1 Boring Old Man

Sometimes you read something that just "clicks." KagroX’s post [Reversing Watergate] on The Next Hurrah was such an article for me. I had read Jane Mayer‘s article on David Addington in The New Yorker last year. I had noted Steve Clemons‘ review of this article and his comments about Cheney. And I have read and re-read the various Cheney political biographies. But it hadn’t all quite come together for me. KagroX begins by reviewing Mayer:

Remember what The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer told us last year, in her article on Dick Cheney’s now-Chief of Staff, David Addington:

He thought the Presidency was too weakened. He’s a believer that in foreign policy the executive is meant to be quite powerful.” These views were shared by Dick Cheney, who served as chief of staff in the Ford Administration. “On a range of executive-power issues, Cheney thought that Presidents from Nixon onward yielded too quickly,” Michael J. Malbin, a political scientist who has advised Cheney on the issue of executive power, said. Kenneth Adelman, who was a high-ranking Pentagon official under Ford, said that the fall of Saigon, in 1975, was “very painful for Dick. He believed that Vietnam could have been saved—maybe—if Congress hadn’t cut off funding. He was against that kind of interference.”

And how Mayer confirmed this with Jane Harman?

Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has spent considerable time working with Cheney and Addington in recent years, believes that they are still fighting Watergate. “They’re focussed on restoring the Nixon Presidency,” she said. “They’ve persuaded themselves that, following Nixon, things went all wrong.” She said that in meetings Addington is always courtly and pleasant. But when it comes to accommodating Congress “his answer is always no.”

And how Cheney himself confirmed it, too?

In a revealing interview that Cheney gave last December to reporters travelling with him to Oman, he explained, “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of Presidential power and authority. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both, in the seventies, served to erode the authority I think the President needs.” Further, Cheney explained, it was his express aim to restore the balance of power.

Dick Cheney is trying to take us back to the Nixon days, the time before Watergate brought that era to an early end – in his mind, apparently, a golden age. I’d read it, even said it, but seeing it in black and white drove it home for me.

Dick Cheney was knocking around like the rest of us back then – going to school [at least in part, to avoid the Draft]. So while I was in Medical School, he was doing some kind of graduate work [never completed]. When he was no longer draftable, he went to Washington as an Intern. His first job was as Donald Rumsfeld’s Assistant in the Office of Economic Oppurtunity in the Nixon Administration. Their task was to basically keep the lawyers from filing cases [to shut it down]. When Nixon resigned, Cheney became Ford’s Deputy Chief of Staff, then Chief of Staff when Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense. When Ford lost to Carter, he went back to Wyoming and ran for the House of Representatives where he served for 10 years as, by far, its most Conservative member. As a Congressman, he voted and lobbied for every Reagen policy and voted against anything that "smelled" Liberal [Head Start, the Clean Air Act, MLK’s birthday as a national holiday, etc.]. In 1988, he was picked by George H.W. Bush to be Secretary of Defense, overseeing the First Gulf War.

What clicks for me is that he came out of the Nixon era disgruntled about what had happened. As Ford’s Chief of Staff, he urged Ford to not give in to Congress. He was a believer that we could win in Viet Nam and dismayed when Saigon fell. Bush’s recent speech with the analogies to Viet Nam could’ve come right out of Cheney’s mouth. In Congress, he opposed the post-Watergate Reforms. As Secretary of Defense, he was a "Hawk," and while he publicly supported George H.W. Bush in limiting the First Gulf War, one doubts that his support was genuine.

If you weren’t there, it would be hard to imagine how devisive the political climate was in those days. Civil Rights workers beaten or killed. Student anti-war protesters beaten or killed. Almost universal polarization in the political electorate. Hatred abounded – the ugly kind, on both sides. For those of us coming into young adulthood during those years, that period left its mark on us for all times. I know I still measure political matters with the same ruler I had in the end of the 60’s. I’m pretty sure Dick Cheney has his same ruler too [though ours obviously differ].

He’s still fighting with those old dragons. He became skilled as a Congressman in the political ways of the Legislative Branch, becoming Minority Whip right before being picked as the Secretary of Defense. But, even though his longest stint in government was as a Member of the House of Representatives, he has always been an Executive Branch man. I think he sees our government as a political struggle for power between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch. So he resists and opposes any "Oversight" by Congress whether it matters or not.

In many ways, he reminds me of another of my least favorite politicians – a man on the other side. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a longstanding Congressman and a master of Congressional Politics. But in the Executive Branch, he played Congress like a violin – and basically did what he wanted to do much as Cheney has. Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin was little different from Cheney’s Iraqi WMD’s – a ruse to get around Congress. Both of these men, in my opinion, became so tied up in the politics of the Congress/Executive axis that they forgot something – this is a government "of the people, by the people, for the people." Whether Cheney thinks we should have stayed in Viet Nam or not is a moot point. Whether Cheney thinks we should continue in Iraq is equally irrelevant. What matters is what we want – and we want out yesterday. In his endless fight with Congress, he regularly forgets who in the hell he works for…