Cheney doesn't need Rumsfeld anymore

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush and the two top Democrats in the House met with reporters on Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney was largely silent, sitting impassively with his characteristic half-smile. "All three of us recognize that when you win, you have a responsibility to do the best you can for the country," declared Bush, apparently forgetting that the vice president was there to make it a foursome.

Cheney may not have felt the need to call attention to himself, but the resignation of his great partner and ally, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had added another layer of mystery to Cheney's role in the administration.

Throughout the election-week series of transition meetings, Cheney's fate was the elephant in the room, the question no one properly asked or answered: Is he in eclipse, or still pulling the levers from his proverbial undisclosed location? It's easy to make a case that he's in eclipse, but it's just as easy to envision scenarios in which his leadership comes even more to the fore in battling a Democratic-led Congress.

Rumsfeld, Cheney's original boss from the Nixon and Ford administrations, has certainly been an ironclad ally. Rumsfeld and Cheney each have weekend houses on Chesapeake Bay, near the resort town of St. Michaels, Md., and the two are regularly spotted in coffee shops plotting administration strategy.

But the importance of the alliance to setting policy has been somewhat exaggerated. Rumsfeld seems to have honed his job as defense chief to a single mission -- modernizing the military, replacing large armies with technologically advanced strike forces. It's a variant of an idea embraced by liberals in the aftermath of the Cold War, and President Bill Clinton had envisioned changing the structure of the Pentagon through his first defense chief, former representative Les Aspin.

Neither Clinton nor Aspin had enough credibility with the military to pull it off, though. And even Rumsfeld -- a military veteran who had served a year as defense secretary under Ford -- was feuding with the brass when Sept. 11, 2001 , brutally intervened. Rumsfeld, working through his chosen generals, made the Afghanistan war a test of his faith in smaller, quicker forces, and everyone involved was showered in glory.

In Iraq, of course, the opposite has happened. Rumsfeld's war plan succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein, but lacked sufficient troops to secure the country.

But as Rumsfeld becomes the scapegoat, it's easy to forget that he was not the prime advocate of the doctrine of pre emptive war, or the so-called "reverse domino theory" of creating democracy in the Middle East, or even the single-minded focus on Iraq as the prime enemy in the Middle East. These notions all emanated at various times from Rumsfeld's Pentagon, but largely from the civilians immediately beneath Rumsfeld -- Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and others -- who were in many respects closer to Cheney than Rummy.

So one key to Cheney's influence will be whether Cheney can exercise equivalent power during the tenure of Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's designated successor. The answer is somewhere in Gates's philosophy and his relationship with Cheney, and both are hard to pin down. Gates was a Cold War hard - liner who seems to have had some reservations about the Iraq war from its inception. How this adds up to a governing philosophy at the Pentagon is anyone's guess. In addition, Cheney and Gates worked amiably together in the first Bush administration, when Cheney was defense chief and Gates was CIA director and deputy national security adviser, but the contours of their friendship are unknown.

However, Cheney was involved in choosing Gates to succeed Rumsfeld, and one can assume that the vice president was mindful of choosing an ally. Unlike Bush, who prides himself on his ability to judge potential appointees by their character ("I know her heart," he said of White House counsel Harriet Miers), Cheney uses the personnel process to insert loyalists into key posts.

Nonetheless, Gates can reasonably claim to be entering the administration with a mandate from the people, via the election, to change war strategies, which might supersede any loyalty to Cheney.

But there are other vehicles for Cheney's influence -- the State Department, for instance. The key position of Condoleezza Rice's top deputy has been open, and many people in the department speculate that it is awaiting Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president's daughter. The younger Cheney has been the State Department's second-ranking official on the Middle East, but is currently on maternity leave.

And there is also the Justice Department. As the Globe's Charlie Savage has reported, Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, was behind much of the department's efforts to expand executive power by asserting the right to disobey Congress in numerous areas of policy.

There'll be a lot of unwanted laws coming out of a Democratic-led Congress, and Cheney, no doubt, will be driving the administration's response.

The bottom line seems to be that Cheney doesn't need Rumsfeld to remain the administration's pre eminent policy maker.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.