President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney wave to the crowd after Bush delivered his speech on the last night of the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
“There are a lot of reasons why George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney as his running mate,” TIME’s Richard Lacayo wrote in 2000. “Charisma isn’t one of them.” Indeed, the former Wyoming congressman and future architect of Bush’s Global War on Terror was something of an ultimate insider, much happier operating the levers of power from behind the scenes. But he shared Bush’s love for the great American West, warm ties with the oil industry and a similar conservative philosophy. More than that, was so close to Bush and his father, the 41st President of the United States, that Dubya tapped Cheney to head up his search for vice president. As TIME wrote in 2000:
When he sat down with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in a Chicago hotel suite on July 18, former Missouri Senator John Danforth assumed he was the only one in the room being considered for Vice President. After the intense three-hour meeting ended, Danforth came away thinking he might be offered the job. It never occurred to him that Cheney, the man in charge of Bush’s selection process, was also his competition. “Cheney flew [me] up to Chicago,” Danforth recalled last week. “I took that to mean Cheney had declined it.”
In fact, by then Bush not only knew he wanted Cheney to be his Vice President; he also knew Cheney, his father’s Secretary of Defense, would say yes. But that was information neither man shared with Danforth. He and 10 other would-be running mates had laid themselves bare before Cheney and his vetting team…
But no matter how sharp their answers or how earnestly they stared into the candidate’s eyes, the other hopefuls didn’t have what Dick Cheney had: a spot in George W. Bush’s comfort zone. To be sure, Bush wanted a running mate who was ready to be President. But just as important was a partner who would be loyal–someone, as Bush said more than once, “who likes me.”