7 Clues To Understanding Dick Cheney

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Even as an elected official later on, Cheney found himself in the position of serving another. Cheney was or could have been his own man politically after being elected to Congress in 1978. He could have associated himself with some hot-button issue or authored a major piece of legislation bearing his name. Instead Cheney followed the same pattern in the House that had worked for him to date: he quietly made himself useful and then indispensable to the higher powers in his party. Bob Michel, the G.O.P. House leader, repaid Cheney's loyalty by making him his No. 2, the G.O.P. whip, in late 1988. When President Bush called Michel in March 1989 to say he was nominating Cheney to be Defense Secretary, Michel was distraught. "I said, 'Mr. President, you're taking my right arm,'" he recalls.

5 Loyalist
Nobody successfully serves as many masters as Cheney has without a disciplined code of loyalty. With his conservative instincts, he was an unnatural fit in the relatively moderate fOrd Administration. He was suspicious of Kissingerian detente, for example, preferring Reagan's muscular anticommunism, but he buried his own politics in service to the President. In the 1976 primary, he faithfully leaned on Republicans in Wyoming, which was fast becoming Reagan country, to stick with Ford, even if most of the delegation went against him.

Cheney occupied the right edge of the spectrum in the first bUsh Administration too. nAtional Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, President Bush, Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and sEcretary Of State Jim Baker all viewed Cheney as the Administration's unreconstructed cold warrior at a time when the cold war was coming to an end. Cheney would voice his opinions internally even if he was usually overruled but the debate stopped there.

He was a hawk during the Persian Gulf crisis and clashed frequently with Powell, who was cautious about using the military to expel Iraq from Kuwait. But Cheney never strayed far from the official line coming out of the White House. He asked early on after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait whether the U.S. should consider overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but abandoned the idea quickly. It fell to Cheney to secure support from Arab leaders for pushing Saddam out of Kuwait, support gained with the promise that the U.S. had no intention of marching to Baghdad. Like the other principal players in that war, Cheney has steadfastly defended the decision ever since.

As he demonstrated at the Pentagon, Cheney expects the same kind of loyalty and discretion from below that he delivers to those above him. Three days into his stint as Defense Secretary, he publicly rebuked the Air Force's top officer for venturing into politics when he sounded out members of Congress on updating the U.S. nuclear force. Later, Cheney cashiered two other top officers for indiscreet remarks.

Even with close associates, Cheney doesn't tell stories out of the Oval Office. Wolfowitz says he can't describe the evolution of Cheney's thinking on Iraq, "because he is so tight-lipped and careful, I still don't know from the end of the last war what his positions were." Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona considers himself Cheney's friend and a fellow conservative hawk. "Every time I talk to him and I make a pitch about something, he'll say, 'O.K.'" says Kyl. "And you don't know what he's going to do with the information. I honestly do not know what goes on between him and the President."

6 Perpetual Student
Ever since his flameout at Yale, Cheney seems to have been compensating, retaining a fiercely scholarly approach to his work. In his first year at the Pentagon, he organized periodic Saturday-morning tutorials with top Kremlinologists and defense thinkers to bring himself up to speed on what was still the U.S.'s prime nemesis.

For the past two years, he and Lynne have held periodic dinner parties an attendee calls them "salons"--featuring big thinkers on topics ranging from American political history (David McCullough) to Islam's relationship with the West (Bernard Lewis). To prepare for a Meet the Press session last fall, Matalin took him two 6-in.-thick binders full of briefing materials. "He loves to prepare," she says. "You can't give him too much information. He just swallows it and asks for more."

Cheney demands the same level of discipline in his staff members. "That last thing you want to do is go to him with an argument you can't back up," says an adviser. "He'll get that look of disgust on his face real fast and tell you to go do your homework."

As a policymaker, his credibility comes in large measure from the way he masters a subject, marshals the facts behind an argument and then patiently and dispassionately lays out the case in his Joe Friday manner. "He never yells; he never even raises his voice," says a close friend and adviser. "He just buries you, slowly, with the force of his logic."