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"Angler": The Rise and (Finally!) Fall of Dick Cheney
By Bernard Weiner (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Bernard Weiner - Writer
Reading Barton Gellman's "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency" (Penguin Press, 2008) is yet another reminder that all too often those who were right early on about the massive dangers facing American society under the CheneyBush Administration were ignored, marginalized, reviled, often punished.
There were scores of us in the media, most on the internet but a healthy handful inside corporate mainstream journalism, who from the very beginning were warning of a power-hungry Administration out of control, with terrible consequences to our foreign/military policy and to the integrity of the Constitution. (See this one, for example, from December 2001.) ( www.commondreams.org/views01/1205-06.htm ) Eight long years were lost to this catastrophically wrong turn in American politics, while the corporate mass-media in the main served as an effective lapdog for the neo-conservative madness.
But Bart Gellman's voluminously-researched volume, along with recent revelations by Obama's Department of Justice about the run-amok legal philosophy in the Bush White House, ( www.truthout.org/030409A ) has demonstrated the incontravertible truth that no longer can be ignored:
The United States came justthisclose to an irreversible militarist coup, and leading the charge at every step of the way was Dick Cheney. I think virtually everyone outside the 30% GOP base, at least by 2006 or so, sensed there was something deeply wrong with the guy and/or in how he operated. Gellman, who (along with Washington Post co-writer Jo Becker) won a Pulitzer Prize for this reporting, nails it. In so doing, he provides an object lesson for how Obama and future presidents might want to treat the Constitution, the separation-of-powers tradition, the rule of law, transparency in governing, etc.
If you haven't read "Angler," do so: It's extraordinary history and a great read. But be prepared: Cheney's actions are worse, more wide-ranging and more scary that you might even have imagined.
THE SEARCH FOR HIMSELF
It seemed fairly clear how much of an influence Cheney had on Bush, especially, say, in the first five or six years. Bush was not prepared, informed, curious, sufficiently intelligent, and, since politics like nature abhors vacuums, Cheney flowed into all the holes. He had appointed himself Vice President precisely to fill that role. How Cheney maneuvered himself into the #2 job is deliciously told by Gellman. Cheney in effect organized "a nationwide search for himself," and made sure that neither his medical records nor his policies and connections would ever be vetted, by anyone.
Cheney, after his decades in the federal structure, knew the byways and little-known corridors to information and power, and used all that knowledge and collected on favors-owed. He also placed cohorts in key positions of power around the capitol, from Cabinet members to sub-Cabinet and even middle-grade officials. Cheney, in charge of appointments, believing that "personnel was policy," installed his guys into these linchpin positions and began to manipulate the levers of power. The result was that Cheney, in effect, was running his own government within the government.
Sometimes, he kept Bush informed, but often he withheld key information from his boss, and moved the chess pieces himself, sometimes with disastrous results. (For some major such withholdings, see what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book"The One Percent Solution.") ( www.crisispapers.org/essays7w/shadow.htm )
The Vice President's two chief lieutenants, Scooter Libby and David Addington, provided the enforcing muscle and the cut-outs to keep Cheney's fingerprints off the various controversial policies being enacted and promulgated. (No wonder Cheney was so upset that Bush in his final days would not grant a full pardon to Libby for taking the fall for him in the spy-outing case of CIA agent Valerie Plame.)
THE INTIMIDATOR
Nothing escaped Cheney's notice. One of his underlings said that Cheney held the view that "everything should run through his office." While all power would appear to flow from the Chief Executive/Commander in Chief, Cheney would exercise a good share of that power, if not most, in the areas that counted: war and peace, the economy, natural resources, homeland security, appointments, intelligence, negotiations with Congress -- in short, the brief of a President. Cheney even made sure to review the daily CIA briefing that Bush would receive later each morning; in the interim, Cheney did his homework, contacted folks in high place, and was thus armed with arguments in case Bush was leaning the "wrong" way on something raised by the briefing.
Cheney was the true eminence grise who exercised power from behind the throne. He may not have had ambition for higher office, but he certainly had an agenda for the accretion of power, and he knew this was probably his last chance to exercise that power; no wonder he didn't give a flying fig for what anyone else thought, not the least the public. He was quite aware that as the elected V.P., he could not be fired, and that the Democrats were too wimpy to even consider taking him on. Cheney was so all-powerful and intimidtating that mere mention that he was interested in a topic could freeze bureaucrats, even Cabinet officers, in their tracks, and policies often changed -- or else.
Cheney managed it, writes Gellman, so that he got "three bites at the apple" on every decision. He intervened early with any topic of his choosing, got the base information and understood the key decisions being considered long before others even knew what was going on, plus he had the final input to the President, should that be necessary. Sometimes, since he had kept Bush more or less in the dark on a topic, what Cheney spoon-fed him late was enough to get Bush on board. "By the time Cheney had Bush's ear," writes Gellman, "he was intimately familiar with opposing views," and dispensed with them easily. In the end, Bush thought he had made the decision, but, of course, it was really Cheney.
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