Instead, Keating was told, that role would be assumed by Cheney — oddly enough, the man who had interviewed Keating for the job and who had been supervising the entire running-mate selection process to begin with!

“The governor thought Dick Cheney was a great pick,” says Keating spokesman Phil Bacharach, adding, “When it comes to the decision, Governor Keating would have to defer to Dick Cheney because of his expertise in foreign relations and international policy; in short his national and international stature.” Keating and Cheney have known each other for some time, Bacharach explains, as they both served in the Bush administration. Keating had asked Cheney to lead the fundraising for the Oklahoma City Memorial. They’re friends, Bacharach says.

That is not to say, however, that Keating was pleased with the oddness of this selection process and that, in the end, Cheney essentially picked himself. According to a source familiar with the process Keating went through, the Oklahoma governor did find that process somewhat “baffling.”

In the job interview of all job interviews, Keating, after all, turned over his most sensitive personal, financial and professional information about himself to the very man who would end up applying for — and winning — the same job.

“On its face, it’s pretty bizarre,” says the Keating source.

From Keating’s perspective, Cheney’s moves were odd for other reasons as well. As head of the selection committee, Cheney was the intermediary between the prospective running mates and Bush. He had promised Keating that he’d get at least one more meeting with Bush before any decision was made; that didn’t happen.

Nor was Keating aware that Cheney was a competitor. Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes told reporters Tuesday that she “assumed” that Cheney was open with other candidates about the fact that, since July 3, Cheney was a leading choice in the process he was supervising. She assumed that, she said, since he had been so forthcoming about so many other issues with her boss. But such does not seem to be the case with those he was interviewing, at least with Keating.

As of last Thursday, Cheney had called Keating’s office to find out where he could reached over the weekend, and no mention was made then — or at any other time — that Cheney himself was in the running. When media reports surfaced that Cheney might be a candidate, Keating and those around him assumed that the stories had been leaked by the Bush team to bump off front-page stories speculating about the willingness of Arizona Sen. John McCain to serve with Bush. Then on Friday, NBC News’ Lisa Myers broke the news that Cheney had flown to Wyoming to change his voter registration from Dallas to Teton County — thus avoiding a constitutional prohibition against state electors casting their ballots for a president and vice president from the same state. Keating then took the story seriously, the source says.

This story, and others from those close to other running-mate candidates, serve to paint a picture of a selection process that was coming apart at the seams. On Thursday, the Bush team reportedly had even asked former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander for financial and other background information. Since the request was coming so late in the process, this led many Republicans to suspect the entire vetting system was unhinging. How could it not be, with the vetter suddenly a top candidate?

In fact, as spokeswoman Hughes acknowledged today, Cheney wasn’t vetted the way that the others were. While he went through and analyzed the political records of prospective running mates like Keating, Michigan Gov. John Engler, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, New York Gov. George Pataki and former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, it was Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh who did what Hughes called a “similar” review of Cheney.

More questionably, while Cheney analyzed and hashed over sensitive financial and personal records of his competitors for the job, it was Cheney and Bush — who is not known for attention to details or a long attention span — who did the same for him. Asked who vetted Cheney’s financial records, Hughes replied, “Just as with other candidates, secretary Cheney is the one who handled that.”

Hughes said that since Cheney is a former secretary of defense, he has already been through numerous FBI background checks and had received a high security clearance.

Recognizing the oddness of the selection process, Bush spokeswoman Hughes broke down the timeline Tuesday for the press after Bush formally announced his selection of Cheney Tuesday afternoon in the Burnt Orange Room of the Frank Erwin Center downtown.

In March, at a post-dinner rap session in the library of the governor’s mansion here, Bush asked Cheney if he had any interest in serving as his running mate. Though Cheney had always been a friend of the campaign, going so far as to help put together the Bush foreign policy and defense advisory group, he demurred, saying that he was enjoying his job in the private sector, as chairman and CEO of the Halliburton Co.

Fair enough, Bush said. Though, he said in his speech on Tuesday, he “kept the thought of him joining me in the back of my mind.”

Several weeks later, in April, Bush asked Cheney to head the selection process; Cheney accepted. Plenty of individuals went through the rigorous vetting process, Cheney, Bush and the vetting team discussed the choices and reviewed their financial, professional and political records.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, Cheney went to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. On July 3, sitting in the den of the guest house — as the new house is being built — Bush and Cheney rapped for several hours, talking about potential running mates. Soon it was lunchtime. Over lunch-meat sandwiches that Hughes said were assembled by each individual, Laura Bush asked her husband how the process was going.

Bush motioned toward Cheney. “This would really be the best man, if he would do it,” Bush said, according to Hughes. “I wish he would.” Bush explained in his speech Tuesday that, having selected “a distinguished and experienced statesman” to head his selection task, he “saw firsthand Dick Cheney’s outstanding judgment. As we considered the many different credentials, I benefited from his keen insight. I was impressed by the thoughtful and thorough way he approached his mission. And gradually, I realized that the person who was best qualified to be my vice presidential nominee was working by my side.”

After lunch, Cheney told Bush that he would consider the possibility. He would need to talk with his family about it, he said. In his speech Tuesday, Cheney said that he had become enamored of Bush. Working alongside Bush was “an experience that changed my life this spring,” he said. “I worked alongside Gov. Bush; I heard him talk about his unique vision for our party and for our nation. I saw his sincerity. I watched him make decisions — always firm and always fair. And in the end, I learned how persuasive he can be.”

On July 11 and 12, Cheney traveled to Washington to interview other candidates — and to visit his doctors at George Washington University Medical Center to get a clean bill of health. Cheney, after all, has had three mild heart attacks and underwent coronary artery bypass graft surgery in 1988.

Cheney has “a long history of elevated cholesterol,” according to Dr. Gary Malakoff, an associate professor of medicine, and has been treated for skin cancer and gout. According to Malakoff, Cheney “takes a long list of medications.” He is also allergic to pomegranates.

Still, the doctors said he was healthy enough to run. A July 24 note given out in the Bush-Cheney press packets from Dr. Jonathan S. Reiner, also an associate professor of medicine, states that Cheney “continues to lead an asymptomatic and extraordinarily vigorous lifestyle. He travels extensively for work, exercises 30 minutes per day several days per week on a treadmill, and engages in vigorous recreational activities such as hunting.”

On July 15, Cheney met with Bush to tell him about the candidates he had been interviewing, and the fact that he was apparently healthy enough for the job. Allbaugh, Hughes and Bush’s chief advisor, Karl Rove, met with the two men, as well as Laura Bush, to talk “about the ramifications of the leader of the search becoming a candidate in that search,” according to Hughes. It was soon after that that Bush contacted his father to have family friend and cardiac surgeon Denton A. Cooley consult with Reiner and Malakoff to give his OK on Cheney’s bum ticker, too. They did so.

According to Hughes, Cheney was insistent that, even though he really really really wanted the job, he would present Bush with other viable options. “I remember being impressed that he was so fair and so thoughtful,” Hughes says, though one wonders how fair Keating, Ridge, Pataki and the others think Cheney was.

It happened fast from there. On July 18, Cheney and Bush met in Chicago with Danforth and his wife, Sally. (Hughes says she assumed Cheney told Danforth that he himself was a candidate, too, though she wasn’t sure.) On July 19, Bush called Cheney and told him he wanted to seriously consider him, asking if Cheney would be willing to leave the Halliburton Co. That day and the next, Cheney discussed his leaving with members of the board of directors of the company. On the 21st, he flew to Wyoming — unbeknownst to the Bush campaign, Hughes insisted — to change his voter registration.

Over the weekend, Bush contemplated his options at his ranch, and by Monday afternoon he had made his decision.

And then, the official version of this story goes, on Tuesday at 6:27 a.m., Bush woke up, fed the cats, gave Spot some water, brought some coffee to Laura and called Cheney at his Dallas home to tell him he had the job. Lynne Cheney answered the phone, Hughes said. Cheney, after all, was working out on his treadmill. Hustling his tail off, no doubt.

Halliburton does business in more than 120 countries and employs more than 100,000 people worldwide. Most interesting, in light of Cheney’s work as defense secretary during the Gulf War, the company made hundreds of millions of dollars cleaning up after that war in Kuwait.

As Democrats race for their paint brushes to color the GOP ticket black, for big oil, Salon talked to activist Pratap Chatterjee, who has monitored the oil industry, and Halliburton, for years. Chatterjee is author of “The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development,” and the architect of a World Bank spoof site on the Internet. He has also worked with Project Underground, a Berkeley, Calif., group which monitors the activities of the oil industry, and the environmental impacts of oil drilling projects.

Describe Halliburton.

Halliburton is the world’s largest oil services company. It was started in 1916, and it became the biggest employer in Houston. It’s very prominent in Texas. The thing that really made it big was when Dick Cheney took it over and merged it with Dresser Industries. After the merger, they became a kind of one-stop shop for all the different elements and services involved in drilling for oil. Whether you need a drill bit or seismic testing, they offer the complete array of services. Halliburton is now the biggest company in that business. They are in 120 countries around the world. Their income last year was $15 billion.

So the company has grown since Cheney became CEO?

Oh, they’ve grown immensely. They do two things: They work in the oil business and in the military business. So it makes sense that they would pick a former secretary of defense to be their CEO. When he was secretary of defense, one of the things Cheney did was scale down defense spending and ax a lot of people. Under Cheney, employment in the armed forces went from 2.2 million to 1.7 million. Well, that might sound good to some people but what really happened was the military started outsourcing a lot of the tasks that the military used to do themselves — things like construction.

What Halliburton is doing now, and this has been the trend around the world as more and more countries outsource, is large-scale construction projects on behalf of the United States military. Companies like Halliburton essentially enabled the Army to use the private sector to go anywhere in the world within 15 days. In 1993, they implemented this in Somalia. Halliburton got a contract to supply $100 million of logistical support to the army — everything from supplying toilets to supplying fresh fruit to translators. Within hours of the U.S. task force arriving in Somalia, they became the largest employer in all of Africa. Since then, they’ve gotten similar contracts in Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995 and Albania in 1999.

How does an oil services company get into the construction business?

They’ve always been in the business of construction and supplying services. Now, they’ve come up with this grand scheme to build floating, mobile bases for the U.S. Army. The only thing that’s similar to them are oil rigs, which they have plenty of experience with.

So they depend on government contracts for income?

In part, yes. They also have large contracts with the oil companies themselves. After the Gulf War, Brown & Root [the construction arm of Halliburton] got a contract to rebuild a lot of the infrastructure in Kuwait. I think the money for that deal was part of an aid package. In Haiti and Somalia, their contracts were considered direct logistical support for the U.S. Army, and it came directly out of their budget. But it is true that they are funded in large part by U.S. taxpayer dollars, yes.

So why would a former secretary of defense go to work for an oil services company?

It makes sense. Just like journalists hire the people who know the business of writing, companies in the oil business hire people who are familiar with how government and government bureaucracy works, and how to land those lucrative government contracts. What I have a problem with, and what Cheney’s move between the defense department and Halliburton illustrates, is the close relationship between business and government in making money at the expense of the environment and all of these kinds of things.

I think Cheney’s decision to go to Halliburton was a major conflict of interest. If your job is working for the U.S. government, for the taxpayer, and what you’re doing is defending the country’s interests, and then you leave and cash in on those contacts to make money for a private company which receives US taxpayer dollars, it’s disingenuous. What Cheney did was get the process rolling with privatization in the [military], and then he went on to profit off of it. Just more than a month ago, he cashed in $5.1 million worth of stock.

So do you think that Bush’s selection of Cheney will shine the spotlight on big oil this election season?

Oh, the Gore campaign has already done it. They’ve issued press releases saying Bush is in bed with the oil industry and things like this. But Al Gore isn’t any better. He has a lot of links to Occidental Petroleum. There’s really no difference between Gore and Bush. Gore led the Senate in calling for the Gulf War, which Cheney’s future employer profited off of. When you look at it, the government and the oil industry work together all the time, and it’s not really a partisan issue. I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all, but this is the business of how multinational business, the military and government work. They’re one and the same. It’s about making profit. It’s about power.

It was left to one man to tell Ford that he needed to address the problem: Ford’s White House chief of staff, Richard Cheney. Cheney, then only 35 years old, took his boss aside and delivered the ugly truth, and soon Ford was acknowledging to reporters that the situation in Eastern Europe was “tragic.”

For Republicans, Cheney is this solid, sturdy man — a conservative voice of reason with a moderate temperament, a former secretary of defense that the Bush team hopes you might remember from former President George Bush’s salad days immediately after the Gulf War. For a politician, he projects a certain apolitical way. He knows Washington, knows how to get things done. Serious. Smart. Makes the trains run on time. Whether or not Cheney’s nomination actually wins George W. Bush any votes, if Bush actually wins, Republicans say, America will be better off because of Cheney’s presence in the White House.

But Democrats are also popping the champagne corks with the news of Bush’s pick. First, many on Al Gore’s team were worried that Bush would pick something other than a fleshy old white Protestant male. (And another Methodist, at that.)

But more than that, many Dems feel that with Cheney come numbers — 3 heart attacks + 3 Republican administrations of olde + 5 military deferments during the Vietnam War + countless far-far-far-right House votes to slam him on — that they are confident won’t add up.

“The Gore campaign has had a lot of bad luck,” says one high-ranking Democratic official. “This is good luck.”

On wedge issues like gun control and nutrition programs for seniors and children, Cheney as a congressman often took the hard-line conservative view, occasionally voting with only a handful of others.

In May 1988, for instance, Cheney was one of only four members of the House to be on the losing end of a 413-4 House vote that banned the sale, manufacture or importation of plastic weapons that are undetectable by airport screening machines. The bill’s supporters argued that, in law enforcement’s efforts to combat terrorism, it was not an undue burden on gun owners to require that their weapons contain at least 3.7 ounces of electromagnetically detectable metal, the minimum amount that can be detected by airport security devices. Cheney disagreed.

And there are a lot more where that vote came from, Cheney having served as Wyoming’s congressman from his election in 1978, through the Reagan revolution, until President George Bush tapped him to serve as secretary of defense in March 1989.

Don’t be surprised when you hear Democrats describing him as having frequently voted to the right of his class of ’78 colleague, Georgia’s Newt Gingrich. On Dec. 17, 1985, for instance, Cheney was one of only 21 members of Congress who opposed a ban on armor-piercing “cop-killer” bullets. (Joe Sudbay, who works on legislative outreach for the Center for the Prevention of Handgun Violence, says Cheney has “never voted with us. Never ever. Never came close.”)

In 1984, he was one of only 12 House members to vote against the Older Americans Act amendments, which added to a program providing nutrition assistance for seniors. In 1987, he was one of only eight House members to vote against $1.6 billion for Older Americans Act programs and, when the bill returned to the House after the House-Senate Conference Committee, one of only seven who opposed adoption of the conference committee report.

Additionally, as the Sierra Club was quick to point out on Monday, Cheney is a disaster on the environment — one of only 21 who voted against the Safe Water Drinking Act in 1986, and one of only eight who voted against reauthorizing the Clean Water Act. The League of Conservation Voters reports that Cheney’s lifetime average of voting on environmentally friendly legislation is just 13 percent.

None of this is incompatible with the views of Bush, who is pro-gun and seen by environmentalists as anti-green. But some of Cheney’s most conservative votes don’t necessarily jibe with the “compassionate conservative” gloss of his new boss.

When Carter moved to give education its own Cabinet-level agency in 1979, for instance, Cheney twice voted against separating the “E” from the Department of HEW (Health, Education and Welfare). In 1986, Cheney was one of only 33 members to vote against authorizing funding for programs that included Head Start; he later was one of 27 who voted against the conference committee report of essentially the same bill.

This begs the question: Bush has said that he wants Head Start to be incorporated into the Department of Education. What on earth would Rep. Cheney feel about this? Oppose Head Start and also oppose the existence of the department that would supervise it?

Democrats will also make populist hay over the fact that Cheney has served since 1995 as chairman and CEO of the Dallas-based Halliburton Co. In a July 1999 Associated Press story on major oil-service companies planning large layoffs, Cheney — whose company had laid off 9,500 workers in a year — proclaimed optimism “because of a recovery in the Asian economy, restrained output by members of the OPEC nations and higher prices for oil and gas.” As gas prices shoot past $2 a gallon, it’s questionable how many Americans are willing to herald a former oil executive who one year ago was trumpeting how much he was looking forward to higher prices for oil and gas.

Even National Review editor Rich Lowry cautioned Monday that a Cheney pick would be questionable, since he “is the head of an oil company at a time when Gore is trying to associate Bush with corporate interests.”

Then there’s Cheney’s life during the Vietnam War, which was partially spent seeking and obtaining deferments to avoid military service. As a student — he dropped out of Yale and studied at the University of Wyoming — Cheney received four 2-S draft deferments from 1963 through 1965. A fifth came a year later under the 3-A classification for those who had dependents.

“I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service,” Cheney once said.

Which is fine, as it was when Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard during that era, but how will it play if Gore is savvy enough to select a running mate who, like him, served in Vietnam?

Republicans will respond that none of that seemed to matter to the Democratic-controlled Senate that confirmed Cheney as secretary of defense in 1989. There are plenty of people from his days in Congress — including current Secretary of Defense William Cohen — who have nothing but nice things to say about Cheney. Cheney as a congressman, and as a member of both the Ford and the Bush White Houses, was a solid, just-the-facts kind of guy, a team player and — though a conservative — never an ideologue who couldn’t work with moderates.

His ability to play nice with others is at least somewhat responsible for Cheney’s success. Cheney began his career working — and working well — with Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1967. After President Nixon formed the Cost of Living Council to control inflation, Rumsfeld headed up the program and Cheney was named assistant director. Rumsfeld was eventually named President Ford’s chief of staff; when he entered his new digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he did so with Cheney as his deputy.

Eventually, after months and months in which Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had been butting heads with Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, Schlesinger was canned. In November 1975, Rumsfeld was brought in to take his place, and Cheney moved up to become, at the time, the youngest White House chief of staff in memory.

Significantly, Kissinger and Rumsfeld weren’t exactly allies, though they found common cause in ousting Schlesinger. (The two also found common cause earlier this year when both were trotted out in a Washington press conference in which they — in addition to Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice — endorsed George W. Bush.)

Cheney soon earned respect as a loyal and trusted aide to Ford. “It isn’t the individual in this job, but who is president,” he said of his job to U.S. News & World Report in a November 1975 profile. “He determines how things go.”

Ford lost in 1976, of course, but Cheney had another bit of fortuitous luck when Democratic Rep. Teno Roncalio, the occupant of the sole congressional seat in the state in which he grew up — Wyoming — soon announced his retirement.

“Who Is Dick Cheney and Why Is He Running for Congress?” read his campaign brochures — the first question of which many Americans are no doubt asking again today.

During this campaign, in June 1978, Cheney had to put his politicking on hold when, at the age of 37, the then-smoker suffered a mild heart attack. Doctors told him to quit smoking and rest for a month.

But even this apparently worked to his benefit. A Washington Post profile from that year stated that “Cheney believes, and there is considerable evidence to support him, that the heart attack he suffered last June 18 was of political benefit to him. Before that, a poll taken by his friend Robert Teeter, who did the voters surveys for the Ford campaign, showed him with a narrow lead and less name identification than he would have liked. The complete coverage of the heart attack and Cheney’s recovery from it solved the latter problem.”

He would suffer two more heart attacks, in 1984 and 1988; in the latter year he also had bypass surgery. All the while, he rose quickly through the ranks of House leadership; he was elected House Republican whip in 1988. Some even predicted he would eventually be elected speaker of the House before President Bush brought him to the Pentagon in ’89.

Even then, it was fate that stepped in, again, to bring Cheney on his serendipitous road to power. Cheney was picked to head the Pentagon only after then President Bush’s first pick, former Texas Sen. John Tower, saw his confirmation go down in flames amid allegations of booze and broads.

Confirmed easily, second-choice Cheney set to the task of downsizing the U.S. military, cutting $10 billion from the budget in his first year. He strongly defended the base-closing plan that closed 31 major military bases, noting in April 1991 that “the budget does have an impact. It’s just as important to maintain defense and have a strong economy.”

Though he hadn’t served in the military, Cheney made no bones about who was in charge. Only six months into his new job, in September 1989, he tapped Colin Powell over several other more veteran officers to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then, in September 1990, Cheney made history by being the first secretary of defense to ever fire a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Chief of Staff and four-star Gen. Mike Dugan, whom Cheney canned for speaking to reporters about plans to launch air strikes against Iraq, without, reportedly, hearing Dugan’s explanation.

There were other incidents. According to Bob Woodward’s “The Commanders,” after Cheney fired Gen. Frederick Woerner, commander of the U.S. military in Central and South America, Woerner said, “After thirty-four years of service I believe I’m entitled to an explanation.” But Cheney gruffly said only: “Time for a change.”

On the other hand, some in the military took “civilian” Cheney’s slaps lightly; after Cheney publicly rebuked Air Force Chief of Staff Larry Welch for appearing to be negotiating freelance with Congress, Welch — a veteran — reportedly said, “I’ve been shot at by professionals and I’m still here. So being shot at by an amateur is not likely to cause me any pain.”

But even for a civilian, it was during war — namely Operation Desert Storm — that team player Cheney’s smooth authority is said to have impressed the elder Bush the most. By many accounts, Cheney was a commanding presence, pushing Powell and others to present President Bush with military options to end the Iraqi presence in Kuwait despite their many misgivings.

In other accounts — most notably Woodward’s — Cheney’s image doesn’t hold up as well under scrutiny. While never budging from his view that the military benefits from civilian supervision and review, Cheney nonetheless could be seen as authoritarian, according to Woodward, showing disdain whenever the subject was raised of the potential need to get congressional authorization for the war, as required — but often ignored — under the War Powers Act.

Though history is still being written on that military operation, at the time it was considered a success, and President Bush was impressed enough to award Cheney (as well as National Security Advisor Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker III) the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. President Bush was so impressed with Cheney that during a brief “Dump Quayle” run in the media, his name was bandied about as a potential 1992 running mate for the elder Bush.

Through image and rhetoric, George W. Bush continues to show that he has learned from his father’s mistakes; bearing Quayle in mind — as well as the suddenness of the announcement of his selection in ’88 — the son’s selection of Cheney is just the latest example of this.

And, once again, through his own achievements as well as a remarkable ability to convey a likable gravity, Dick Cheney is in the corridors of power. And he brings a realistic take of what this job entails. “The vice president is always in a very difficult position, in any circumstances,” he said in 1987, expressing sympathy for then Vice President Bush as vice chairman of a House committee investigating Iran-Contra. “If he challenges the president in policy meetings, disagrees with him, he’s viewed as being disloyal.”

Weathered and seasoned, Cheney will no doubt be an asset to Bush behind the scenes, even if the Democrats succeed in making him something of a liability with swing voters.

In that, Cheney can be seen as almost a post-election pick, for which Al Gore and his team are no doubt grateful.