Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush
‘Statute of Limitations Has Expired’ on Many Secrets, Former Vice President Says
Washington Post Staff Writer
By Barton Gellman
August 13, 2009In his first few months after stepping down, former vice president Richard B. Cheney threw himself into public combat against the "far left" agenda of the new commander in chief. More private reflections, as his memoir takes shape in slashing longhand on legal pads, have opened a second front against Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush. Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.
"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times – never apologize, never explain – and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."
When I saw th recent Frost/Nixon Movie, it reminded me of seeing the real Frost/Nixon Interviews back in the late 70’s. I had just finished a Psychiatric Residency and was in early Psychoanalytic Training, so I was is an analytic period of life, obviously. But what struck me was how much Nixon was still caught up in the issues of his failed Presidency – justifying himself, still holding grudges, like his mind had been frozen in the White House and was still there even though three years had passed. He spoke as if his thoughts had great import, which by the time of the interviews seemed odd. I felt the same thing as I read this article. Cheney’s still there in the White House, the Vice President who would be President. Cheney would of course see it as "… that Bush had gone soft on him" instead of that Bush had " …hardened against Cheney’s advice." Like the Nixon of Nixon/Frost, Cheney remains sure he was on the correct trajectory, but other, lesser people just wouldn’t listen. Dick Cheney is no longer in charge, no longer important.
The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end. Cheney’s post-White House career is as singular as his vice presidency, a position he transformed into the hub of power. Drained of direct authority and cast aside by much of the public, he is no less urgently focused, friends and family members said, on shaping events…
I recall a comment Cheney made when the Democrats regained power in Congress. He was talking about John Murtha’s support of Nancy Pelosi. He said something like he couldn’t understand why someone like Murtha who had amassed so much power over the years would go along with the new speaker. It didn’t occur to Cheney that it was because Murtha agreed with her. To Dick Cheney, being "the hub of power" was a personal thing, the important thing – "shaping events."
What is new, Hannah said, is Cheney’s readiness to acknowledge "doubts about the main channels of American policy during the last few years," a period encompassing most of Bush’s second term. "These are not small issues," Hannah said. "They cut to the very core of who Cheney is," and "he really feels he has an obligation" to save the country from danger. Cheney’s imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for "regime change"…
Cheney "…’really feels he has an obligation’ to save the country from danger" and "…views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness." He saw Bush as backing down by halting the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closing secret CIA prisons, seeking congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reaching out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea. He’d gone to all that trouble to establish absolute power – put it in every Signing Statement, OLC Memo, Presidential Appointment. And here was George W. Bush listening to others instead of him. I’ll bet he was furious at Bush’s arrogance. Like he said of Murtha, why would Bush back down like that? What’s the point of garnering power if you don’t use it? I doubt it occurred to Cheney that maybe Bush had awakened a little and realized that Cheney’s advice had been flawed.
The depths of Cheney’s distress about another close friend, his former chief of staff and alter ego I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have only recently become clear. Bush refused a pardon after Libby’s felony convictions in 2007 for perjury and obstruction of an investigation of the leak of a clandestine CIA officer’s identity. Cheney tried mightily to prevent Libby’s fall, scrawling in a note made public at trial that he would not let anyone "sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder." Cheney never explained the allusion, but grand jury transcripts – and independent counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald – suggested that Libby’s false statements aimed above all to protect the vice president.
Last month, an account in Time magazine, based on close access to Bush’s personal lawyer and White House counsel, described Cheney’s desperate end-of-term efforts to change Bush’s mind about a pardon. Cheney, who has spent a professional lifetime ignoring unflattering stories, issued a quietly furious reply. In the most explicit terms, he accused Bush of abandoning "an innocent man" who had served the president with honor and then become the "victim of a severe miscarriage of justice." Cheney now says privately that his memoir will describe their heated arguments in full…
The place where Cheney’s anger finally boiled over was with the Libby pardon. Libby was guilty of a lot more than the things he was convicted of doing. And he was taking a hit for the sins of the fathers – Bush and Cheney. Cheney seems incredulous that you would have power and not use it. He could have easily protected his Chief of Staff himself – by telling the truth about the Plame outing. Libby was obviously worried the whole time that was going on, checking with others along the way. But he did what he was told to do. Cheney could’ve faced the music and testified truthfully. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and let Scooter take the heat. He may rale at Bush for not pardoning Scooter, but he’s never going to tell the truth himself about his part in that scenario.
George W. Bush is not a favorite of mine. But a lot of what I didn’t like about him was put there by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. In some ways, I respect Bush for finally saying "no" to Cheney directly. Bush knew that Cheney had done a sleazy thing [a lot of sleazy things] and he stood up to him in the end. They were a malignant pair, George Bush and Dick Cheney – sicker as a team than as individuals, and they were pretty sick one at a time.
Like all extreme Narcissists who think of themselves as super-powers, who are impervious to the lesser opinions of others, Dick Cheney is, in the end, a coward. His fears lead us down a paranoid path that was disasterous for the country. He was so mistrustful of others that he micromanaged everything, and ended up putting his crazy paranoid stamp all over our government. He’s almost never mentioned by the current Republicans for obvious reasons. Unlike Gonzales, he’s rich, so he doesn’t need to go looking for work, so I’m glad to hear he’s occupying himself writing. I personally welcome his memoirs [which will have the theme that he was "right" about everything, but that others refused to listen to him]. I doubt that even his former supporters will read his book [though we will]. And like the Richard Nixon of Frost/Nixon, he’s not yet aware that he is superfluous, a has-been, or a shouldn’t-have-been. Although he should stick to fly-fishing and his grandkids soccer games, he’s going to keep telling us how it ought to be…
In some ways I guess it is not a total surprise that there were limits to the degree to which Dubya allowed himself to be Dick’s puppet. The President must have recognized at some level that they were not doing the right things and that it was going badly for America because of the things they were doing. He must have also remembered that he promised to root out the perps in the Plame affair and see that justice was done and when all he could do to follow up was a ‘not-pardon’ with all of it’s lame, half-arsedness instead of what he was on record to deliver in the first place…well, no wonder really that he might harbor the same kind of hurt feelings against Dick that Dick has against him. Not sure that I’ll be in line to enrich Dick by a single solitary penny despite the promise of a good dose of voyeurism into the diary of a madman.