I try to keep politics and entertainment separate, especially in this
blog. But every now and then, the two intersect as they do with The
World According to Dick Cheney [shown on Showtime]. This documentary should have a subtitle: How I marginalized myself in the Bush
Administration. This documentary will change nobody's opinion of this very polarizing figure. If you thought he was Darth Vader and a war criminal, nothing here will change your mind. If you think he was a patriot who did what he could to protect the country, your viewpoint will also be validated.
At the beginning, the filmmaker asks Dick Cheney a few
questions -
Favorite Virtue: Integrity
What do you appreciate most in your friends: Honesty
Idea of happiness:
a day on the south fork of the Snake with a fly rod…
Main fault: “I guess I don’t spend a lot of time thinking
about my faults would be the answer…”
How did he feel about 9/11: He didn’t think about it that way – he had a
job to do.
Dick Cheney’s story begins in earnest with 9/11. Cheney:
“A Secret Service agent came in and said “Sir, we have to leave
immediately.” They propelled me out of
my office and down the hall. I got on
the telephone with the President, he was in Florida, and told him not to be in
one location where we both can be taken out.
We had a list of six aircraft that had been hijacked. We could account for three of them – two in
New York, one in the Pentagon but we had three more out there and we didn’t
know where they were. There’d been a
report of a plane outside of Washington 80 or 90 miles away headed for
Washington at a high rate of speed. You
could wring your hands, be worried and be emotional about it, then you can’t
function. Under those circumstances
you’ve got to act. You know you’ve got
to deal with the situation as it arises.
You’ve got to anticipate difficulties.
That’s the nature of conflict. A
plane 80 miles out traveling at a high rate of speed to Washington is a matter
of minutes before it arrives over the city.
I gave the instructions that’d we’d authorize our pilots to take it
out…”
Dick Cheney is not what you’d call a good
politician. He was a better bureaucrat
than he was a politician. He liked being
the power behind the throne. To wit: “The
ones who spend all their time trying to be loved by everybody probably aren’t
doing very much. If you’re not prepared
to have critics and to be subject to criticism, then you’re in the wrong line
of work. If you want to be loved, uh, go
be a movie star…”
The story then shifts to Wyoming. Dick Cheney grew up in Casper, Wyoming. In high school he played football and
baseball, and was the senior class president.
A local oil man arranged for him to get a scholarship to attend
Yale. He had a drinking problem. Instead of concentrating on school, he and
his friends drank beer – a lot. He was
in over his head. He flunked out of
school his freshman year. He was allowed
to return but he lost his scholarship, but he got thrown out of Yale after his
sophomore year. He went back to Wyoming
and worked. He strung power lines, living
day to day, paycheck to paycheck. He
still drank a lot. He was arrested twice
for DUI. His friends at Yale were
graduating from college. His high school
sweetheart Lynne graduated from Colorado College a year early, all the while
Cheney is sitting in jail in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Lynne pretty much read him the riot act,
telling him she wasn’t going to marry a lineman. So he got his act together and enrolled at
the University of Wyoming, majoring in political science. After he received his Bachelor’s degree, he
enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He planned to teach political science after
he earned his doctorate. Cheney and
Lynne got married. This was all taking
place at the time of massive protests against the Vietnam War. Cheney supported the war. He says the experience in Madison drove him
and Lynne toward the conservative end of the political spectrum.
So how did a college dropout with two DUI arrests become
a power player in Washington? In 1968
the Cheneys moved to Washington DC. He
participated in a program that paired grad students with members of
Congress. He was going to stay only for
a year before returning to Wisconsin to finish his studies. It was during this time he met a young
Congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney interviewed with Rumsfeld who threw
Cheney out of his office. Cheney: “If you’re looking for warm and fuzzy,
Rumsfeld’s not the right place to go.”
But a few months later, Richard Nixon appointed Congressman Rumsfeld to
be director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Cheney wrote a 12-page memo telling Rumsfeld
what he ought to do for his confirmation hearing. Rumsfeld liked what he read, remembered
Cheney and asked Cheney to come to work for him. So at age 28 he had an office in the West
Wing of the White House just down the hall from Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was a consummate bureaucratic
infighter, and Cheney learned this from him.
Nixon offered Cheney a job to work on his 1972 re-election campaign, but
Cheney chose to stick with Rumsfeld.
What follows after Cheney’s arrival in Washington is the
making of a modern-day Machiavelli. In
rapid succession, the film details Cheney rocketing to positions of power
within the Ford Administration [White House Chief of Staff at age 34], his
election to Congress, his rapid ascent to a leadership position in the House
Republican Caucus, and his stint as Defense Secretary. The Gulf War takes up about one minute of the
documentary. In fact, the time devoted
to his time in Congress and his time at the Pentagon were about as short as
this paragraph.
After Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, Cheney decided
he’d give the presidency a shot in 1996.
In 1994 he drove all over the country, trying to drum up support for a
possible candidacy. Cheney: “I spent a
lot of time on the road. I thought that
I was qualified by background and experience to do the job. I mean I believed that I could function effectively
as president. Part of it was to assess
that basic question about my willingness to do what I would have to do…” He’s not good at retail politics, and he
didn’t like it. He didn’t raise much
money, and didn’t attract much support, so he opted not to run for president. Then he went to work for Halliburton [that’s
all that is said about Halliburton]. He
knew he’d never be elected president, and was quite happy working in the
private sector. But like other areas of
Dick Cheney’s life, his time at Halliburton was given short shrift by this
film.
When George W. Bush ran for president, he asked Cheney
once to consider being his running mate.
Cheney told him “no.” Cheney: “I
had seen the unpleasantness a number of vice presidents had, the negative experiences. Jerry Ford always told me the worst job he
ever had in his life, the worst eight months in his life was when he was vice
president – he hated the job.” Cheney
was happy to be in the private sector, but he agreed to lead Bush search for a
vice president. He said his process was
very intrusive, that he’d ask for ten years’ worth of tax returns, for any
information that might be an embarrassment to Bush. He admitted he probably would not go through
his own selection process if asked to be vice president. About Bush:
“He knew what he wanted and what he was looking for, and that was
somebody who could be part of ‘the team’ to help him govern.” He would tell Bush stories about the dynamic
between the president and the vice president.
The key thing he described was the ambition of the “number two guy,”
that ambition was “latent disloyalty” that would automatically disqualify
someone for the job. He kept telling
Bush he didn’t want the job, but after a review of all the prospective
candidates, Bush told Cheney that he was the solution to the problem. Cheney said the reason he finally said ‘yes’
was when he realized Bush was deadly serious about the vice presidency being a
consequential position. He liked
Cheney’s background in national defense and security.
Nothing was said in this documentary about his numerous
draft deferments. Not much was said
about the 2000 election, either. What
the documentary focused on with this part of the story was the transition. While Bush and Gore were fighting the Florida
recount, Cheney led the transition. That in itself was unusual – vice presidents
don’t run things. It’s revealed he made some of the Cabinet
picks, even going as far as three to four levels down from the Cabinet
secretaries. What emerges is an
administration that thinks more like Dick Cheney than George W. Bush. He persuaded his old friend and mentor Donald
Rumsfeld to be Defense Secretary again.
He persuaded Bush to make it so.
As for his role in the Bush Presidency, he was given “walk-in” rights to
any meeting on any topic. This allowed
Cheney to shape any debate such that by the time recommendations for action
came to Bush, those recommendations already had the Cheney stamp on them.
Filmmaker: “Do you
remember walking back into the White House as vice president on January 20th,
2001?”
Cheney: “I
do. When I’d first arrived there back in
1968 I was one of the youngest people in the West Wing, and this time around I
was the oldest.”
After 9/11, Cheney wanted to expand electronic
surveillance to be able to find, track and capture terrorists inside the
US. Cheney and his counsel David
Addington devised a program that would keep track of billions of phone calls
and emails. This was the warrantless
wiretap program. It was authorized and
re-authorized several times since 9/11 [every 30-45 days]. But federal law said a special court had to
authorize such a thing for each and every person the US government wanted to
monitor.
Cheney: “The big problem was it didn’t allow us to get a
fast enough turnaround on threats, to be able to effectively intercept the
communications we needed to guard against further prospective attack. From time to time there may be something so
sensitive that you don’t want to raise the specter, the possibility that it
might be leaked, and there are some things that need secrecy.”
Cheney didn’t want to go to Congress to adjust the
law. Ever the proponent of executive
power, he knew the Justice Department had the power to write a secret memo
saying the White House didn’t need any warrants for the new spying.
Cheney: “It worked
– it was a good program. It saved a lot
of lives and did a lot to allow us to thwart prospective attacks by al-Qaeda.”
At the end of 2003 two new people arrived at the Justice
Department – Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith [Head of the
Office of Legal Counsel]. These men
provided fresh sets of eyes to something that had been put in-place after
9/11. Both men are conservative
Republicans, but each time they looked at the memo re-authorizing the
warrantless program the more they thought the legality of the program was
dubious. There was intense debate
between the Justice Department and Cheney’s office about the program. Attorney General Ashcroft had to sign off on
the program in order for it to continue.
He would sign it only if Comey and Goldsmith said it was okay. Cheney didn’t tell President Bush about the
growing resistance from Justice. One
week before the program was set to expire, Comey met with Ashcroft. Comey told Ashcroft of several things they
thought were illegal and that Ashcroft should not sign off. Ashcroft told Comey “ok, go ahead and tell
them to make these changes, and if they don’t I won’t sign.” Hours after that meeting, Ashcroft was
hospitalized with a very bad case of pancreatitis [he nearly died]. Ashcroft delegated all of his authority to
Comey, who became the Acting Attorney General.
The Cheney-Justice fight came to a head in March 2004. Comey, Goldsmith and 10 other Justice
Department lawyers threatened a mass resignation if the program was
re-authorized without Justice concurrence.
Bush stopped by the White House during the 2004 campaign. Cheney told him the warrantless wiretap
program was due to expire. He didn’t
tell him that Justice challenged its legality, or that mass resignations from
Justice were imminent. Cheney kept Bush
completely in the dark about this state of affairs. Bush re-authorized the program. Comey went to Condoleeza Rice to try to see
the president. After a Friday morning
anti-terrorism briefing, Rice told Bush “something’s on Jim Comey’s mind, he’s
a good man, maybe you ought to check.”
Bush saw Comey and asked “what’s all this I hear about you not
signing? How can you possibly, sort of,
this last minute, late-in-the-game, tell us suddenly it’s no good?” Comey was floored by what he heard and told
the president “if your staff is telling you that, you’re being very poorly
served.” Comey was just going to resign,
then he realized the president really didn’t know what was happening. Bush told Comey to change the surveillance
program and make it legal. In 24 hours,
there was a change from mass resignations at Justice to Bush telling them “I
will stop doing the things you say are illegal.” Bush was pissed – at Cheney. Cheney would have let all those guys at
Justice resign. News of such a thing would
have made Bush a one-term president.
Bush wrote in his memoirs “I never wanted to be blindsided like that
again.” Bush understood the Cheney had
walked his administration to the edge of a cliff, and it forever changed the
Bush-Cheney dynamic. This whole episode
is quite a revelation. People have gone
to jail for less.
Cheney - “If you’re a ‘man of principle, ‘compromise’ is
a bit of a dirty word.” Implication – if
anybody compromises on anything, he has no principles.
Further damage to the Bush-Cheney dynamic was caused by
the Valerie Plume scandal.
The source of the Valerie Plume leak: Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of
State. Fitzgerald knew this but wanted
to find out if anyone else leaked Plume’s identity. In Dick Cheney’s mind, since Fitzpatrick knew
the source of the leak, the case should have been closed. But Fitzpatrick continued to investigate,
much to Cheney’s annoyance. In the
course of his investigation, Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby lied to
investigators. A grand jury indicted
Libby, he was tried and convicted. The
result - Bush was pissed even more at Cheney.
When Bush ran for president in 2000, he wanted to rid the Oval Office of
the scandals that plagued his predecessor. But with Scooter Libby, he had a scandal of
his own that could have been avoided. That
must have made Bush furious. Again, Bush
was “blindsided.” Cheney nagged at Bush
so much for a pardon for Libby that he stopped taking Cheney’s phone
calls. What nags me about this whole
Libby episode is this [in the context of this film] – at the beginning of the
film, Cheney says the one characteristic he values most in his friends is
“honesty.” How does his constant
going-to-bat for a person convicted of lying to investigators square with that,
and why didn’t the filmmaker call him on that?
Perhaps the characteristic he likes most in his friends is loyalty, not
honesty [but that’s just me…]. The Libby
case is the tipping point for the Bush-Cheney relationship. To wit: when it was discovered there was a
nuclear plant in Syria, Cheney recommended the US take it out militarily. To this, Bush is described as “rolling his
eyes” and then asking everybody in the meeting “who agrees with the Vice
President?” Nobody raised a hand –
Cheney had marginalized himself.
Then there was Iraq.
Much time was devoted to the war in Iraq. He expresses astonishment over what
transpired at Abu Grahib. He expresses
astonishment over the Iraqi insurgency and how Iraq had spun out of
control. Cheney is still convinced the
WMDs were in Iraq, but doesn’t explain how none were found. According to him, everybody ‘knew’ Saddam Hussein still had weapons
of mass destruction. However, in this
film he doesn’t say anything about the location of the WMDs because the
question wasn’t even asked [?!?].
There seems to be one theme of this piece – Dick Cheney
had [in his own mind] an inside track to “the truth,” regardless of facts that
would indicate otherwise.
I guess that’s
another way of saying ‘the ends justify
the means.’
Bush is portrayed as an inexperienced
figurehead who was “blindsided” quite a bit. Apparently Bush had been
“blindsided” and misled by Cheney so much that when the subject of a pardon for
Scooter Libby came up, the recollection of all those times of when he was
blindsided must have been why Libby was never granted a pardon.
It also explains why Rumsfeld was forced to
resign immediately after the Republicans got trounced in the 2006 mid-term
elections.
Because of that, there is
still friction between Bush and Cheney.
Bush wasn’t interviewed for the film, neither were Colin Powell nor
Condoleeza Rice.
Lest one think this
film was slanted entirely toward Cheney, several journalists and colleagues are
interviewed to give their spin on what they think Cheney got wrong.
George W. Bush wanted a “consequential” vice president –
what he got was Cardinal Richelieu. About
his time in Washington, Dick Cheney is given the final word: “If I had to do it over again, I’d do it in a
minute.” The one big message from this
documentary – defiant to the end, Dick Cheney regrets nothing.
