No one has come to the anomalous office of vice president better prepared for it than Dick Cheney. At the age of thirty-four, Cheney became White House chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and in later years he served as a member of Congress and secretary of defense. Cheney was also an eminent Republican conservative, a fact that commended his placement on the ticket with the younger Bush, who at that time was suspected by many in the party of being too much his moderate father’s son. That Cheney ran the process producing his own nomination occasioned a few chuckles among political observers, but Cheney’s bona fides as a serious voice in Washington could not be questioned.

The president routinely sought Cheney’s counsel, especially early in his presidency when he was still learning the ropes of the Oval Office. And the professional staff Cheney assembled remained a powerful center of gravity throughout the Bush years. The exact extent of Cheney’s influence in this administration is still a contested question for history, unresolved in these interviews. Yet his association with the core issues of the War on Terror—what Cheney himself once called the “dark side” of American security policy—made him one of history’s most influential vice presidents.

These observations, from interviews conducted for the Miller Center’s George W. Bush Presidential Oral History Project, are excerpted from Inside the George W. Bush White House: An Oral History, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2026.

Ambassador Eric Edelman, principal deputy assistant to the vice president for national security: Cheney had been chief of staff to the president at a ridiculously young age. I once had to introduce him and I did a variant of Tom Lehrer’s joke: “When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for 10 years.” It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished in life.

Secretary of the Treasury John Snow: I guess if you want to be vice president, you ought to get the job of picking who the vice president is going to be.

Cheney is an able guy and performed well in all his jobs—a good, competent operator. Chief of staff is the gatekeeper. He decides who gets in and out the door. He watches the president’s schedule. He makes sure the president is using his time well. Dick would have been terrific at that. Then he went off and ran for the House seat in Wyoming. He might have become Speaker one day if he had stayed.

Who suggested that he should be the person to help find the vice president? It was Bush’s dad. “Use Cheney. He’s the right guy to help you find out who this would be.” Cheney is a very talented guy. He is a pro at government.

Margaret Spellings, chief domestic policy advisor: Cheney was the elder statesman of old-style Republicanism and was sought after by that crowd of old-style Republicans. Bush, and a lot of people around him, were not hard-over like that—Condi, me, Karen. Karl was sort of in the middle. I’m talking about philosophy and conservatism and orthodoxy. I think Cheney thought he was protecting the president from all these wacky, inexperienced, too-moderate folks. This plays out a lot in the foreign-policy realm with Condi.

Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor: When I first got there, I heard that the vice president had said that he should chair the principals committee. Well, that’s what the national security advisor does. When Steve Hadley asked him about it, the vice president said, “Whose idea was that? That’s a dumb idea.” This was a staff idea that they had taken in to [him]. So sometimes the vice president was operating differently [from his staff].

Philip Zelikow, counselor to the secretary of state: The vice president made a play to become the chairman of the [national security] principals committee instead of [relying on] the national security advisor. That to me would be a big deal.

What happened is I’d do these drafts [on national security structure during the transition], so I gave my draft to [Cheney’s counsel] David Addington, who was representing the vice president’s interests. He would glower at me and take it away and return it to me later. In this case he returned to me, in writing, suggested changes signed by Dick Cheney, his signature on the page to let me know these are not coming from David Addington. That [memo] included this [change]. I immediately go to Condi and to Steve. Even in the transition they were both very worried about the role of the vice president and of the vice president’s office, because they could see that this was creating a new power center.

Steve basically said, “I’ll work this.” In effect the vice president withdrew. There are different stories. I don’t know exactly what happened. I asked Scooter [Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff] about this last year after a conference. Scooter said, “Oh no, the vice president didn’t ever really want that. That’s Addington. Addington wrote that in and he gave a bunch of changes and Cheney just signed off on it to lend it suitable gravitas.” Maybe that’s right. I don’t know. All I know is what I got. And I know that Steve Hadley had to go in with someone, maybe Scooter, maybe even the vice president, and the tone I got was more Do you really want to do this? Because, if he wanted to do this, this was going to go to the president. Maybe the real story is just more benign, which is Addington did it and Cheney didn’t really understand what Addington had done.

Eric Edelman: The urban legend about Cheney’s office in the Bush 43 administration is that we had this giant NSC staff that was parallel to Condi’s staff and it was pulling all the strings. It’s just not true. We actually had the exact same number of people that Gore had, because I inherited it and I’m the one who did the staffing. We kept on all the career people.

Cheney did not want to be [operational]. What he wanted to be was extremely well informed about all elements of national security, all elements of the process. He did not want us to characterize his position to anybody, because he really wanted to be in a position to give his unvarnished advice to the president in private.

By agreement with Condi, we were all on the NSC email system. We were included on all their emails and we got to see the briefing memos before we did our briefing memos for the vice president. The only thing you could say is we did a memo for the vice president that they didn’t see, and we saw what they were providing the president. But that was by design, not by some nefarious plan.

Secretary of State Colin Powell: We had two national security councils—one that belonged to Condi Rice and the other one belonged to the vice president. The vice president had staffed his office with people to be staffers to the vice president, but he inserted himself totally into the information flow as if he were the chief of staff. That caused a great deal of confusion. We ran into problems almost immediately.

The first one I’ll point out is the Kyoto Accord. I’m in my office a short time—a couple of weeks after taking over—and I get a call from Condi saying the president is getting ready to sign a letter to the Congress saying that we will not be participants in the Kyoto Accord. I said, “What?” It was a campaign promise, so it was not a surprise. It was how we do it. I said, “Wait a minute, Condi, we have to talk to our allies and friends first. We’ve got to put the groundwork in before you do something like this.”

She said, “Give me some language.” I gave her some language right away to say we will consult with our allies, dah, dah, dah. “So why does it have to go up now?” “Because Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) is asking for the administration’s position on this.” She calls me back and says, “This language won’t sell.” I said, “Won’t sell with who?” She said, “It just won’t sell.” I said, “OK, I’ll come over right away with different language.” I went down to the White House with more language, which I thought would sell.

As I go through the outer office heading into the Oval Office, in the reception room, there is Christie Todd Whitman, the head of EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], who has not been consulted about this. She is not sure why she is waiting there. I go into the Oval Office and Condi looks at me with kind of an embarrassed look on her face and she says, “Too late, it’s gone.” “What do you mean, ‘It’s gone’?” She said, “The president signed it, the vice president gave it to him and the vice president personally has taken it up to the Hill.”

In the next twenty-four hours I said to the president, “We can’t work like this. You could have laid the groundwork for this, but now you are going to be faced with a pain in the butt for the next six months. All of your buddies in the EU [European Union] are going to be down on you for not sharing this with them or consulting with them and pulling out of an accord that they thought was pretty good and which the previous administration had agreed to.” It is always wise to see what the other guys did before you decide you’re going to throw it away, but it was part of his campaign promise. I said, “You know, Mr. President, things like this, you have to prepare the ground.”

Q: On this dual NSC, is it your sense that the president affirmatively embraced it, or acquiesced?

Powell: He accepted it. I don’t know if I’d use the word “acquiesce.” He accepted it. I think he saw that Mr. Cheney had a great deal of experience in the Congress and as chief of staff, and so he accepted it for six of the eight years.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: I’ll give you a specific anecdote that shows you how he accepted it, toward the end of the first administration. [At] his [2004] state of the union, Ahmed Chalabi was in the box with Laura Bush. You may remember the pictures. The next day, the secretary was traveling, so I sit in his chair at a cabinet meeting, right next to the president. President Bush came in, and all of us, being the usual sycophantic aides, said, “Great job last night, boss. You knocked it out of the park.” He was liking that. He sat down and then he said, “By the way, what was Ahmed Chalabi doing in the box with Laura?”

Powell: Sitting next to Laura.

Q: The president says this?

Armitage: I was desperate to know this as well. I’m looking around and seeing there are only a couple of people who could have done that, namely Dick Cheney and Dick Cheney, who was there at the meeting. And no one said a word. The president just went on about his business, instead of saying, “God damn it, I’m president of the United States and I want to know how he got there.” So he acquiesced. He accepted it.

Condoleezza Rice: The vice president, from Day One, respected me as national security advisor and then me as secretary of state. I never found the vice president going around me. There were a couple of times we had slipups, where things happened that I didn’t know about. The vice president always said, “That’s wrong; I shouldn’t have done that.” He would have his conversations with the president over lunch and he would tell the president what he thought. Either he would tell me what he’d said to the president or the president would say, “The vice president thinks this, this, and this.” We’d work it out. I never felt blindsided, or hooded, from what the vice president was doing.

Dan Bartlett, counselor: I would say in areas where President Bush was least experienced, on foreign policy and those things, that Cheney was going to have a disproportionate amount of influence and voice. Because of his background in the House and leadership he played a pretty heavy role in the strategy with the Congress.

I mean everybody was asking, “Is Cheney really running these things?” Cheney was always very deferential to the president, not only in public settings, quasi-public settings, like staff settings, but also privately. He never stepped outside of bounds, his role. He used his platform to make his case when there were private lunches and things like that. The president was always quick to call us after he’d come in. We’d go through the list of Cheney’s views of the day. All that changed at the end over the pardon [request for Scooter Libby], but up to that point that relationship withstood a lot.

As you would expect [with] the arc of a presidency, his influence was more substantial early on. And it was to the point in the second term [where] he was, on a lot of issues, irrelevant.

Margaret Spellings: Bush did rely on Cheney and his wisdom and his experience. Bush is a trusting person. Maybe too much so [in some cases].

Frances Townsend, homeland security advisor: The picture painted of the vice president as the Darth Vader of the policy process, I found comical. He had a very sharp intellect and did not suffer fools gladly. But he was by no means the malevolent force that he was painted out to be.

Josh Bolten, White House chief of staff: I remember there was a guy at Princeton. I visited his class. He was teaching a seminar, apparently the entire thesis of which was Cheney ran the Bush administration. They had me as the guest there. They said, “Tell us, how did Cheney run the Bush administration?” That was the basic tenor of the questions. I said, “He didn’t.” How do you know? “I was there.”

Q: Reflect a bit on the popular conceptions about Cheney and where those are right and wrong.

Dan Bartlett: In Washington and politics you get a lot of people who will stab you in the back. Dick Cheney was perfectly comfortable with stabbing you in the chest, which I appreciated. You always knew where you stood with him. You knew his views. At key times on the back end of decisions, he would admit when he was wrong, which is a pretty rare situation.

I can think of three different occasions. One wasn’t an apology to me, but the issue about coming out for a Palestinian state. There was a big internal debate and Cheney was vehemently against it. Rose Garden speech, [the president] did it. Two days later he went and told the president, “You were right, I was wrong. It was the right move to make.” We also said [Yasser] Arafat has got to go.

The second one is when he shot Harry Whittington and he shut down all internal communication. [Cheney accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington when the two were quail hunting in Texas in February 2006. Their refusal to notify the press immediately drew heavy criticism both inside and outside the administration.] We couldn’t get hold of him, couldn’t get hold of his staff. Only learned later that there were some back-channel communications with Karl, but they decided that no one in the world would understand or have context for him accidentally shooting somebody while hunting except for one reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

All the while the entire world at this point is saying, “The vice president of the United States shot somebody, and we can’t get a comment.” I had to go to the president and get the president to instruct him to talk to us. Two days later he apologized for it. He said, “I shouldn’t have put you in that position, shouldn’t have put the president in that position. You can appreciate what we were going through down there, I hope, but I erred in my judgment.” He had no need to come to me or say anything like that.

The last one, which was probably the most important one, was the decision to go public with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 20th hijacker and the revelation of the [enhanced interrogation] program. There was a very heated, constructive mostly, debate around this topic. I remember we were on vacation on the Outer Banks in North Carolina with all my friends and family. They’re all out on the beach and I’m in a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secure space for handling classified materials].

The president ultimately made the decision to go forward. We did the big East Room disclosure of that, gave the speech. Several days later the vice president came up to my office, closed the door, and said, “You were right.” It’s pretty interesting. He’d duke it out, but he had an ability to reflect like that that you wouldn’t expect.

General George Casey, army chief of staff: You know when you’re in the meeting and there’s one guy in the back who is really smart, and he always asks one really great question that nobody else has thought about? That was Cheney.

Representative Richard Gephardt (D-Mo), House minority leader: People talk about Cheney and being dark and ridiculous and so on, and there is some truth to that. I think he gets carried away. I knew him from early days in the House, so I know him well. He did turn way dark, but you have to, again, remember where we were. I think in his own mind he thought that he was in this job at a time of great danger to the country. The phrase he uses about nuclear devices in the United States is something like “You can only be wrong once.” I think he took it as his own personal responsibility to see that everything humanly possible could be done to prevent a nuclear device in the United States. I understand it. I think he sometimes went too far in some of the things he wanted to do and did, but I understand the motivation. It’s not like he wants to rip up the Constitution.

General Peter Pace, chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff: The vice president I knew was and is a patriot who in my mind was, as we all were in the aftermath of a terrorist attack at home, trying to figure how to prevent the next one. So far, successful. It’s coming. There is no way to prevent it forever, but I think that the way the Bush presidency and the team handled the aftermath resulted in actions that prevented further attacks here at home. A combination of a bit of good luck and a lot of hard work I think has prevented another attack here at home. That’s something that they should be proud of.

Josh Bolten: I think most White Houses have a bit of a tension between the regular White House staff and the vice president’s staff, some of it born from the usual circumstance that the vice president is eventually going to be running for president, which was clearly not the case here. The vice president’s team—they’re not like an alien entity within the White House. They’re kind of like everybody’s uncle. For his part, Cheney made clear to his staff that they were not to big-foot anything.

Dan Bartlett: What I didn’t appreciate, and I think maybe others didn’t appreciate, was how much his staff was engaged in different areas, in departments. There were some stories that came out, kind of like, Wow, I didn’t know that.

Margaret Spellings: There was a distinct culture between the vice president’s shop and the way they thought about things and the way the Bush team did. This gets more pronounced as time goes on. … I never really trusted how they were maneuvering things. They would end-run around policy processes. They were less aboveboard in the way they operated. It was to my great benefit that they cared less about a lot of the domestic stuff: Who cares what goes on at the department of education? Philosophically his team in particular didn’t buy into the kinds of things we were doing. They had more important fish to fry in national security, in the energy realm. There were domestic policy areas they did care about, but not housing, not veterans affairs particularly.

Even though there was sparring [within the rest of the Bush team], things came out in the wash, and we were pretty aboveboard with each other. I’d get mad at Karl; he’d get mad at me. It was like a family. [But] then there was this sort of, What’s going on over there [in Cheney’s office]? They’d call up agencies and departments and ask for information, extra-jurisdictional, and there was always, in my view, a suspicion about what their game was. What were they doing and why?

In policy, you’d have these transparent processes, committees, lower-level staff, fact finding, what are the issues, up to principals. You know how this works. And then in time before the president, Cheney and his people were ciphers. They never said anything. It was always What the hell? Where are they going to show up next? A “Where’s Waldo?” kind of thing.

Condoleezza Rice: [While] the vice president was absolutely transparent. … the office of the vice president, his staff, was quite a different matter. They were of one hawkish mind. They wanted to be a separate power center. They tried many, many times to insert themselves, and sometimes did, into processes that they probably shouldn’t. But not the vice president.

Margaret Spellings: To be fair to the vice, I think a lot of this stuff was [the vice president’s] staff unbridled. Often, I felt the vice president didn’t care enough to be weighing in at this level. He wasn’t personally, I don’t think, killing any kind of discussion about [for example] higher education in America and the importance of it. But his staff was crazy about it, they were just nutty. There was never really a forum to raise things like this to the vice president except through his staff. Unlike the president, where you could raise everything. But there was this kind of shadow deal going on over there that was a nuisance.

And their primary strategy was the stall-out. Until you get the thing through the process, it isn’t ready to use up presidential time on. There were a million monkey wrenches. I can’t even remember what the issue was, but it was like, “How come we can’t get [this thing done and to the president]?” I’m like, “We’re still grinding through the process.” “[But] I’m the decider!” That kind of thing. You could never get [stuff] to the presidential level [for a decision] because of all the monkey wrenches.

Karl Zinsmeister, director, Domestic Policy Council: A kind of sclerosis had set in long before I arrived [in 2006]. I don’t know what preceded me, but when I arrived there was a very rigid, settled alignment of forces that never really changed. We all felt at times like the vice president’s office had given up on actually trying to make a difference and changing anything on the domestic policy side. Their interventions were often symbolic, virtue signaling, not practical help. There was a lot of fatigue and resignation on the domestic policy side. I do not believe that was happening on the national security side. But in my world, I can hardly think of an issue where there was an engagement that had either the effect, or seemingly even the intention, of being anything more than just a protest.

There were a few hot button issues where you knew you were going to get a hot email or response from the vice president’s representatives, but even then it was not like I’m going to fight you on this in the trenches and we’re going to get it different. It was like I just want to let you know—your mother wears army boots.

I say that in real mourning. Dick Cheney was from AEI [American Enterprise Institute], the same as I was. I knew him at AEI and liked him a lot. I knew his wife and liked her. He is a true public intellectual, a national asset. He’s a really smart person, not just a politico. But he was using his bullets on Iraq, Guantanamo, the intelligence program, et cetera. and probably didn’t have ammo left on the domestic side.

Josh Bolten: The vice president’s office, and I think the vice president himself, took it upon themselves to be the custodians of the flame on a number of issues of presidential prerogative, institutional prerogative. They were leading voices on issues relating to the confidentiality of executive branch documents and veto letters and things like that. They paid a lot of attention, close attention to it. I didn’t always agree and frequently overruled when I was chief of staff, but I admired their principled consistency and their diligence in pursuing those issues.

The relationship between the president and the vice president was seriously impaired midway through the second term over Scooter Libby’s role in outing an under-cover intelligence official, Valerie Plame, to a journalist. Libby’s intent had been to discredit the work of Plame’s husband, diplomat Joe Wilson, who had raised questions publicly about the veracity of the administration’s rationale for taking the nation to war in Iraq. Libby was convicted of four counts of misrepresenting the truth to investigators—triggering an awkward effort by the vice president to secure for his former chief of staff a presidential pardon. [The original source for Plame’s “outing” turned out to be Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in conversation with journalist Robert Novak. Colin Powell briefly discusses this in his oral history.]

Fred Fielding, White House counsel: The Libby case had been going on when I got there [in January 2007], but there was [soon] a [conviction]—and then the question of what the president should do. A lot of pressure was on the president to grant him a pardon before he was sentenced, before he had to go to jail. I advised the president what I thought he should do, and he accepted an option of granting a commutation of sentence. His statement at the time he did that was prepared by me and my office. It tried to maintain the sanctity of the jury’s decision and was respectful of the jury’s decision of guilt but deferred the imposition of jail time. No restoration of civil rights. Just that.

Most people didn’t read it carefully when it was released, but it pretty much blocks a pardon later. But at the end of the administration, people started clamoring for a pardon for Scooter, and so I again went through the whole transcript and analyzed it. We had many meetings about it. Not a hundred, but we had several meetings about it—with the president and vice president, chief of staff, and the counselor, Ed Gillespie. And it was obvious. I wanted the president to stop all pardons after Christmastime. Just get away from that end-of-the-administration business, especially the Scooter one. But he didn’t bite the bullet on that one.

Q: And your rationale was?

Fielding: That Marc Rich thing. [In the final hours of his presidency, Bill Clinton pardoned convicted felon Marc Rich, whose criminal record included massive tax fraud. Rich’s ex-wife had made substantial donations to Clinton’s campaign and his library fund. This pardon offended even some of Clinton’s best supporters. Every president confronts last-minute appeals to act, sometimes from close friends.] Plus the temptation at the last minute. Best friends come in and say, “You’ve got to free Joe, he’s my—” dah, dah, dah, dah. And people are not shy about buttonholing the president of the United States and asking for pardons. It was driving him crazy after a while. He really got annoyed about the whole thing, but he was always polite and would say, “Take it up with my counsel.”

In my judgment the [Libby] conviction was maybe unfortunate, but it was valid. It wasn’t a goofy conviction. It wasn’t a political conviction. It was a solid conviction.

Josh Bolten: The most difficult and poignant moment in my and the president’s relationship with the vice president related to Scooter Libby. At one point the vice president came to me and said that Scooter would like to talk directly to the president. I said, “I know, he has made that request to me and I’ve turned him down.” He said, “Well, now I’m asking.” I said, “I wish you wouldn’t.” He said, “I am.” I said, “OK, then I’m turning you down also.”

He said, “May I raise this with the president?” I said, “I wish you wouldn’t, but under no circumstances would I prevent you from raising something with the president that you think he needs to hear. If I may, I will alert him that you are yourself going to ask him to visit with Scooter Libby, even though I’ve turned both you and Scooter down for that visit.” But, even in the issue that was the most emotional and personal to him, he was respectful of the role that I had to play as chief of staff.

Dan Bartlett: Those final weeks of the presidency around the pardon issue, the president was miserable.

Q: Because he doesn’t like the idea of pardons?

Bartlett: He didn’t like the process. People he thought of as friends were using that friendship to bring forward their requests for pardons. Then it culminated with the vice president leaning on him incredibly hard.

Colin Powell: The vice president said publicly, “You don’t leave your people on the battlefield.” What battlefield are you talking about? Scooter was found guilty of lying. You expect the president to overlook a lie? I was thinking the president would do it. I wouldn’t have cared one way or another. I felt sorry for Scooter, whom I knew quite well. But the president felt he couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it.

Dan Bartlett: The vice president just couldn’t imagine a scenario where he didn’t pardon Scooter, to the point where the president instructed some of his internal lawyers to take a fresh look and really get down to the nub: Did he, or didn’t he, lie? Let’s not ask ourselves what motivated it. He asked Brett Kavanaugh, who now serves on the D.C. Circuit, who was our staff secretary at the time, to shepherd that process with another lawyer. They both came back pretty clear. They brought Scooter in and let him make his case, the whole thing. The president then lessened the sentence but did not fully pardon him.

I remember the president calling me—he was at Camp David, his last weekend. All the family is there, and he says, “I have the vice president calling, leaning [on me].” Clay Johnson [was pushing for] somebody from the department of justice we weren’t going to [pardon], so he had Clay furious at him. “This is not how I envisioned ending my presidency.”