Word: cheneys
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...around that time, in 1983, that Cheney and his wife Lynne co-wrote Kings of the Hill, a very readable history of House leadership. One of their conclusions was that many of the most effective Speakers rose to power by taking an obscure post within the institution and making it important. Cheney did just that with the House Republican Policy Committee, a moribund operation whose chief function when he reached it in 1980 after only one term in Congress was to crank out explanations to members of the G.O.P. position on various issues. Cheney turned it into an internal party...
...newly elected President George Bush ran into trouble with his first nominee for Defense Secretary, Texas Senator John Tower. Facing accusations about heavy drinking, womanizing and security lapses, Tower withdrew his name. Bush, who needed a new nominee who would get a quick confirmation from Congress, reached for Cheney, a popular Congressman. Cheney, who had little hope of reaching his dream of Speaker so long as the Democrats had a lock on the majority, quickly accepted. He was approved by a Senate vote...
That was the year the Berlin Wall came down, but Cheney arrived at the Pentagon as a Gorbachev skeptic, unconvinced that this was the beginning of a new era in which the U.S. defense budget could be reduced by much. In the end, he delivered a 25% cut in the military, which required a major rethinking of Pentagon doctrine, and an ambitious and politically difficult plan for closing military bases in the U.S. He also went after some of the expensive but dubious weapons programs he had supported in Congress. He canceled the Navy's $57 billion A-12 attack...
...months leading up to the Gulf War, Cheney was far more aggressive about countering Saddam Hussein by military means than Powell, who, like Baker, believed that economic sanctions would bring Iraq to heel. Just two days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Cheney was pushing for American troops to go in to defend Saudi Arabia. "Dick was probably ahead of his military on this," Bush wrote in his and Scowcroft's memoir, A World Transformed. Cheney was dispatched to Saudi Arabia for one of the most sensitive missions of the war, persuading King Fahd to agree to a massive deployment...
When Bill Clinton unexpectedly ended the Bush years, Cheney found himself for the first time in decades without a government job or the prospect of one. Eventually he entered the same line of work as the Bush family, the oil business. The Halliburton Co., where Cheney has been CEO for the past five years, is the world's leading supplier of oil-field equipment. It hasn't been a job that requires charisma. Its labor and environmental practices have opened him up to attack. But it's been a job that in some ways he has done pretty well...