SALON

Dick Cheney

Tuesday, Nov 28, 2000 8:00 PM UTC

Sweet dreams, honey

Every time Lynne Cheney's morbid novel hits the bookstores, her husband has a heart attack. When you read it, you'll see why.

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Just in time for Christmas shoppers, Lynne Cheney’s long-lost novel “The Body Politic” is arriving in bookstores in a new paperback edition, advertised as “a revealing look at what it might be like to be the vice president of the United States.”

Let’s hope, for her husband Dick Cheney’s sake, that it doesn’t reveal what his vice presidency will be like. Mrs. Cheney’s fictional vice president, a 59-year-old Republican, dies in office of a heart attack. Her real-life husband is also 59 and has, of course, just survived his fourth heart attack. As one of her characters, a paranoid Secret Service agent, observes, “Life imitates art.”

Well, perhaps “art” is too strong a word. “The Body Politic” is a poorly written, allegedly comic, satire about life in a Republican White House, coauthored by Lynne Cheney and Victor Gold, who served as Vice President Spiro Agnew’s press secretary and coauthored President George Bush’s “autobiography,” the out-of-print “Looking Forward.”

In 1988, when the novel was originally published, Dick Cheney suffered his third heart attack and underwent quadruple bypass surgery. Twelve years later, the novel reappears and Cheney’s heart fails again. If he were a superstitious man, he might think his wife’s book is cursed.

There is something else in Mrs. Cheney’s book that might give Mr. Cheney pause. When the fictional vice president dies, his scheming, ambitious wife participates in a White House coverup of his death and manages to succeed her late husband as the country’s first female vice president. Move over, Lady Macbeth.

Mind you, this is all supposed to be funny. “The Body Politic” is, after all, one of those slapdash works of fiction penned by Washington insiders with too much time on their hands. It would be entirely forgettable except for its uncanny coincidences and remarkable reappearance at the most awkward moments.

The 1988 novel first resurfaced last summer when Dick Cheney, in charge of George W. Bush’s hunt for a running mate, became the vice presidential candidate himself. That was after Bush Senior placed that private call to Cheney’s doctor in Texas to make sure the old warhorse’s damaged heart could withstand the rigors of a presidential campaign.

Governor Bush’s selection of his father’s former defense secretary suddenly returned Lynne Cheney to the limelight. The world hadn’t heard much from Mrs. Cheney since her controversial, outspoken tour of duty as Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even her role as co-host of one of the lesser Beltway talk shows, the now defunct “CNN Crossfire Sunday,” was terminated in 1998. But thanks to her husband’s rise, she, too, was resurrected. Her friend and fellow cultural warrior, the virtuous Bill Bennett, commented, “She’ll be hard to muzzle.”

Lynne Cheney did, indeed, eagerly return to the public arena. However, there were two problems. First, the press discovered that one of her daughters, Mary, was proudly and openly a lesbian. Asked by ABC’s Cokie Roberts about her daughter’s public declaration of homosexuality, Mrs. Cheney promptly denied it, asserting that “Mary has never declared such a thing.” This came as a surprise to her daughter’s friends and co-workers at Coors Brewing in Colorado, where Mary Cheney worked with a gay and lesbian task force to overcome a longstanding gay boycott of the conservative-owned beer company. “Basically, I don’t talk about Mary’s personal life,” Mrs. Cheney told the sympathetic Washington Times. “We kind of have a mother-daughter agreement. I don’t talk about her personal life, and she doesn’t talk about mine.”

Conservatives were spared a shameful moment when Mary did not, as it was rumored she might, bring her female partner to the Republican Convention. While the rest of the Cheney family smiled to GOP delegates, Mary remained in the background behind her more sexually appropriate sister, Elizabeth, and young niece. But then the other problem emerged. It turned out that when she wasn’t rooting out “political correctness” at the NEH, Lynne Cheney was writing novels that were steamy, racy and politically embarrassing. Elaine Showalter, an English professor at Princeton, unearthed one of the books, “Sisters” (1981), which had been published only in Canada. Lo and behold, “Sisters” was “a gothic female historical novel,” featuring an account of frontier women in Cheney’s home state, Wyoming, who shared an unmistakable “lesbian ardor.” In one passage, the female heroine watches two women in an intimate embrace, and as Lynne Cheney writes, she “felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them.” Not exactly the sentiments one might associate with a sharp-tongued ally of the Christian Coalition.

That was not all. In “Executive Privilege” (1979), Lynne Cheney writes with sympathy and concern about a troubled president who seeks solace in daily conversations with a staff psychiatrist, only to be betrayed by — George W. Bush, take note — his vice president.

As if this rediscovered fiction might not stir up enough trouble, Cheney’s “The Body Politic” describes a Republican vice president who dies “blissfully, at age 59, in carnal arrest.” In a scene reminiscent of Nelson Rockefeller’s demise, Cheney’s fictional vice president succumbs while he is having sex with a glamorous network television correspondent in his private townhouse. Cardiac arrest during sex leaves a “beatific smile on the Vice President’s face,” writes Cheney, describing the corpse. The vice president’s fatal tryst with a TV reporter gave “new meaning to the media term one-on-one,” muses the deceased politician’s press secretary. He is only surprised that his boss, “the ultimate WASP,” was sexually attracted to the pushy Italian-Jewish correpondent, Romana Clay. (Such clever names.) “I was still under the impression that his taste in extramarital sex ran to patrician bluebloods, the discreet wives and daughters of America’s ruling dynasties. But when I saw Romana at the top of the townhouse stairs in a flesh-colored peignoir, things fell into place…”

When queried last summer about this unseemly prose, Mrs. Cheney tried to dismiss the sex scenes as the work of her co-author, Victor Gold. His name, after all, appeared first on the hardback. Inconveniently for Lynne Cheney, the order has been reversed on the new paperback: Her name now appears first in bold letters above the title. Moreover, the publisher’s blurb on top of the back cover prominently touts Lynne Cheney as “the wife of Republican candidate for vice president Dick Cheney.”

For a woman who may soon become our second lady, Lynne Cheney does nothing but disparage the office of vice president in her comic novel, arguing that “for a Type A overachiever, the Vice Presidency is the worst kind of career move.” “Under the Constitution the only thing the job calls for is waiting,” writes Cheney, “waiting for the President to die or be impeached; waiting for the Senate to wind up in a tie vote so the Vice President can break it.”

Again, that last phrase now carries more weight than when she wrote it. If Dick Cheney actually makes “the worst kind of career move” and becomes vice president, he will apparently be at the beck and call of an equally divided Senate, with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats. Will he, too, regard this duty as burdensome and odious? All the waiting forces Cheney’s fictional vice president, Bully Vandercleve, to seek relief in adultery, or as Cheney indelicately puts it, “It was only a matter of time before he started looking for ways to drain his Type-A batteries.”

Will Dick Cheney feel similar urges? In an exquisitely divided Senate, there will be even more intrigue and political drama than in Cheney’s novel, where the Senate threatens to deadlock over a Cuban resolution (yes, even incensed Cuban-Americans figure in this clairvoyant novel). What toll this heated political maneuvering might take on Dick Cheney’s physical and mental health remains, perhaps, for another novel.

And what might we predict about Lynne Cheney’s behavior as second lady from “The Body Politic”? Her alter ego is Cissy Vandercleve, the adulterous vice president’s wife with “hot hazel eyes” and a “French vanilla complexion.” The important thing to know about Cissy is that she is ambitious, launching her career as a conservative crusader with a campaign to commemorate Ayn Rand on a postage stamp. The other thing about Cissy is that she is fed up with her role as appendage to a Washington politician.

Even Lynne Cheney’s friends describe her as ambitious and driven. She relishes political combat like her character Cissy who “loved the game” of politics but resents her second-class status as a woman. Lynne Cheney wrote an article in 1985 called “The Decline of the Dutiful Wife” in the Washingtonian magazine, and as Lingua Franca discovered, an author’s note describes her as “willing to help in her husband’s campaigns … but only if she’s given a speaking role.”

Lynne’s comic persona, Cissy, sheds no tears over her philandering husband’s demise. She immediately joins the plot to pretend the vice president is still alive, in order for the Republicans to win the presidential campaign. When the farce draws to a close, she has clawed and maneuvered her way to the top, replacing the late Bully as No. 2 on the GOP ticket. Wish fulfillment, or merely a second-rate plot that Lynne Cheney may regret writing? In any case, it resurfaces at a particularly awkward moment in our presidential history. One wonders who is at fault here: the publishers, St. Martin’s, who could not resist an opportunity to resuscitate a mothballed novel in hopes of cashing in on Dick Cheney’s new position, Mrs. Cheney or both?

Before leaving “The Body Politic” and returning to our national drama of electing a president, I feel compelled to mention two other unfortunate episodes in Lynne Cheney’s “revealing look” at the vice presidency. There is, for example, the matter of assassination. “It’s the nut mentality,” warns her Secret Service character. “They’re looking for a challenge, see? Something to get them on the evening news. Nobody’s ever shot a Vice President before. Presidents, popes, senators, governors, preachers, rock musicians, they’ve been shot. But never a Vice President. It would be a Guinness first.” This comes as a frightening suggestion of what might happen, halfway through the satiric novel. I can’t imagine Dick Cheney would find it a particularly comforting thought.

And then there’s the fate of the president, a nervous man who does not react well to pressure. His aides treat him like a child. They withhold vital information, including the fact that his vice president has been dead for six weeks. Without informing the hapless president, they hire a Las Vegas comedian to impersonate the Vice President on the radio. The impersonator is named Moishe Feinbaum, but he’s actually an African-American ex-Baptist. Oy vey! (Remember, Lynne Cheney thinks this is funny.)

Cheney and Gold portray the executive-office Republicans they know so well as manipulative, conniving, ruthless men who will do anything to seize and hold power, deceiving Congress and the American people without a moment’s hesitation. There are characters who remind us of Alexander Haig, H.R. Haldeman and G. Gordon Liddy conducting “dirty tricks” and bugging and intimidating their opponents. President Bush is even mentioned by name as someone, like Oliver North, who undertook a secret (and perhaps illegal) overseas mission. To win the presidential election, the Republicans shamelessly exploit the Hispanic vote, passing out “fortune enchiladas” with a message inside, in Spanish, saying vote for the Republican candidate.

The GOP presidential aides sneak their boss into Bethesda Naval Hospital when his blood pressure soars. They lie to the press, saying the president is only undergoing a routine checkup. When the president in “The Body Politic” is at last told the truth about his deceased vice president, he collapses from a stroke or a heart attack, and dies.

I don’t think George W. Bush has anything to worry about, though. Despite the soaring tensions of the election stalemate, the Texas governor is still jogging and they say his blood pressure is fine (although his face did erupt in that nasty boil). As for Dick Cheney, he can rest somewhat easy — as far as I know, his wife is not yet writing another novel.

Stephen Talbot's summer movie picks are "Smoke Signals" and "Bulworth." More Stephen Talbot.

Wednesday, Dec 14, 2011 12:00 AM UTC

Two nasty Republicans say nice things about Newt

First Dick Cheney, then Rudy Giuliani suggests Gingrich may be the toughest candidate in the GOP field

By Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, left, and Newt Gingrich (Credit: AP)

What does it mean that two of the nastiest men in the Republican Party are saying nice things about Newt Gingrich? On CNN Monday night Dick Cheney warned the GOP not to “underestimate” Gingrich, and lavished praise on the disgraced House speaker for his formidable political skills.

Today, also on CNN, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani likewise had kind words for Gingrich, arguing he’s more electable than Mitt Romney in a race against Barack Obama.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. “You won’t have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively.”

With a straight face, Giuliani explained why charges of “elitism” wouldn’t fly against Gingrich. “One of the strengths he has is he’s got a common touch, he’s able to talk to people, he comes from a poor family, understands poverty from that point of view. He doesn’t come from the American elite. It’s going to be hard to paint him that way. There are a lot of other ways you can paint him, but you can’t paint him that way.”

You can’t? The man with the half-million-dollar Tiffany credit line? The guy who wants to do away with “truly stupid” child labor laws? The one who thinks the poor lack a work ethic? The “historian” who earned just under $2 million from Fannie Mac and took in another $37 million for his healthcare think-tank? The candidate whose tax plan overwhelmingly favors the super-rich? How many ways is Giuliani wrong there? More ways than he and Gingrich have wives between them.

Can we also acknowledge there is no such thing as a “Reagan Democrat” anymore? There are white working-class people who now permanently vote against their own class interests, and they’re Republicans, not Democrats. Then there are white working-class people who are understandably sometimes confused about which party represents them, because Democrats have spent so many years sucking up to Wall Street and playing down their populist past. Some of those voters — the ones who are public workers, or union members, or close to retirement and listening to proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare — are starting to realize that they have become the GOP’s latest scapegoat, the 21st century welfare queens, and they’re taking another look at Democrats. Some white working-class voters stayed Democrats. But the Reagan Democrat analysis hasn’t made sense for a long time.

Finally, I love the fact that Gingrich and Giuliani have six wives and two marriage annulments between them. Add in Donald Trump, who seems to be leaning toward Gingrich too, they can start a Three Wives Club. Way to go, family values party!

I’ll be talking about the latest on the GOP field with Ed Schultz and Ezra Klein on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” at 8 ET.

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Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

Tuesday, Dec 13, 2011 10:38 PM UTC

Cheney urges “a quick airstrike” against Iran

Mr. Torture thinks President Obama should risk war to recover a downed drone. Plus: Nice words for Newt!

By Dick Cheney (Credit: AP)

Once again, CNN philanthropist journalist Erin Burnett has used her show to give voice to the voiceless, to seek out the powerless to offer opinion on the day’s news. She debuted her show “OutFront” in early October by mocking Occupy Wall Street and defending the industry that destroyed the economy.

On Monday night Burnett gave a platform to a man almost as loathed as his Wall Street buddies, former Vice President Dick Cheney. And Cheney, predictably but contemptibly, took the opportunity to bash President Obama for not authorizing “a quick airstrike” to retrieve a predator drone that was recently downed in Iran.

Cheney told Burnett:

The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. [...]

They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can’t do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that.

The former vice president has been insulting Obama  since Inauguration Day, insisting his policies will make the country “less safe.” Two months into his administration, Cheney charged that the new president “is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.” He’s accused Obama of “half measures” and “dithering” on foreign policy. And more than once he’s criticized the president for not taking a tougher stance on Iran.

Even after Obama authorized the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden, who Bush and Cheney essentially let run free thanks to their discretionary war with Iraq, Cheney wasn’t happy. “I still am concerned about the fact that I think a lot of the techniques that we had used to keep the country safe for more than seven years are no longer available. That they’ve been sort of taken off the table, if you will.”

So Cheney’s carping is nothing new. But suggesting that the president launch “a quick airstrike” to retrieve the downed drone is ridiculous, even for Cheney. There’s no such thing. Cheney has to know that any new U.S. incursion, following on the drone discovery, would sharply escalate tension with Iran, and to do that to recover a drone isn’t at all worth the risk.

It was left to CBS Early Show co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis this morning to ask the follow-up question Burnett did not: “Would not, though, an airstrike on Iran have potentially led us into a war with them?”  Cheney replied:

Well, if you look at what Iran has done over the years, they’ve been the prime backers of Hezbollah, of Hamas, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 that cost us 241 American lives. These were Iranian-supported ventures. It’s not as though they haven’t already committed acts that some people would say come close to being acts of war.

For us to go in and take out the drone that crashed would have been, I think, a fairly simple operation, and it would have denied them the value of the intelligence they can collect by having that aircraft,” he said. “But the administrative basically limited itself to saying, ‘Please give it back,’ and the Iranians said no.

ThinkProgress made a good catch: When a U.S. spy plane ventured into Chinese airspace in April 2001 and crashed with a Chinese fighter jet, the Bush-Cheney administration wound up apologizing in order to get 11 soldiers released from Chinese custody.  They didn’t send in “a quick airstrike.”

For the record, Cheney sounded bullish on Newt Gingrich in 2012, though he hasn’t endorsed anyone formally. “I wouldn’t underestimate him,” Cheney said, praising Gingrich’s political skills. “The thing I remember about Newt, we came to Congress together at the same time, ’78, and when Newt showed up, he said, ‘We can become the majority. We can take back the House of Representatives. We hadn’t had the House since the 1940s. And initially, none of us believed it, but he was persistent. And he was tenacious. He kept it up and kept it up and kept it up. And finally by ’94, he’s the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives with a Republican majority.” Cheney declined to describe the way Gingrich crashed and burned in the years that followed. You’ve got to count that among the nicest things anyone who’s worked with Gingrich has said about him during the whole campaign. Stay tuned.

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Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

Friday, Oct 7, 2011 3:25 PM UTC

Dick Cheney interviewed by Liz Cheney at “Ideas Forum”

The Atlantic Magazine's celebration of Washington's power elite culminates in a pleasant father-daughter chat

By Former Vice President Dick Cheney, accompanied by his daughter Liz, addresses the Washington Ideas Forum on Thursday. (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

This week, the Atlantic Media Co. held its “Washington Ideas Forum,” one of many regular events held for Washington’s political elite to gather and congratulate themselves for having so many ideas. The Atlantic — which also publishes a monthly magazine, I’m told — throws these pricey orgies of self-regard each year, in Washington and Aspen. One of the big “ideas” presented at this year’s forum was actually a pretty old one: that no matter how awful and criminal certain people’s behavior is in office, they will never, ever be kicked out of the Washington elite.

That’s why the forum hosted Henry Kissinger, this big idea’s mascot. And that’s why the forum ended with an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a memoir to promote. Cheney was joined onstage by his daughter and co-author, Liz Cheney, who is devoting herself to whitewashing her father’s legacy of torture and death and shooting old men in the face.

They were technically being “interviewed” by a third party — a journalist! — but for some reason most of the question-asking was actually done by … Liz.

“Were you really secretly running things?” Liz Cheney asked.

“No,” her father said.

As proof, he cited the fact that President Bush once had Cheney’s dog banned from a section of Camp David.

This gentle interrogation seems to have struck certain high-profile Atlantic contributors as a bit silly but on the other hand it would be much harder to get big names to attend these things if they were worried someone might call them out for being a war criminal. (Hot tip for the International Criminal Court: Try sending out invitations for a sham “Ideas Festival”?)

The forum also hosted former Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf, an actual former dictator. (But one of the “good ones”!)

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Tuesday, Sep 6, 2011 10:25 PM UTC

Guy who wants Obama to read less fiction not as concerned about Cheney’s reading list

Tevi Troy says the former Vice President may not have read much nonfiction, but he did meet with guys who write

By

Remember Tevi Troy, the Republican “former senior White House aide” who criticized Barack Obama at the National Review Online for reading well-reviewed novels instead of Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” and other conservative book club selections? He’s back with another of his wonderful posts about the reading habits of prominent politicians. This time, he’s talking Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney’s memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post’s nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn’t mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:

Noticeably missing from the pages of Cheney’s memoir are references to books examining the big issues of our day — issues of crucial importance during his tenure with the Bush administration. From his memoir, it is impossible to know if he took any counsel at all from the estimable books of the past decade on national security, terrorism, torture, Islam, domestic surveillance. He remains opaque to the end.

This seems sort of like a defensible version of the weird criticism Troy leveled at President Obama, right? (As Troy wrote of Obama: “the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.”) So does Troy agree with the Post on Cheney? No. No, he does not:

When it comes to the books Cheney read as vice president, though, Cheney is indeed less forthcoming about the titles. He does, however, list a variety of thinkers and writers with whom he met while in office, including Fouad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, Nathaniel Philbrick, Jay Winik, Edmund Morris, David McCullough, Charles Krauthammer, and Victor Davis Hanson. In addition, while Cheney was vice president, there were public reports that Cheney read a number of books with contemporary policy implications, including Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy, Elliott Cohen’s [sic] Supreme Command, and Winik’s April 1865 (interestingly, President Bush was reported to have read all three of those as well). I am sure that neither of these lists depicts the totality of what Cheney was reading and to whom he was speaking, so I guess by some measure he does remain “opaque.” But the list of at least some of the outside influences Cheney looked to during his vice presidency was available and out there, both within and outside Cheney’s memoir, if one had chosen to look for them.

He may not have been reading serious nonfiction about contemporary issues, but he met with Charles Krauthammer! That is basically the same thing, right? Reading an “estimable book” on Islam is surely a waste of time when you can just call up Victor Davis Hanson for a chat.

So for Cheney’s reading list we’ve got those all-important “meetings” plus two historical war books and one foreign policy manifesto that plainly reinforced Cheney’s already extant biases. I can see why self-proclaimed presidential reading expert Troy was “somewhat bothered” by that Post piece that made the same argument he made about Obama two weeks ago except not as stupidly.

Turns out this Troy character may not actually be a serious scholar of the history and meaning of presidential reading, and may, in fact, just be some random shameless right-wing think tank hack!

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Tuesday, Aug 30, 2011 4:01 AM UTC

The Cheney Regency

In his new book the former vice president disses his boss -- and boasts of power

By Clockwise from upper left: Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell

Give the old vizier his due. Richard Cheney is the most influential and radical political leader of his times. The former vice president’s new autobiography, assertively titled “In My Time,” tells at least part of the story. The fuller telling of his biography will have to come from guilty aides, declassification of key documents, and possibly a future war crimes tribunal. In the meantime, what the man wants to tell us in the here and now is interesting enough.

Cheney’s memoir — by turns implacable, misleading and frank — presents strong evidence that he served as de facto co-president of the United States from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, until late 2006. Certainly, the book demonstrates that no vice president in American history has ever wielded such influence — some would say control — of the levers of power in Washington.

His radicalism is served proudly. “I wanted to make sure the governor understood my record was not moderate,” he writes about an early meeting with Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The Cheney Regency featured a canny bureaucratic mandarin waging war in tandem with a passive chief executive, who shared his views but his not skills. There is nothing comparable in the history of the American presidency. Some sympathizers have discerned the hand of God in Bush’s presidency. Cheney, a less sentimental observer, gives more credit to himself.

Bush, his nominal boss, while occasionally lauded for his “courageous” decisions, cuts an unobtrusive and unimpressive figure in Cheney’s life. The first important political decision that Cheney attributes to Bush was selecting him as his vice-presidential running mate. “Dick, you’re the solution to my problem,” Cheney repeatedly quotes Bush as saying.

About Bush the man, Cheney has nothing to say. Nothing about his struggle with alcoholism, his troubled relationship with his father, his extensive record of two terms as governor of Texas, or his efforts to define a “compassionate conservatism.” Such irrelevant details do not interest Cheney who focuses relentlessly on power.

Chronologically, the next important decision that Cheney attributes to Bush came on Sept. ll as the White House confronted reports of hijacked airliners flying into buildings. The president, he writes, 

“approved my recommendation that they [Air Force pilots] be authorized to fire on a civilian airliner if it had been contacted and would not divert … When the president came on the line I told him about the shootdown order.”

This is a fib, if not a lie, as a careful reading of the 9/11 Commission report indicates. While the report’s language is tactful, senior commission staffers certainly had their doubts that Cheney ever spoke to Bush about the order before it was given. The evidence supports their doubts.

That pattern recurs in Cheney’s book: The chain of command appears to function normally while the vice president shapes crucial decisions. As the Bush White House pondered how to respond to the attacks in September 2001, for example, Cheney recalls offering sage advice: “I suggested to the president that it would be useful to make certain that [Secretary of Defense] Rumsfeld had assigned priority to planning for possible military action against Saddam.” Rumsfeld’s plans would be put into action in Iraq 18 months later.

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to Washington in 2002 to ask the White House to support a U.N. resolution against Saddam, Cheney disagreed — and assumed he had Bush’s assent. “I knew the president was no more interested than I was in an endless round of inspections and deception in Iraq,” he writes.

As the preparation for war intensified in the early 2003, Prince Bandar, the Saudi potentate, came to Washington skeptical that Washington was really going to invade Iraq. Cheney says he met with Bandar, who was reassured.

“I conveyed the message to the president. He met with Bandar the following Monday.” End of story. Bush’s conversation with Bandar has no importance in Cheney’s account — and perhaps in reality.

After the destruction of Saddam’s regime in March 2003 and Bush’s reelection, in 2004, Cheney felt so secure in his power he starts omitting Bush from his ambitions altogether. “I felt strongly that a major change was needed in the national security team,” Cheney writes. “Getting a new secretary of state was a top priority.”

It is safe to say that no vice president in American history has dared use such presumptuous language about the composition of a presidential cabinet. Cheney’s target Colin Powell soon resigned — though he claims he planned to all along.

About Iraq’s descent into violent chaos from 2003 to 2006, Cheney is mostly silent. Not surprisingly, he does not address the human toll: the awful civilian deaths or the massive displacement of Iraqi Christians, and the impoverishment of millions. He shrugs off the worldwide revulsion generated by the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. He offers occasional paeans to fallen U.S. soldiers, but more often he calls attention to his own influence in ways that seem condescending to his patron.

As the White House was forced by failure to consider a new policy in 2006, Cheney still tried to impose his will. When Bush’s aides prepared a presidential speech about the dismal situation in Iraq that did not include the word “victory,” Cheney proudly reveals that he intervened with the speechwriters — and literally put the talismanic word in the president’s mouth. Even Bush’s critics have stopped retailing such tart anecdotes about the former president. Cheney has not.

Not coincidentally, Bush broke with Cheney about this time. In November 2006, Bush fired Rumsfeld without asking for the vice president’s opinion. For the first time in five years, Bush started making key decisions on his own.

Cheney’s account turns petulant at this point. After 2006, no one in the Bush administration (besides Cheney) can do much good. The new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mistreated two top generals. Secretary of State Condi Rice was so eager to reach an agreement with North Korea she issued a public statement that was “utterly misleading.” And President Bush had failed by acting on her recommendations, not his.

“The process and the decision that followed seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded ways I had seen him make decisions in the past,” he writes with surprise.

What had changed was that Cheney no longer dominated the process of presidential decision-making on foreign policy. He was merely the vice president. His reign was over but his pride remained. Like the man or not, the possessiveness of his book’s title is deserved. From 2001 to 2006 was Dick Cheney’s time. 

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Jefferson Morley

Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday). More Jefferson Morley.

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