Reply #13: Here's more

[Emit]

Cheney was the dominant figure on September 11. It was he who urged the president to fly to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, which had secure communications facilities. It was he who ordered that House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other congressional leaders be taken out of town to one of the Eisenhower-era bunkers built for use if America was under nuclear attack. In subsequent interviews explaining his actions on September 11, the vice president spoke blandly about the importance of ensuring presidential succession in a crisis. He never mentioned the clandestine exercises in which he and Donald Rumsfeld, accompanied by scores of civil servants, had occasionally sneaked out of Washington in the middle of the night to practice, for several days at a time, how to run America during a nuclear attack.

Soon after Bush returned to Washington on the night of September 11, Cheney began spending time at Camp David, so that he was outside the capital while the president was at home. As the autumn progressed and as American forces went to war in Afghanistan, the vice president was often reported to be working in an "undisclosed location" out of Washington. Eventually, the "undisclosed location" turned into a national joke, a routine for the comedy shows. It became part of Cheney's identity. The blend of solemnity and mystery was fitting for a man who, throughout his career, had embodied the twin propositions that (a) running a government was weighty, unglamorous business and that (b) he always had some secrets he could not discuss.

On September 11 there was one thing Cheney did not do: He did not address the nation. While running the Presidential Emergency Operation Center, he sent out no words of reassurance, delivered no "fight-them-to-the-beaches" oratory. That was the president's job, and for Cheney, the Silent Man, it was certainly just as well; if he was playing the role of Churchill, then it was Churchill without vocal cords. The president stumbled as he spoke to the country that night, but he recovered his public standing in a speech the following week.

While Cheney was by nature uncommunicative, there were also political forces at work to keep him mute. Inside the White House, a number of powerful people -- staff members like Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser, and Karen Hughes, the communications director -- spent their days ensuring that the president got full public attention and credit for being in charge of the battle against terrorism. After Cheney appeared on television on the Sunday after September 11 and gave an extraordinarily detailed, coherent account both of the events of that day and of the administration's emerging response, the vice president virtually disappeared from the airwaves for months. There were delicate suggestions that in the early days of the crisis he might have overshadowed the president.

Still, out of public view, Cheney was omnipresent, even when he was off in an undisclosed location and was participating in the administration's meetings only with his image and voice piped in on Secvid, the secure video teleconferencing system. It was Cheney's specter that hovered over the administration's policy deliberations, its internal wrangling, its decision making. Other administration officials could handle the TV interviews, the show business. But over virtually every foreign policy action the Bush administration took, whether on terrorism of Afghanistan, the Middle East or Iraq, there always loomed the ghost of this balding, white-haired, slightly pudgy, bespectacled man of deeply conservative views who took government seriously and worked as the consummate inside operator.

Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, pp. 296-297