Cheney's HandiworkUnveiling his methods, and some of his motives.

(Continued from page 1)

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

As much as anyone, Cheney is responsible for the Nixonian miasma that enveloped the Bush White House from early on.

Yet journalism being only the first draft of history, key questions about Cheney's White House operations remain. Some concern the outcomes of his handiwork: For example, after a stranger-than-fiction showdown with Cheney's allies at the hospital bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller persuaded Bush to revise his illegal wiretapping program. But Gellman doesn't reveal who really won the battle, resorting to vague language. "Over the next weeks and months, the program changed. It stopped doing some things, and it did other things differently."

We also crave to know more about Cheney's motives. Gellman suggests that Cheney favored war with Iraq not because he feared Saddam Hussein's intentions, but because he wanted to knock off an easy target and send a message around the Middle East. I don't find the argument persuasive—I'm inclined to think Ron Suskind had it right in emphasizing Cheney's "1 percent doctrine," the idea that after 9/11 the government had to take even minute probabilities of danger much more seriously—but without documents or more inside reporting from Cheney's inner circle, we can't know for sure. Indeed, Gellman elsewhere writes that Cheney considered the "nexus" of terrorism, rogue states, and deadly weapons to be his paramount concern—suggesting a genuine fear of a nuclear-armed rogue dictator, not the reckless gamble of using a war to test a theory.

Most important, with so much attention given to the infighting among second-tier administration officials like Addington, Jack Goldsmith, and James Comey, the president is offstage too much of the time, and Cheney himself often lurks only in the shadows. So we remain curious about Cheney's relationship to Bush. How much did the president know about Cheney's active role in fashioning and refashioning policies? Did he approve? Was he aware of the bureaucratic maneuvers that, for example, gave Addington influence over the nominally more senior White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales? Why did the president—as Gellman reports—draw from the short list that Cheney had made of acceptable Supreme Court justices in picking John Roberts, only then to depart from it in nominating Harriet Miers, and then return to it for the choice of Sam Alito? And how did Cheney view Bush in all of this—with respect, affection, or disdain?

None of this is to denigrate Gellman's reporting, since it would take a combination of Lincoln Steffens, Joe Alsop, and Bob Woodward to crack the secretive bond between the nation's two most powerful men, neither of whom has much fondness for the news media. But we can speculate. Gellman's portrait suggests that Bush was all too happy to defer to Cheney on the defining issues of his presidency, for the two men usually saw eye to eye. Gellman points out their many differences—in their appetite for studying detail, in their personal styles, in their political judgments. Yet they share a supreme confidence that their goals are correct, a willingness to bend or break rules to reach them, and an inflexibility about changing course. Despite the claim of White House flacks that Bush likes to hear clashing opinions, Gellman notes, he actually prefers consensus and finality. According to a Cheney aide, the president liked to be told "your senior advisers believe X"—and then to stick with that decision. It was a message, when the crises of the Bush years came, that Dick Cheney rarely failed to deliver.

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

SPONSORED CONTENT

• America's Armageddon Revisited
  Getting beyond romanticism about the Civil War.
  David W. Blight | Dec. 14, 2009
• Booked for the Holidays
  Slate picks the best reads of 2009.
  Dec. 10, 2009
• Hey, Mr. Postman
  Why e-mail can never replace the letter.
  Megan Marshall | Dec. 7, 2009
• Search for more Books articles
• Subscribe to the Books RSS feed
• View our complete Books archive