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September
27, 2001
Before Sept. 11
Ailing Cheney
Told Bush He Would Quit Soon
Ridge Scheduled As New Veep
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Before the September 11 attacks, vice
president Dick Cheney was set to quit. President George Bush
was preparing to nominate Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as
Cheney's successor.
A prominent Philadelphia businessman
and close friend of Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge has been
telling friends that in late summer Cheney went to Bush and told
the president that his health was so precarious that he would
soon be forced to quit the vice presidential post. Bush had thereupon
called the Pennsylvania governor and told him that when Cheney
stepped down he wanted to nominate Ridge to the US Senate for
confirmation as the new vice president.
With a medical history of four
heart attacks since 1978, and a bypass in 1988, Cheney's condition
has been a subject of concern ever since Bush put him forward
as his vice presidential nominee at the Republican convention
in Philadelphia in July, 2000. Cheney's health once again hit
the headlines in January of this year when he was forced into
surgery for an angioplasty amid the stresses of the Florida recount
at the start of this year. Cheney had another "mild"
heart in March and again went under the surgeon's knife.
It's no surprise that Bush
called Ridge. Before he himself became the nominee Cheney had
been supervising the search for Bush's running mate and put Ridge
at the top of the list. But Ridge is pro-choice and the fury
of the Republican right forced Bush to abandon the plan. Even
so, in recent months there's been widespread speculation that
Cheney would stand down in 2004, with Ridge as his designated
successor. When Cheney was in hospital for surgery after his
last heart attack, Ridge was summoned to Camp David, where he
appeared at a press conference standing behind Bush.
Cheney's decision to quit lends
another level of drama to the morning of September 11, when a
vice president with a weakening heart was running the country
while the President was heading for the SAC deep shelters in
Nebraska.
On September 12, amid widespread
public dismay at Bush's disappearing act on a day of dreadful
national crisis, the White House concocted the story, later reiterated
by Cheney, that there had "credible threat" of a plan
to attack Air Force One, thus justifying Bush's zig-zag, belated
return to Washington. The White House told New York Times columnist
William Safire that after the onslaughts of the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon a terrorist phone call "using code words"
had said Air Force One was a target. Safire leaped to the astounding
conclusion that there was a bin Laden mole in the White House.
Two weeks later, on September 25, CBS News reported that there
had been no such phone call.
In a Meet the Press interview
with ABC's Tim Russert on September 16 Cheney laid great stress
on succession as having been very much on his mind in those frantic
morning hours of September 11. Four days later Bush told the
joint session of Congress he was nominating Tom Ridge as head
of the new Office of Homeland Security, thus setting Ridge on
the national stage. CP
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