You know the axiom about not wanting to see how sausage is made. Well, before the final credits roll on the Bush Presidency, it is instructive to look at how our country came to be put through the meat grinder that is Iraq, Katrina and the worst financial crisis since The Depression. How did such a poisonous political culture foment, and was it born of ignorance, arrogance, ideology, greed, evil, or something else?
If the answer to this question is even remotely of interest (lest we repeat the same mistakes in our generation), read ‘The Angler’ by Barton Gellman, a brilliant, exhaustively researched, powerful tome on the Cheney Vice Presidency. It is arguably the book of the year.
While I think that in the abstract, most of us “get” how government works, i.e., the three branches of government – Executive, Legislative and Judicial – when taken out of the petri dish and applied to the handling of real world events, the people involved, how they rise to the occasion (or don’t) and the protocols that drive those outcomes, the specifics are illuminating and instructive.
In The Angler, we really see how government works, or at least did in this administration. We see how Cheney drove the Executive branch to reclaim power that was lost post-Nixon.
While it is trite and easy (for some) to paint Cheney as an evil Darth Vader, in truth, the key takeaway is that he was a true believer and an arrogant son of a bitch who was playing chess to everyone else’s checkers game.
Cheney's depth of detailed knowledge on everything - policy, law, protocol, people and process - is scarily impressive.
He had a clear game plan and a president who, while ultimately the final decision maker, was highly manageable, allergic to detail and stubborn to the point of blindness.
The book raises all sorts of questions on the delineation between Cheney and Bush, and how that defines culpability.
It provides rich detail behind the scenes on key events in a manner that is not partisan, preachy or editorializing, but at the same time, it offers very strong analysis and an excellent narrative from many of the key players.
As a book of fiction, it would be gripping. As a book of truth, it is a searing, essential read, especially if you like the game politic.
In the interim, here is a tantalizing snippet from ‘Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House’ in the February edition of Vanity Fair:
(On the culture of wiretapping/snooping): The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn’t use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we’d broken the Japanese code. He thought he’d broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.
(On Cheney’s management of Bush): As my boss [Colin Powell] once said, Bush had a lot of .45-caliber instincts, cowboy instincts. Cheney knew exactly how to polish him and rub him. He knew exactly when to give him a memo or when to do this or when to do that and exactly the word choice to use to get him really excited.
As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.
Related Posts:
- Obama’s First Cuts: On Administration Team Building
- Course Correction: What Obama's Victory Says About Us
- Why Experience Matters: On Palin, Putin and Prudence
