Indeed, nearly every malady now facing Halliburton follows from deals done during Cheney's reign. Those deals are ultimately the responsibility of the Halliburton board of directors -- who, rather than choose an experienced CEO who knew the oil-field services and construction business, picked a charter member of the Bush family's crony network.

Halliburton's board members have been candid in discussing the reasons for hiring Cheney -- and his business acumen is never mentioned. Cheney, whose degrees are in political science, had virtually no business experience when he became CEO of Halliburton in 1995. Thomas H. Cruikshank, the former chairman of Halliburton, told one reporter that Cheney got the job because "he would be able to open doors around the world and to have access practically anywhere ... There was a lot that he could bring in the way of customer relationships."

But there's little evidence to show that those relationships did Halliburton any good. Instead, Cheney's ability to forge relationships got Halliburton into the worst acquisition in its history. In January of 1998, Cheney went quail hunting with Bill Bradford, the chairman of Dresser Industries, another big oil-field services company. During their shooting expedition on a ranch in South Texas, Cheney proposed a merger with Dresser. After a series of meetings, Bradford agreed.

But Cheney didn't grasp the scope of Dresser's legal liabilities. Dresser owned a subsidiary that was facing a mountain of legal bills stemming from its old asbestos business. That asbestos problem began catching up to Halliburton almost immediately. The year of the merger, Halliburton had about 70,000 outstanding claims on asbestos. By 2002, it was facing more than 300,000 lawsuits. In late 2001 alone, the company was hit by jury verdicts totaling $122 million. The company's stock price fell like a rock -- going from a high of more than $60 in the days after Cheney was named as Bush's running mate to as low as $9. Credit rating agencies downgraded Halliburton's debt, and there was open talk of bankruptcy.

Since then, Halliburton has been able to strike a deal with its insurers to cover much of the asbestos-related costs. But Halliburton is likely to suffer from its asbestos hangover for several years to come, as it works to pay down increased debt it took on to resolve the matter.

"The Dresser deal will go down as one of the worst deals in the modern energy business," says a Houston-based energy analyst who has been following Halliburton for several years. The analyst asked that his name not be used -- which is not surprising given Halliburton's size and the staunch Republican leanings of most energy business personnel. Asked if Cheney was a good CEO for Halliburton, the analyst replied, "The answer is clearly no. He knows how to make decisions. But he wasn't an energy guy. You can't find anything good that comes out of his tenure."

Another Cheney-era deal, the Brazilian offshore oil project known as Barracuda-Caratinga, is also draining the company's cash. During Cheney's time at the helm, Halliburton agreed to a fixed-price contract with the Brazilian oil company, Petrobras, to build the infrastructure needed for the two offshore oil fields -- Barracuda and Caratinga, which are located in about 3,000 feet of water. But the project has spun out of control. In a June 29 research note, Merrill Lynch analyst Mark S. Urness wrote that the cost overruns and charges taken by Halliburton on the project have already totaled $675 million, and the company may still have to cough up another $272 million to resolve the mess.

Despite the problems, Urness still rates Halliburton a "buy," saying that the company has a "solid fundamental outlook" that is based on its "leading oil services franchise, as we anticipate increased worldwide upstream capital spending by producers through 2004-05."

Halliburton recently lost a $106 million legal judgment to a pair of Houston oil companies that had claimed the services giant violated confidentiality agreements in an oil deal in western Kazakhstan, near the Caspian Sea. Again, Cheney was involved.

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