CHENEY (1975): "Start FBI Investigation (Target-S. Hersh & NYT)-With Or Without-Public Announcement"

During the Ford years, the Secret Service gave Richard Cheney perhaps the most apt code name it had ever derived, Backseat. That was a perfect description of Cheney's role as an anonymous White House functionary.

Cheney's ascent in the Ford White House served as an illustration of how an individual can rise to the top by virtue of his willingness to take care of the mundane chores that persons with larger egos avoid, thereby establishing reliability and learning all the inner workings of an organization. Cheney was akin to the clerk who becomes chief executive, the copy editor who rises to become editor in chief, the accountant who takes over the film studio.

The archives of the period show how Cheney, as deputy chief of staff, started out in the Ford administration by supervising such lowly matters as plumbing and toilets:



It was Cheney who oversaw the sending out of WHite House Christmas cards and gifts. When Betty Ford was uncomfortable on a White House helicopter, it fell to Cheney to try to get a headrest installed at her seat. Cheney even took care of the WHite House table settings.



Others soon discovered, as Rumsfeld already knew, that when you gave something to Cheney, it got done -- not flashily but competently. He was the perfect staff man. He worked longer hours than almost everyone else. "The individual who'll join the staff and who'll want to work nine-to-five and maybe see a little cocktail party circuit isn't there when you need him," Cheney told one interviewer.

It wasn't long before Cheney was taking over larger, more important assignments, standing in as Rumsfeld's alter ego when the chief of staff was occupied elsewhere. One natural area for Cheney was intelligence: He was trustworthy, faceless and unfailingly discreet. During the Ford years the CIA was trying to fend off an unending series of press and congressional investigations and, with them, efforts by the Justice Department to establish new rules and guidelines to govern intelligence collection. In May 1975 the New York Times published a story by Seymour Hersh describing the US intelligence community's secret effort to lift a sunken Soviet submarine off the seabed in the Pacific Ocean. Cheney was in charge of the meetings aimed at trying to figure out if the Ford administration should take legal action against the newspaper. Cheney's handwritten notes show that he actively considered a number of countermeasures, such as seeking an indictment of Hersh and the Times or even obtaining a warrant to search Hersh's apartment. The aim, Cheney wrote, was "to discourage the NYT and other publications from similar actions." In the end Cheney and the White House decided to back off after the intelligence community decided its work had not been significantly damaged. Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, pp 59-61

If anyone in America had the government experience to respond to a terrorist attack upon Washington, it was Cheney. As President Ford's deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff, Cheney had mastered the inner workings of White House operations right down to the salt shakers and plumbing. In Congress he had worked on the House Intelligence Committee, learning how the CIA and America's several other intelligence agencies operate. As defense secretary he had been in charge of the U.S. armed forces. Above all, although almost nobody knew it, during the 1980s Cheney had been one of the leading participants in the highly classified planning to maintain continuity of government and set up a new presidential chain of command if America was under attack.Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, p.295