How Dick Cheney created the key policies of the eight-year Bush administration

Dick Cheney is known to be far and away the most powerful Vice President America has ever had. There is not even any debate on this subject. The obvious question is “How did he become so powerful?” It's not a new question.

This question is generally answered briefly, and pretty much everyone who knows about the issue answers it much the same way. The first response is to point to his experience in government. They will always point to Cheney’s experience in the White House as Ford’s chief of staff, his time in Congress during which he was Republican Whip, then his time as Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush. The second thing normally mentioned is George W. Bush’s dislike of the mechanics of governance, usually associated with a brief statement that as the first MBA President, “W” delegates his work to his subordinates. Both facts are true, but “W” has brought a lot of experienced people into government and delegated work to them. No one else has ever placed their own agenda into action in the way that defines the Bush Presidency. What has made Dick Cheney such a unique individual in “W’s” White House?

At last Barton Gellman explains how Cheney accomplished his task of setting so very much of the White House agenda in his excellent book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. There is a lot in the book, but what has not been clear until now has been what tools Cheney has used to manipulate government and set it to the tasks that forwarded his agenda. His agenda included the economic issues, the security issues and the energy issues.

Cheney was brought in as a defense – foreign policy expert to educate then Governor George W. Bush as he prepared to run for election as President. His broad experience in the federal government and his wide network of personal contacts made him a logical person to task with finding a Vice Presidential candidate to join with Bush. Cheney’s control of that process provided him with the background on potential candidates and at the same time to frame what characteristics the Vice President should have. Cheney defined the requirements such that he himself was the best candidate, convinced Bush that he met the requirements for Vice President, and with his knowledge of the other candidates’ deepest secrets he was able to present them to W in such a way that they were not selected. In the end, candidate George W. Bush was presented with a single clear candidate who met the requirements Cheney had established – Cheney himself.

Cheney was not selected the assist in electing Bush. He was selected in part because he would not run for President himself, so he would not become an opponent within the White House fighting Bush’s policies. So Cheney was chosen to assist Bush govern when he was elected without becoming a threat to Bush.

Cheney started organizing the executive office even as the battle for the Florida votes was being fought by Jim Baker. At that point Cheney took over the staffing of the federal government for the incoming administration. He asked Bush for the role and Bush gave it to him. He knew what positions needed to be filled, what individuals in those positions could do for him or to him, and he had his wide network of contacts and friends available to fill those jobs. He also had a Republican Senate to work with, so that his appointees could be quickly confirmed.

The network that Cheney set up is quit interesting. First he brought “Scooter” Libby and David Addington into his own office. These were people he had long worked with. He then arranged for everything in the White House to run through his office. In addition, he had Libby assigned as Assistant to the President, the highest rank in the White House so that he outranked almost everyone in Bush’s office. Several other members of Cheney’s staff also held the same rank as individuals doing the same job for the President. Mary Matalin, Cheney’s Counselor, shared rank and office space with Karen Hughes who was Counselor for Bush. In previous White Houses the members of the Vice Presidents’ office held rank one level below that of the equivalent person on the President’s staff.

Then Cheney chose individuals for the policy positions. Cheney placed Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor (she had previously worked for him) and backed her up with Steven J. Hadley who had also worked for Cheney at the Department of Defense. Then he placed Colin Powell, who he had previously promoted to Chief of Staff when he was Secretary of Defense, at Secretary of State . Donald Rumsfeld, who went to Secretary of Defense, had been Cheney’s mentor and closest friend since they worked together under Nixon. Paul O’Neil, who went to Secretary of Treasury, had worked closely with Cheney when Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff. Cheney chose John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Ashcroft had embarrassingly just lost a Senate race to a man who had died three weeks before the election, and was grateful to Cheney for the position.

Cheney was not working just to get control of the top of the major departments. He also knew that a lot of issues that came to the top for decisions had been selected and framed by individuals at levels below Department Secretary, so he suggested that trusted acolytes be appointed positions at lower levels in the bureaucracy. One example is John Bolton who went to the State Department to keep Colin Powell from going off Cheney’s defined reservation. These appointments gave Cheney control or awareness of new issues as they moved up the bureaucracy and gave him a major advantage over other players of bureaucratic politics since he was generally prepared for new issues before they were.

The foreign policy team consists of The Attorney General, The central intelligence director and the secretaries of state, defense and treasury. When the Foreign policy team meets, it is called the Principals Committee, except when the President is attending. Then it is called the National Security Council. The normal job of the National Security Adviser is to chair meetings of the Principals Committee. Chairing the committee means to set the agenda and to coordinate activities the committee directs. Cheney chose to join the committee, making him the highest ranking member when the President was absent. Richard Haas, director of policy planning in the State Department, later described Cheney’s role as getting “Three bites at the apple,” on every decision. Cheney got his information from the deputies, then from the Principal’s committee, and then had his influence on Bush when the two of them were alone.

This wasn’t all that Cheney was involved in. As Vice President he had an office with the Senate. He also had regular meetings with Senator Arlen Specter and a few other senior Republican Senators. He also went to his old friend Bill Thomas, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and asked for an office in the House. He got one right off the floor. This was important because all tax bills originate in the House.

With this structure in the executive branch and congress as well as his web of contacts throughout the government Cheney was in position to be aware of and able to influence major issues from their inception to the point at which George W. Bush finally decided what to do with them. This was possible because Bush himself was disinterested in most of what Cheney was doing .

It appears to me that the hard right-wing turn of the Bush administration in Bush’s first term was largely dictated by Cheney’s agenda. It was permitted by Bush because he trusted Cheney. Cheney immediately followed any direction given by Bush and so kept that trust, but in many cases Bush simply did not make a decision, letting issues grow and fester in the bureaucracy. In those cases Cheney felt free to use his own power to implement the elements of his own agenda.

Barton Gellman describes this process in much greater depth and carries it on well past its initiation. The book is worth buying and reading.

Dick Cheney - The most dangerous man in America

Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman has published his book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, describing Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President America has ever suffered. Much of what Gellman has written is new information for the public.

The story that becomes clear is that Dick Cheney arranged to have himself chosen Vice President by George W. Bush, and from that position has spent the last seven-and-a-half years working to create a Monarchical role of"Commander in Chief" for the American President in which the President is the supreme decision-maker with almost no limitations by any other institution including Congress and the Courts. Except for earlier reports by Gellman this story has also completely escaped the notice of the American media.

The following is an except from the review of "Angler" by Steve Clemons.

Richard Cheney has sculpted the vice presidency in a way never seen before. He revolutionized an office that has turned many of its occupants into obscure eccentrics—one that Benjamin Franklin referred to as “Your Superfluous Excellency.” Cheney refused to do state funerals. Instead, he rerouted the in- and outboxes of power in the White House and turned himself into the nation’s most consequential political force. Whether George W. Bush approved or not, his VP animated most of the controversial policies that will define for decades the Bush II presidency. [Snip]

Cheney was put in charge of finding Bush’s VP, and he positioned himself for selection. He uncovered, through an exhaustive questionnaire process, the most private and intimate details of the lives of the other candidates. No one vetted Cheney, though, so nobody had anything on him. He had the goods on everyone else, and he got the nod from Bush.

The curious way in which Cheney maneuvered himself onto Bush’s ticket is one of many disturbing stories in this new and brilliantly researched account of Cheney’s adventures as Bush’s “No. 2.” Barton Gellman, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist, examines the nuts and bolts of Cheney’s power apparatus. He shows how a mere vice president engineered a massive expansion of presidential power, knocked back the constitutional authority of Congress and the judiciary, helped launch an illegitimate war, developed a system for spying on America’s citizens, oversaw White House-sanctioned torture, and pushed official secrecy to unprecedented levels. We see how Cheney punctured America’s mystique as a benign and respected nation—how he shattered the moral, economic, and military pillars of American power. [Snip]

Gellman ... records previously unknown anecdotes about the inner workings of the administration and Cheney’s take-no-prisoners approach to winning policy battles. While Bush and members of his inner circle like Karl Rove seemed to be obsessed with the political machinations of their work, Cheney had a deeper purpose behind his crusades. For him politics and political gamesmanship, seduction, and intimidation were all about changing the nation’s policy course—all about principle. Cheney['s]... heart and soul were invested in the most important and controversial aspects of the Bush presidency, the policy areas he cared about most—terrorism, intelligence, national security, energy, environmental policy, tax and budget issues.[Snip]

Cheney and his abrasive lawyer David Addington wanted to bring on governmental crises and tensions with Congress in order to demonstrate the dominance and infallibility of presidential power, which they defined as the “unitary executive.” In Gellman’s framing, Cheney saw 9/11, discussions with energy lobbyists, and even torture policy as mere vehicles for asserting his vision of a near monarchical presidency.

Angler leads its readers to think that, even without 9/11, Cheney would have found triggers to justify his imperial expansion of presidential powers and official secrecy, his pugnacious disregard for international law, the huge defense spending increases, the war against Iraq—or whatever nation would show that America was an irresistible force—and the massive tax cuts. Gellman argues that Cheney was never an apostle of neoconservatism. He didn’t have a burning desire to establish democracy in Iraq. For Cheney, John Bolton, Addington, and others, Iraq was but a means to an end—a tool to expand presidential prerogatives. The same does not necessarily apply to Scooter Libby, a leading neoconservative thinker who strongly favored the invasion for ideological reasons.

This book is simply one of the scariest stories ever written about contemporary America. Cheney and Addington essentially hijacked the bureaucracy of national security and put themselves in the cockpit of government. In chapter after chapter, we read how Cheney set about constructing a secretive system of government and policymaking in which he was accountable to almost no one. We see, for instance, how Cheney pushed through the second round of tax cuts—a move that made even Bush uncomfortable—and how he undermined Christine Todd Whitman, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, over laws regarding air quality. [Snip]

Cheney’s maneuvers, his angling inside the wide berth that Bush gave him, eventually created so much blowback from colleagues inside the administration and Congress that his office began to slide off its rails. Gellman relates a telling incident involving this reviewer and the vice president on the subject of North Korea, when it appeared that Cheney was unaware of President Bush’s intention to ask Congress to remove North Korea from the terrorist watch list. (I was not the source of this information: the New York Times reported the encounter between Cheney and me on its front page.) At an off-the-record forum, I asked Cheney about the possible change toward North Korea. The question was simple, but Cheney froze, staring at me for an awkwardly long time. He refused to answer, then left the stage. Gellman suggests that Cheney, who for years had been wired into every key national-security decision and able to paralyze nearly all policies with which he disagreed, had been left out—“not read in,” according to the lingo—of the policy-making process, the very tactic his team had so often used against their rivals.

Cheney was also frustrated on the Iran front, increasingly convinced that his team was losing in the interagency process to State Department officials R. Nicholas Burns, Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Gates. He felt his hawkish, more militarily focused strategy was being undermined by advocates of diplomacy. In a Salon article on Sept. 19, 2007, “Why Bush Won’t Attack Iran,” I disclosed that a senior member of Cheney’s team had said that the vice president was considering ways to “tie the president’s hands” and outflank those delaying a confrontation with Tehran—a policy that Cheney felt amounted to appeasement. Clearly, the Angler’s influence was declining. Some sources suggest that Cheney still wields great power and has of late been winning his battles again against Rice, Bellinger, Gates, and others. But he is certainly a long way from his halcyon first years in office, when he had virtually nothing stopping him.

[highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

This looks like a book that explains a great deal of the inner workings - especially the series of blunders - of the Bush White House since January 2001.

Here's a question this review triggers. A great many people have anticipated that Bush will create some form of "October Surprise" between now and the Presidential election in order to get McCain elected President. But if Cheney has been the primary motivator of so many of the White House activities, is Cheney either interested or in a position to cause some kind of international incident in the next two weeks? What is the relationship between McCain and Cheney?

I have written a great deal about the Reagan Revolution, its underlying conservative ideology, and the manner in which the Reagan Revolution has led directly to the present credit crisis and Recession. Gellman's book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, suggests that behind the scenes of - and perhaps even mostly unrelated to - the current economic crises there has been a very different mechanism for many of the disasters that have been created by the Bush administration. I suspect that this book will be the basis for a lot of the defenses created by conservatives to avoid blame for the disastrous state that America has been brought down to. It won't wash. Dick Cheney and his acolytes have been a key element of Republican dominance for the last three decades and especially so since 2001. The Conservatives who will be wanting to distance themselves from him are the same ones who linked arms and supported his actions in lockstep, just as the social conservatives have. Conservatives are driven as much be social cronyism as they are by their myth of ideology. They just don't like to look at that aspect of being a conservative.

A Review of a book is supposed to sell people on the idea of buying and reading it. Steve Clemon's review has succeeded.