How the Bushes Misunderstood Cheney
If Ronald Reagan had not chosen George Bush as his Vice-President, there would be no Bush dynasty today. And if Bush’s fellow-Texan Ross Perot had not run against him, in 1992, there would be no Clinton dynasty, either.
.. What the Bushes expect from these people is not just competence but loyalty. There’s family, and then there’s staff. (Only one person, James Baker, has ever transcended those tight categories.) Staff pursue the family’s interests, not their own.
Bush 41’s news-making remark to Meacham was, in effect, an accusation that Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had violated this cardinal rule during Bush 43’s Administration. Speaking about Cheney, Bush told Meacham, “He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer. … It just showed me that you cannot do it that way. The president should not have that worry.”
.. As the C.E.O. of Halliburton, he was living in Texas at the time, rather than in Washington, and he projected a stolid, phlegmatic trustworthiness. He hardly ever said anything, so how could he have an agenda?
.. As the Secretary of Defense, he hired Paul Wolfowitz as one of the top officials in the Pentagon, and he tilted away from Mikhail Gorbachev and toward Boris Yeltsin because he believed that Yeltsin would push harder for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After that happened, Cheney sponsored a study by Wolfowitz calling for the maintenance of a one-superpower world in the post-Soviet era as the core principle of U.S. foreign policy.