The World According to Dick Cheney

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.