WASHINGTON — This time, mild-mannered Dick Cheney was really mad. House Speaker Jim Wright had broken the one ironclad rule of politics: a deal is a deal.

After barely losing a key vote on a budget bill in October, 1987, Wright adjourned the House temporarily, reconvened it shortly afterward and twisted the rules to bring the measure up immediately for another vote. Wright let all time for voting expire, then won back the allegiance of a Texas Democrat who had strayed on the issue--thus carrying the bill for the majority.

The next morning, Cheney, then the third-ranking Republican in the House, unleashed his anger in an interview with the National Journal, a magazine widely read on Capitol Hill.

Calling Wright a "heavy-handed son of a bitch," Cheney accused the Speaker of arrogant abuse of power. "He doesn't know any other way to operate," Cheney fumed, "and he will do anything he can to win at any price, including ignoring the rules, bending rules, writing rules, denying the House the opportunity to work its will. It brings disrespect on the House itself."

Was this Dick Cheney, the soft-spoken conciliator, the political scholar who can disagree without being disagreeable? The man President Bush described last week as "a thoughtful, a quiet man"?

Absolutely, says his wife, Lynne V. Cheney, director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. "It's a quiet, cold sort of anger, not an outburst," she said. It's a tool, one he uses selectively, but to great effect, she added.

And on the rare occasions that her husband loses his temper, it is usually at "somebody double-dealing, somebody not keeping a bargain," she said in an interview Wednesday.

Dick Cheney, 48, today is on the verge of being confirmed--anointed, some say--as the nation's 17th secretary of defense. He is portrayed by political friends and rivals alike as bright, articulate, fair, unflappable and eminently likable.

But he will need to be tough, too, and sometimes angry, as he moves across the Potomac to the Pentagon, which sits mired in scandal and virtually paralyzed by an absence of top managers in the aftermath of the nasty and prolonged confirmation battle over John Tower, President Bush's first choice as defense secretary.

Cheney, a Wyoming Republican in his sixth term in the House, is everything former Texas Sen. Tower is not. Cheney is balding, gray-suited and soothing; Tower is pomaded, London-tailored and abrasive.