BOOK REVIEW
Dr. Strangelove
Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), $27.95, 483 pp., Hardcover.
Reviewed
by James G. Bruen, Jr.
Dick Cheney was not among
those who believed the names on the Republican presidential ticket in 2000
should have been inverted. He aspired to the vice-presidency, not the
presidency; and, as he told former vice-president Dan Quayle, while in that
office he did not intend to busy himself attending state funerals as has been
typical of modern vice-presidents: he had other plans; substantive plans. Angler is the story of how Cheney
aggregated and exercised power to accomplish his will within the Bush
Administration. “Cheney’s most troubling quality was a sense of mission so
acute that it drove him to seek power without limitation. His indifference to
public opinion, an important constraint on most office holders, verged on
contempt,” writes Barton Gellman.
Angler’s description of the interior workings of
the Bush Administration will be uncomfortable reading for those who choose to
maintain the view of government taught in civics classes. A tale of secrecy, trickery,
deception, lies, coercion, intimidation, torture, and threats, all unbounded by
morality and in the service of Cheney’s will, Angler emphasizes tactics and issues, without delving deeply into
Cheney’s motivation, core beliefs, or, indeed, to whom, if anyone or anything
other than himself, he owes allegiance.
“For the public, Cheney had
become a punch line, an inverse Dan Quayle – ridiculed not for vacuity but for
dark and all-too clever scheming,” writes Gellman. “That these were caricatures
of both men did not diminish the impact.” If that indeed is a caricature of
Cheney, Angler’s description of the
first term of the Bush presidency reinforces it. President Bush was “decider”
only when “he chose to be;” otherwise, Cheney had free reign. “There would be
many reasons for Cheney’s dominance in the Bush administration, some of them
subtle. One was as simple as could be. The vice president knew what he wanted.
Unlike most of his rivals, and even the president he served, Cheney seldom
indulged in ambivalence.”
Angler begins with a chilling vignette, reminiscent of Alfred Kinsey’s
methodology, in which Cheney, in charge of George W. Bush’s search for a
running mate, elicits confidential information from a potential
vice-presidential nominee, only to secure the nomination for himself and later
use that information to scuttle the man’s appointment to Bush’s cabinet.
Indeed, with Bush’s blessing, Cheney was in charge of the transition, “the
dominant force in the Bush administration to be.” Although “Cheney took care to
defer to Bush, leaving the final yea or nay on each prospective nominee to the
man at the top of the ticket[,] Bush ratified each choice.” Cheney’s reach
extended beyond the Cabinet to second- and third-ranking officials, and “in the
policy fields that Cheney cared about, he found places for allies even deeper
in the bureaucracy[,] gently, by way of suggestions, not commands, to those who
did the hiring.”
For his own staff, Cheney chose two men “possessed of far more
experience and force of will than their counterparts on Bush’s staff, [who]
would have outsized influence in the events to come.” David Addington, “a
ferocious advocate of presidential authority,” was counsel to the
vice-president and “Cheney’s enforcer in the bureaucracy.” I. Lewis “Scooter”
Libby, who, while at Yale, “had studied political science under Paul Wolfowitz,
then followed him on an ideological exodus from their liberal Jewish roots,”
was Cheney’s chief of staff and national security adviser. Like Wolfowitz, for
whom he had then worked at the Pentagon, Libby had dissented when George H.W.
Bush ended the first Gulf War without ousting Saddam Hussein. Cheney also arranged
for Libby to hold the title of assistant to the president, which gave Libby,
and thus Cheney, the right to challenge speeches, legislation, and executive
orders before they got to the president.
In addition to nominations
and appointments, Cheney’s policy interests included war and peace, the
economy, natural resources, and relations with Congress. Cheney appeared to
fall in line behind Bush’s decisions, once made, but until Bush settled an
argument, Cheney used every advantage he could muster to prevail; afterwards,
he used every loophole he could manufacture or exploit. The descriptions of
Cheney’s approach to war and peace are the most chilling parts of Angler. “Bush had given him the lead
White House roles on both terrorism and intelligence. The vice-president took
the hardest rhetorical line, harder than the president himself.”
Cheney authorized the Air
Force to shoot down a civilian jetliner on September 11, 2001. “On what
authority?” asks Gellman, who establishes painstakingly that, contrary to later
statements of the president and vice-president, Cheney acted on his own
initiative.
If Bush and Cheney simply lied, as
substantially all the evidence but their own suggests, then a template for
‘this crusade, this war on terrorism’ was established from the moment it began.
Again and again the two men would display a shared sense of danger, an instinct
for the precedent-busting response, and a willingness to blur the line between
discretion and subterfuge.
On September 11 and afterward, Cheney staked
out decisions of great national moment without explicit authority from Bush. …
He did not defy the commander in chief, but he certainly did not always wait
for orders.
On September 11, Cheney
summoned Addington to the bunker beneath the White House. What extraordinary
powers would the president need for the impending war?, asked Cheney. Addington
subsequently “requested OLC opinions on subjects calculated to elicit broad
replies.” OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel, a Department of Justice office that
issues opinions on questions of law that are then binding on executive
agencies, describes itself on its web site as “serving as, in effect, outside
counsel for the other agencies of the executive branch.” John Yoo, an academic
on leave to work as a deputy at OLC, had made his name in academia by
controversial writings on presidential power. At OLC, Yoo pushed these views
well
beyond the bounds of accepted scholarship, even among those who shared his
presidentialist bent. Yoo declared in the most expansive terms that the
commander in chief need take no account of restrictions set by the coequal
legislative and judicial branches.
Yoo’s declarations were
often kept secret. “In a prolific run of opinions that fall and winter, Yoo
claimed without limitation that the president could disregard laws and treaties
prohibiting torture, war crimes, warrantless eavesdropping, and confinement
without hearing. The breath of his language was stunning.” And it was just what
Cheney and Addington desired. There was “near-hermetic secrecy” in which “not
only the conduct of policy but even the law itself … was classified. The new
legal framework was meant to be invisible, unreviewable – its very existence
unknown by legislative or judicial actors who might push back.” Cheney and
Addington kept Yoo’s secret “congenial analysis” hidden in their back pockets
in case they were ever forced to legitimatize their actions publicly.
Cheney freed Bush to fight the ‘war on
terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that the government had to
shake off old habits of self-restraint. With Bush’s consent, Cheney unleashed
foreign intelligence agencies to spy at home. He gave them legal cover to
conduct what he called ‘robust interrogation’ of captured enemies, using
calculated cruelty to break their will. At Cheney’s initiative, the United
States stripped terror suspects of long-established rights under domestic and
international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House
ownership. Everything from capture and confinement to questioning, trial, and
punishment would proceed by rules invented on the fly.
Bush and Cheney were not
alone in wanting to shake off restraint. Neocon George Weigel writes that the
contemporary Catholic belief that the just war theory includes a presumption
against war is “based on as mistaken reading of Catholic intellectual history
and a mistaken understanding of moral theology.” Weigel seems to favor
compulsory war, at least where the war is launched by the United States or
Israel. A delusional modern Athanasius, he declares the contemporary Church
heterodox; he, almost alone, stands for orthodoxy, as he declares the Iraq Wars
just. Is Bush’s preventive war approach just? The Church and Popes John Paul II
and Benedict XVI say no. Weigel’s view, reduced to its essence, is that
whenever the president decides to go to war, the war is just. But Cheney was
not hampered by the Church’s just war theory; he had a more cold-blooded
approach, telling Meet the Press that
“it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to
achieve our objectives.”
The world’s last remaining superpower, Cheney
believed, must not stand helpless against the dangers of a state-terror nexus.
A defensive crouch was not an option. The United States could not defeat every
potential foe, unseat every hostile government, but tackling one would send a
powerful message to the rest.
Notes Gellman, “The question
was where to begin.” Iran? Iraq? Libya? Syria? Sudan? North Korea? Cuba?
Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Military and political interests militated against
attacking many of these countries. Cheney was looking for an exemplar, not a
formidable foe:
Cheney, in the end, did not press for war
with Iraq because Saddam really topped the list of ‘grave and gathering
threats,’ as he led the Bush administration in asserting. The United States
would take him down because it could. The war would not preempt immediate
danger, a more traditional ground for war, but prevent a danger that might
emerge later – from Baghdad or anywhere else in the viewing audience.
Use any means at our disposal, basically. The United States would take him down because it could. What could
be more cold-blooded than launching a war with its attendant death,
destruction, misery, and suffering, merely because you can and you want to send
a message to other countries?
Well, how about this? At
Christmastime in 2003, the government was on edge, fearing “a spectacular
attack around New Year’s Eve,” possibly nuclear terrorism. Cheney decided, with
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s support, to inform Iran that the United
States would respond to such an attack by using nuclear weapons against Iran,
even though, Gellman notes, there was “little or no indication that the plot,
if plot there was, had support from the Islamic republic.” Gellman summarizes the
situation very succinctly:
Iran might
be involved, might know something. With stakes this high, there was no time
to wait for proof. This was a dark-side moment: motivate your enemy with a
stick. Iran needed every incentive to find and stop the coming attack, just in
case it could.
As one participant at the
meeting where Cheney made the decision to threaten Iran told Gellman:
These
are ruthless men, and they were completely credible in the role of making
ruthless threats, and that was exactly what they believed the situation
required. It’s not every day you make a threat to obliterate a country when you
have no evidence at all. They had no idea whether Iran in fact had any role.
Angler’s
chilling depiction of Cheney’s power and amorality is all the more striking
because Gellman is not unsympathetic to Cheney or his methods. “Cheney served
his county with devotion, at some cost to himself,” he writes. Indeed, Gellman
ultimately endorses Cheney’s utilitarianism:
The
Bush-Cheney strategy after September 11, with its claims of White House
supremacy and its sharp tilt from civil liberty to state command, estranged
even proponents of a unitary executive and a strong national security state. …
Today cannot speak for tomorrow, and Cheney may turn out to be right that the
pendulum will swing back. Nothing is likelier to bring that about than Cheney’s
worst nightmare made flesh. If Nexus
comes, loosing a plague or igniting a mushroom cloud, posterity may decide we
should have stayed the vice president’s course.
A mushroom cloud, though,
was not Cheney’s worst nightmare: we should be thankful that a mushroom cloud
did not appear over Iran at Cheney’s instigation. But the publicly expressed
willingness of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of State,
to “totally obliterate” Iran suggests that the danger did not end with the recent
change of administrations. 
This review was
published in the May, 2009 issue of Culture
Wars.
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