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Bush-Cheney Dynamic Under Scrutiny Again White House Letter

Posted on: Monday, 21 November 2005, 12:00 CST

By Elisabeth Bumiller

Their relationship is the talk of the capital. Is there a rift? Or is the couple just drifting apart? Has the senior partner taken the junior partner to the woodshed? Who is the senior partner, anyway?

"They spend quality time together, just the two of them," said Andrew Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, who tried to tamp down the speculation in an interview last week. "I'll walk into the Oval Office and they're talking, and I'll walk out and shut the door."

Card was referring, of course, to the most mysterious bond in Washington, the relationship between President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

In recent weeks, the city has buzzed about whether Cheney's stock has declined with the president. The hum is driven by Bush's skidding approval ratings as a result of policies identified with Cheney, and by reports based on anonymous sources in The (New York) Daily News, Time magazine and on cable news.

In short, Bush is said to be upset with Cheney because the vice president promised a fast, rosy finish to a now two-and-a-half-year- old conflict, and because an aggressive effort by Cheney's office to discredit a war critic led to the indictment of the vice president's top aide.

For now, the consensus among Republicans close to the White House is that Bush may well have been angry about the actions of Cheney's office, and that he has long been aware that the vice president oversold the case on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But the same Republicans say that Bush was as much of a hawk on the war as Cheney, and that in any case the relationship between the two has inevitably changed as Bush has become more secure after almost five years in office.

People close to the White House also note that it is hardly a harmonious time in the West Wing, and that Bush's normal testiness has never spared his number two. Even in the best of times, one former administration member said last week, Bush would readily cut off Cheney in mid-sentence in front of the staff.

Still, the White House adamantly denies any rift Card called Cheney "probably the most senior adviser" to Bush and the view among Republicans is that this marriage, if it is on the shoals, can be saved. "Any friction between them would be viewed the way kids view an argument between Dad and Mom," said Vin Weber, a former congressman and friend of Cheney. "And that is, it's a lot more serious to the kids than it is to the parents."

One policy divide did appear to open up last week over Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and his proposed amendment on torture, which would ban the cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners held by the U.S. government. The amendment passed the Senate last month, but Cheney, who wants an exemption to give the CIA a free hand in interrogations, was so adamantly opposed that McCain finally picked up the phone and called Bush.

"I said I wanted to see him because I wanted to discuss this issue with him," McCain said in an interview, recalling a conversation with the president earlier this month. "And he said, 'I'd like for you to talk with Steve.'"

Steve was Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, who immediately told McCain, the senator said, that 'the president wants me to talk to you about this and see if we can't reach a common ground.'"

McCain, who remains in negotiations with Hadley, declined to say if he thought the episode illustrated a distance between the president and vice president, or at least a recognition by Bush that Cheney's intractability had become an obstacle to a compromise.

"I don't think that is necessarily the case," McCain said. "But I don't say it isn't."

White House officials say that Cheney is still with Bush in the president's most critical early morning meetings, the CIA, FBI, hurricane and communications briefings, and that the vice president attends all major policy sessions as well. They also say that Bush and Cheney continue to have their one-on-one weekly lunch, still the most important meeting in Washington.

White House officials downplay talk that Cheney has been missing in action lately, either at his home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or on an annual pheasant-hunting trip to South Dakota earlier this month. Cheney kept in touch by videoconference, Card said, even from the South Dakota hunting trip.

Since then, Cheney has added another vacation spot to his life, St. Michael's, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. This past weekend, the Cheneys moved into a $2.6 million waterfront house on nine acres, or 3.6 hectares, there, within walking distance of the weekend house of Cheney's fellow hawk and longtime friend, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Friends describe Cheney as subdued since the indictment of his chief of staff and friend, I. Lewis Libby Jr., and say they are concerned about his weight, which appears to be up again after recent years of keeping it under control. Cheney, 64, has had four heart attacks, and in September had surgery to repair aneurysms in arteries behind both his knees.

Still, Card described Cheney as "right in the middle" of all important White House activity. And, he added, "I have great respect for how the vice president understands that the president is the president."

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E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

Tomorrow: John Vinocur writes on the U.S. State Department's changing take on Europe.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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