrorists,
by Al Qaeda.
WOODWARD: He really is the self-appointed examiner
of worst-case scenarios.
What could go on that would be so bad,
that might even make 9-11 a footnote.
CHENEY: You've got to figure out where the terrorists are,
what's their base of operations,
do they have access to that technology,
how do they have access to that technology,
is there a state out there,
a state actor that has some capability in this area, Iraq?
Uh, that is a potential source for the terrorists.
MANN: Why was Iraq important to Cheney?
It's because it was in a strategic location
in the Middle East.
The United States had defeated it once before,
without much difficulty,
and it was, um, a place where the United States
could show the region its continuing military power.
NARRATOR: In his first State of the Union speech after 9-11,
Bush names Iraq as a new foreign policy priority
for the United States.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America
and to support terror.
States like these and their terrorist allies
constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace
of the world,
by seeking weapons of mass destruction.
NARRATOR: In the wake of Bush's speech,
Cheney leads the administration's effort
to make a case that war with Iraq is justified,
because of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
CHENEY: We know he is, uh,
working once again on a nuclear program.
We know they have weapons of mass destruction,
we know they have active programs.
There isn't any debate about it.
Of course by 2002, we got the, uh,
the National Intelligence Estimate,
and a whole bunch of reporting that led up to that
that said he had resumed
his weapons of mass destruction programs.
Immediately, the intelligence services,
especially the CIA,
say this is a very dangerous model,
Mr. President, Mr. Vice President.
A...there may well be no weapons,
B...if there are weapons, when we invade the country
it may be impossible to find the weapons.
To build a case for war on weapons of mass destruction,
is a dangerous roll of the dice.
In 1998,
Bill Clinton ordered strikes on targets inside Iraq,
um, because he felt Saddam had refused
to comply with the U.N. Security Council resolutions,
and in fact come clean on his weapons of mass destruction.
And the whole intelligence was collected,
analyzed, and presented,
before George Bush and I ever got back into the Oval Office.
They never really had a meeting
about whether they should attack Iraq.
It was kind of an incorporated assumption.
The evidence is overwhelming...
CORN: He kept getting out there
on Meet the Press and the other venues,
but it was all innuendo.
Who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim?
We don't know.
TIM: Could it have been Saddam?
I don't know.
WOODWARD: I really think there was a momentum to war.
Cheney is saying,
"We've got to do it, the intelligence is there."
He had the personnel, he had the technology,
he had the know-how, he had a lot of the raw material,
and he had the desire to get back into the business big time.
REPORTER: He said we have a lot of allies out there,
but I haven't noticed any of the Arab states
supporting strong action against Iraq.
Well, I think, um, I guess the way
I would characterize it is that they are
uniformly concerned about the situation in Iraq.
SUSKIND: Bush is insecure as president.
Cheney brilliantly exploits this.
NARRATOR: Cheney points to Iraq's refusal to submit
to weapons inspections as clear proof
that Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction.
But there is another explanation.
SUSKIND: What Saddam is worried about is that his neighbors,
and he's got tough neighbors including the Iranians,
will find out that, that he's a paper tiger,
that there's nothing here.
GELLMAN: Cheney was cherry-picking intelligence,
interpreting intelligence,
taking this piece and that piece.
He has been seeking to acquire
the kinds of tubes that are necessary
to build a centrifuge.
WOODWARD: Colin Powell thought Cheney had a fever
for attacking Iraq.
Powell concluded Cheney could not,
was always twisting intelligence and exaggerating it.
CHENEY: Our administration is moving forward
on an agenda to build a safe and prosperous future
for the American people.
NARRATOR: In August of 2002,
Cheney addresses the National Convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
He presents his most forceful case yet
for war against Iraq.
CHENEY: Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror
and seated atop ten percent of the world's oil reserves,
Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination
of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion
of the world's energy supplies
and subject the United States or any other nation
to nuclear blackmail.
Simply stated, there is no doubt
that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,
there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use
against our friends, against our allies,
and against us.
There is no basis to discount any of the concerns
that I am raising this morning.
NARRATOR: Three weeks after Cheney's speech to the VFW,
Bush presses Congress to authorize a war.
Cheney believes that Bush, as Commander-in-Chief,
does not need to ask Congress for permission to attack Iraq.
But Bush decides that for political reasons,
he needs the backing of Congress.
America's leadership and willingness to use force
confirmed by the Congress is the best way
to ensure compliance and avoid conflict.
We will continue working closely with members of Congress
on both sides of the aisle
to build a strong bipartisan resolution.
GELLMAN: They had to win this vote,
and there was a key piece on that chessboard.
As long as he behaves himself within his own borders,
we should not be addressing any attack of resources against him.
GELLMAN: Dick Armey, the majority leader in the house,
a very reliable conservative, 100 percent rating
from all the conservative groups over the years,
a good friend of Dick Cheney's over the years.
ARMEY: Do we sometimes get caught up in wars or conflicts
over purposes that are in fact not imperative
to maintaining our freedom and our safety,
I'm afraid sometimes we do that.
Dick Armey just didn't see it. This guy Saddam, he said,
he's a clown, he's unfriendly to the United States,
he's...terrible to his own people,
but a threat, a national security threat to us?
If Armey had voted no, he would have given political cover to
dozens and dozens of Democrats who also wanted to vote no
but were afraid to do it.
JIM MCDERMOTT: This resolution is premature.
There has been no showing by the Intelligence agencies
or the White House of imminent danger to the United States.
Mr. President, this is plain and simple.
A blank check, given to the President
of the United States, I won't touch it!
GELLMAN: Armey's mind will not change,
and so it comes to Bush's biggest closer, Dick Cheney,
to go convince his friend Dick Armey.
Dick Cheney called in Armey to a little office
he had off the main floor of the Capitol building,
and he tells Armey a story,
that Saddam Hussein has made rapid progress
toward the miniaturization of a nuclear warhead.
He's talking about...
the sort of ultimate terrorist threat of a suitcase nuke.
He also tells him that Saddam and his family
have had direct personal contacts
with Osama bin Laden and his people,
so that there are very close ties.
He tells Armey, "I'm telling you things
that are essentially too classified
or too scary to tell the general public,
but in fact, the situation's actually worse
than we've been portraying."
Almost nothing Cheney told Armey in that conversation was true.
Armey had a bad feeling about it,
but here you have the vice president telling him,
"Saddam has direct ties to Al Qaeda
and is getting close to building suitcase nukes."
And at that point, Dick Armey feels that he cannot,
in good conscience, vote against the war.
Well, let me begin by thanking you all for coming.
I'll make a brief statement, and we'll open up for questions.
I have decided to support President Bush
and the resolution authorizing the use of force
to change the current regime in Iraq.
My decision follows a careful, exhaustive review
of the facts and evidence against Saddam Hussein.
REPORTER: What made you change?
ARMEY: Information.
The assets that Saddam has
that can be destructive to people,
uh, weapons of mass destruction,
is greater than what I had supposed. The degree...
NARRATOR: Three days later,
congress votes on whether to authorize war with Iraq.
SCHUMER: As we move towards final passage,
the choice before us is this resolution,
imperfect as it is,
or none at all.
Because I believe it is important for America
to speak with one voice at this critical moment,
I will give-- I will vote to give
the president the authority he needs.
CORN: I take it on good faith that Dick Cheney
and George W. Bush cared about protecting America.
Who wouldn't?
And that they were concerned and worried, genuinely,
about threats to America.
But...
they rigged the deck.
I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration,
that a vote for the resolution best serves the security
of our nation.
CORN: When you're in power, you have the ability
to completely shape the debate,
particularly when it involves secret information.
And it's a pretty immense power.
Mr. President,
we trust to you the best we have to give.
Use them well, so they can come home
and say to our grandchildren,
"Sleep safely, my baby."
CORN: Virtually all the Republicans voted for this
and half of the Democrats in the House and Senate.
The I's are 77.
The Nay's are 23.
The joint resolution is passed.
You try to do everything you can diplomatically,
without resort to force.
But our history is replete with examples where,
ultimately, we had to use force.
INTERVIEWER: And the argument that this was a war you wanted?
Wanted? Why, because liked war?
[MACHINE GUN FIRE]
NARRATOR: The opening stage of the war was
a massive aerial bombardment, designed to produce
what the pentagon calls "shock and awe."
[EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE]
When the ground war begins, the Iraqi army crumbles.
RUMSFELD: With each passing day, the Iraqi regime
is losing control over more of the country.
Coalition forces are closing in on Baghdad.
SOLDIER: We got a med-evac coming on!
Get on the roof.
[INDISTINCT SHOUTING]
RUMSFELD: Tomorrow will mark three weeks
since Operation Iraqi Freedom began,
and the progress has been nothing short of spectacular.
Today, Saddam Hussein's regime is history.
[APPLAUSE]
NARRATOR: Thirty-five years into his political career,
Cheney has reached the pinnacle of his power.
He has reasserted the presidential authority.
His philosophy is now American policy.
Thank you all.
[APPLAUSE]
It's not enough to say,
as you oftentimes do in the national security arena,
"There's only a 1 percent chance that's going to happen."
You can't say, "That'd only cost us 10,000 lives."
You've got to be prepared to make certain
they never get through again.
ANNOUNCER: And he's about to fall...
NARRATOR: The invasion is complete.
Saddam has been toppled.
But, despite the administration's assertion
that major combat operations had ended,
the war in Iraq is not over yet.
[SHOUTING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
There was a level of violence people weren't anticipating.
NARRATOR: Looting and lawlessness quickly become rampant.
[SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
U.S. troops are not ordered to intervene.
Donald Rumsfeld wants to bring them home as soon as possible.
Many are told they will be home in a month.
HOOVER: His way of thinking was Iraq is always going to be Iraq.
You're never going to be able to create
a stable constitutional government unless you stay there
physically for 20 years,
but let's not get tied down there.
NARRATOR: In the aftermath of the invasion,
Iraq is under military occupation.
Governing it is the responsibility
of the Defense Department.
Two weeks after
the administration declares victory,
50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party
are fired from their jobs with Rumsfeld's approval.
Most are low level civil servants who had nothing to do
with Saddam's atrocities.
Without them, Iraq has no functioning government.
RUMSFELD: We expected that...
once you took away that top layer of leadership,
that the professional bureaucracy underneath
could carry on.
Um, that didn't happen.
NARRATOR: Seven days later, the Iraqi army is disbanded.
General Tommy Franks, who leads the U.S. forces in Iraq,
has been planning to use the Iraqi army
to help provide security.
Instead, the ex-soldiers and fired bureaucrats
form the nucleus of an anti-American insurgency.
The attacks begin three days after the dismissal
of the Iraqi army.
SOLDIER: Whoa, holy shit!
SOLDIER: Oh, fuck.
SOLDIER: Holy fuck.
NARRATOR: As the situation in Iraq begins to deteriorate,
the administration faces questions
about the intelligence it used to justify the war.
In the days before the Iraq war began,
President Bush had presented his final and best case
against Iraq in his State of the Union address.
He had made a claim
about Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions
that later became known as "The 16 Words."
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa.
NARRATOR: The origin of "The 16 Words" dated back to late 2001.
The U.S. had received a report
that Iraq had bought raw uranium, known as yellow cake,
from the African country of Niger.
If properly treated, yellow cake could be used
in a nuclear weapon.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies had quickly dismissed
the claim, which had been based on forged documents.
CORN: There was a fellow in the State Department
who looked at these and immediately said,
"There's nothing to this."
NARRATOR: But Cheney had learned of the yellow cake report,
and he had asked the CIA for more information.
The e CIA had then asked Joe Wilson,
the former U.S. ambassador to Niger, to investigate.
Wilson was sent over there to check to see about reports
that the Iraqis were seeking uranium from Niger.
CORN: He knew officials in the government
and thought he could go and talk to people and suss it out.
NARRATOR: Ambassador Wilson told the CIA he had found no evidence
confirming the report.
The only thing Wilson had uncovered was
one brief conversation between an Iraqi official
and a former Nigerian prime minister.
The former prime minister had, in fact, been approached
by an Iraqi delegation in 1999 wanting
to establish better communications
and commercial relations with Niger.
Now, the only thing Niger had to export was uranium and goats.
And Iraqis had plenty of goats.
NARRATOR: Seven months after Wilson's trip,
Britain's MI6 intelligence agency issued
a public statement saying that Saddam had, in fact,
tried to buy uranium from Niger.
Despite Wilson's report and repeated warnings
from senior CIA officials, the administration decided
to make the British claim part of its case for war.
Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney,
members of Congress:
This year we gather in this chamber, deeply aware
of decisive days that lie ahead.
After the invasion of Iraq, Joe Wilson goes public
in The New York Times.
WILSON: That information was erroneous, and they knew about it
well ahead of both the publication
of the British white paper
and the president's State of the Union address.
Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby, they go ballistic.
I think it was more of a concern in the office
of the vice president, frankly, than it was elsewhere
in the White House.
NARRATOR: Eight days later, Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame,
is named in The Washington Post.
Plame is an undercover CIA agent.
Her cover is blown.
Someone at 1600 Pennsylvania
may have leaked the classified identity...
REPORTER 1: The motive for outing the agent may have been revenge...
REPORTER 2: New York Times reports today an aide learned
about the identity of a CIA agent from his boss,
Vice President Dick Cheney.
Washington is consumed in this,
something I haven't seen since the Lewinsky scandal.
People will frequently die from revelations like this.
I do know that the president of the United States would
not expect his White House to behave in that way.
If there's a leak out of my administration,
I want to know who it is.
And, uh, if the person has violated law,
that person will be taken care of.
NARRATOR: As the scandal grows,
Deputy Attorney General James Comey appoints
an independent prosecutor to investigate.
Effective immediately, the United States Attorney
for the northern district of Illinois,
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, will serve as special counsel
in charge of this matter.
CHENEY: He knew who the source of the leak was.
It was Rich Armitage in the State Department,
Colin Powell's deputy, was the source of the leak.
NARRATOR: Fitzgerald does not file charges against Armitage,
Determining that Armitage did not know
Plame was an undercover agent.
Fitzgerald then investigates whether
any other White House staffers leaked Plame's name.
The special prosecutor zeroed in on my office.
Libby goes before a grand jury and testifies twice under oath.
His testimony, and the testimony
of reporters he spoke to, present conflicting accounts
of how Plame's name was given to the press.
Meanwhile, the military's hunt
for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
has turned up no actual weapons.
CORN: They weren't finding the factories,
they weren't finding the raw materials,
they weren't finding the infrastructure...
I firmly believe that when it's all said and done
the people of the United States and the world will realize
that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program.
Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
Please tell me.
The White House obviously was getting quite worried,
and a whole narrative was developing
that they had misled the country into the war.
NARRATOR: Two months after the invasion,
the CIA forms its own weapons inspection team
to take over the search from the military.
David Kay, a widely respected former chief weapons inspector
for the United Nations, leads the group.
During an exhaustive eight month search,
he finds nothing.
I think everybody in the military,
certainly in the intelligence community,
and certainly the members of the Iraq survey group
would have hoped by now there would have been a breakthrough.
You just don't make decisions like we do,
and put our nations youth at risk based upon something
that appears not to have existed.
We know that prior to going in, that he had spent time
and effort acquiring mobile, biological weapons labs.
We were quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program.
We found a couple of semi-trailers at this point,
which we believe were, in fact, part of that program.
I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will,
that he did, in fact, have programs
for weapons of mass destruction.
NARRATOR: Six days after Cheney's statement,
weapons inspector David Kay appears before
the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Incredibly enough, administration leaders
are still saying that we found weapons of mass destruction,
but today's witness, Dr. David Kay,
is saying that those two trailers were for producing
hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly rocket fuel,
not for biological weapons.
CHENEY: Now the regime of Saddam Hussein is gone forever,
and at a safe remove from the danger,
some are now trying to cast doubt upon the decision
to liberate Iraq.
The ability to criticize is one of the great strengths
of our democracy, but those who do so have an obligation
to answer this question:
How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?
MANN: When the facts run against him, th he tends to come up
with a new rationale to explain the new facts.
The rationale changes, but the bottom line doesn't.
CHENEY: We didn't find stockpiles.
We did find that he had the capability.
And we believed he had the intent.
BUSH: We know Saddam Hussein had the capability
to produce weapons of mass destruction.
We know Saddam Hussein had the intent
to arm his regime with weapons of mass destruction.
DURBIN: Think of how often Vice President Cheney told us
that we were in imminent danger from an attack
from Saddam Hussein because of arsenals
of chemical and biological weapons
and the rebuilding of the nuclear weapons in Iraq.
That was the reason we did it.
And then we found out that we were duped.
RUMSFELD: I don't know any more than anyone else knows,
all I know is that the fact the stockpiles were not found
and the fact that the administration had, I think,
unwisely placed so much stock
in the idea that there were existing stocks,
it probably would have been wiser in retrospect
if the White House had focused on the fact that the basis
for doing what the president decided to do was not rooted
in a single thing.
NARRATOR: The dispute over the case for war intensifies
at the same time as a top-secret spy program comes
under challenge from within the United States government.
In the wake of 9-11, Cheney had wanted
to expand electronic surveillance
to hunt terrorists inside the United States.
Cheney and his lawyer, David Addington,
had helped design a new program that would keep tabs
on billions of phone calls and emails.
But existing law said that a special court had
to issue a warrant for each individual
the government wanted to monitor.
CHENEY: Big problem was it didn't allow us
to get a fast enough turnaround on threats to be able
to effectively intercept the communications we needed
to guard against further prospective attack.
The question then arose, "Should we go to Congress
and ask them to adjust the law?"
Dick Cheney was a strong proponent
of not going to Congress.
NARRATOR: Cheney knew the Justice Department had the power
to write a secret memo saying that the administration
didn't need any warrants for the new widespread spying.
Justice had been issued the memo.
From time to time, there may be something so sensitive
that you don't want to raise the possibility
that it might be leaked,
there are some things that need secrecy.
NARRATOR: The administration now undertook a massive program
of warrantless surveillance on Americans.
Addington had taken charge of the paperwork.
The president had to sign an authorization every 30
or 45 days, or thereabouts, to keep it going.
The program would have automatically shut down any time
that approval wasn't granted.
It worked. It was a good program.
I think it saved a lot of lives,
and did a lot to allow us to thwart prospective attacks
by Al Qaeda.
GELLMAN: At the end of 2003,
two new people arrived at the Justice Department.
One is Jack Goldsmith,
who becomes head of the Office of Legal Counsel,
and there's a new deputy attorney general, Jim Comey.
Jack Goldsmith starts to look at this thing,
and the harder he looks at it,
both the technical side and legal side,
the more his head starts to hurt.
SAVAGE: Goldsmith and Comey are conservatives,
they are Republicans.
They just simply happened not to be adherent
to the notion that the president need not obey federal law.
The president signed up for it, lawyers signed up for it,
the regional package had been reviewed
at the appropriate level in the Justice Department,
and John Ashcroft and others had signed up to it.
GELLMAN: This debate begins between Justice
and the Vice President's office, primarily,
at the end of December, 2003.
It gets more and more intense in January and February
and comes to a head in March.
NARRATOR: Attorney General John Ashcroft must sign off on the program
for it to continue.
But he'll only sign if Comey and Goldsmith
tell him it's okay.
The deadline to renew the program is drawing closer,
but Cheney does not tell Bush of the growing resistance
at the Justice Department.
One week before the program is due to expire,
Comey meets with Ashcroft.
GELLMAN: Comey says, "Boss, we've worked this through every way we can,
we think this, this and this are illegal.
We don't think you should sign off on it."
Ashcroft says, "Okay. Go tell them to make those changes.
If they don't make those changes, I'm not signing."
Hours after his conversation with Comey,
Ashcroft is stricken with acute pancreatitis.
He is rushed to the hospital
and hovers on the brink of death.
CHENEY: He suddenly decided when he was sick,
that he was going to delegate all this authority
to Comey and Comey was then the acting attorney general.
NARRATOR: The next day, Goldsmith tells Addington
Justice won't recertify the surveillance program.
It will now expire in five days.
Three days later, Cheney meets with Comey and Goldsmith.
ADDINGTON: The chief of staff was there, Vice President Cheney,
I was there.
GELLMAN: Cheney says to Comey, "How can you possibly reverse
the department's course on something this critical
to the security of the United States."
Comey looks Cheney right in the eye and says,
"Just because you really want it, doesn't mean it's legal.
No lawyer who has looked really hard at this thing
has said it's okay."
David Addington pipes up and says, "I did."
Comey says, "No good lawyer."
I'd call it tension in the air, yeah.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen,
the president of the United States.
NARRATOR: In early March, Bush is frequently away
from Washington, campaigning for reelection.
The day before the deadline,
during a brief stop in the capitol,
Cheney finally tells him that
the warrantless surveillance program is in danger.
GELLMAN: Bush is given the impression
that Ashcroft's been signing all along, but now his deputy
has got the steering wheel for five minutes and won't do it.
He doesn't have any idea
there's been a three-month controversy over this,
or that there are big, substantive objections.
NARRATOR: That night, Comey and two-dozen other top lawyers at Justice
prepare to resign if the administration continues spying
without warrants.
It will be the largest resignation
in the history of the United States government.
It was Wednesday, March 10, 2004.
And how do you remember that date so well?
This was a...
very memorable period in my life,
the most difficult time of my entire professional life,
and that night was probably the most difficult night
of my professional life.
NARRATOR: The next day, without telling Bush that mass resignations are
on the way, Cheney advises the president
to reauthorize the program without the approval
of the Department of Justice.
SAVAGE: The president extended the warrantless surveillance program
in the face of the new opinion of the Justice Department,
that it was illegal.
The program was reauthorized without us,
without a signature from the Department of Justice
attesting as to its legality.
I prepared a letter of resignation intending to resign.
I couldn't stay if the administration was going
to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice
said had no legal basis.
I simply couldn't stay.
GELLMAN: George Bush doesn't know what the stakes are.
You had, for example, the chief of staff
of Attorney General Ashcroft saying that he's going
to want to resign too, as soon as he's healthy enough.
You have the director of the FBI, Bob Mueller,
saying, "If Justice tells me I can't participate in this,
I'm not going to, and if you order me to, I'll also resign."
So the president now has this unprecedented meltdown
happening at the Department of Justice,
and he does not know it. Nobody tells him.
This is March of 2004. Elections coming in November.
This would have been the end of Bush's presidency,
he would have been a one-term president.
So the next morning, they have the morning briefing,
the regular Friday briefing on the terrorist threat,
and Condi Rice tells the president,
"Something's on Jim Comey's mind, he's a good man,
maybe you ought to check."
Bush takes him in to his private dining room and he says,
"What's all this I hear about you not signing?
How can you possibly, this last minute, late in the game,
suddenly tell us it's no good?"
Comey is floored.
He says to the president,
"If your staff is telling you that,
you are being very poorly served."
Comey was planning on just resigning, but he feels now that
the president doesn't understand what's happening.
NARRATOR: Bush tells Comey to change the surveillance program
and make it legal.
So what you've just had is, in 24 hours,
the president of the United States doing a complete 180.
He had, the day before, signed an order that said,
"In your face, despite your objections,
I'm authorizing this thing." The next day, he caves and says,
"No mas, I will do it the way you say I'm allowed to do it.
I will stop doing the things you say I can't do."
That is unprecedented in American history.
CHENEY: In the end, what ended up happening,
revisions were made to the program and so forth,
we had to adjust and adapt, which we did.
My personal view, well, was different in the sense
that I basically would have let them resign.
Because I thought the program was perfectly legitimate,
it was totally necessary, it had been totally approved,
and signed up to twenty separate occasions
by the attorney general of the United States. So--
NARRATOR: In his memoir, Bush writes
"I never wanted to be blindsided like that again."
GELLMAN: Cheney is an anti-politician.
But no president can be an anti-politician.
No president can govern that way.
CHENEY: If you're a man of principle,
compromise is a bit of a dirty word.
President made the decision that he wanted
to avoid major controversy.
It was his call. So that's what we did.
Bush understood that this was
a mortal threat to his presidency.
He understood for the first time
that Cheney had walked him right to the edge of a cliff.
And it changed their relationship forever.
NARRATOR: The following month,
another crisis rocks the administration.
[♪]
MALE REPORTER: Americans did this to an Iraqi prisoner.
NARRATOR: The nation is shocked by photos showing horrific abuses
by guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
MALE REPORTER 2: Ever since 9-11,
the new war on terrorism with its new rules.
All eyes have been on the United States--
FEMALE REPORTER 1: Headlines around the world screamed torture.
MALE REPORTER 3: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally approved
the use of guard dogs to intimidate prisoners.
BUSH: I shared a deep disgust,
those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.
Everybody knew it was wrong
and the people involved in doing it--
primarily because they lacked adequate supervision.
Ultimately, were dealt with appropriately
under the uniform code of military justice.
SAVAGE: Questions remain about whether what was happening in Abu Ghraib
was actually official policy.
Regardless, it shook loose the fact
that memos have been written
approving techniques like these in certain circumstances
and it created a national debate
about whether the United States was engaged in torture,
and if so, should it be?
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
BECKER: With Abu Ghraib
and some of the practices at Gitmo,
became hugely embarrassing to the administration.
Who is in charge of the interrogations?
Did they have authority over the guards
and what were the instructions that they gave to the guards?
General Smith, do you want to respond?
McCAIN: No, Secretary Rumsfeld, in all due respect,
you've got to answer this question
and this is a pretty simple straightforward question.
[♪]
NARRATOR: Pressure's mounting for Rumsfeld's resignation
both inside and outside the administration.
FEMALE REPORTER: There are new calls for Rumsfeld to go.
Charlie Rangel, Democratic congressman, said:
"If Rumsfeld does not resign, he should be impeached."
For the benefit of the United States, for our country,
I believe Mr. Rumsfeld has to resign.
NARRATOR: Rumsfeld sends a resignation letter to Bush.
CHENEY: President looked at making a change in Defense
and I argued against it.
Our policies in Iraq were going well
and I thought we were doing the right thing
and the strategy that was being pursued
was the president's strategy.
NARRATOR: Cheney issues a statement defending Rumsfeld, saying:
"People should get off his case and let him do his job."
Cheney convinces Rumsfeld not to resign.
[CROWD CHEERING]
BUSH: Saudi Arabia is making raids and arrests.
Libya is dismantling its weapons' programs.
The army of a free Iraq is fighting for freedom
and more than three quarters of Al Qaeda's key members
and associates have been detained or killed.
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
NARRATOR: Despite the ongoing war and falling approval ratings,
Bush defeats John Kerry to win re-election in 2004.
CHENEY: This was an historic election.
And once again,
I have delivered the state of Wyoming
for the Bush-Cheney ticket.
NARRATOR: The two men shared the stage, for the public celebration
but behind closed doors,
the rift is growing between Bush and Cheney.
ADDINGTON: George Bush's two terms
were almost two different presidencies.
The second term was rough on both of them,
rough on their relationship,
it was rough on their relationship with the cabinet,
it was rough on their relationships with their staffs.
It's not about them, of course, it's about the country.
But the country was going through two wars
and having a tough time of it.
[♪]
NARRATOR: In 2000, Bush had promised
to restore honor and integrity to the White House.
He is frustrated by the ongoing criminal investigation
of Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby.
A few hours ago, a federal grand jury,
sitting in District of Columbia,
returned a five count indictment against I. Lewis Libby,
also known as Scooter Libby,
the vice president's chief of staff.
NARRATOR: Libby is indicted, not for the leak itself,
but for lying to investigators.
CHENEY: Scooter did not leak that information.
The investigation should have been closed at that point,
problem solved.
'Cause that was the issue that they set out to investigate.
It was a very skillful Washington insider
that served the vice president pretty well.
I think that's one of the reason's why people target him.
CHENEY: Fitzgerald, once he got appointed special prosecutor,
was determined to try to find somebody in the White House
that he could nail.
All he could come up with
through that whole effort were charges against Scooter.
That he had misled and obstructed justice.
NARRATOR: Once the indictment is announced,
Libby resigns, costing Cheney his most senior aide.
News reports about the scandal in Cheney's office
are a constant distraction for President Bush.
But the news from Iraq is much worse.
[♪]
By January 2006, the war has dragged on for almost 3 years.
CHENEY: We may well have some kind of presence here
over a period of time,
but the level of activity that we see today,
from a military standpoint,
I think will clearly decline.
I think they're in the last throes of insurgency.
NARRATOR: Sectarian strife is rampant.
Shiite militias murder Sunnis with impunity.
Al Qaeda in Iraq kill Shiites daily.
500 Iraqi civilians die that January.
Insurgent attacks are up to 75 a day.
[GUNSHOT]
Sixty two Americans soldiers are killed,
bringing the total to 2,243.
[CROWD PROTESTING]
American troops are now in the middle
of a full-blown Iraqi civil war.
MAN: Get back! Get back!
POWELL: We're not winning.
So it's grave and deteriorating and we're not winning.
Um, we are losing.
This is the time now to start to put in place the kinds
of strategies that will turn this situation around.
[♪]
Rumsfeld and Cheney
say this war is not going as badly as people say.
CHENEY: I didn't think it was time for us to be signaling
a change in policy.
Stock market's open. The free press is there.
They've got television, they've got radio, they've got--
Schools are open.
SUSKIND: Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, they're almost like one person.
Brothers for decades.
Men who rise together,
men who finish each other's sentences.
HAYES: They've had this long professional relationship,
but it was also a deeply personal relationship.
There was a sense that they had sort of an alliance based on
thirty years of working for one another and friendship.
HAYES: There's very little evidence that Cheney went to Rumsfeld
and said, "Don, we've gotta change course."
So many American soldiers were killed,
so many Iraqis were killed,
Cheney should've been all over Rumsfeld on this.
Went on, not just for months, but for years.
Bush is losing faith in Rumsfeld
as a leader for the war.
He's no longer an effective spokesman for the Pentagon.
Politically, they're facing Congressional elections.
It now looks like the Democrats will, in fact,
win control of the House of Representatives.
Disapproval of George Bush and disapproval of the Iraq war--
I think they were one percentage point apart.
So this is a referendum.
[♪]
Bush admits that we took a thumping
and he decides to dismiss Donald Rumsfeld.
WOODWARD: He told Cheney and Cheney said,
"I don't agree with that decision."
CHENEY: The president took me aside and said,
he didn't say, "I'm thinking about it,
"I'm gonna make a change." He didn't want another debate,
we had that debate a couple of times.
President knew how I felt about it,
and asked me if I wanted to be the one to deliver the news.
That was easier for him. He didn't have to do it.
But I also, um-- I was the right guy to do it.
[♪]
[AIRPLANE FLYING]
ANNOUNCER: Good afternoon and welcome
to today's review in honor
of Secretary Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
[BRASS BAND PLAYING]
CHENEY: My first association with Don Rumsfeld,
was one of life's great turning points,
both professionally and personally.
On the professional side,
I would not be where I am today
but for the confidence that Don first placed in me
those many years ago.
And on the personal side,
it's enough to say that I have no better friend
and ask for none.
I've never worked harder for a boss
and I've never learned more from one either.
I believe the records speak for itself.
Don Rumsfeld is the finest Secretary of Defense
this nation has ever had.
[CROWD APPLAUDING]
The way the history works,
you don't get a lot of credit for what didn't happen.
This is one of those kinds of situations,
it isn't so much what you achieved
as is what you prevented.
How you safeguarded against further attacks
against the United States.
I think that's a major accomplishment.
Please.
FEMALE REPORTER: Mindful of the frustrations
that many Americans are expressing to you,
do you believe you need to make any adjustments
on how you run the White House?
Many of your senior staff have been with you
from the beginning.
Uh, I've got a--
staff of people that have, first of all,
placed their country above their self interest.
HANSON: Very popular administration
that had handled themselves very well after 9-11
was suddenly becoming unpopular. And it was not just unpopular
by every three months, but by the day.
[♪]
HANSON: Cheney's approach to foreign policy and national security
put Bush in a position of real danger in terms of his legacy.
Cheney's influence was somewhat diminished
and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
was very, very close to the president.
It was sort of-- Her influence was ascendant.
NARRATOR: In the last two years of the administration,
Cheney remains deeply worried
that rogue states will spread
weapons of mass destruction around the world.
He advocates a hard line against nuclear armed North Korea,
Rice prefers diplomacy.
CHENEY: North Korea had tested weapons
and it was their first nuclear weapons' test.
It was in the fall of '06.
Should've been some effective sanctioned imposed
or some fairly dramatic action taken.
Condi disagreed.
NARRATOR: Bush chooses Rice's approach.
FEMALE REPORTER: Are you concerned that hard liners within the administration
may undermine your efforts, the State Department's efforts--
Well, I think they said the efforts
of the United States government, the last time I looked.
NARRATOR: Cheney's concerns about treating North Korea
too gently are soon realized.
The administration obtains evidence
that North Korean scientists are working on a new
nuclear reactor in Syria.
The reactor's in the middle of the desert.
There's no population around at any place.
They tried to hide it.
You can't say it's to generate electricity,
there's no power line coming out of it.
It's just out there for production of plutonium.
You don't want Syria to have that capability,
that they might be able to pass along to Hamas or Hezbollah
or Al Qaeda.
[♪]
When the intelligence agencies
discovered that Syria was building a reactor that could
soon make material for nuclear weapons,
they had policy debates about it.
CHENEY: Condi recommended taking it to the United Nations.
I strongly recommended that we ought to take it out.
WOODWARD: Cheney was just a voice alone
saying we have to attack and destroy this reactor.
I thought it would sort of again reassert the kind of authority
and influence we had back in '03.
When we took down Saddam Hussein
and eliminated Iraq as a potential source of WMD.
There's certain lines out there and you do not cross them.
And one of those lines is you don't provide nuclear
technology to terrorist-sponsoring states.
And Condi was on the wrong side of all those issues.
So we had significant differences.
CALABRESI: Cheney was advising again,
a very robust and in this case, unilateral strike against Syria.
CHENEY: I argued in front of the group and in front of the president,
got all through making the case again
and I thought I was rather eloquent.
At one point, President Bush literally rolled his eyes.
CHENEY: The president said,
"All right, how many people agree with the vice president?"
And nobody put their hand up.
WOODWARD: He was isolated and quite irrelevant.
[♪]
NARRATOR: In the waning days of the administration,
Cheney presses Bush one last time
over what Cheney considers a vitally important issue.
REPORTER 1: We do have news on
former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
he has been sentenced to 30 months in prison.
NARRATOR: In 2007, Scooter Libby had been convicted of four felonies
relating to the Valerie Plame scandal.
REPORTER 2: Prosecutor Fitzgerald told the court today,
"Libby's lies created a house of mirrors for investigators."
And Fitzgerald implored the judge to impose
a tough sentence to make it clear that truth matters.
He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, a $250,000 fine.
He did not want what was going on in his office
and the vice president's office where he worked to come out.
So there are a lot of fingers pointing at Dick Cheney.
The most immediate question for Libby, and therefore for Cheney,
was whether or not Libby was going to jail.
CHENEY: The president commuted his sentence
so he didn't have to go to prison.
Which, when you think of it,
is an outrageous proposition anyway.
But he wasn't pardoned.
NARRATOR: The end of the administration is swiftly drawing near.
Before he and Bush leave office,
Cheney wants a full pardon for Libby.
[♪]
CHENEY: I know he got a lot of advice, from inside, from his staff,
not to do it.
So I-- I was pretty much alone
in terms of my recommendation.
I pushed very hard for a pardon.
I thought a pardon was appropriate.
But the president made the decision
that there weren't going to be any more pardons.
It stuck with Bush that Libby had not been truthful.
And that he had gotten the punishment that he deserved.
Bush was absolutely adamant
that Libby did not merit pardoning.
CHENEY: That was-- That struck close to home.
I felt that we were leaving
a good man wounded on the battlefield.
Cheney got right into Bush's face, was very hot about it,
very insistent that it would be dishonorable and disgraceful
not to pardon Libby.
CHENEY: It was a major strain on our relationship.
Obviously a source of considerable friction.
And it got so bad, that Bush said to aides,
"I don't want any more visits by Dick Cheney.
I don't want to take another phone call from him."
CHENEY: President had the power to fix it
and to make it right and he chose not to.
The relationship between Bush and Cheney
never recovered. It has yet to recover.
WOODWARD: Cheney, one of the monumental figures in American politics,
in the end, did not work as well.
[CROWD CHEERING]
I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear,
That I will execute...
CHENEY: The last day after we had the inaugural ceremony,
he and I departed out to Andrew Air Force base.
ADDINGTON: President Obama was kind enough to allow one last flight
to take President Bush home to Texas
and Vice President Cheney home to Wyoming.
[♪]
A few of us, not many, flew home to his Wyoming home.
I escorted him and went in the car,
and I remember reaching in,
and shaking his hand and saying,
"Mr. Vice President, on behalf of a grateful nation,
thank you for your four years of service to the country."
And the door closed and he went off to his home.
That was sort of my last memory of Dick Cheney, serving him.
[RIVER FLOWING]
[♪]
CHENEY: I don't run around thinking,
"Gee, I wish we'd done this, or I wish we'd done that."
The world is as you find it, you gotta deal with that.
And you get one shot, you don't get do-overs.
So I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.
I think, because the president wanted it to be
a consequential vice presidency, it was.
I think we did a very commendable piece of work.
Under difficult circumstances,
with a full understanding it wasn't popular with everybody
and we were gonna take a lot of incoming fire.
MAN: For the people who don't like Dick Cheney,
they're gonna see him as the Darth Vader
he always was during the Bush administration.
On the other hand, I think there are a lot of people who see him
as the leading edge of the Bush administration's efforts
to insure that there wasn't another large scale attack
on the United States and for that group,
they'll be very grateful.
Cheney is maybe in a Venn diagram of one,
of people who are geniuses at political power,
at understanding and acquiring power, and who are zealots.
If you have someone who is both,
he's gonna move the needle in history.
CHENEY: I don't lay awake at night thinking,
"Gee, what are they gonna say about me now?"
I didn't worry about it a lot when I was doing it,
and I thought, the best way to get on
with my life and my career was to do what I thought was right.
And I did what I did, it's all on the public record,
and I feel very good about it.
If I had to do it over again, I'd do it in a minute.