The Consequences to Come: American Power after Bush

Read an Excerpt

American Power After Bush

Copyright © 2008 NYREV, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59017-298-8

CHENEY: THE FATAL TOUCH

Joan Didion

IT WAS IN some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this guy." The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.

"He was in with the freshman football players, whose major activity was playing cardsand horsing around and talking a lot," his freshman roommate told the Yale Daily News, not exactly addressing the enigma. "Wasn't gonna go to college and buckle down" and "I didn't like the East" are two versions of how Cheney himself failed to address it. As an undergraduate at the University of Wyoming be interned with the Wyoming State Senate, which was, in a state dominated by cattle ranchers and oil producers and Union Pacific management, heavily Republican. This internship appears to have been when Cheney began identifying himself as a Republican. ("You can't take my vote for granted," his father would advise him when he first ran for Congress as a Republican.) He graduated from Wyoming in 1965 and, in the custom of the Vietnam years, went on to receive a master's degree. He never wrote a dissertation ("did all the work for my doctorate except the dissertation," as if the dissertation were not the point) and so never got the doctorate in political science for which he then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin.

Still, he persevered, or Lynne Cheney did. When, in 1968, at age twenty-seven, a no-longer-draft-eligible "academic" with a wife and a child and no Ph.D. and no clear clamor for his presence, he left Wisconsin for Washington, he managed to meet the already powerful Donald Rumsfeld about a fellowship in his House office. Cheney, by his own description and again failing to address the enigma, "flunked the interview." He retreated back to the only place at the table, the office of a freshman Republican Wisconsin congressman, Bill Steiger, for whom Cheney was said to be not a first choice and whose enthusiasm for increased environmental and workplace protections did not immediately suggest the Cheney who during his own ten years in Wyoming's single congressional seat would vote with metronomic regularity against any legislation tending in either direction.

The potential rewards of Washington appear to have mobilized Cheney as those of New Haven and Madison had not. Within the year, he was utilizing Steiger to make another move on Rumsfeld, who had been asked by Richard M. Nixon to join his new administration as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Cheney, James Mann wrote in Rise of the Vulcans,

noticed a note on Steiger's desk from Rumsfeld, looking for advice and help in his new OEO job. Cheney spotted an opportunity. Over a weekend, he wrote an unsolicited memo for Steiger on how to staff and run a federal agency.

Rumsfeld hired Cheney, and, over the next few years, as he moved up in the Nixon administration, took Cheney with him. Again, in 1974, after the Nixon resignation, when Rumsfeld was asked to become Gerald Ford's chief of staff, he made Cheney his deputy.

In Cheney, Rumsfeld had found a right hand who took so little for granted that he would later, by the account of his daughter Mary, make a three-hour drive from Casper to Laramie to have coffee with three voters, two of whom had been in his wedding. In Rumsfeld, who would be described by Henry Kissinger as "a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly," Cheney had found a model. In the Ford White House, where he and Rumsfeld were known as "the little Praetorians," Cheney cultivated a control of detail that extended even to questioning the use in the residence of "little dishes of salt with funny little spoons" rather than "regular salt shakers."

Together, Cheney and Rumsfeld contrived to marginalize Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president and edge him off the 1976 ticket. They convinced Ford that Kissinger was a political liability who should no longer serve as both secretary of state and national security adviser. They managed the replacement of William Colby as CIA chief with George H. W. Bush, a move interpreted by many as a way of rendering Bush unavailable to be Ford's running mate in 1976. They managed the replacement of James Schlesinger as secretary of defense with Rumsfeld himself. Cheney later described his role in such maneuvers as "the sand in the gears," the person who, for example, made sure that when Rockefeller was giving a speech the amplifier was turned down. In 1975, when Ford named Rumsfeld secretary of defense, it was Cheney, then thirty-four, who replaced Rumsfeld as chief of staff.

Relationships matter in public life, until they do not. In May 2006, during a commencement address at Louisiana State University, Cheney mentioned this long relationship with Rumsfeld by way of delivering the message that "gratitude, in general, is a good habit to get into":

I think, for example, of the first time I met my friend and colleague Don Rumsfeld. It was back in the 1960s, when he was a congressman and I was interviewing for a fellowship on Capitol Hill. Congressman Rumsfeld agreed to talk to me, but things didn't go all that well.... We didn't click that day, but a few years later it was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work and offered me a position in the executive branch.

Note the modest elision ("it was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work") of the speaker's own active role in these events. What Cheney wanted to stress that morning in Baton Rouge was not his own dogged tracking of the more glamorous Rumsfeld but the paths one had possibly "not expected to take," the "unexpected turns," the "opportunities that come suddenly and change one's plans overnight." The exact intention of these commencement remarks may be unknowable (a demonstration of loyalty? a warning? to whom? a marker to be called in later? all of the above?), but it did not seem accidental that they were delivered during a period when one four-star general, one three-star general, and four two-star generals were each issuing calls for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as secretary of defense. Nor did it seem accidental that the President and the Vice President were taking equally stubborn and equally inexplicable lines on the matter of Rumsfeld's and by extension their own grasp on the war in Iraq. "I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation," George W. Bush said in response to a reporter's question during a Rose Garden event. "But I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

The question of where the President gets the notions known to the nation as "I'm the decider" and within the White House as "the unitary executive theory" leads pretty fast to the blackout zone that is the Vice President and his office. It was the Vice President who took the early offensive on the contention that whatever the decider decides to do is by definition legal. "We believe, Jim, that we have all the legal authority we need," the Vice President told Jim Lehrer on PBs after it was reported that the National Security Agency was conducting warrantless wiretapping in violation of existing statutes. It was the Vice President who pioneered the tactic of not only declaring such apparently illegal activities legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their behalf.

"Bottom line is we've been very active and very aggressive defending the nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that," the Vice President advised reporters on a flight to Oman in December 2005. It was the Vice President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S. Addington, that supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the Geneva Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA between 1977 and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for torture," it was the Vice President's office that issued this characteristically nonresponsive statement: "Our country is at war and our government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us."

Addington, who emerged into government from Georgetown University and Duke Law School in 1981, the most febrile moment of the Reagan Revolution, is an instructive study in the focus Cheney favors in the protection of territory. As secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush, Cheney made Addington his special assistant and ultimately his general counsel. As vice-president for George W. Bush, Cheney again turned to Addington, and named him, after the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in connection with the exposure of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, his chief of staff. "You're giving away executive power," Addington has been reported to snap at less committed colleagues. He is said to keep a photograph in his office of Cheney firing a gun. He vets every line of the federal budget to eradicate any wording that might restrain the President. He also authors the "signing statements" now routinely issued to free the President of whatever restrictive intent might have been present in whichever piece of legislation he just signed into law. A typical signing statement, as written by Addington, will refer repeatedly to the "constitutional authority" of "the unitary executive branch," and will often mention multiple points in a single bill that the President declines to enforce.

Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill Clinton left office, the device had been used, by the first forty-two presidents combined, fewer than six hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued more than eight hundred such takebacks during the first six years of his administration. Those who object to this or any other assumption of absolute executive power are reflexively said by those who speak for the Vice President to be "tying the president's hands," or "eroding his ability to do his job," or, more ominously, "aiding those who don't want him to do his job."

One aspect common to accounts of White House life is the way in which negative events tend to be interpreted as internal staffing failures, errors on the order of the little dishes of salt with the funny little spoons. Cheney did not take the lesson he might have taken from being in the White House at the time Saigon fell, which was that an administration can be overtaken by events that defeat the ameliorative power of adroit detail management. He took a more narrow lesson, the one that had to do with the inability of a White House to pursue victory if Congress "tied its hands." "It's interesting that [Cheney] became a member of Congress," former congressman Tom Downey said to Todd Purdum, "because I think he always thought we were a massive inconvenience to governing." Bruce Fein, who served in the Meese Justice Department during the Reagan administration, told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that Cheney's absence of enthusiasm for checks and balances long predated any argument that this was a "wartime presidency" and so had special powers:

This preceded 9/11. I'm not saying that warrantless surveillance did. But the idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play. It was Cheney and Addington's political agenda.

"I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job," the Vice President said after one year in office. "We are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last thirty to thirty-five years." "Watergate-a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the '70s, served to erode the authority, I think, the President needs to be effective," he said to reporters accompanying him on that December 2005 flight to Oman. Expanding on this understanding of the separation of powers as a historical misunderstanding, the Vice President offered this:

If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-Contra Committee; the Iran-Contra Report in about 1987. Nobody has ever read them, but we-part of the argument in Iran-Contra was whether or not the President had the authority to do what was done in the Reagan years. And those of us in the minority wrote minority views, but they were actually authored by a guy working for me, for my staff, that I think are very good in laying out a robust view of the President's prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters.

There are some recognizable Cheney touches here, resorts to the kind of self-deprecation (as in "I didn't like the East" and "I flunked the interview") that derives from a temperamental grandiosity. The "obscure text" that "nobody has ever read" was the two-hundred-page minority report included in the 1987 Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, a volume printed and widely distributed by the US Government Printing Office. The unidentified "guy working for me" was Addington, at the time of the Iran-contra hearings a counsel to the committees but during the events that led to Iran-contra an assistant general counsel at William Casey's CIA, where he would have been focused early on locating the legal enablement for what Theodore Draper, in his study of Iran-contra, A Very Thin Line, called the "usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group within the government."

This minority report, which vehemently rejects not only the conclusions of the majority but even the report's ("supposedly 'factual'") narrative, does allow that "President Reagan and his staff made mistakes" during the course of Iran-contra. Yet the broadest mistake, the demented "arms for hostages" part of the scheme, the part where we deal the HAWK missiles to Iran through Manucher Ghorbanifar and Robert McFarlane flies to Tehran with the cake and the Bible and the falsified Irish passports, is strenuously defended as a "strategic opening," an attempt to "establish a new US relationship with Iran, thus strengthening the US strategic posture throughout the Persian Gulf region."

We had heard before, and have heard recently, about "strategic openings," "new relationships" that will reorder the Middle East. "Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad," Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 about the benefits that were to accrue from invading Iraq. "Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991." We had heard before, and have heard recently, that what might appear to be an administration run amok is actually an administration holding fast on constitutional principle.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Consequences to Come Copyright © 2008 by NYREV, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---