In My Time

Dick Cheney “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir” Threshold Editions, 2011, 532 pp.


Full disclosure: I generally vote for president based on who controls congress—I think it too dangerous to have one party control both as each is too extreme for me. Did I mention I enthusiastically voted for Goldwater in 1964?

I have problems with the latest George Jr. Republican actions, particularly:
• Terry Schiavo (not mentioned in book): On February 25, 2005, a judge ordered the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. Several appeals and federal government intervention followed, which included U.S. President George W. Bush returning to Washington D.C. to sign legislation designed to keep her alive.
• Deregulation of the financial industry and enforcement agencies. (not mentioned in the book!)
• WMD’s as the cause of our war with Iraq.
• Releasing the name of a CIA agent as payback. (covered as just incidental chit chat in the book except for the conviction of Libby part)

Quick Summary of Career:
• Cheney spent nearly forty years in D.C., interrupted with a short stint as CEO of Haliburton.
• Born 1941 to a family of Democrats. Senior class president, baseball and football player, married his high school sweetheart. Went to Yale and flunked out, began working building power lines in Wyoming, arrested twice for DUI. Got back on track and later attended the University of Wyoming, where he earned both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in political science. He subsequently started, but did not finish, doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
• Career after U.W.:
o 1975 – 77: Chief of Staff for President Ford
o 1977 – 89 Member House of Representatives’ from Wyoming
 Jan to March 1989 House Minority Whip
o 1989 – 93 Secretary of Defense for President Bush Sr.
o CEO of Halliburton
o 2001 – 09 Vice President for President Bush Jr.
• became secretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, overseeing America’s military during Operation Desert Storm and in the historic transition at the end of the Cold War.
• Born in Lincoln, Nebraska 1941; hospital bill $37.50.
• Cheney sustained the first of five heart attacks in 1978, at age 37; he had subsequent attacks in 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2010

My Notes:

Pg. 81: By the time President Ford came into office, the U.S. was unwinding in Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords had been signed in January 1973 and American combat forces had been removed. President Nixon had given his assurance the U.S. would help the South Vietnamese resist a renewed enemy attack, but the antiwar forces in both houses of Congress were able to cut off funding that would have been necessary to provide that support.

Pg. 103: The Carter-Ford election of 1976 ended up closer than any other presidential election since 1916 when Wilson edged out Charles Evans Hughes.

Pg. 131: Newt Gingrich and Cheney were both freshman Republicans in 1978. Newt had an unwavering conviction that Republicans could once again become the majority in the House. But to do it, he argued, Republicans had to quit being polite to the Democrats and go after them.
Pg. 137: While Cheney was secretary of defense he found out that former President Carter was actively lobbying against the U.S. position of using force to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1990-91. Carter had contacted heads of government with seats on the Security Council and urged them to oppose our resolution. His intervention was ineffective as well as totally inappropriate.

Pg. 155: Secretary of Defense for George H.W. Bush during which time they had to deal with the liberation of Panama, the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the defense of Saudi Arabia and the liberation of Kuwait.

Pg. 176: Many at the Pentagon had a deep distrust of the media that was shared by Cheney. For instance, the unduly negative reporting had helped sour public opinion on the Vietnam war; the Tet Offensive in particular was presented as a devastating blow to the U.S. when, in fact it had resulted in punishing losses to the North Vietnamese.
Pg. 197: Colin Powell repeatedly kept pressing the case for long-term sanctions against Saddam to get him out of Kuwait rather than use military force. Cheney was very skeptical to think that Saddam would give up one of the world’s great oil reserves—100 billion barrels in Kuwait—because of sanctions.

Pg. 207: Cheney, as Secretary of Defense, opposed seeking congressional approval for a use of force against Iraq. He felt they had all the authority needed because the U.S. Senate had previously ratified the United Nations Charter, including Article 51, which allowed going to the assistance of a member state, such as Kuwait, that had been invaded. He, in fact was afraid they would be turned down. George Bush went to congress anyway & got approval but it was close in the Senate: 52-47; it easily passed the House: 250 – 183. Yet, in 1991 Bush had won the war but in 1992 lost the presidency to Bill Clinton: Clinton, 43 per cent; Bush, 37 percent; Ross Perot, 19 percent.

Pg. 244: The 1994 midterm elections were historic, with Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. The last time they had control in the Senate was 1986; in the House, 1954. Cheney declined to run for President in 1996; instead he became CEO of Halliburton in January 1996.

Pg. 261: When leaving Halliburton the board offered to accelerate the exercise dates on all Halliburton options that had been granted to him so he could exercise them before being elected as VP. He declined the acceleration, and set up an irrevocable gift trust that would donate all the after-tax profits from those invested options to charities. He sold all his vested options.

Pg. 332: Since 1996 Afghanistan had been under the control of the Taliban, who had imposed an extreme form of Islam on the country, closing schools for girls, forbidding music, and carrying out grisly executions, as well as providing a safe haven for al Qaeda’s training camps. On October 7, 2001 the U.S. began military strikes against al Qaeda camps and military installations of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Cheney then goes on to claim that “in a little more than three months, working with the Northern Alliance and allies in the south, we had overthrown the Taliban and liberated 25 million people.” He does add, later, that ten years later we still find ourselves with nearly one hundred thousand American troops still fighting in Afghanistan.

Pg. 352: On June 23, 2006 the NY Times published a story detailing the U.S. efforts to track the flow of funding to terrorists. On June 6, 2006 the Supreme Court decision Hamdan v. Rumsfeld held that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits any behavior that is ‘humiliating and degrading’ and bans ‘outrages upon personal dignity,’ applied to the detainees of our war on terrorism. Cheney states that the decision seemed to ignore the plain language of Common Article 3, which makes clear that it applies to ‘armed conflict’ on of an international character.’ The War on Terror could hardly be more international. But once the Supreme Court handed down its decision, the CIA interrogation program clearly needed new legal underpinning to continue. Congress then passed the Military Commissions Act in October 2006; Bush in July 2007 then signed an executive order establishing guidelines for the CIA interrogation program. President Obama reversed all this within two days of in inauguration.

Cheney claims Enhanced Interrogation Methods helped stop a number of attacks:
• A plot to strike the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti,
• A planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi,
• A plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, California, and
• A plot to fly passenger planes into Heathrow Airport and building in downtown London.

Pg. 413: Many have charged Cheney with pressuring analysts to find evidence of WMD’s in Iraq no matter what the evidence. Cheney responds that he finds this charge with no foundation as the judgments the CIA arrived at were essentially the same as those produced by the agency during the Clinton years. Intelligence services in other countries had also reached similar conclusions.
Pg. 419: Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, terrorists had learned two dangerous lessons from America’s weak response to previous attacks—on our embassy and Marne barracks in Beirut, in Somalia, on the World Trade Center in 1993, on the military training facilities in Riyadh and at the Khobar Towers housing complex, on our embassies in East Africa, and on the U.S.S. Cole. First, terrorists came to believe they could strike with impunity, that the U.S. response was likely to be inconsequential. Second, they learned that if they did attack U.S. assets or personnel, we might well change our policy or withdraw.

Pg. 420: Libyan leader Qaddafi watched the U.S. actions in Afghanistan and preparations for Iraq and decided he did not want to be next. He announced he would turn over all his WMD materials, and he did. (Of course Iran and North Korea did not.).

Pg. 455: On January 10, 2007, President Bush announced the surge in Iraq. Immediate criticism followed: Former secretary of state Colin Powell had said in December 2006 that America was ‘losing in Iraq and a ‘surge cannot be sustained.’ Days after the president’s speech Republican Senator Chuck Hagel declared the surge ‘a waste of our troops and a waste of our treasure.’, and Senator Barack Obama predicted that rather than soling sectarian violence, the surge would increase it. In April 2007 Senator Harry Reid said, ‘This war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything.’ In the next ten months U.S. troops, together with Iraqis, defeated the insurgency, dealt a severe blow to al Qaeda, and created a secure environment so that the Iraqi political process could begin to take hold.

Pg. 465: In the fall of 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.

Pg. 472: On September 6, 2007, Israeli F-15s took out the Syrian al-Kibar nuclear facility. Satellite photos afterward showed that the Israeli pilots hit their target perfectly. There was not a single crater except where the nuclear reactor once stood. (Some day, I maintain, we will find that U.S. smart bomb weapons were used.)

Pg. 490: Strongly critical of Condi Rice’s handling of North Koreans, in spite of her instructions. In early 2001 President Bush decided to set a new course for dealing with North Korea and made other countries, most importantly China, a part of the negotiations. But U.S. diplomats repeatedly kept meeting bilaterally with the North Koreans.

Pg. 510: TARP has remained controversial. But it is clear that TARP was a success. Of the $245 billion invested in banks, Treasury has already recovered approximately $244 billion. Treasury expects ultimately to record an overall profit from the bank investments portion of TARP of approximately $20 billion.