1 Boring Old Man

Six Questions for Bart Gellman, Author of Angler

1. You open the book by recounting the role Cheney played as manager of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential selection process. Cheney, you suggest, milked this position for all it was worth… Do you consider Cheney’s handling of the vice presidential vetting process to cast any insights on Cheney’s later conduct as vice president?
   ^{… The news in my book about this process is that Cheney never filled out his own questionnaire; that the heart surgeon who vouched for his health never met him or looked at his records; and that Bush and Cheney never interviewed anyone for the job until Cheney already had it nailed…}
2. … Who were the key figures that Cheney brought into the Bush Administration, and how did this build his influence as vice president?
   ^{Donald Rumsfeld has to be top of the list, because the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis dominated national security policy for the first six years of the Bush Administration. Bush knew he wanted Colin Powell, who at the time, according to Gallup polls, was the third most popular man in America…}
   ^{The other obvious power posts are at Justice and Treasury. Cheney brought in Ashcroft and Paul O’Neill, though as it happened he wound up clashing with both of them…}
   ^{Dick Cheney simply knew the back channels of government better than anybody else. You don’t need to go to the cabinet officer if you can find the right deputy assistant secretary–for instance, Paul Hoffman at Interior, the former head of Cheney’s Wyoming congressional office–to make a decision that never reaches the level of the cabinet.}
3. You describe a small coterie of figures very close to Cheney who were behind the most controversial and radical decisions of the Bush era–the circumvention of the Geneva Conventions and the gutting of the surveillance limitations in FISA. These figures occupied three redoubts: the office of the vice president, the office of the secretary of defense, and the office of legal counsel inside the Justice Department. How could these three posts effectively wield such vast power?
   ^{… nobody in government doubted that Addington was dominant. There are a lot of reasons for that: he was highly experienced, preternaturally swift in cutting through paperwork. He knew more than any other senior lawyer about national security law, and he was highly opinionated. He’s also a big, loud, forceful man, and he intimidated rivals.}
   ^{If you widen the circle you add Jim Haynes, the general counsel at the Pentagon and an Addington protégé and John Yoo at the OLC in Justice. OLC’s role is hard to overstate: ordinarily the Office of Legal Counsel is the final authority in the executive branch on what is and is not legal… So the back channel from Addington to John Yoo in the first couple of years was critical. Yoo wrote the opinions that permitted things like warrantless domestic surveillance and the deliberate use of cruelty in interrogations, and Addington wrote the words that gave operational force to the new policies. Gonzales’s role was mostly to digest and explain the new policies to the president…}
4. When Cheney acted, you tell us, his hand frequently was undetected even by the most experienced Washington insiders… How could aides to a vice president wield such power? What was their secret?
   ^{Even people who despised them–and Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, has to be counted in that group–said those two men were the most effective team in government.}
   ^{I’ve already talked about Addington. He is unusually capable, and he is a zealot. I don’t mean that insultingly. Addington is one of those people who are entirely unbending on principles… Jack Goldsmith, a very conservative lawyer who nonetheless battled Addington on torture and domestic espionage, told me Addington is principled to the point of being stupid. What Goldsmith meant is that Addington pushed his positions so far that they became self-defeating…}
   ^{Scooter Libby had three hats: chief of staff and national security adviser to Cheney, and also assistant to the president. That last part was very important: it’s the highest rank in the White House, and it gave Libby equivalent stature to Condi Rice and Andy Card… Like Cheney, Addington and Libby knew exactly what they wanted. That’s a huge advantage in any organization. Most people, on most hard questions, will spend some time on the fence. The ones who are sure of themselves, and know how the machinery works, can make things happen.}
5. You describe the Bush White House’s struggle with the Justice Department over a special NSA program that authorized trawling through the communications of millions of Americans, when Bush, surprisingly, reversed one of his own decisions. What made him do so in this case?
   ^{… Authority for the program had to be renewed every 45 days, and each renewal required a sign-off from Justice. The trouble began when John Yoo left the OLC, about a year and a half after the domestic espionage began. Cheney and Addington had to choose a new lawyer to bless the program. They settled on Patrick Philbin, who seemed to be a reliable choice, and then Jack Goldsmith took over the account when he arrived to head the OLC in October 2003. Philbin and Goldsmith developed strong doubts about the legality of the program, which were amplified when David Addington angrily rejected a request from NSA lawyers to see how John Yoo had justified it in top-secret memos.}

   ^{For the next three months, Addington and Cheney tried to suppress a growing legal insurgency. Andy Card acknowledged to me that Bush was out of the loop. By early March, Jack Goldsmith ruled that parts of the program were unlawful. Ashcroft and Comey backed him. Bush did not learn until Wednesday March 10, 2004–the day before the program would expire–that Justice refused to certify its legality. As it happened, Ashcroft was in the hospital and Jim Comey was acting AG. Bush was allowed to believe that Comey raised last-minute objections to a program that Ashcroft had approved. That does a lot to explain why the president sent Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales to Ashcroft’s sickbed at George Washington University Medical Center. If Comey wouldn’t sign, the president had no reason to doubt that Ashcroft would.}

   ^{The hospital visit became infamous when Comey testified about it in 2007. What he said then was that the attorney general sat up in bed and declared his support for Comey. What Comey did not disclose then, and what was not known until now, is that Ashcroft said he regretted certifying the program at all. He had not really understood it until Philbin and Goldsmith dug down. The next day, Thursday March 11, Bush renewed the program anyway. He signed new language–again written by Addington–declaring that he, the president, was the ultimate authority on what was legal. Bush signed that document without knowing, as Cheney, Card and Gonzales knew, that Mueller, Comey, and many more layers of the senior leadership at Justice were going to resign…}
6. You tell us that suggestions that Cheney used his position and power for personal financial gain are unfounded. But you also document Cheney’s inconsistent views of the powers and prerogatives of offices. What does this say about Cheney’s attitude towards the Constitution, the law and notions of legal formality?
   ^{… By the time he became vice president, he thought more highly of the office, noting that he was an independent, elected constitutional officer. At each stage, he had a broad interpretation of the powers and prerogatives of the job he held at the moment.}
   ^{There’s no venality here. Cheney was not trying to aggrandize himself, to steer money to friends, or to set himself up for higher office. He simply believed that the stakes were high and he was more capable than others. He saw the world, he believed, as it truly is and was prepared to do the “unpleasant” things that had to be done to safeguard us. Cheney is a rare combination: a zealot in principle and a subtle, skillful tactician in practice.}
   ^{A lot of critics call Cheney and Addington contemptuous of the Constitution. I think that’s completely wrong–a cartoon that misses something important, because it fails to take them seriously. The vice president has an unyielding conviction, to which he has devoted substantial thought, about what the Constitution means… In his own frame of reference, the Constitution not only permits but compels him to help Bush break free of restraints on his prerogatives as commander in chief and leader of the unitary executive branch. But where Cheney does show contempt is for public opinion, the capacity of the citizenry at large to make rational decisions…}

A lot of critics call Cheney and Addington contemptuous of the Constitution. I think that’s completely wrong–a cartoon that misses something important, because it fails to take them seriously. The vice president has an unyielding conviction, to which he has devoted substantial thought, about what the Constitution means… In his own frame of reference, the Constitution not only permits but compels him to help Bush break free of restraints on his prerogatives as commander in chief and leader of the unitary executive branch. But where Cheney does show contempt is for public opinion, the capacity of the citizenry at large to make rational decisions…