The imperial vice presidency

Of the Bush Cabinet secretaries, former Attorney General John Ashcroft most strenuously confronted Cheney about his seizures of power. Ashcroft was perhaps the most conservative member of the Cabinet, and it was out of a sense of his own constitutional obligation that he objected. When Ashcroft discovered that John Yoo, the deputy assistant in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, had been recruited by the Cheney operation to write memos on detainee policy that would deny any role in the new legal process to the Justice Department, he was outraged. At the White House he confronted Cheney and Addington. "According to participants [at the meeting]," the Post reported, "Ashcroft said that he was the president's senior law enforcement officer, supervised the FBI and oversaw terrorism prosecutions nationwide. The Justice Department, he said, had to have a voice in the tribunal process." But Cheney did not relent. Ashcroft received no meeting to discuss the matter with Bush. Cheney was the gatekeeper -- the decider for the Decider.

The narrative of Powell's internal struggle with Cheney remains largely unknown. From conversations I have had with former senior CIA officials, it is clear that Powell himself does not fully understand all the ways he was misled, manipulated and abused in order to get him to make the case for the invasion of Iraq. To this day, Powell still does not really know what the CIA and the White House knew about weapons of mass destruction and when they knew it, largely because Cheney was so successful in his rigging of the intelligence process.

Powell's performance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 10 demonstrated his continuing confusion. He wondered why the CIA didn't tell him before his speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, that the intelligence on mobile weapons laboratories wasn't solid, even now unaware that CIA director George Tenet had been informed by CIA officers but dismissed their information because it ran counter to the case the administration wished to make for going to war.

Powell was caught between his diminished self-image as a loyal aide and good soldier indebted to a coterie of Republicans who had promoted him eventually to secretary of state, and his grandiose self-image as the most respected and popular public man in the country, and his influence imploded. He was strangely incapable of gaining political traction to hold his ground. Now the record cannot be changed. He can only learn how easily Cheney toyed with him.

Curiously absent in the lengthy Post articles, except in one brief passing scene, is Cheney's ubiquitous shadow in his shadow presidency -- his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Obsessed with secrecy, Cheney ordered Libby to ensure that one national security secret became public -- the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert CIA officer. Now convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, Libby awaits word from the federal appeals court on whether he will be able to stay his 30-month prison sentence. Steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the prosecutor, he continues his obstruction, protecting his principal. "There is a cloud over the vice president," said Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, in his closing remarks to the jury. "And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice."

Despite the recent round of punditry that Cheney's influence has waned, he remains a formidable force. These are Cheney's final days; this is his endgame. He will never run again for public office. He is freed from the constraints of political consequences. He now has no horizon. He lives only in the present. He is nearly done. There are only months left to achieve his goals. Mortality impinges. Next month, he will have his heart pacemaker replaced. He disdains public opinion. He does not care who's next. "We didn't get elected to be popular," he said on Fox News on May 10. "We didn't get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party."

To the last minute, Cheney refuses to loosen his grip on power. Meanwhile, his former aides pump up pressure for a presidential pardon -- a pardon that would enshrine Libby's obstruction of justice and shield Cheney forever, "an entity in the executive branch" who would be above the law. A breeze is blowing a leaf toward an open window of the Oval Office.

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