Cheny still obsessive about the threats America faces

Even after leaving public office and while suffering from weak heart, Dick Cheney is as obsessive as ever about correcting the many mistakes American politicians are making.

Cheney passes most of his days at the top of the garage at his new house in McLean, where he built an office under the dormered roof and filled it with books and binders of his vice presidential papers. He kept copies of the unclassified ones and consults the rest on visits to the National Archives. He took detailed notes in the White House, head bobbing up and down as he wrote and sometimes disappearing from the screen in videoconferences. Those notes, according to one person who has discussed them with Cheney, will form the core of his account of the Bush years.

"What impressed me was his continuing zeal," said an associate who discussed the book with Cheney. "He hadn't stepped back a bit from the positions he took in office to a more relaxed, Olympian view. He was still very much in the fray. He's not going to soften anything or accommodate shifts of conscience. There was no sense in which he looked back and said, 'I wish I'd done something differently.' Rather, there was a sense that they hadn't gone far enough. If he'd been equipped with a group of people as ideologically rigorous as he was, they'd have been able to push further."

Barton Gellman, author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency the biography on Cheney, continues to tell the story of Mr. Cheney in his retirement.

History will determine which has been more destructive to the unique American Democratic Republic - the threats that Cheney perceives or Dick Cheney himself.