Cheney's Grimy Trail in Business

Vice President Dick Cheney has spent most of the past year in hiding, ostensibly from terrorists, but increasingly it seems obvious that it is Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the media and the public he fears. And for good reason: Cheney's business behavior could serve as a textbook case of much of what's wrong with the way corporate CEOs have come to play the game of business.

The game involves more than playing loose with accounting rules, as Halliburton Co. is accused of doing while Cheney was the Texas-based energy company's chief executive.

On Sunday, SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, whom Cheney pushed for the job, reluctantly turned on his sponsor and announced a vigorous investigation of Halliburton's accounting violations. Recent business scandals, however, are also the product of legal loopholes that allow firms to scoop up billions in unregulated profits.

It was just such loopholes that allowed the rise and subsequent fall of Enron and telecom heavyweights like WorldCom--in the process making CEOs like Dick Cheney very, very rich.

Recall that Cheney was a political hack for most of his professional life, first as a staffer in the Ford White House, then as a congressman for a decade and after that as secretary of Defense under the current president's father.

During the Clinton years, however, Cheney took an extremely lucrative five-year cruise into the private sector as chief executive of Halliburton.

After deciding, following an extensive search, that he would be George W. Bush's best candidate for vice president, Cheney resigned from the energy services company with a $36-million payoff for his final year of corporate service.

This journey from the public payroll to the corporate towers and back left a slimy trail of conflict-of-interest questions. For example, Defense Secretary Cheney conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on U.S. military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer, Halliburton, to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade. When Cheney left to become CEO of the entire company, he recruited his Pentagon military aide, Joe Lopez, to become senior vice president in charge of Pentagon dealings, which ultimately formed the most lucrative part of the otherwise ailing company's business.

Since returning to the public office, these disturbing patterns have continued.