-Caveat Lector- The Chairman and the CEO In Incoming Corporate White House, Bush Is Seen Running Board, Cheney Effecting Policy Vice President-elect Cheney is infusing the transition to Republican George W. Bush with executives from private enterprise and the makings of a corporate culture. (Spencer Green - AP) By Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 24, 2000; Page A01 It has been fashionable in recent days for political insiders to say that Vice President-elect Cheney will become the nation's "prime minister," with President-elect Bush serving as ceremonial head of state. Cheney allies, though, reject the parliamentary analogy in favor of a corporate one: Bush as the nation's chairman of the board, Cheney as America's chief executive. Call it Bush-Cheney Inc. Chairman Bush sets the tone, sets goals and signs off on final decisions. CEO Cheney makes it happen. It would be an unprecedented role for a vice president, exceeding by far even the significant role Vice President Gore has played in the Clinton White House. The analogy seems particularly apt now that Cheney, as chairman of Bush's transition, is assembling what is arguably the most corporate administration the country has ever had. There's Cheney, fresh from oil-services giant Halliburton Co., and Bush, a Harvard MBA who successfully ran a baseball team. The new Treasury Secretary-designate, Paul H. O'Neill, hails from Alcoa and International Paper. Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, is late of an automobile trade group; domestic policy chief Josh Bolten is a Goldman Sachs alum; Commerce Secretary-designate Donald L. Evans is an oil man; Office of Management and Budget Director-designate Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. is a pharmaceutical executive; and personnel czar Clay Johnson was a mail-order honcho. The list goes on. Equally important, though, is the corporate culture infusing the administration Cheney is building: a buttoned-down operation that jealously guards information, has a rigid hierarchy and defined chain of command, and places compatibility of personnel over ideology and ends over means. At the center is Cheney himself, the quintessence of the company man -- only his company is the government. A student of power and a lifelong devotee of governance, Cheney is unusual for a modern politician, particularly for one from the Republican Party, which has come to value outsiders. Cheney came to Washington, after working for a Wisconsin governor, as a Hill staffer. He climbed his way through the Nixon and Ford administrations, then up the leadership ladder in Congress. He ran the Defense Department and helped govern a political think tank. "He was bred for governance," says Marshall Wittmann, a conservative analyst with the Hudson Institute. Along the way, Cheney developed a corporate executive's style for management. By the time he arrived at Halliburton late in life, Cheney fit right in. "He views governing more like a business," says Dave Lesar, Cheney's number two and then successor at Halliburton. So businesslike was Cheney at Halliburton that he couldn't honor his own implementation of casual Fridays. "For Dick that meant he wore a tie with a sports jacket, not a suit," Lesar says. Cheney, in an interview last week, puts his corporate style this way: "Corporation people are very much results oriented. Process is important, but it's important in order to get to an objective, to produce a result. In government, process is seen to be the be-all and end-all. In Congress, for example, nobody's responsible for what Congress does or doesn't do. They're just responsible for their individual votes." Cheney can be Machiavellian in his wielding of power. He has been known at various times to fire subordinates to demonstrate his authority. "If somebody gets too far out of line, he really has no hesitance about letting them go," says Kenneth L. Adelman, a longtime friend. "He's really very different from other top people like Ronald Reagan or Cap Weinberger, who were always reluctant to let somebody go." He also knows the managerial skill of negotiation, Adelman adds. "Cheney recognizes it's important to have fights with Congress and it's important to lose fights." While high-level government officials are notorious for their susceptibility to political and personal winds, Cheney has a managerial style that is dispassionate, even cold. He sets goals, demands efficiency, and punishes those who fail. "He is a chief executive type, unemotional," says Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who worked with Cheney when he was defense secretary. "He delegates based on performance: Here's the task, and if you don't achieve this goal, I'm going on to the next person." Cheney's view, Portman says, is "we're not family, we're colleagues." "That's unusual in government," Portman says. "Government folks are such bad managers because they have a tough time being tough." For underlings, this can be motivating -- and unnerving. "Every day's a dance with death," says a member of Cheney's staff. Asked whether he ever had occasion to feel Cheney's displeasure, Sean O'Keefe, a former secretary of the Navy, says: "Thank Christ I did not." Though his boss, the president-elect, also uses a businessman's eye in government, their two styles are quite different. Bush favors a flat hierarchy and gives authority to a wide range of underlings, common among the new generation of managers. Cheney's style, with a more tightly controlled inner circle, is reminiscent of the old-line industrial concerns. "He is very much a chain-of-command kind of guy," says a top transition aide. "He has very clear lines of authority and responsibility." Comparing Cheney and Bush, the aide says: "They both have a tendency to hub and spoke, but Cheney has a smaller wheel." Jim Stevenson, an aviation writer who had been critical of Cheney as defense secretary, puts it less kindly: "He'd surround himself with a few close associates and they'd huddle together like musk ox protecting their young." But Cheney's admirers and critics alike agree on several things. He is uncommonly dedicated to his work, he is unusually efficient for a government executive, and he is invariably successful. From his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations to Congress, the Pentagon, Halliburton and the early phases of Bush's transition, Cheney has delivered the desired result. From his early days in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Cheney's work ethic made him extreme even in a place full of workaholics. He'd arrive at 5:30 each morning and work late into the night. "It was really ridiculous," says Adelman, who worked with Cheney at President Richard M. Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity. Cheney was a Yale dropout with time as a telephone lineman on his résumé, but he also had the drive of one who was the first member of his family to go to college. Donald S. Rumsfeld noticed that quality when he hired him at the White House from an American Political Science Association fellowship. "When things would get frantic and hectic and there was a crisis here and a problem there, he would get cooler and enjoy it," Rumsfeld says. Cheney, for his part, lists Rumsfeld as his top model: congressman, White House denizen, Cabinet member, business executive. Cheney also exhibited early on a management trait that would follow him through his career: a preference for ends over means, or results over process. Around 1970, young Cheney found himself arguing with then-Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) over various government assistance programs. Cranston favored the programs because of their noble purpose, but Cheney only wanted to fund them if they could produce demonstrable results, a reasoning that would later influence his votes against the preschool program Head Start. After a few years in the House, Cheney and his wife, Lynne, set about writing what amounts to a textbook of political management. Published in 1983, the book, "Kings of the Hill," dissects the routes to power used by top House leaders such as Henry Clay, James Blaine and Sam Rayburn. "One characteristic they invariably shared was a love for the institution they served," the Cheneys wrote. Referring to Woodrow Wilson's characterization of the House as a "vast picture thronged with figures," they wrote, "One must also keep in mind the power of strong individuals to reshape the forms they find. . . . It is they who make the institution less complicated than Wilson's simile suggests." Cheney, never one for introspection, declines to say which leader's path to power most inspired him. "It's a fascinating collection," he says mildly. "I wouldn't call it a model." Cheney rose to power in the House through the Republican caucus by using his prominence as a former White House staff chief to gain immediate influence, rather than wait to build seniority. "His strength was within the caucus," says Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), a onetime colleague of Cheney's. "Everybody understood he was a different type." After just one term, Cheney became head of the Republican Policy Committee, eventually becoming the minority whip. He most likely would have become the House Republican leader if he weren't tapped to run the Pentagon. One accomplishment of Cheney's as a House leader may provide a hint about his managerial style in the new administration. He became the GOP point man on aid to the Nicaraguan contra rebels. Over several years, he held together most of the Republicans, then cobbled together a majority by courting conservative Democrats. "Dick walked around and made sure the votes would be there," Leach says. At the Defense Department, military commanders were at first stunned by the iron fist with which Cheney ruled. Just eight days into the job, he rebuked Air Force Chief of Staff Larry D. Welch in a news conference over the general's discussions with members of Congress about strategic missile modernization. Cheney called Welch's actions "inappropriate," saying he would "make known to him my displeasure." Welch, since retired, now says it was "a two-hour flap," that Cheney later explained to him privately. But at the time, says O'Keefe, "he was sending a very strong message saying we were not going to have that." The brass took another blow when Cheney fired a successor to Welch, Gen. Michael J. Dugan, who had spoken to reporters about the targeting of Saddam Hussein in the bombing of Baghdad. Cheney told Dugan that he "displayed egregious judgment," and made him the first member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be fired since 1949. "That sends a signal of accountability," says Adelman, who was with Cheney when he decided to dismiss Dugan. "That may be Dick's style with subordinates." Even luminaries such as Gens. Colin L. Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf learned not to exceed their assignments. Once, after Powell met with President George Bush to discuss the Persian Gulf War, Cheney took the Joint Chiefs chairman aside with instructions to "stick to military matters," as Powell recalled in his memoir. And when Schwarzkopf later said publicly that he had recommended continuing the ground war to Baghdad, Cheney shot back that Schwarzkopf "raised no objection to terminating hostilities." As manager of the Pentagon, Cheney showed some flexibility. He'd scrap his schedule if a subject interested him, extending a 20-minute meeting to two hours. He relished back-and-forth with subordinates who disagreed with him. But pity the adviser who wasn't up to the task. "You'd think, 'Oh God, I don't want to disappoint this guy,' " says David J. Gribben, who worked for Cheney as legislative director at the Pentagon. Though Gribben says Cheney never raises his voice or demeans an underling, assistants still dread "the thought of going in to Cheney and being found not prepared." After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cheney, as defense secretary, practiced a form of gamesmanship with Congress. Facing certain cuts, Cheney decided to put three items on the chopping block rather than let Congress do the cutting for him. He offered up cuts in the National Guard, base closures, and the V-22 Osprey, knowing full well that Congress would balk. Congress "won" the battle by refusing to make many of the cuts, but Cheney therefore had leverage in protecting his priorities. "We lost some of those battles -- and we got 90 percent of what we wanted," Gribben says. Aviation writer Stevenson, who has written a book about the A-12, an attack jet canceled by Cheney, criticizes Cheney for blaming underlings for failings that were his own. "He was the Teflon man," Stevenson says. "Others were taking the fall." Still, Stevenson has a grudging respect for Cheney's results. "He was one of the better defense secretaries," he says. "He was ready to start slashing and burning to reduce the budget." By the time he arrived at Halliburton in 1995, Cheney found it easy to convert his executive "skill set," as the management consultants call it, to the private sector. "There's no doubt Dick was very at ease in the corporate world," Halliburton's Lesar says. The pattern was almost identical. "He was all business," says Lesar, nothing touchy feely. And he immediately asserted his dominance in symbolic ways. He spent two months studying the management of Halliburton, says Lesar, then fired "three or four of the top 10." Cheney's years at Halliburton were prosperous, though it's unclear how much was Cheney's work and how much was the booming economy's doing. The firm slashed costs, restructured its balance sheet, integrated clashing divisions, modernized its technology and vastly increased its size by going on a buying spree. Cheney's pattern was the same: Give leeway to a tight band of loyalists, and punish those who transgressed. Once again, he showed ideological flexibility when it suited his managerial aims. He opposed sanctions against Iran, where Halliburton wanted to do business. "Our government has become sanctions-happy," he said in 1998. Now he supports Bush's position in favor of sanctions. Now assembling the Bush administration, Cheney inspires fear and awe among those involved in the transition. He's been serving at various points as Bush's spokesman, his legislative liaison, his personnel manager, and his strategist -- in short, his chief executive. The unusually potent role for a vice president, the Hudson Institute's Wittmann says, is what Reaganites were thinking of in 1980 when they briefly floated the idea of former president Gerald R. Ford joining the ticket as vice president with the understanding that he would be much more. "This is the Reagan-Ford relationship that never was," Wittmann says. To get an idea of how Cheney will influence the new administration, it's instructive to draw a corporate-style organization chart of the transition. The dozens of workers are divided into groups: legal, policy, strategy, administration, communications, press. Each group's head reports to Johnson, who in turn reports to Cheney, who answers only to Bush. The only person who reports directly to Bush other than Cheney, transition officials say, is White House staff chief Card -- who also answers to Cheney in a dotted-line relationship. Such an arrangement might confuse those accustomed to Bush-Quayle or even Clinton-Gore. But it should look familiar to the folks at General Electric. © 2000 The Washington Post Company ___________________________________ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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