I picked up this book from the library the other day, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet by James Mann. It is a detailed account of the 35-year histories of the top six members of the Vulcans (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Armitage, Rice)--"Bush's inner circle of advisers who have a long, shared experience in government, dating back to the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and first Bush administrations." It's a little dry, but it has been interesting to read in more detail about how these people's histories are connected.
If anyone in America had the government experience to respond to a terrorist attack upon Washington, it was Cheney. As President Ford's deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff, Cheney had mastered the inner workings of White House operations right down to the salt shakers and plumbing. In Congress he had worked on the House Intelligence Committee, learning how the CIA and America's several other intelligence agencies operate. As defense secretary he had been in charge of the U.S. armed forces. Above all, although almost nobody knew it, during the 1980's Cheney had been one of the leading participants in the highly classified planning to maintain continuity of government and set up a new presidential chain of command if America was under nuclear attack.
chapter nineteen
More:
At least once a year during the 1980's, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was still working diligently on Capital Hill, and Rumsfeld remained a hard-driving business executive in Chicago. Yet for three of four days at a time, no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Rumsfeld's offices locate him. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number through which they might relay messages in case of emergencies... ...After leaving their day jobs, Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man, joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and a single member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, separately slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a discarded military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear made its way to the same location.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal figures in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan administration. Under it, the administration furtively carried out detailed planning exercise to establish a new American "president" and his staff, outside and beyond the specifications of the U.S. Constitution, in order to keep the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Over the years a few details about the existence of this Reagan-era effort have come to light, but not the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld... ...This was not some abstract textbook plan but was practiced in concrete, thorough and elaborate detail. The Reagan administration assigned personnel to three teams...Each team included an experienced leader, who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had already served at high level in the executive branch, preferably with experience in the national security apparatus. This was where Cheney and Rumsfeld came in since they had previously served as White House chief of staff in the Ford administration. Besides Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were regulars, other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of Central Intelligence, and Kenneth Duberstein, who worked for a time as Reagan's real-life White House chief of staff.
~snip~
... Reagan's secret program set aside these constitutional and statutory requirements under some circumstances; it established its own process for creating a new American president, ignoring the hierarchy of presidential succession established by law... ...Reagan established his continuity of government program under a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's national security adviser, the president himself made the final decision on who would head each of the special teams, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. Within Reagan's National Security Council, the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North...Vice President George H. W. Bush was given authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government building in the Washington area...and a secret budget...used to buy advanced communications equipment (apparently, some of the info about this secret program came about because of allegations of waste and abuses in awarding these communications contracts to private companies--Emit)
...Cheney and Rumsfeld were familiar with the Armageddon exercises of the Reagan era. They themselves had practiced all the old drills... ...except for Rumsfeld's brief stint as Middle East envoy, neither he nor Cheney ever served in the Reagan administration. Nevertheless, as team leaders Cheney and Rumsfeld played important roles in this project...Moreover, their participation in these Reagan-era exercises demonstrated a broader underlying truth about Cheney and Rumsfeld: Over three decades, from the Ford administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never too far away; they stayed in touch with its defense, military and intelligence officials and were regularly called upon by those officials. Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which presidents may come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.
from chapter nine
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