(violin music) - [Voiceover] It's the summer of 2000 in Texas, an aide to Governor George W. Bush asks Halliburton Corporation's CEO Dick Cheney if he'd consider running for vice president.

- [Cheney] I wasn't looking for work.

I was in the oil business.

I had a spotty academic record.

I had history of heart disease.

And I'm not the guy you want, bad idea politically.

- I believe you're looking at the next vice president of the United States.

(applause) - [Cheney] He said, "you're the solution to my problem."

- [Voiceover] Big experience in foreign policy and defense.

That's what Dick Cheney brought to the table.

- [Voiceover] And in September 2001, that experience was urgently called upon.

- Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center.

- [Voiceover] Nobody anticipated that it would come the way it came on 9/11.

- [Voiceover] It was absolutely total chaos.

- [Voiceover] Seemed like Armaggedon, what's next?

- [Voiceover] When the day arrived, this is everything he had been preparing for.

- [Voiceover] The president is away on Air Force One.

Other hijacked planes appear headed toward Washington.

- [Cheney] I never hesitated.

I couldn't take a poll.

I didn't have time to call the president.

(yelling) - [Voiceover] Watching those towers come down, nothing ever will be the same.

- [Voiceover] Did that searing experience of 9/11 change him in some ways?

Certainly some of his friends think that's true.

- [Voiceover] That of course remained the eternal question.

Who is Dick Cheney?

(mid tempo violin music) - [Cheney] Time travels on.

Things change.

I don't know how long I'm going to be around.

It's up to me and others who participated to explain what we did and why.

(mid tempo violin music) (low engine rumbling) - [Voiceover] Before the War on Terror.

- [Voiceover] Boom, there's a hit.

- [Voiceover] Before Dick Cheney's vice presidency, there was an earlier war in the Middle East with American forces led by a young Secretary of Defense from Wyoming.

- The Armed Forces of the United States began an operation at the direction of the president, before Saddam Hussein could withdraw his troops from Kuwait and end his occupation of that country.

- We look back on it now and it's the model of how to go to war, clear objective.

- Our goal remains the same, deliberate Kuwait by forcing Saddam Hussein out.

- [Voiceover] Overwhelming force.

- [Voiceover] Over 10,000 separate sorties have been flown on combat and support missions in just the past seven days.

- Short time frame and low casualties.

- Then we got the rest of the world to pay for it.

What better way to fight a war than that?

- [Voiceover] We had an objective.

We achieved our objective and we weren't going any further.

Who is this cowboy from Wyoming who has suddenly been elevated to the position of Secretary of Defense?

What qualifies him for this?

- There was never a sense of aw, shucks, I don't belong here.

He was not thinking of himself as Dick Cheney from Casper, Wyoming talking to the solvable man, but Dick Cheney representing the United States of America.

- [Voiceover] But he was Dick Cheney from Casper, Wyoming.

(inspirational music) (mid tempo violin music) When Dick Cheney was 13, his family moved from Nebraska to Casper, a small city built on the oil industry, but a large influence in shaping the future vice president.

His father, Richard Herbert Cheney, worked for the federal government and had to choose between positions in Great Falls, Montana or Casper.

He chose Casper.

- He was working for a new deal agency, the Soil Conservation Service, created the deal with the Dust Bowl and those kinds of problems.

His father was a William Jennings Bryant Democrat, a committeeman in Nebraska.

- [Voiceover] On the Cheney side, his great grandparents homesteaded in Nebraska in the 1880s and lost their farm to draught.

His grandfather was part owner of a bank that went under in the Great Depression in the 1930s.

- [Cheney] It affected Dad well his whole life, as it would anybody.

Never bought a new car, always bought a used car, or said he could get as just a good a car for less money.

He saved money out of his paycheck every single day of his life.

My mother's father had a sixth grade education, owned small cafes, was a meat cutter, worked on the Union Pacific Railroad after the war started, cooking for section gangs.

He urged my folks to send a telegram to FDR announcing my birth, because my birthday was the same as President Roosevelt's.

When I was born, he turned 59 that day.

My family on both Mom and Dad's side were all Democrats, so I was the first Republican probably since my great grandfather, who fought in the Civil War on the Union side.

(playful music) - [Voiceover] For the Cheney family, Casper in 1954 was a good fit.

- You went across the alley on the east side of the house and there was nothing all the way to Glenrock, except horny toads and jackrabbits, but there was this great sense of sort of openness and space that was part of growing up in Wyoming.

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] Dick Cheney was quiet, played football, liked the outdoors, and liked Lynne Vincent.

- [Cheney] I knew who Lynne was as soon as I got into the eighth grade.

She was a pretty important person, and top student and baton twirler.

- It was everything you can imagine.

The '50s were, we went to movies, we went to Rex's In & Out drive-in downtown.

We had proms and you know, wore big skirts with lots of petticoats under them.

His mom worked and my mom worked, and that was unusual in the '50s.

- Except during football season, I always had part-time jobs.

Ben Franklin or candy store, Donell's Candy Store at Hilltop.

- [Voiceover] Cheney was senior class president, but no one saw a future politician.

- He was a thoughtful young man, not just in terms of being interested in other people's welfare and how they felt about things, but in terms of thinking about world events.

He liked old movies.

And I didn't know anybody else who liked old movies as a teenager.

- [Cheney] So I had a great time in high school.

I hadn't given any serious thought about what I was gonna do after high school.

- [Voiceover] But others had, including an influential Casper oil man who had attended Yale with George H. W. Bush.

- [Cheney] Tom Stroock came out to the house and talked to the folks too, and basically recruited me.

Full-ride scholarships to Yale University, I mean it was news.

In those days, being from Wyoming was affirmative action.

- [Voiceover] But the young man from Wyoming struggled in New Haven.

- Dean wrote home in a letter to my parents, he said "Dick has fallen in with a group "of very high-spirited young men."

I was a mediocre student at best.

And at the end of that third semester, the dean called me and he said "Look, why don't you take a year off and think about it?"

It wasn't Yale's fault, it was mine.

(mid tempo violin music) - [Voiceover] The long distance calls to Lynne Vincent in school of Colorado College continued.

They cost less.

Dick Cheney was back in Wyoming working on a power line crew.

- [Lynne] I was dismayed that he wasn't taking more advantage of the opportunity he had, but I still thought he was the best guy I'd ever met so, I hung in there.

- [Voiceover] Another try at Yale, then Cheney was finished for good.

Back in Wyoming, he worked, he drank, he played, often with his friend Joe Meyer.

- Joe had this hot car and so they would tie ropes to the back of the car and they would get their water skis and they would drive down the canal while one of them skied down the irrigation canal.

(clanging) - [Voiceover] The young lineman from Casper landed behind bars for driving under the influence twice.

- My Yale roommates were all graduated from college and I was in jail in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

And I was slow on the uptake, I guess, but at that point I decided look, I really need to clean up my act, figure out what I'm gonna do.

- [Voiceover] A stint at a community college in Casper.

Then the University of Wyoming in Laramie, marriage, and master's degrees for both Dick Cheney and Lynne Vincent Cheney.

He did a 40 day internship at the Wyoming Legislature.

- There are no professional politicians in the Wyoming Legislature.

Everybody had a real job.

Legislature was something you did every other year for 40 days.

If you're a farmer, we want you on the agriculture committee, you know something about it.

It produced good government, and nothing improper about it at all.

(bells chiming) - [Voiceover] The couple then pursued doctorates at the University of Wisconsin, and a family.

(chanting crowd) American involvement in the war in Vietnam roiled the campus.

- There were mornings when it was hard to get to class because of the tear gas, or the National Guard was out, or there was another protest under way.

If you had to categorize my views on the war, it would have I was supported with the administration, fairly traditional republican point of view.

Our main concern was to raise a family and to get on with getting our degrees, and both of us then planned academic careers.

- [Voiceover] Cheney received five draft deferments.

- By 1963 I was back in school, 1964 I was married, 1966 I was a father, and January of '67 I was too old to be drafted.

I was became 26 and was outside the age limit.

I operated by the book.

There were some 13 million people in my age cohort that could have served.

Some three million did serve, a lot of them drafted, some of them volunteered.

I have great respect for those who did.

I was never called.

If I'd have been called, I'd have gone.

(mid tempo violin music) - [Voiceover] Cheney's graduate work in political science led to a fellowship in a congressional office in Washington D.C.

and an end to his formal education.

Lynne Cheney would complete her doctorate in English Literature in the stacks at the Library of Congress.

- I think Cheney got his PhD in human relations and communications, and being smart from his wife, Lynne Cheney.

(laughs) (water splashing) - [Voiceover] Cheney wanted to serve his fellowship at the capital with an up and coming young congressman from Illinois.

So he went in and told him about the thesis he was preparing on roll call voting.

- He listened to all of that and then he stood up, shook hands, said "Thank you very much, "this isn't going to work."

Boom, and I was out.

- [Voiceover] But Cheney was persistent.

When Representative Donald Rumsfeld was nominated to head the Office of Economic Opportunity for Richard Nixon, he heard again from the young man from Wyoming.

- I sat down and wrote an unsolicited memo to him one night, about 12 pages, telling him how he should conduct himself in his confirmation hearings, what he should do with the agency once he got it policy wise and so forth.

- [Voiceover] A few weeks later, the new head of OEO sent for Cheney.

- They didn't say, "do you want a job?"

They said, "You're Congressional Relation, "now get the hell out of here."

- He likes to tell that story, but it isn't true.

There was nothing I asked him to do that he didn't put his head down and do it exceedingly well.

He never looked for recognition, never talked about what a wonderful job he'd done.

He was just a very serious, intelligent, hard worker, who was as reliable as anyone could be.

- [Voiceover] Cheney and Rumsfeld quickly became a team and moved together to the cost-of-living council, under which President Nixon proposed wage and price controls - It really helped develop the philosophy I had that government does certain things well.

They do defense well.

They're the only ones who can.

They're pretty good at collecting taxes.

Maybe managing the Social Security System.

But controlling wages and prices for every man, woman, and child in America, that was a huge mistake from a policy standpoint.

- [Voiceover] The Vietnam War remained as sore point between Congress and the Nixon White House.

In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act requiring the president to get congressional approval after military action taken without a declaration of war.

- I was concerned that Congress was exceeding its authority.

I guess you'd put me down as having believed that we needed a strong executive, especially in this day and age.

And the War Powers Act, in my mind, is still unconstitutional.

- [Voiceover] When Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford took over, Rumsfeld was named Chief of Staff and Cheney was part of the package.

- [Cheney] Don said, "I want Dick as my deputy."

He said, you know, "we'll be interchangeable.

"I'll make sure you get plenty of face time with the man."

We worked it out so the president was as comfortable with me as he was with Don.

- And then when I went off to the Pentagon, it was a five minute decision for President Ford, and the first four were for coffee.

He decided he wanted Dick Cheney to replace me as Chief of Staff.

- [Voiceover] He was 34, the youngest Chief of Staff ever at the White House and ready to take charge.

- The key to running the place effectively, you've got to have control over the president's schedule.

That's the most important resource you've got.

You can't have people running willy nilly in and out of the Oval Office or showing up without the proper preparation for the president.

(drumming) - [Voiceover] Cheney showed a keen understanding of the levers of power in the back rooms of government.

- You're very powerful.

It's maybe the second most powerful job in Washington, but nobody elected you and nobody wants to hear from you publicly.

Dick gave me some very good advice.

He said, "You get out there publicly, "and the old saying in Washington, "the higher the monkey climbs, "the more you see of his behind.

"And that's gonna catch you."

- [Voiceover] And you outwork everybody.

- He was the guy who got in there the earliest in the White House, he stayed the longest, and he took care of all the mundane chores.

What salt shakers should be used at White House dinners.

What kinds of Christmas cards Betty Ford should send out.

- [Voiceover] Behind the scenes, Cheney was unafraid to take on powerful people, including Ford's appointed vice president, Nelson Rockefeller.

- Rockefeller would show up, you know, once a month, with a big new spending proposal.

And he was always going against that grain.

I believe we could not win the nomination with Rockefeller as the running mate.

(applause) - [Voiceover] And in the end, Gerald Ford's 1976 running mate was Bob Dole, not Nelson Rockefeller.

- He had a major speaking slot on the program, and in the middle of his speech, the sound system went dead.

(applause) And he blamed me for that.

He was absolutely convinced I'd pulled the plug on the sound system, which I had not.

(applause) Shortly after that, we ran into each other underneath the platform, and he cornered me down there.

And just really laced into me.

And I understood exactly why he felt the way he did.

My job was to take it, say "yes sir, Mr.

Vice President."

And then get out of there as quickly as possible, which is what I did.

- [Voiceover] Ford, who had pardoned his predecessor and then vowed he himself would not run for president, changed his mind, ran, and lost the White House to Jimmy Carter.

(mid tempo violin music) From Pennsylvania Avenue to Beech Street in Casper, Wyoming, driving a U-Haul with an eye on running for office.

- I loved politics, public policy.

But I also had a strong feeling that I didn't want to be dependent upon somebody's success at the polls, that if I was gonna be involved, I wanted to put my name on the ballot.

- [Voiceover] Senator Cliff Hansen was retiring and Cheney told Governor Stan Hathaway he wanted to run for the seat.

- Stan had been a mentor to me, had given me my first political job when he was State Chairman.

And he said "well, they said you could do that.

"You could run for the senate if you want.

He said, "of course if you do, "Al Simpson's gonna kick your butt."

(laughs) Which was exactly the way he put it.

- [Voiceover] But Wyoming's single seat in the U.S.

House of Representatives, unexpectedly came open that year, and Dick Cheney threw his hat in the ring.

- [Cheney] I basically took the road and drove myself all over the state.

I didn't wanna bigfoot it.

I didn't want to come in and say, gee, I've been at the White House.

- He didn't rally a crowd.

He kind of briefed the audience.

You know, he gave this very sort of matter of fact tick tock of issues, extremely articulate, well argued, very well organized pattern, but it wasn't an appeal to emotion.

And I thought wow, I wonder how successful he's gonna be.

- [Voiceover] But Cheney had a high wattage campaigner often by his side, Al Simpson, running for the U.S.

Senate.

- He's House guy and I'm Senate Guy.

I said let's stick as close together as we can.

I think we both have a good chance.

- He was an imp.

He was a puckish.

He had a wonderful wry sense of humor and that smile you know, we just had a lot of fun.

We just had fun.

And there's a pie rally in Douglas or something.

There's one woman just harassing us both.

"Well why don't you do this?"

And then the pie auction came up and here's a picture of Cheney holding the pie.

And I said, "throw it at her."

And his hand began to move, and Lynne and Anne were in the front row and they said, "Stop it, stop."

- Often times I'd be introduced as a former White House Chief of Staff.

And I would say that the guy who had the job before I did is named Don Rumsfeld.

He went on to become Secretary of Defense.

Before Rumsfeld was Al Haig.

Al became the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

And before Haig it was Bob Haldeman.

He's doing four to six in a federal penitentiary in California.

- There he went, all over the state, and did retail politics.

Just simply catching farmers in fields, always figuring out in what small town was the local coffee clutch.

If somebody invites you into their kitchen, and maybe invites a neighbor over, and you talk for hours sometimes.

And you think well, maybe I got two votes out of there.

(laughs) But it worked.

- My brother David ran the Medicine Bow Post.

Of course the Post had a really tiny circulation.

David was just smitten by Cheney and his family in particular.

- [Voiceover] Then, the campaign took a sudden and unexpected turn one night in Cheyenne, where the Cheneys were staying with old friends Joe and Mary Meyer.

- Lynne woke us up at about two in the morning and said, "Dick has some tingling in his arm "and we think he's got a pinched nerve.

"He's really uncomfortable.

"Can you tell me how to get to the hospital?"

- It's probably nothing, but you know, we'll go get it checked out.

And I walked in to the emergency room, sat down on the examining table and passed out.

(heart monitor beeping) I was having a heart attack.

I was 37 years old.

The question for me was would I have to give up my hope for career in politics, and especially the race for the house seat.

And I asked Rick that question.

And he said, "Ah hell Dick, hard work never killed anybody."

- It was also clear to me that the Cheneys did want to go on with this campaign, but they were asking, does this make sense?

Can we do it?

- [Cheney] Lynne filled in for me out on the campaign trail.

Did a good job.

Some of my associates suggested that we ought to make her be the candidate, and I ought to hang it up.

- [Voiceover] Cheney was elected to the U.S.

House of Representatives with 59% of the vote.

That would be his closest election in six races for Wyoming's sole seat in the House.

The former White House Chief of Staff already knew his way around the capital.

And he got plum committee assignments, including the interior committee, a must for a representative from a state with a lot of public land.

- He rose like a cork.

And he knew the players.

- [Voiceover] With Simpson and Senator Malcolm Wallop, he crafted a Wyoming Wilderness bill.

- An awful lot of the state's lands were locked up under wilderness area review.

And the only way you could get them freed up was to get legislation adopted that in effect said this is gonna be wilderness, and this is gonna be multiple use, which is what we did, but it took awhile to get there.

- [Voiceover] It took six years.

Of the four million acres of federal forest in Wyoming under review, 640,000 were protected in the final legislation.

- Generally speaking, I'd say the Republican Party has not been the greatest advocates of wilderness protection, except that is, in a sense, a kind of conservative philosophy of being a steward of the land.

But at the same time, this is a person who loved to fish and spend time in the outdoors.

- [Voiceover] Cheney pushed for sharper tax cuts than President Ronald Reagan asked for.

And defense budget increases.

- He did increase the deficit, but I thought the military spending was more important.

I was consistently conservative, but I was pro-life, I was pro-gun.

But I was perceived, I think partly, because of style more than anything else, as somebody who was reasonable, somebody who got along with people on both sides of the aisle.

- [Voiceover] But his favorite assignment in Congress, invisible to the public, was on the secretive House Intelligence Committee.

- I was, I would say, intensely interested in the subject matter.

It was an exciting time, it was an era of Iran-Contra.

We had major defections in those days, spies coming over to defect and then going back.

And once you'd established yourself as somebody who was serious about it, the information flow would start, you know, it's like opening a fire hydrant.

- [Voiceover] And he was included in secret continuity of government exercises during the 1980s in which teams of federal officials were spirited to secret locations to govern if the nation came under attack.

- What happens to American leadership in the middle of a nuclear attack?

Who runs the government?

He takes part in these exercises, and through that, he gains insight into really the hidden, but permanent, national security apparatus, the military.

- [Voiceover] Cheney was minority whip, near the top of the republican congressional leadership, in line some day to become speaker.

Heart bypass surgery after his third heart attack in the summer of 1988 had stabilized his health.

Lynne Cheney had become the forceful head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

They were a Washington power couple.

- I don't think Dick and I have ever been excessively caught up in a social life of Washington.

Especially when you have children at home, you don't throw yourself into that.

What I remember is just great conversation.

I had some challenges, of course they were very different from the ones that Dick faced.

In a way, our lives have been a long conversation.

- [Voiceover] Then, another twist of fate.

John Tower, nominated in 1989 for Secretary of Defense by newly elected President George H. W. Bush, was rejected by the Senate.

- So we had a little meeting in the White House.

It was just Brent Scowcroft, and me, and President Bush.

And Brent and I recommended that Dick be named Secretary of Defense, and President Bush thought it a good idea.

- It was not an insignificant choice I had to make.

Went upstairs and met with the president in the private office.

It has this picture hanging on the wall of President Lincoln meeting with William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Admiral David Porter, just a matter of days before the end of the Civil War.

My great grandfather had served under William Tecumseh Sherman, been with him on the march to the sea, and running over in my own mind what he would think of his great grandson being in the White House, meeting with the President of the United States about taking over the post of Secretary of Defense.

Given a chance to be Secretary of Defense, go back to the executive branch, be in command of the world's most formidable military.

I didn't agonize over it.

(mid tempo violin music) - [Voiceover] Despite his lack of military experience, Cheney immediately asserted himself, reprimanding the Air Force Chief of Staff.

- He's making his point.

I said, man this guy knows how to make decisions.

He's a quick study.

You come to brief him, if you don't have your message getting into his head in 10 minutes, he'll throw you out.

If you've got it getting into his head in 10 minutes, he'll let you go the other five and make a decision.

- People really liked him in the Pentagon.

It kinda liked that tough edge.

- [Voiceover] And he made a bold, unconventional choice for Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, a soldier he'd met first when he was on the House Intelligence Committee.

- One thing I did in effect when I'd picked him was jumped him over I think 14 more senior generals.

He was also the youngest ever to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

It was a good professional relationship when we were at the Pentagon.

It was never a close personal relationship.

He liked old cars, I played tennis.

I went fishing, you know, he grew up in the city.

I was a Westerner, he was a Brooklyn boy.

- [Voiceover] Relations run usually good as well among the various agencies with diplomatic, military, and intelligence responsibilities.

- We would have a Wednesday morning meeting where it would just be Brent, the National Security Advisor, Cheney, the Secretary of Defense, Baker, the Secretary of State, and we would bring our differences to that meeting.

And we would work it out.

- That was very much by design because he had worked in government and he had seen that where it wasn't so well soldered together.

They were determined not to let that spin out of control.

- What struck me about Cheney at the time was how intellectually curious he was as a cabinet secretary.

When you become a cabinet secretary, you tend to be running nonstop and you don't have time to think much, or to reflect, or to step back.

He really always preserved time.

- On a Saturday morning, setting aside three hours, Cheney could sit and listen to this kind of discussion, ask intelligent questions, but mostly listening.

- [Voiceover] Yet, there was much for the Secretary of Defense to do right away, a coup attempt in the Phillipines, a corrupt dictator, Manuel Noriega in Panama.

The Soviet Union is breaking apart.

Dick Cheney was in the driver's seat.

- We had been in a Cold War for four decades, which was basically two super powers confronting each other and always on the verge of a possible nuclear war.

The tectonic plates in American strategy were shifting.

- The degree to which we were sort of poised on the edge of the abyss, the possibility of all-out nuclear war receded.

- [Beschloss] Dick Cheney was able to build a relationship with some within the Soviet government and say essentially, we're for real, we want to end the Cold War too.

That helped the Soviets to make certain concessions that they otherwise might not have made.

- [Voiceover] The Defense Secretary cut his own budget as well.

Military base closings, fewer troops and fewer weapons, including programs beloved of Congress.

In addition to budget cuts, there was a change in strategy embodied in the secret Defense Planning Guidance leaked to the press in 1992.

- An unfortunate amount of press reporting at the time that suggested this was focused on U.S.

secret plans to dominate the world.

And there's a real chance here to expand the alliance structure with these new democracies emerging especially in the form of Soviet Union, and it's not so much that the U.S.

is preeminent, but rather the U.S.

and its allies represent an absolutely unbeatable force.

(dramatic music) - [Voiceover] but it was in the Middle East, not the former Soviet Union, where the U.S.

and Dick Cheney would be tested.

There was a long standing dispute over the Iraq-Kuwait border, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein had his eye on his tiny neighbor's massive oil fields.

- Iraqis had made nice, nice to the Kuwaitis, and we're brother Arabs, and don't worry, everything's fine.

And then of course then they invaded.

There was this debate over whether or not the fact that he had invaded Kuwait was a strategic threat to us.

And my argument basically was that yes, indeed it is.

And there was, I think, hesitation.

I'd call it part of the leftover Vietnam syndrome.

Now on the part of a lot of people, I think Colin was one of those.

But at one point he argued for letting the sanctions work.

- [Voiceover] Also open to debate, do they need Congress or the United Nations to support military action?

- My thought was if we get the rest of the world together behind this effort then the president can go to the Congress and say you mean you're not going to support the president on this approach, but the president of Ethiopa's gonna support him.

Dick didn't think we needed to do that.

- The president felt strongly that he wanted to have Congress on board.

And the president made the right decision.

- [Voiceover] Then, the difficult task of convincing Saudi Arabia to let Americans base the invading force on their soil.

Cheney led the delegation.

- You know, when Saudis signed on, that was sort of the go ahead flag for all the gulf states, 'cause they were the big kids on the block.

- You can agree and can disagree with Dick Cheney, but at the end of the day, you know where he stands, and you know that he tells you what he believes.

And that comes with a great deal of respect in that part of the world.

- It was early in the morning.

I took Lynne with me, and we went down to the Vietnam Memorial.

There wasn't anybody else around, just the two of us.

And walked down to the Memorial and I wanted to see it before we actually launched.

It was a reminder of the cost that's involved when you get it wrong.

(airplane engine rumbling) By that evening, we'd launched the war in Kuwait.

- [Voiceover] The operation under way tonight, taking place in the predawn darkness of the Persian Gulf involves allied air forces of four nations.

As they undertake their missions, they do so after months of careful planning.

- We were surprised at how fast he had collapsed.

And we ended up with a hundred hour ground war.

The basic intelligence, or sort of the conventional wisdom was that Saddam could never survive politically the kind of defeat we administered to him.

- [Voiceover] Some thought the coalition should have pushed on to Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein.

- They were in power even when he's kind of slaughtering some of his own citizens who have risen up against him.

It just sends a message, maybe you won't succeed in your aggression, but you won't pay the only price you really care about, which is losing power.

- We had an objective.

We achieved our objective, and we weren't going any further.

- I saw Cheney as possibly the best Secretary of Defense I'd ever seen operate.

I'd been in the service for over 20 years at that point.

- [Voiceover] At the end of the Gulf War, polls showed huge approval ratings for the Desert Storm team and President Bush.

- I think he had the highest rating ever by a president.

That wrapped up in the spring of '91.

Two years later, he was out of work.

- [Voiceover] As was his Defense Secretary.

What did Dick Cheney do?

A road trip.

- No more security.

I was driving.

Didn't have a worry in the world.

Turned out to be about a 8,000 mile road trip.

Stopped along the way, made speeches, fished a bit.

Part of that was a trial run, going around the country helping congressional candidates.

I was obviously thinking about what I wanted to do next.

One of the options was to run for president.

- After 1992, Dick Cheney was no doubt a front runner for the Republican nomination in 1996.

- [Voiceover] And another member of the Desert Storm team was generating political buzz as well.

- Powell, without actually setting up a political structure, finds himself wooed by many Republicans to be their candidate in 1996.

He'd become sort of a star, much more of a celebrity.

So the man that Cheney had kind of plucked out of the lower ranks of four star generals to be Chairman of the Joint Chief in the first place, has now eclipsed him in the public mind as a political force.

(inspiring music) - About Christmas time, we came out as we always do for the holidays and the more I thought about it, the more I decided this was not something for me.

(mid tempo violin music) - [Voiceover] If his political career was over, the former Defense Secretary could do what a lot of former politicians have done, join the corporate world, particularly companies that dealt with the government.

- I felt my future, certainly from a private sector standpoint, was unlimited.

I was interested in making some money, never had.

Time for a whole other career in the private sector.

- [Voiceover] Cheney fished and hunted all over the world, often with corporate elites, and that's how Halliburton executives connected with him on a trip to New Brunswick.

- He was asked to run this multimillion, 60,000 employee public corporation with responsibility not to the tax payers, but to the shareholders.

Completely different way of just simply managing.

- [Voiceover] The second largest oil field services company in the world, Halliburton had done business with the Pentagon during Cheney's tenure as Defense Secretary and before, through a subsidiary Brown & Root.

- As a result of Desert Storm, one of the conclusions we reached was that there was a role here to contract out some of the logistics and support functions that we were using full-time active duty military personnel for.

- [Voiceover] Halliburton did a study for Cheney's Pentagon in 1992 about private services for the military overseas.

And then, contracted to provide those services in the 2003 war in Iraq.

- They'd have on a standby basis equipment materials and so forth, and they'd fly in and arrive about the same time as the troops, or shortly thereafter and build the camps, and take care of the laundry, and the food service, and trucking.

What they said to me, as I recall, is "We're looking for broader understandings "sort of at the world at large."

- They made him a salesman rock star for the company.

They would take him around the world really.

If you do business with Halliburton, you get to go to a cocktail reception and schmooze with Dick Cheney.

And it worked.

- We built a railroad across the Australian Outback from Alice Springs up to Darwin.

A new baseball stadium for the Houston Astros.

Did a lot of deep offshore work in the oil and gas business.

- He went up the learning curve fairly quickly.

He did some good things, he didn't screw up, which is a nice metric of somebody coming in.

- [Voiceover] Later, when Cheney returned to public life, his tenure at Halliburton and his compensation there would be scrutinized by journalists and political foes.

- I was accused of foul and nefarious deeds by some of my favorite people, like Bentley.

- [Voiceover] The corporate world of Texas was a far cry from Washington, D.C.

- By 2000, he's not really a product of Wyoming.

He's a product of that experience with Halliburton and their world.

- So I really enjoyed those years in Texas.

I don't think of it as a detour.

I didn't think we were going back in politics.

How would that happen?

(mid tempo violin music) - [Voiceover] The Cheneys had been in Texas four years when Governor George W. Bush started his run for the White House.

A Bush aide asked Dick Cheney if he would consider the vice presidency.

- I had history of heart disease.

I had a spotty academic record.

I'd been kicked out of Yale twice.

And I sort of vetted myself and said, I'm not the guy you want.

- [Voiceover] Then, it was Bush himself who called, asking Cheney to run the search for a VP candidate.

- That was something I'd done before for Jerry Ford, and it was a definable task.

I had left no stone unturned.

I mean, tax returns, health records, tell me if there's anything embarrassing in your background.

- [Voiceover] In early July 2000, Cheney found himself on the back porch at the Bush ranch in Crawford with two big binders on vice presidential candidates.

But Bush had another idea.

- He said, "You're the solution to my problem."

And I said, "Well okay, I'm willing to actively consider."

- We reviewed many candidates, all of whom are very impressive.

But I continue to believe the best candidate might be sitting next to me.

- I think part of the appeal, of my appeal, was that I did not have aspirations of running myself.

I'd vetted everybody else, but nobody vetted me.

- [Voiceover] Cheney's heart history was a question mark, though he'd been reasonably healthy since quadruple bypass surgery in 1988.

- He's had three heart attacks in the past.

He's totally asymptomatic, he lives a vigorous life.

He skis, he hunts, he's running a big company now.

- I'm 60 at the time.

And I'd had a coronary artery disease.

I said you know, that's all true.

If health was the only criteria, you know, go get a 30-year-old.

That's not what he was after.

What he was after was somebody with experience.

- Not a lot of people from places with three electoral votes are even able to land a spot on the ticket like Cheney was able to do.

- George W. Bush did not have foreign policy experience or defense, had not been in Washington in a powerful position.

Dick Cheney had and gave that ticket immediate credibilty in some quarters where it did not have it before.

(dramatic music) - [Voiceover] In addition to gravitas and experience, Dick Cheney was an effective campaigner, starting at the nominating convention.

- There was a lot of compassionate conservatism there and some of the president's advisors and communications experts and so forth really softened the tone.

I saw my role and part as going after the opposition.

They will offer more lectures, and legalisms, and carefully worded denial.

Soon our men and women in uniform will once again have a Commander in Chief they can respect.

(cheering) That's what vice presidents are supposed to do.

I relished the thought, I didn't have any problem with that.

- [Voiceover] In contrast, there was the low key, respectful debate with Joe Lieberman, considered one of the finest ever in a presidential race.

- I think if you asked most people in America today that famous question that Ronald Reagan asked, "Are you better off today than you were eight years ago?"

Most people would say yes.

And I'm pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you're better off than you were eight years ago too.

(laughter) - And I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.

(laughter) - I can see my wife and I think she's thinking, "Joe, I wish you would go out into the private sector."

- Well, I'm gonna try to help you do that, Joe.

- No.

(laughter) - [Voiceover] Gore Lieberman narrowly on the popular vote.

But in the electoral college, Bush Cheney would win the White House, if they held their lead in Florida.

- Even though this went down to the razor's edge tonight, there has been a discernible shift in the mood now-- - I woke him up, I said, "get your pants on.

"You're vice president of the United States."

He said, "It's too early to call."

- One of the reasons for Al Gore's delay is that he has actually called George W. Bush and taken back his concession phone call, so-- - [Voiceover] Facing the protracted recount in Florida, with the White House in limbo, the Republicans brought in an experienced fixer, Cheney's fly fishing friend, Jim Baker, while Cheney ran an unofficial shadow government.

- [Cheney] The transition actually started around the table, the little table in our kitchen, in our townhouse there in McLean.

- And when we won, after that 37 days when the Supreme Court finally ruled, Dick called me, he says "Congrulations," And he said, "Only under your leadership "could we go from 1,581 vote lead to a 537 vote lead."

- There's never been a White House in which the vice president was given the power from the very beginning to basically assemble the administration.

Pulled together the team that's going to serve the president - [Voiceover] A team of foreign policy thinkers who had advised Bush during his campaign were soon embedded throughout the administration.

Condoleezza Rice nicknamed them "The Vulcans."

Cheney was one of them, but his portfolio was much broader.

- I basically was given pretty much free reign to get involved in whatever I wanted to get involved in, participate in the meetings I wanted to participate in.

- [Voiceover] That included heading an energy task force.

When he worked in the Wyoming Legislature, Cheney believed farmers knew best about agriculture policy.

And now, the energy industry was advising the task force, but Cheney and longtime legal council David Addington resisted congressional efforts to reveal who in the industry was consulted.

- The deliberations themselves were legitimately confidential.

So the people could come in and tell us what they wanted, now they weren't making decisions, they were not part of the task force.

- The general accounting office demanded to see who they were.

Cheney and Addington refused to turn it over.

We don't have to disclose to the investigative arm of Congress who we're meeting with.

They go to court over it, and they win.

- [Voiceover] Under the Constitution, the vice president serves as president of the Senate.

In this role, Cheney cast a tie-breaking vote to enact a 1.6 trillion dollar tax cut.

- We had a surplus at the time, and the president had campaigned on the basis of tax reduction, which I certainly supported.

There were certain things such as defense spending, where you could, in fact, cut taxes in order to achieve economic growth and development, and at the same time, spend more money.

- [Voiceover] Nevertheless, the tax cuts, health benefits, and military actions to follow would erase the 2000 surplus and add five trillion dollars in debt over eight years.

In the spring of 2001, the president gave Cheney an assignment that fit his abiding interests.

To size up the nation's national security apparatus.

- I renewed my relationship and sort of caught up with all of the key intelligence agencies.

So I went and visited the CIA, and the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Intelligence Agency and so forth.

- And he's thinking, even in that time, of what we call bugs and gas, you know, biological and chemical weapons.

- There was a feeling that the world isn't gonna leave us alone the way it appears to be doing right now.

But nobody anticipated that it would come the way it came on 9/11.

(mellow guitar music) - [Voiceover] March 5th, 2001, a burning feeling in the vice president's chest, back to George Washington Hospital.

Cheney had suffered a mild heart attack in November, 2000, his fourth, and a stent was surgically implanted to reopen a narrowing artery.

- Scar tissue had started to grow around the stent and we had to go back in and reopen it.

(heart monitor beeping) - We knew that his heart had been weakened over his almost 25 year history of heart disease.

- [Voiceover] Implanted defibrillators would shock the heart back into a normal rhythm when it goes awry, were a relatively recent innovation.

- No device like this had ever been implanted in a sitting vice president of the United States, someone with that kind of visibility.

I think a lot of people were shocked about it.

- [Voiceover] Shocked, and in some cases unsure whether Cheney was fit to continue as vice president.

Rumors that administration officials were worried surfaced in the media.

- Tim, is anyone in the administration even daring to talk about the possibility that Dick Cheney might have to step down?

- They are not publicly, but privately they had this discussion last November, Matt, when Secretary Cheney had his fourth heart attack.

- I had a tendency to look at each episode, or incident, affecting my heart as there was okay, I've got a problem, what's the solution?

Here's the solution, we're gonna do this solution, and then you go back to work.

- [Voiceover] But, with an awareness of his own mortality.

It was in March 2001, after the stent procedure that the vice president wrote a letter of resignation and gave it to his trusted aide, David Addington.

- You could have a vice president who is incapacitated, unable to function, similar to Woodrow Wilson in the last 17 months of his administration, when he had a stroke.

So in light of my own health history, we came up with this scheme, this proposal, where I in effect would resign the office, on paper, sign it, give it to David.

But with instructions that made it possible then for the president to pull the plug if in fact something, if I'd reached that point, or I was no longer able to function.

- [Voiceover] They were also prepared for another dire possibility.

- That acted David to review all the statutes and all the precedents so that we could be ready tomorrow if necessary to take over.

If something happens to the president, I didn't want there to be any hesitation or that we would be unprepared in terms of stepping in and taking the oath of office and becoming President of the United States.

(dramatic music) I was in my office in the West Wing when my assistant called in and told me that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

That's when we turned on my television, sat there and watched for a few minutes.

- I was driving to my office at the State Department, and I heard on the radio that a plane crashed into one of the towers.

And I didn't think much of it.

I assumed that could be an accident.

- We saw the second plane actually come in and strike the other tower.

That triggered the notion that this is obviously a terrorist attack.

Then all of a sudden the door to my office burst open and one of my agents, a Secret Service agent named Jimmy Scott, came bursting in.

He wasn't polite or courteous.

He came straight around behind my desk and put his left hand on my shoulder, and with his right hand he grabbed the back of my belt and literally lifted me out of the chair and propelled me out of the room.

- Our building got hit, a plane crashed into the Pentagon.

The smoke got so bad I had to go downstairs, I went around, looked and the pieces of the aircraft were so small.

- People were saying, "Oh there's a bomb on D Street.

"There's an explosion on C Street," and everything else, you know, all the stuff's going around.

Then the orders came down to go home.

- I was downtown when the Secret Service grabbed me, put me in the car, and took me to the White House.

- People were still being pulled out of the building and the last thing in the world I would have thought of doing was getting in a helicopter and leaving.

- Then we heard the siren inside the State Department to evacuate.

Myself, as well as couple of my colleagues, we walked out of the building and we went to Constitution Avenue and it was an absolutely total chaos.

- I remember standing next to a heart surgeon, watching those towers come down.

And I said to him, "Nothing ever will be the same."

(melancholy music) - [Voiceover] White House officials are in the Bunker and the Situation Room on different floors.

The Pentagon is on fire.

The president is on Air Force One, destination unclear.

- The phones on Air Force One, where the president is flying from Florida to Louisiana, keep cutting out on him.

He can't quite hear people.

- [Cheney] He very much wanted to come back, but I said, "Mr.

President, "Washington is under attack as well as New York."

About the same time I arrived, Norman Mineta arrived, and he had a list of potentially hijacked aircraft.

We actually had tail numbers for six aircraft and we could only account for three.

The two that had hit the World Trade Center in New York, and the one that had hit the Pentagon.

- It already attacked the seat of economic power in New York and they'd attacked the seat of military power in the Pentagon.

And so one has to assume that the trifecta is to go after the seat of political power.

- [Cheney] They had a report of aircraft, which they believed had been hijacked, coming in past Dulles Airport at a very high rate of speed headed for Crown.

Crown was the codeword for the White House.

- If there'd been a strike on the White House.

I do not think that the Presidential Emergency Operations Center would have been secure.

- [Voiceover] In the Bunker, an Air Force official asked the vice president if they should shoot it down.

- And I said yes, I gave that order.

He stepped out for a minute and then he came back in again and asked the question again as though he wanted to make sure that he'd actually heard what he'd heard, and I said, "Yes, absolutely take it out."

- He made the decision to shoot down a civilian airplane in the space of time that it takes a batter to swing at a ball.

- I couldn't take a poll.

I didn't have time to call the president.

If it was gonna happen, it was gonna happen very fast.

And so I never hesitated.

- [Voiceover] But the planes sent up to defend the capital could not fire their weapons.

- They're not armed, no, it takes time to do that.

The reality is that weapons are dangerous, and they tend to be kept in safe places.

- So the order, obviously, couldn't be carried out, but we didn't know any of that at the time.

And then the other element of it that we found out later, two of the aircraft that had been scrambled went out to sea.

And they didn't even go in the right direction.

- We have had and do have planes that are at the ready, but they're at the ready for the kind of a threat that is external.

All of our radars are facing out, not in.

- [Voiceover] Ultimately, the passengers on United Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers.

And the plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing all 44 aboard.

Only when the president had flown back to address the nation from the White House, did Cheney leave the capital.

The entire Cheney family, including grandchildren and dogs, was moved to Camp David in Maryland.

- You wouldn't have known we were at the center of a world crisis from watching Dick.

I just looked totally exhausted, at the end of my rope, and Dick is just totally focused, he has a yellow pad, he's taking notes on what should be done.

- We usually go up the Potomac, then we could look down and see the Pentagon and see the smoke just still rising from where it had been struck.

- [Lynne] It seemed like Armageddon, what's next?

If they'd managed to bring this off, what's next?

- We live in Washington in Georgetown, and you could wake up in the middle of the night and hear those combat air patrol patrolling Washington because of the fear that there was gonna be another 9/11 style attack.

- Suddenly you had a president and vice president who were dealing with threats that they were getting 24 hours a day from people who wished the most ill for the United States.

- [Cheney] What steps do we need to take?

How do we defeat that next attack before it's every launched?

It put us as an administration in an entirely different place in terms of our priorities, what we were gonna spend our time on.

- We are coping with people who don't wear uniforms, don't carry their weapons openly, are perfectly happy strapping a suicide vest on a kid or a woman, sending them into the shopping center and killing people.

- [Voiceover] The secret world of international intrigue that had captivated Cheney since his days on the House Intelligence Committee was now the sole focus.

- It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there.

And we have to operate in that arena.

- Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

(applause) - The first weekend after 9/11 up at Camp David were focused on how do we respond.

By then we're pretty confident that it's Bin Laden.

Bob Wolfowitz was one of those who said you know, we shouldn't overlook Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

And that we need to be focused on that as well too.

That you know, we could look at Iraq later, but the first priority had to be Afghanistan.

(gloomy music) - [Voiceover] The invasion of Afghanistan began in October.

- It was very difficult to get forces there, and so the CIA took the lead.

And they did most of the battling in the beginning.

- [Cheney] It was a devastating combination.

We had our Special Forces guys with the Northern Alliance and able to call in precise strikes from our aircraft overseas.

- [Voiceover] The Taliban had driven back.

Bin Laden escapes into Pakistan.

The war is quickly over.

- The problem is that they've announced a broad War on Terror.

And a victory in Afghanistan is not by itself a victory in the War on Terror.

- [Voiceover] They need, as part of their political message to the country, a very serious phase two.

- [Voiceover] A tension turned once again to Iraq.

- Iraq was very much the top of the list.

If we looked around the world where we might see that hookup, that linkage, between the terrorist on the one hand, and the guy with the bad stuff on the other.

Iraq was the place.

- It was a mindset of my God, they're coming after us.

But Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 as we now know, and that's something that lots of people, including Cheney, tried to sell.

- I'm not saying Iraq was involved.

I wasn't saying it then, but I was saying, Iraq is harboring several major international terrorists.

Saddam was the only world leader who not only didn't condemn the attacks, he basically said, you had it coming to you and there's more coming if you don't change your policy.

- He had produced and used weapons of mass destruction before.

This wasn't a first time thought or an original idea with him.

He used it against the Iranians extensively during the Iran Iraq war back in the '80s.

He'd used it against his own people at Al-Awja in '88, killed thousands men and women and children.

- When the president, after a National Security Council meeting, said "I need to see you."

And so we went off in a private office down in the Situation Room.

And he said, "I want you to get a war plan for Iraq."

- The polls show the public doesn't understand why would we be attacking a country that hadn't attacked us.

- [Voiceover] A move against Iraq would have to be justified with intelligence, and no one in the White House knew the world of intelligence like the vice president.

- I had an arrangement already that if there were subjects I was interested in that the president might not be interested in or that wasn't ripe yet for the president.

So I had my intel book every morning was divided into two sections.

There was the stuff before the tab, that was the PDB, that's what the president would see.

There was the stuff behind the tab, which might include everything from raw reports from the field of subjects I was interested in.

- He would go out to the CIA and you know, kind of "wait a minute, I read this intercept," or "I read this agent's report on page 68, "it says the following, how do you rationalize that?"

Doing his homework.

Pushing his agenda, which is to protect the country after 9/11.

- When the vice president calls you in and folds his arms, and says, "Tell me about this," and asks some pointed questions, they're sending a message there.

- One of the allegation was, "Cheney manipulated the intelligence.

"Cheney went out and intimidated the CIA "and his visits out there were designed "to reshape the intelligence "to support the policy he wanted to pursue," which was not true.

I wasn't in the business of telling them what they should think.

- Someone once said, if it's intelligence, it's not a fact.

If it were a fact, it would be a fact, but it's a judgment.

- [Voiceover] Other government officials in Congress, in the State Department, judged the intelligence differently and by the summer of 2002, the debate over military action against Iraq was contentious.

The United Nations was negotiating to send weapons inspectors in.

- The key event in the run-up to the war in Iraq was Cheney's speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August of 2002.

- Nothing in the last dozen years has stopped him, not his solemn agreement, not the discoveries of inspectors.

- You had Powell, and the president, and Condi essentially saying they were gonna allow inspectors to do their job.

And you had Cheney saying it wasn't gonna work.

- What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons program, and to gain possession of nuclear weapons.

- It's pretty clear that the Bush White House is planning to ask Congress for authority to wage war and topple Saddam Hussein's regime.

- Those of us who were military, Colin, myself, couple of other people, we didn't think that was a good idea to put American boots on the ground in the Middle East for an extended period of time.

- Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region.

When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace.

- He had the voice.

That deep voice that conveyed that he was always doing the thing that any probing senior executive would do, that he was doing only the prudent thing.

He always seemed confident that he was right.

- [Voiceover] And grounded in experience, particularly his experience at the Pentagon a decade before.

- Put yourself in Cheney's shoes at the end of the Gulf War.

He's Secretary of Defense, they've just defeated the Iraqi army in Kuwait, and the Intelligence people come to Cheney and say, "Hey, it turns out that Iraq had a much more "robust weapons program than we knew."

So to Cheney, the lesson of that is Intelligence gets things wrong by underestimating, not overestimating.

- [Voiceover] The classified National Intelligence estimate in October 2002 told Congress Iraq probably had weapons of mass destruction, but would not use them against the U.S.

unless threatened.

It noted Iraq was years away from nuclear weapons.

- There were people who cherry picked that intelligence and selected only key morsels from it, and disregarded all the rest.

Yes, it was an Intelligence failure.

- [Voiceover] Congress, some of its members personally lobbied by Cheney and Bush, overwhelming passed a resolution supporting the use of arms in Iraq in October 2002.

President Bush, seeking international and domestic support for military action, in December 2002, asked CIA director George Tenet again to confirm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

- If all this comes to the President of the United States and he's being told by all these sources and allies, and the director of the CIA saying it's a slam dunk.

"Mr.

President, it's a slam dunk," and then he said, "Well, I'm not gonna do anything about it."

Now how likely is that, how responsible would that be for the President of the United States to take a pass?

- [Voiceover] President Bush still wanted international support for military action.

He sought a United Nation's resolution, despite Cheney's objections, and he assigned Colin Powell to ask for it with a speech initially drafted by Cheney aide Scooter Libby, with CIA input, and then rewritten at the State Department.

- Indeed the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are conceiling their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

(gunfire) - At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.

- [Voiceover] Like the Gulf War in 1992, like Afghanistan in 2001, the 2003 invasion went quickly, lasting less than two months, but sectarian warfare did not end.

Substantial WMD's were not found, though Saddam Hussein eventually was.

- That also led directly, five days after we got him out of his hole, to Muammar Gaddafi's surrendering his materials.

He had centrifuges, uranium feedstock, a weapons design.

There's always sort of this tendency to say, "Well, we should never have done it."

I think what we did in getting rid of three major potential sources of proliferation was well worth the effort.

- The larger purpose of the invasion of Iraq was to shake things up in the Middle East through an application, once again, of American power in such a way that governments like Syria, like Iran, and the Palestinians would be undercut in such a way that America would emerge as the dominant power in the Middle East.

(gunfire) - [Voiceover] The War on Terror was not fought only on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The threats seemed to be everywhere, the rules of warfare upended.

And the vice president sought new ways of responding.

Electronic eavesdropping was one of them.

(beeping) - [Cheney] Program was to use our capabilities to intercept communications from overseas into the United States.

I took it to the president and that was the genesis of what we call the Terror Surveillance Program.

Every 45 days he had to personally reauthorize the program.

- [Voiceover] The eavesdropping was interrupted in 2004 when Deputy Attorney General James Comey refused to reauthorize.

Changes were made, and surveillance resumed.

- We worked hard not to violate the individual rights of American citizens, and we did do it within the context of the law and the best legal opinions we could get.

And I'm convinced it saved lives.

- The president needs to use his full powers as chief executive to do whatever is necessary to defend the country, even if it means overriding federal statutes, and that's exactly what they do.

- [Voiceover] There was another tool in the War on Terror, for awhile unknown to the public and many lawmakers.

Tough interrogation tactics used by the CIA, often at overseas black sites, to extract information from prisoners believed to be terrorists.

- The big Cheney question is the enhanced interrogation.

How much he actually knew, how much he supported.

- This was a program that developed out of the fact that we had captured, began to capture, members of Al Qaeda.

The professionals in the agency talked to me about being able to use enhanced interrogation techniques.

Techniques we came up with up to and including waterboarding and that was the most significant, but specifically had been deemed not to constitute torture, and therefore to be within the safeguards of our our international agreements.

Not everybody agreed with that, but we did it by the book.

- In hypothermic temperatures, with shackles on, with no food, with little sleep and so forth, I'm a fricking infantry officer, I knew that was torture.

- With respect to waterboarding, most of the specific examples where we used the technique was on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

He was the single most valuable source we had on Al Qaeda.

And he's the guy that was subject more than anybody else to enhanced interrogation techniques.

- [Voiceover] But a massive Senate report in January 2015 disagreed about the value of the CIA's program.

The report reveals specific techniques and concluded they did not result in major intelligence gains.

Only Democrats on the Intelligence Committee signed the report.

But other voices too were raised against enhanced interrogation.

- I have long believed some of these practices amounted to torture as a reasonable person would define it, especially, but not only, the practice of waterboarding, which is a mock execution.

- I was called the vice president for torture among other things.

- [Voiceover] In 2004, the War on Terror was a major issue in the presidential election.

There were pictures of prisoner abuse by American military personnel from Abu Ghraib, and taunting videos from Osama Bin Laden.

The president's approval ratings were dropping and more so, the vice president's.

- I went to him, before the '04 election, three different times, and said to him, I said, "Mr.

President, you know, you need to think about "whether or not you want me to continue in the second term."

And I wanted him to have that option and it not to be difficult for him or a political problem.

And he went away the third time and thought about it and came back and he said, "No," he said, "you're my guy, Dick, I want you with me."

(gloomy music) - [Voiceover] With low voter turnout and a mere two and a half percent margin of victory, the Bush Cheney ticket was reelected.

- He was a much more sophisticated and experienced president than he was the day he was sworn in, which was obviously to his benefit.

And he'd taken a lot of hits over the Iraq War.

It was not a popular war by that time.

In the last term, especially given my general view of the world, and I was more hawkish than most, that the president didn't accept my advices as much as he had in the first term.

- President Bush begins to drift away from Vice President Cheney on some of these issues.

He begins to see other priorities, he worries about repairing relations with the allies.

He decides to try multilateralism with Iran and North Korea.

He opts not to bomb the Syria nuclear plant.

- We're dealing a Syrian reactor built by the North Koreans, intelligence provided to us by the Israelis.

I was a strong advocate that we should take it out militarily.

I was the only one in the administration who argued for that.

- [Voiceover] Bush and Cheney did agree, at least, to try to resolve the unfinished, unpopular fight in Iraq with a large new deployment of American troops.

The surge, as it was called, was largely viewed as a success.

- Now this was against the wishes and the advice of a lot of people.

In a sense, it was doubling down, you might say, but it worked.

- I mean, in Vietnam, we finally got to a successful counter insurgency strategy, but after five years which was already politically too late.

In Iraq, it took us four years to get to the same point.

You would have thought with any amount of institutional learning, we would have gotten there faster.

It has a lot to do with burying all the lessons from Vietnam - [Voiceover] In the closing days of the Administration, the vice president was further isolated by problems in his own office.

The Justice Department was investigating the leak of a CIA agent's identity.

The agent was married to a State Department consultant, who had publicly disputed the Administration's claim that Iraq sought nuclear arms materials in Africa.

- Then it was full speed ahead with an investigation was focused especially on my office, and it speculate focused on me.

- [Voiceover] The leaker, it turned out, was in the State Department, but longtime Cheney aide's Scooter Libby was nevertheless convicted on other charges related to his grand jury testimony.

Loyalty was a lifelong principle of Cheney's.

- In fact, he should never have been convicted, and that he should have been pardoned, and the president had the authority and the ability to do that and chose not to.

And I was not a happy camper.

- [Voiceover] 2009, the George W. Bush presidency and the Dick Cheney vice presidency comes to an end.

- [Cheney] I think it was a consequential vice presidency.

Frankly, I can't think of another one that was more consequential, not at least in modern times.

- It'd be very hard to argue that future historians will not say that at least up to the year 2009, Dick Cheney was the most powerful vice president in American history, but at the same time they will also have to say that there was not a lot of competition for that title.

- You know, there's always someone who's gonna be demonized and it may well be that Cheney took some arrows, saved other people in a way from taking them, including the president.

- Opinions are very polarized on Cheney and they don't seem to be changing over time.

You either admire him greatly for his commitment, his passion, his determination, or you see him as a very dark force in American politics.

- I'd get one of those calls every year for the rest of my life.

"What has happened to Dick Cheney?"

And I'd say, "nothing."

- [Voiceover] What had changed was Dick Cheney's health.

The White House ages all its inhabitants, but Dick Cheney was in steep decline.

- [Voiceover] In the early summer of 2010, he was dying.

- It was like a vortex, a whirlpool, that spins faster and faster the farther down you go, and once complication leads to and generates another.

- He had passed out from sudden cardiac arrest as he was backing out of the garage.

The Jeep had gone into the flower bed.

- And indeed, he had had what would have been a failed arrhythmia at that moment, and his device sensed it, treated it, charged its batteries, and then delivered a shock.

The whole process took about 15 seconds, but that would have been the day that Dick Cheney died.

- Dick's response was, when I asked is anything wrong he said, "well, I don't think so."

(laughs) - I was a pretty sick puppy.

- He never said, "I'm so sick," but he was so sick.

- When I came out from under the sedation.

- He never remembers his dreams.

- I had very vivid memories of being in Italy in a little village north of Rome, living in a nice villa, and the family asked me afterwards, "Dad, were we with you?"

And I said, "no."

That wasn't the right answer.

But I was at peace.

(heart monitor beeping) - [Voiceover] After 20 months on the wait list for a heart transplant, one becomes available.

- At this amazing moment during the operation, Allan Spear, his transplant surgeon, called me over and said, "Hey, John, take a look at this."

And in his hand was the vice president's heart, the largest heart I'd ever seen.

The first words he said when the breathing tube came out of his mouth the morning after his transplant, he said, "hot damn."

And that's about emotional as I've seen him get.

(flowing water) (calming music) - [Cheney] We were avid fishermen before we came to Wyoming.

My grandfather, Mom, and Dad did.

That became an important part of what we did.

But it became a lifelong hobby for me.

- We got this started in the late 1990s, and we decided to invite Dick and get him out of the White House 'cause he loves to fish.

- [Voiceover] Okay, first fish-- - No, no, no.

Big fish only, don't change the rules once you're in the water.

(laughter) - There we go, don't change the rules.

(water sputtering) - [Scarlett] We all ended up calling ourselves "the great release" because he was in the pressure cooker in Washington.

- [Cheney] I spent a lot of time on the river with my fly rod.

I've been, I think so far this year, on five hunting trips.

I opened the duck season Louisiana, shot pheasants, sharp tailed grouse in Montana, pheasant in South Dakota, geese on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake.

I'm making up for lost time to some extent.

(calming music) (midtempo violin music) - Your real name's Richard.

- That's right, I'm Richard and you're Richard.

Spending a lot of time with family, and that's important.

A little bit of footage and I thought-- It's a privilege, obviously, to get to be able to do that.

And it's hard to find more fun than watching them grow and develop and be part of that.

- [Voiceover] The Cheneys have a gated home in McLean, Virginia, a place next to Donald Rumsfeld's on the eastern shore, and a home in Wyoming, where they spend the majority of their time.

- [Lynne] What I mostly look forward to is waking up every morning and looking out our window and seeing those grand mountains, seeing the Tetons.

- [Voiceover] Stock options from the Halliburton years, worth millions, went to benefit the University of Wyoming, which now houses the Cheney International Center, and the George Washington University Hospital, home of the Richard B. Cheney Cardiovascular Institute.

- I'd hate to see a whole generation of people grow up sort of with a shorthand notion or convention of wisdom, "Bush lied, people died."

Especially when you get into the controversial areas.

There are a lot of people who will not stand up and speak out.

As I've always feel an obligation to the best of my ability to explain what we did and why we did it.

- [Voiceover] Major funding for this program was provided by: (mid tempo music) Additional funding provided by: (mid tempo music)