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Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kal Raustiala and I am director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to our first ever, totally online events. We are doing this with our special guest, Jim Mann, who is the author of The Great Rift, the book we'll be talking about today, and is the author of many books about foreign policy. In fact, I'd say probably my favorite kind of historian and chronicler of recent foreign policy issues. So Jim has covered in the past the Obama administration, the Bush administration's foreign policy team, and in this book, he addresses the very close at one time and then much less close to the end relationship between Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, both, of course, enormous failures during the Bush years, but also going back really into the 70s and 80s. And he Chronicles that relationship.

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as it evolves, so it's a great pleasure to welcome Jim. I'm going to turn it over to him in one second. Before I do that, I just want to explain how this will work. I will kind of hand the screen over to Jim in a moment, he will present his book talk about his book for a while, he and I will then have a conversation split screen. And then I will take some questions from all of you and what, what you can do is send in those questions typed in, of course, we will pick a few. We have hundreds of people watching right now. So don't be discouraged if your question doesn't get chosen. But we should have time for a few and we'll wrap in about an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. So quick introduction of Jim as I mentioned, he's chronicled many, many foreign policy issues in the past. He was a longtime reporter for the LA Times. And he is currently a fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS the School of Advanced International Studies in DC. So

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Jim, let me turn it over to you.

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Thank you, everyone, thanks for either watching or listening in.

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This is my most recent book, I will hold it up

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called the Great Rift. And it's it's really about the lives and the careers and the ideas

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of Dick Cheney and Colin Powell to former officials who are now both alive but well out of the limelight. But there was a time when they dominated the news and the airwaves every bit as much as say, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Brooks do now only much more so and for much longer periods of time, in fact, years at a time

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and the book is about

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debates of that era, which now, in the current climate seemed like a long time ago, this book is really a history of a period which has now passed. So, Powell and Cheney were among the leading figures of the period from about 1988 to 2008. The two decades, which really we could call the the post Cold War period, the Berlin Wall came down in 1987. And during that 20, year period 88 to 2008.

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Powell served for nine years and as in a been in several positions, he was a national security adviser. He was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he was Secretary of State he served under four presidents because he served in Reagan's last year and his time has been

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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff lasted into the first year of the Clinton administration. That's so so Powell served in office for longer than any of the Presidents I mean, never to two term president during that period. One was,

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I mean, George W. Bush and before him, Bill Clinton, they served for eight years, so Powell was longer. And Dick Cheney served for longer than that, because he was Secretary of Defense under George HW Bush, and then vice president under George W. Bush. So if just for sheer longevity, these guys were the dominant figures of the era. And they work for a time in the first Bush administration so closely together, that at later on, Powell said we could just about finish each other's sentences. In the second George W. Bush administration, they became bitter adversaries, the contrast

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Between these two guys interested me, there was a time when Colin Powell was so popular that many people thought he could have been President of the United States. And in fact, he thought of running before deciding not to in 1995 and six.

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On the other hand, Cheney was so powerful that there was a time when many people thought he was the president of the United States. There were certainly jokes about that, in the early years of George W. Bush's administration. And there are lots of ironies inherent and looking at these two guys.

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Powell

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thought of Cheney and Cheney's partner in service, Donald Rumsfeld, the two of them as politicians, because in fact, both of them were for a time elected members of Congress.

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And yet it was Powell who was the charismatic figure who was great with crowds the way you think a politician should be.

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So in reverse, Cheney thought of Powell as more politician than policymaker.

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And it's hard to believe now. But during this period,

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everybody, this post Cold War period, everyone shared an assumption that no longer seems so obvious that the United States was without challenge the leader of the world. And and the debate was really over how the United States should exercise that power. Should it seek to maintain the status quo that it held at the end of the of the Cold War? Or should it seek to try and reorder existing arrangements in places like the Middle East? Should the United States continue to work in tandem with its cold war allies, or should it operate mostly on its own and overall today, we're living with the consequences.

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of the choices that were made during that period, up to and including the war in Iraq. Now the book starts much earlier in the Vietnam era,

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which were, which was a formative experience in different ways for each of these two guys.

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For Powell served in the military, he served two tours in Vietnam. He was injured if one of them and he came away from that period.

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With a deep mistrust of Washington's willingness

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and the decision making in fighting that war, he came away with bitter denunciations of what he called the slide rule of bureaucrats in Washington and the translation. For slide rule bureaucrats usually meant Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the leading figure in Washington in prosecuting that war

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Cheney, for Cheney, Vietnam was also a formative experience but in a different way.

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Cheney was not in the military. He didn't fight.

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As he once said he had other priorities during that period.

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But he was a rising young official, really an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon and then the Gerald Ford administrations. And it was during the Ford administration that in reaction to Vietnam,

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Congress began passing a series of restrictions on the powers of the presidency. Most famously it passed the War Powers Act. But there were a whole bunch of more specific measures saying what, what the United States could or could not do in places around the world whether it was Southeast Asia or Angola, and Cheney was serving in the White House during that period.

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He'd be eventually became White House Chief of Staff. And so what he took from this Vietnam era

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was that Congress was intruding too much on the powers of the executive. And that that it would be optimal to reverse these trends. And he spent much of his career in trying to loosen and oppose congressional restrictions on the powers of the President.

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So these two guys form something of a partnership, dating starting in the mid 80s. At that point, cheney has been elected to Congress. He served for several years, and he's emerging as a leading foreign policy and intelligence expert within the Congress. Powell is in the military.

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They actually meet when there's a congressional delegation

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to Germany where Powell is a commander, and the two guys meet for the first time. But then shortly after Powell serves in Germany he's asked to become the deputy White House Chief of Staff. There's a staff shake up in the Reagan administration. And Frank Carlucci is named National Security Advisor. And Powell I said Deputy Chief of Staff but he'd become became the Deputy National Security Adviser under

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under Carlucci

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and

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he begins to deal with Congress and he finds that the go to guy for him to deal with and he needs things he needs money. There's a secret intelligence programming

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He needs funding for a bunch of other things any anybody in the White House knows he would like to have some go to people in Congress Cheney was Powell's go to guy. And they form a friendship and I document in the book because I found their correspondence. The little notes back and forth when Cheney is sick, Powell writes a note Cheney writes Powell notes Good luck as he's leaving the Reagan administration. They become in Powell's description, buddies.

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And their thing stands, they go about their business and in the earliest days of the George HW Bush administration,

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until Cheney becomes defense secretary and brings in his choice Colin Powell, to be the the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and during

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During that period, through the George HW Bush administration, they formed something of a partnership. They have disagreements, but they continue to

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work very closely with each other. They fight to military conflicts together, one in Panama, and then the Gulf War at the time by far the biggest war the United States had carried out

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since Vietnam. They were, you know, after the victory in the Gulf War, they ride up.

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Broadway together in New York and victory parade.

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They are mentioned together as possible candidates for president

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and

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as that administration is leaving office, the two of them still

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seem quite good friends and they remain that way through the 90s. An awful lot happens in the 90s. So in ways that will ultimately tug these guys apart, Cheney is a loyal Republican, and the Republican Party is moving to the right. And the United States is finding that sometimes it's kind of a pain in the neck to work with its allies the way it had in the Cold War. There are disputes over what to do in Bosnia and in the Balkans in general. And maybe it's easier to just abandon the allies. That's one line of thinking there.

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So they take office in the

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at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, and from almost from the beginning, there are at odds on policy issues. There's Korea. There's a whole bunch of international treaties that Cheney and the people around him would like to get out on and so on.

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And by the time of, to about 2002, they are very much at odds over whether to go to war in Iraq. Now, I'm going to pass over in the interest of time the details on Iraq.

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But

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and I'll leave that for questions of which, you know, I'm sure there will be.

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And let me just turn to one of the

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interesting issues that I address in the book, which is what caused this change. Did Cheney change? The one of the things you hear regularly even from former senior officials that is the Cheney somehow changed when, during the second Bush administration.

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Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser from the first bush administrator

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said, I don't know Cheney anymore.

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And there are an awful lot of people who say that, and all kinds of reasons are given. I mean, I joke that everybody knows some cardiologist somewhere at the dinner table, who told them that Cheney's heart attack could have changed his personality.

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Or Colin Powell says the difference between the two administrations was that the presidents were different.

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Or there's a line of argument that maybe Powell.. maybe Cheney was influenced in the second administration by his wife, Lynne, which doesn't make sense because he was married to Lynne, in the first administration well before that, too.

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So I examine these theories one by one and

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and Cheney's career and I say, look, Cheney was always conservative. His voting record there was a point in Congress

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When he came out to tell his press A Will you call the Washington Post and tell them I'm not a moderate? I'm a conservative,

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because people would portray him as somehow a centrist or moderate. When that's not what his record show. Why did they think that?

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Why did people think I call it the myth of the moderate Cheney?

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Well, one reason was Cheney's manner. So Cheney did not act and behave like Newt Gingrich. He was not confrontational. His manner was that of a CEO. He always talked as though everything was under control, although we would find out eventually, that really it wasn't.

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So what one was his manner and the other is what I call his hired gun theory, which is he once said, as he was about to run for Congress for the first time, some reporter from Washington,

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Ask them, how can you be a low lowly Congressman, when you've been White House Chief of Staff and he said, Well, when you're White House Chief of Staff,

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you're a hired gun.

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And

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all through his early career, he would carry out other people's

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orders and ideas. And

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eventually, he got to be vice president in a role where he was actually encouraged to advise the new president who had less experience in him. So he eventually what changed about Cheney was his rank eventually rose to a position where you didn't have to worry about being a hired gun anymore. And at that point, I'm going to hold up I think I've used up my time and just to say that it turned out that

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distinctive characteristic about Cheney was that amid all his all his certainties he can he conveyed this era of certainty. It turned out that he was wrong on some very big things about American power, but what can i estates could do and how other countries would react to it. And that turned out to be the distinctive

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characteristic of Dick Cheney. And so let me hold up there and I welcome your questions now.

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Okay, well, thanks, Jim. That was great. Great overview. Great start. Let me ask a couple of questions. To begin, I've read the book, I really enjoyed it. It's sort of interesting to read a history of something that I lived through, and I'm sure a lot of the viewers lived through or at least lived through parts of it, and to kind of dig down into things that you know, you remember in a certain way, but now you see in a different light. So I really applaud you for the good work on the book.

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Let's talk about Iraq a little bit first, because you kind of your remarks said, I'm going to skip over that. And obviously, that's a big deal, for many reasons. So I guess first question would be,

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to what degree do you think that Cheney or Powell? When did they know that things were not going well with Iraq? And were they really both true believers until so Powell gives the famous presentation before the UN Security Council, which now is really a kind of stain on his career. And I know he views it that way. Cheney seems to not really backtrack at all on a rock until it's so overwhelmingly obvious that it's a disaster and even then his backtracking is pretty minor. But did you find that kind of buried in the records or internal conversations, they knew more than they were letting on early on?

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So First of all, it's a mistake to think that Powell

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was a direct opponent of the war. That's not the way it came across.

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Powell, his biggest mistake was this he had reservations about intervening. But But he chose to express those reservations with tactical things. So the biggest, first of all, amazingly, this is one of the biggest things I found in the book. There is no single meeting at which a decision is made to go to war in Iraq. It's actually astonishing. I thought it would be there in the record. It's not.

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They have increasingly intense debates about whether to go to war in the summer of 2002. And what Powell argues, then, is essentially to deflect and delay going to war, he says, and he's the Secretary of State. He's worried about Americans as

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We can't do this without going to the United Nations. And that is the debate Cheney argues as he did during the Gulf War, we don't have to go to the United Nations palace as we do. And eventually bush sides with Powell, and actually long forgotten now, there is about two or three months of winning support for a first United Nations resolution.

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Which is then if you opened up your watch your Washington Post, or a New York Times in November, December of 2002, which say, great victory for Colin Powell, because he won a unanimous United Nations resolution that sort of authorized something with Iraq but didn't specifically authorize military action. There are things that Powell does also tell Bush that he thinks if we are going to go to war

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The force that's being used is not sufficient.

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But that's kind of written off as well. That's the Powell doctrine.

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Give just take a moment to explain the Powell doctrine. Yeah. Sorry.

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what's called the Powell doctrine actually originated with Ronald Reagan's defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, and then embraced by Powell was, you do not go to war

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on, first of all, without strong public support, and a clear mission, and if you do, and this is the part mostly associated with Powell do so. When you do it, you do it with overwhelming force. And that's the way Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs carried out military action Panama and in the Gulf War. And new Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld thought, well, that's old fashioned. You know, we can we can do this with lighter, faster

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forces turned out to be not such a good idea. Was that good? I'm sorry to keep it. This is the stuff is always so interesting. And was Rumsfeld. So I've met Rumsfeld. And he's, you know, he's an impressive person in some ways who made colossal mistakes in other ways. Is this an example where he genuinely believed that a light footprint in Iraq could work? Or he knew that politically, we were never going to mount? A Gulf War style overwhelming force approach? I would say both. Both. Yeah.

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I'm left let me come to the UN resolution for with which Powell is now rightly closely identified.

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At the end of 2002, it's clear the United States is headed for war because while during palace mistake about going to the UN and that that would be

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The resolution of this is that during the time that the UN is dealing with this in the fall of 2002, America's troops are rolling into the middle east by the 10s of thousands. So they're sitting there, Bush's ready to go to war. And he asks the CIA First, draw me up the case for war. How am I going to explain this a little bit? I know it sounds crazy to say, okay, we're ready to go to war. Now we have to figure out why we're doing it. But that's really what happened. And he gets memos. He gets memos from CIA staff,

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and a couple of other people, and they include all kinds of other things. Cheney was a believer in the idea that Iraq was linked to terrorism. So there's a whole set there's a memo with a whole bunch of different reasons. And then separately, Bush assigns the job of explaining this to

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To the UN, to PAL and Powell says, first of all, I'm not going to take this memo from the Chinese staff. I'm going to draw up my own speech and he goes out to the CIA. And he goes over the evidence, because he doesn't want this Cheney stuff. He's going to take what the CIA gives them and he does the speech that that he gives, has as its basic blueprint material from the CIA, about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. The problem was, Powell had focused so much on getting rid of the Cheney staff material, that he hadn't really scrutinized the the CIA's material well enough, and at the end of all this down the road, he ends up angry at the CIA for misleading him. So to come to your question about after once the invasion started.

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Cheney continues to hang to the idea that all is going well. And he uses the phrase after a few months that first he and Rumsfeld refuse to use the word insurgency for what's happening in Iraq. And then they keep saying that the war is in its death throes Cheney says this, not just a after a year or two, I think even two or three years later, he's still using the word death throes that did not turn out to be true.

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How I mean, Powell, I think how publicly holds for about six or eight months to the idea that okay, you know, let's see what's happening in the war he, but after a while, he's, you know, he goes, he gives up the illusion that everything is going well

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and was that when you use

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titled The book, The Great Rift. And you start off as you described in your, in your opening remarks with stories about how these two guys you don't at first blush seem very similar end up becoming pretty close clearly have a great working relationship or even friendly in a personal way, but then by the end basically hate each other. And you end the book with this anecdote about flying to Texas for a special event, I forgetting exactly what the event was, they're all on a private plane from DC and they won't even look at each other practically. And then they start chatting a little bit, but initially they get on the plane, they don't even talk. So so there's clearly an arc of, of a friendship to kind of almost hatred was the Iraq War, the signal feature that led to that or did it start earlier or kind of flesh that that arc out a little bit? Um, well, first of all, the event you mentioned was in 2011. And it was the anniversary the 20th anniversary.

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We have the Gulf War, where they were

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successful partners, generally speaking, they've gotten along well and the George HW Bush library and Texas a&m decided to have a anniversary event and invited many of the participants. At first they couldn't get how or and Cheney to appear together on the same stage. They didn't want to. They agreed and when there was a plane charter to take them down from Washington. Yes, that's right. The atmosphere was described by participants. It's just incredibly chilling. Ryan Crocker, who was heading the library,

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you know, says that it was hard to get the two guys

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to look at each other.

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When did that start? Well, you know, I've described how Cheney's style

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was not like Newt Gingrich in style. He was not confrontational.

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Or he tended to shirk from just pointless screaming he would tell you, you know, obviously some very tough guy tell you disagree. But, you know, he was not a Gingrich screamer.

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So he wasn't confrontational and Powell style was very much of as bad of an insider.

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So

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just even though he was so good with crowds, he was really had come through come up through the ranks as an insider. So they never really confronted each other. I have an amazing quote from Colin Powell a wonderful double negative, he kind of was musing about it. He said, Well, we were never not friends.

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Meaning in you know, in dealing with each other It wasn't, you know, you know, I hate you and hate you.

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Jim, can you repeat that you froze for a moment. You have a wonderful quote, and then you froze. Yeah, there's a wonderful quote that I have from an interview with Powell, where he thought about it and said, Well, you know, we were never not friends, meaning they never really had it out directly

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to one another, directly to one another. to one another one on one. Um, when did it start?

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It started with the earliest days of the George W. Bush administration. Well, before September 11.

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They were at odds over several issues. Again, Powell was the secretary of state and was eager to work in concert with allies. There was a a controversy over global warming and the Kyoto accords were

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Cheney one and out one of the US out

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And managed to pull one of these maneuvers where he got pushed to sign something before Powell ever saw it.

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So it was like that it was over policies.

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You know if you talk about the personal level on the personal side just to show you that when the administration was taking office,

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they were still friends

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during the transition of 2000, after Bush had been elected

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or declared the winter by the Supreme Court.

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There's a Thanksgiving. Cheney Cheney has a heart attack and it's in the hospital and it's going to last through Thanksgiving. So he can't have Thanksgiving dinner at home with his family. And that Thanksgiving dinner is brought to the hospital by Alma panel colon panels wife. So their efforts at close

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personal relations. The disagreements were really over how the United States should deal with the world. But they got they definitely got to the point where they were ugly.

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Let me ask you about Cheney's motivations, because in some ways, he's more of a, certainly more of a cipher than Powell. Powell, people always wonder, as you alluded to, why did he not run for president? When he had a chance he was incredibly popular, and probably could have done well, though. He didn't have experience as a politician directly. Cheney does end up being a politician, he actually gets elected at various times Congress, he's vice president. But Cheney, you know, is kind of has this enduring fascination for a lot of people because he's so dark. And what is he really all about what's really motivating him? And one of the things that you discuss which I've seen elsewhere, if Cheney was really fixated on regaining the power of the presidency that he felt post Vietnam had been taken away by Congress, seized by Congress, and that's

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President the presidency needed to be put back in its rightful place at the center of American politics. And that seems to be a kind of guiding principle for him. So I guess two questions flow from that. Why did he think that President? Why does he think that presidential power is so important? So many of the policy disputes with power, are often about kind of unilateralism in the global dimension, but also about the president being able to decide everything. But in addition,

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how has you alluded to this a bit in the book, but how has Cheney reacted to Trump? So now we have a president who,

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in some ways, supports a lot of things that Cheney liked, and other ways is totally unhinged in a way that Cheney does not like, or I assume Cheney does not like does not support past changing positions. So if you could kind of address both of those things, where does Chinese fascination with executive power come from? And then what's his view on Trump? How is he articulated that? Well, let me I'll start with one other thing you talk about Chinese motivation.

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And I'm sure many of the people watching this have seen the movie deep and nice. But Excuse me. Yeah, Veep is excellent, but something else

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in advice, you see a Cheney and All he cares about his power he and Rumsfeld, all they care about is his power. And I thought that was dead dead roll, because it leaves out Cheney's beliefs. You know, there's a scene at the beginning of the movie where it's him and and Rumsfeld, you know, what do we care about? It's sort of it doesn't matter.

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And, you know, I think underlying Cheney has a lot of convictions about American power

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that the United States is and should be the most powerful nation on Earth that we

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that we should build up our military power Cheney's actual written blueprint

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was the United States, which was issued at the end of the Gulf War, United States should maintain so much power that that no other country in the country would be crazy to even try and build up. It's spent so much money to build up its power.

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So that's the that's the motivation.

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And the executive power is is you can't build up American power without a strong presidents not you know, Congress can approve all the defense budgets and what it wants. But if you don't have a powerful president,

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you're not going to get to where Cheney wants you to be.

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Far as Trump that's a very interesting question. I do address it at the, at the in the last chapter of the book.

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There are there's a school of thinking that I see regularly comes up on the left, that all conservatives are alike.

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Well, they're not and Trump did not arise from changing. And you can see that, in part from Cheney's own reactions to some of what Trump has done. So he denounced the involvement of Russia in the campaign. He did. He denounced Russia and Trump for not taking strong action against Russia. There was a private meeting reported where he turret were Cheney, this is at a retreat of a think tank, cheney is there and he turns to pence the Vice President, and basically says what you know, really

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gives him a tough time for the Trump policies towards North Korea, thinking he can do a deal with with Kim Kim Jong on and so on. So, Chinese foreign policy is not Trump's foreign policy. That's for sure.

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I'm in the nitty gritty of Washington. There are things that Trump does for Cheney. I can't say for Cheney because I don't know that but certainly, at one point after a year or so in Trump pardons screwed up Scooter Libby, who is Chinese chief of staff.

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Cheney had tried

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very hard in the in the final weeks of the Bush administration to get his own president department, Scooter Libby and bush wouldn't do it. So there there are certainly parts of this.

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Parts of what Trump does that Cheney approves of but overall, they really come there's there's no populist in Dick Cheney. No, he's an anti populist. I mean, you describe how he almost disparages American public opinion

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grabbing interview, I think

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Martha Raddatz is interviewing him at one point about how unpopular the Iraq war is. I think I'm getting this right. And that's right. And so they're just terrible. And and the American people hate this, and Cheney says, so. Oh, yeah. He just couldn't, could not care less about what people thought about him. Right. Okay, so I want to go to questions from the audience. There's a lot of them. Just one last one before we do just on a point you just made is one of the fundamental differences between Cheney's vision of the republican party and foreign policy and Trump's that Trump Trump has a kind of strategy. Trump as a deal maker and believes in making deals whenever possible. And it seemed like Cheney was not really a deal maker. That wasn't how he operated. Is that kind of an important distinction that we'll see in the future in the Republican Party about whether or not you know, Trump is often described as transactional? I don't think of Cheney as transactional, but let me know how you view it. Oh, I think that's exactly right.

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Don't think of Cheney is transactional at all. He knows where he wants to go. And he, he has an idea. I'm speaking in the present tense now, but he had an idea of what he wanted. And sure.

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If he had to, if he was going to get nothing at all, yes, he'd served in Congress and knew that sometimes you had to compromise, but he hated doing it. And, you know, with Trump, you get an idea that each transaction is separate with Cheney.

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He has his priorities, and he's gonna, you can tell on each individual case where he was going to come out.

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Okay, great. So a lot of good questions. I'm gonna just kind of read through a few. I'll go one by one. And we'll end in maybe 20 minutes or so. So. So one thing, one of the questions raises Cheney's relationship with Halliburton, which we haven't talked about

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Their kind of private sector, careers and Cheney has this lasting position in the oil industry. and just curious, did his financial so the question is to Cheney's financial distress and Halliburton play a role in pushing for the Iraq war. But I would also press you to just say more broadly to Cheney or Powell's experience in the private sector in any way shape, their later public experience. You know many people believe that. I really, you know you look at Cheney's life and career and I don't think it's money. Let's take the oil industry. For Cheney, oil meant power. He was interested in oil in the Middle East as one component of American power in the world. He was paid well in Halliburton but once he was back in public life, I Mean again

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My own view of Cheney is he cared about American power, not his own, not Halliburton.

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Yeah that makes sense he certainly could have made a lot more money if he'd stayed in the private sector. He had such an incredible career. What, 33 years old and he's Chief of Staff to the President. He could have parleyed that for the rest of his life. Okay so other questions that came in. Um, one brings up the risk of regime changes. One did both Cheney and Powell fail to anticipate that post-Saddam Iraq would give rise to a civil war? So one of the twists..did they imagine it would give rise to a new terrorist threat such as ISIS?

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SO one of the results of the breakdown in Iraq is it ends up opening space for ISIS. Did any one see that coming?

42:00

Not specifically ISIS no. In some ways I would give some vague credit of foresight to Powell, who did tell Bush famously you know..he called it the Pottery Barn rule you know "You break it you own it" meaning Iraq might fall apart and it would be up to us to fix it.

42:35

Now did Powell actually call it the Pottery Barn rule or was that called that later>

42:40

I think it was a combination of I think Powell did refer to it..well I'm not sure on that. It was Tom Friedman who made it famous and it was Powell who said "if you break it you own. I think it was Tom Friedman who called it the Pottery barn rule.

43:00

Okay, good advice. Next question. In you opinion what are the lasting legacies of Colin Powell and Dick Cheney's rift in the contemporary Republican Party? SO you know Trump whether he wins in November or not is eventually going away, hopefully sooner rather than later, but he is going away and there is going to be a Republican Party left. So it is interesting to think about what will be remaining. There seem to be two strands in your book, the Powell strand and the Cheney strand, and the Powell strand seems mostly dead but Trump is definitely not the Cheney strand either. So what do you forsee for the next president?

43:47

Let me back up on the Republicans. Because if you go back to the Republicans in the Reagan era, Reagan had put together a coalition of 3 different groups which had never been put together before. One was economic conservatives, the second was evangelists, who before Reagan had been supporting Southern Democrats and the third was hawks, who were unhappy with Jimmy Carter and Reagan brings them all together all three groups have problems with HW Bush and the younger Bush puts them back together. And Cheney certainly represents and reflects the views of especially the hawks and also to some extent economic conservatives. And yes they're still there, but as we talk about with Trump, Trump is no conventional hawk. He's sometimes described as a Jacksonian which means if we do have military action go all out but try to avoid it if possible. Where did the hawks go? That's a good question they are certainly still around if you look int eh US congress you'll find two prominent Republican hawks one who's first name is Liz and last name is Cheney an the other is Tom Cotton so they're certainly still there.

45:20

I don't think their influence is going to grow but they're certainly there. Powell, there's nothing left of Powell's strand of Republicans. Powell thought of himself as moderate republican in the model of HW Bush. By the mid-90s Powell gets up and he gives a speech which is about the strong importance of recognizing the rights of immigrants and supporting people who came over on the Mayflower and there are a few boos. In a few decades if you move forward by the time he left the George W Bush administration in 2008, he feels no connection of any kind to the Republican party and endorses Obama over John McCain who was something of a friend. SO and really beyond Powell I don't think that strand of modern Republicanism...it may remerge as some faction of some other party but really there's nothing left.

46:52

So and what strand...I agree with that analysis, what strand do you think is going to take over, do you have any..let's imagine we're already at the next election or Trump for some reason something happens and they sub in someone else. What do you think the Republican Party its most likely to look like?

47:06

You know good question, I mean the dominant strand will be a pro-Trump faction. Without Trump, who knows if anyone can make that stick. Trump is certainly familial and nepotistic so will it be one of the Trumps? I have a hard time imagining that. I have a hard time imagining Jared Kushner as the leader of the Republican Party. It will be a battle among pro-Trump Republicans to take over the mantle. I don't know who that will be. That will be one faction. And then depending on what happens in the meantime there may be some anti-Trump republican factions that we don't see now. I say that half kiddingly, but once Trump is gone you'll be amazed at the number of Republican members of Congreess who will claim that really privately they disagreed with him and Trump would have been much worse and much more Trumpian than he was if it hadn't been for what I, Lindsey Graham, told him in private he shouldn't do. There will be a lot of that.

48:28

I think there will be a lot of like, Trump who? I wasn't a part of that story. Um trying to sweep it under the rug but it will be interesting to see. So let me return to the questions. This is kind of a 180 but one fo the interesting questions that was raised was how did you research this book? So I know you did some interviews you obviously went through. Lot of archives, but spell out your methods and kind of how you were able to get into the nitty-gritty of some pretty classified deliberations.

49:00

Okay well any book on modern history is a combination of archives and internets. For archives, I actually found a wealth of material I didn't necessary expect to find at the Regan Library. That's where I found the 80s correspondence between Powell and Cheney. I also went to the Bush 41 library at Texas A&M and found what I could there. Believe it or not, some of that is still classified but a lot has been declassified. And the material from the George W. Bush administration which happens to be at the Bush 43 library in Dallas is mostly classified and not very helpful. And for interviews I used interviews are re-interviews. Because I had done a previous book called Rise of the Balkans which was all about George HW. Bush's foreign policy and so I had a lot of interviews from that and went out and conducted a bunch of new interviews. These are all people now being interviewed 15-18 years after they left office and had a lot more to say than they might have had in 2003.

50:30

Did you interview both Powell and Cheney directly?

50:37

I interviewed Powell directly, I did not interview Cheney. We had negotiation for a while bait that and he ultimately declined.

50:48

Hm okay. Couple more questions and then we'll wrap. Why did Powell never run for President? So we talked about this a little bit. What do you think it was..whether it was president or some other major political position. Why didn't he capitalize on his popularity?

51:07

Well there's a couple fo things. There's political science and there there's psychology and both play a role. on the political science end the period he was thinking of running it was for the 1996 presidential election and he didn't have a party. He wasn't going to challenge a sitting president, I mean he wasn't going to run as a democratic challenger to a sitting president Bill Clinton, and he just didn't have a base with that Base of the Republican Party. And he thought about running as an independent as people gave that some consideration and realized okay so he wins an elections as an independent and then he has no constituency in Congress. How's he going to get legislation passed? So that's the political science side.

52:07

On the personal side he discovered and says quite openly that he just didn't have..he didn't have what it takes he didn't have the deep desire to be president. That's part of it and the part he didn't say but the part that people who work with him say is he actually has something of a thin skin and he couldn't have taken the really nasty mudslinging that comes with running for president.

52:42

You have to be a little unusual to run for president it seems. Um so final question. Cheney's Vice presidency was really unique in American history and theres a lot of a. Attention to the fact that maybe Cheney was the real president fo ra awhile and Bush just a figurehead and you address that in the book so I'll sort of leave that to the book but the question is how did he change the institution of the vice presidency? And I'll add a little addendum, how did he change the foreign policy process? Did he change it in any meaningful way or was he sort of a one-off? Pence is certainly not a very active public VP. Biden was maybe a little more active. But do you see any lasting impact?

53:39

Well you know it's funny I say that Powell's role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a one off because he was the most powerful there has every been and no Defense Secretary is going to allow a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to be as powerful as Powell was. Same thing in a different way for Cheney. There as not been with all due respect to either VP Gore or Biden or Pence there has not been a VP nearly as powerful as Cheney was. That rose out of the specific circumstances. The Fact that you had a republican governor who had not served in Washington before and so on. And I'm not sure that there will be a future Vice President who will wield as much power certainly as Cheney did in the first term. Cheney had thought about it for a long time the institution of Vice President so it goes back a long time and I don't think there ever will be another VP like Cheney.

54:57

Alright so thank you so much for coming on, talking about your book. Thank you Jim. Thank you everyone for watching.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai