Republican Convention: Dick Cheney: The Insider

There are a lot of reasons why George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney as his running mate. Charisma isn't one of them. When the Gulf War ended, you could have made a ticker-tape parade just from the press clips devoted to Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. In that media rush Cheney went mostly unnoticed, though as the hawkish Secretary of Defense, it was he as much as anyone who put in motion the military option against Saddam. That's what a retiring manner will sometimes get you. On a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when Cheney was a powerful but mostly unassuming Congressman, he and a few other House members killed some time with a pop-psychology test. It was supposed to indicate the profession best suited to your personality. Cheney's turned out to be funeral director.

Henry Hyde, the Illinois Congressman, got it right a few years ago. "Dick doesn't make you want to throw your shoes over the Riggs National Bank Building," he said. "But he makes you nod affirmatively when you're thinking about a cool, competent, smart guy with good judgment, and a conservative." There were a lot of affirmative nods last week, even among some Democrats, when George W. settled on Cheney. Like the elder George Bush, he has a serious resume, with stops at the White House, Congress and the Pentagon, plus a career that hit warp speed when he was just 34 and became Gerald Ford's chief of staff. "He's bright. He doesn't have a mean streak. He deals with issues, not personalities. He doesn't run to the cameras," says Lee Hamilton, a leading House Democrat when Cheney was minority whip, the No. 2 G.O.P. leadership post in the House. "Dick always has been a person you can take ideas to and see how he reacts to them. You can confide in him."

Whether he confides in you is another matter. Around Washington, Cheney has long had a reputation as affable but guarded, easy to like but hard to read. In The Commanders, Bob Woodward's account of top-level decision making during the Panama invasion and the Gulf War, Powell, whom Cheney had recommended to be head of the Joint Chiefs and who depended on Cheney as a pipeline to Cabinet meetings he did not sit in on, complains that "Cheney comes back from the White House and tells nothing." Pete Williams, an NBC News correspondent who was for years Cheney's press spokesman, used to joke about how the capital was full of Che-ney watchers, a breed like Kremlin watchers, who would try to fathom the man's thinking from whatever small signs he gave.