7 Clues To Understanding Dick Cheney

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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.