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Latitude for Cheney put to test

Vice president's handling of shooting confounds some who say his independence worked against him

BY CRAIG GORDON | NEWSDAY WASHINGTON BUREAU

February 19, 2006

WASHINGTON - A private man on the public stage, Vice President Dick Cheney has long operated outside the normal rules of American politics.

In some ways, he was an unlikely pick for vice president, gruff and taciturn, with a bum heart to boot. Youthful blots on his record - flunking out of Yale University, a pair of long-ago drunk-driving arrests - might have squelched hopes of a political career at an early age.

Since becoming vice president, Cheney has made no effort to curry favor with the media or open up, Bill Clinton-style, lending an aura of aloofness that critics label as arrogance.

Friends disagree. "He's not a philosopher," said longtime friend Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Cheney's home state of Wyoming. "He won't have a cup of coffee with the media and describe the inner mind of Dick Cheney. That's not who he is."

But as the sun set over Kenedy County, Texas, on the night of Feb. 11, Cheney's ability to play by his own rules hurt him, even some of his supporters say.

Cheney had no one around to tell him what Republicans now say with eye-rolling exasperation - you can't wait four days to tell the world how you accidentally shot your friend.

Republican insiders call it a reflection of a White House culture where Cheney is given extraordinary latitude. Cheney can run his office as he sees fit, travel freely out of sight of reporters and operate in a world where the usual retinue of aides and handlers cannot reach.

"The vice president answers to no man other than George Bush," said one Republican familiar with the handling of this episode. "The White House staff just shrug their shoulders and say, 'That's the way it is.'"

"This is a case where that relationship was not to their advantage, because no one at the lower level could pick up the phone and say, 'Dick Cheney, you should do this,'" the source said.

In fact, a puzzling aspect of this episode is that neither Bush nor his Chief of Staff Andrew Card spoke to Cheney the night of the shooting. Card didn't speak to him until Sunday morning, Bush not until Monday.

It is the second time in four months where Cheney's seeming independence has caused controversy as Bush tries to recover from the worst year of his presidency. Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted in October on perjury charges. Cheney has faced questions about whether he authorized Libby to divulge classified information.

Already, one Republican - former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan - has mused publicly of a dump-Cheney effort, but insiders see little chance of that.

Cheney is too important to Bush, they say - a reality that gives the vice president job security and the wide berth that can lead to what happened last week.

"He is 100 percent loyal to the president, and if the president or Andy Card asks him to do anything, he does it," said Charles Black, a longtime Bush family friend and adviser. "They value him and his wisdom and what he adds to the team, so they let him do things his way."

Cheney proved his value to Bush when he joined the ticket in 2000, uniting the steady hand of a wizened Washington pro to a candidate whose sole elective experience was six years as Texas governor.

Cheney graduated from the University of Wyoming - and earned five deferments from the Vietnam War.

He was White House chief of staff for Gerald Ford, a Republican congressman, defense secretary during the Persian Gulf War and chief executive of Halliburton, an oil-services giant that has drawn fire for its Pentagon contracts in Iraq.

In his Fox News Channel interview last week, Cheney was by turns contrite and unrepentant, sorry for the shooting but not for how he divulged it. The controversy? The result of jealousy from a media he had long disdained, Cheney said.

He even seemed to recognize that years of Democratic criticism of him on everything from Iraq to torture policy might have taken a toll on his credibility with the public: "Are they going to take my word for what happened?"

But in the end, Cheney made clear that he believed he alone could decide how to divulge what happened on a "private weekend with friends on a private ranch."

The controversy over the shooting may be behind Cheney, many analysts say, but some believe that image - the public man staking claim to a remarkable zone of secrecy - may be one that rankles voters for some time to come.

"They took a story that was going to be laugh lines for late-night comedians and turned it into a front-page story," said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at George Washington University. "There was something in their attitude there that I think is going to have a lingering effect, about how a certain arrogance seemed to have crept into the White House complex."