Cheney landing at Kabul, Afghanistan, earlier this year. Photo by Mark Silva

by Mark Silva

TAMPA --On the hustings, where Vice President Dick Cheney seldom is seen, the single most influential member of the Bush administration other than the president likes to unleash vivid rhetoric about the terrorism the nation has suffered and the dangers it still faces.

"One doesn't need a dramatic cast of mind to believe that our world really did change six years ago," Cheney said in recent and rare public appearances in Tampa and in Grand Rapids, Mich. "There will be no running, or relenting, until the problem has been dealt with -- decisively, systematically and permanently."

With his unrelenting reminders of the catastrophe the nation confronted on Sept. 11, 2001, and perils that remain, the vice president is the most persistent purveyor of the Bush administration's most aggressive case for the war in Iraq. Even while Gen. David Petraeus' testimony attracted widespread media attention, the single-mindedness of Cheney's war campaign, and the fierceness of his attacks on critics, have served to rally the base of the Republican Party.

And now, as President Bush appeals to Congress and the public for support for more war funding, Cheney is raising his profile. He argues -- as he did in a recent op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal -- that "the events of 9/11 are the defining moment of the era from the standpoint of national security."

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In some ways, Cheney's message is a reprise of his role throughout the Bush presidency -- using harsher rhetoric than other officials and aiming it at Bush's most loyal supporters. But now his role is magnified by the departure of most of Bush's inner circle, including Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove.

While other Iraq war supporters are cautious about linking that conflict with the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney is not.

"The terrorists have been at war with the United States for a long time," Cheney said in Florida and Michigan. "And after 9/11 this nation made a decision: We're at war with them."

Despite health problems, Cheney has outlasted not only Rumsfeld and Rove but also former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales, ex-Chief of Staff Andrew Card and others. Only Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, remains of the original close-knit Bush-Cheney team.

"In the early parts of the first term, Cheney was far less of a public persona," said James Mann, author of "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet." "Now, because he is more isolated from these old allies like Rumsfeld ... and because he is a little more out on his own, and he sees debates inside the administration not going his way as much as they did before, there is more of this public voice in the wilderness -- dire warnings, doom, gloom -- than in the first term," Mann said.

So while Bush attempts to wield more conciliatory words about cooperating with Congress, Cheney attacks. Days before Bush was pressed at a news conference to comment on a MoveOn.org newspaper advertisement lambasting Petraeus -- Bush called the ad "disgusting" -- Cheney started the administration's offensive against Democrats for not denouncing it.

"It's bad enough when politicians turn their backs on a war they voted for and supported when it was popular," Cheney said to applause Sept. 17 at a GOP fundraiser in Kansas City, Mo. "But no one in politics, regardless of party, should hesitate to object when an American soldier at war is mocked and insulted."

Democrats say they welcome the attacks of a figure whom opinion polls portray as even less popular than the president.

"The bottom line is that the public just doesn't believe what the vice president has to say anymore, and hasn't for some time," said Matt Miller, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "If he is the messenger that the administration wants to send out to sell a failed policy, then so be it. We will gladly have that argument with them."

"The guy has always been more conservative than people thought, though he was perceived as a moderate when he started out in the Ford administration," Mann said. "He had risen through, and he was good at paperwork and bureaucracy."

Now, in announcing the withdrawal of 21,000 combat troops from Iraq by the middle of next summer, the president has called on Congress to work with him. But Cheney is holding lawmakers who press for a quicker withdrawal to account for what he considers political motives.

"President Bush will make his decisions based on the national interest and nothing else," Cheney told audiences at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and at the Ford Museum. "Not by artificial measures, not by political calculations and not by poll numbers."

Cheney's own view of the challenge confronting the United States hasn't softened. The war, he believes, is the culmination of a long-running conflict with terrorists intent on destruction of the U.S.

Adm. William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, introduced Cheney to 550 troops at MacDill as "a strategic thinker who has served our nation for 40 years ... a man with vast experience in the crucible of national security."

After four decades in public life, Cheney, who has suffered four heart attacks, has a defibrillator in his chest. He recently had it replaced for a worn battery. He also suffered a blood clot in his leg after a trip around the world, which involved 65 hours of air travel over nine days.

In February, Cheney made a nine-day, globe-circling voyage to tout the administration's war policy in speeches from Japan to Guam to Australia.

He made surprise stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he awoke one morning at Bagram Air Base to the alarms of a suicide attack at the gate of the base that killed several personnel. The vice president, far from the scene, was untouched. But the attack served as a dramatic reminder of the messages he had delivered along the way.

In his speeches, Cheney offers a ready bill of particulars to make his case. He starts by citing a history of attacks against the U.S., beginning with the 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel.

"Ultimately, of course, they attacked the homeland on 9/11," Cheney said. "The terrorists are betting that Americans will grow tired, distracted and weak. That's a bet the terrorists are going to lose."

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Mum's the word

Vice President Dick Cheney, who has served four presidents and served as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, has a penchant for secrecy so strong that he refuses to report to the National Archives the volume of material that he classifies and declassifies, as the Archives requires.

"I'm told that researchers like to come and dig through my files, to see if anything interesting comes up," Cheney said to laughter at a Sept. 14 speech at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. "I wish them luck, but the files are pretty thin. I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don't write any."