Nice piece by Robert Kaiser in the Post about Dick Cheney's new memoir:
If this book were read by an intelligent person who spent the past 10 years on, say, Mars, she would have no idea that Dick Cheney was the vice president in one of the most hapless American administrations of modern times. There are hints, to be sure, that things did not always go swimmingly under President George W. Bush and Cheney, but these are surrounded by triumphalist accounts of events that many readers — and future historians — are unlikely to consider triumphs.
Cheney is far from candid about the many ways he exploited that unique arrangement. There isn’t space in a book review to retell the story, but curious readers should compare, for example, two accounts of the fight waged by the vice president and his staff attorney, David Addington, against the Department of Justice over the legality of post-9/11 eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.
One account, which appears in the best book on the Cheney vice presidency, “Angler,” by former Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, describes how Cheney and Addington provoked “a flat out rebellion” in the Department of Justice, prompting most of its top officials and the director of the FBI to draft letters of resignation in the spring of 2004, to be used if the White House refused to change course. This raised the specter of a Watergate-like scandal. Gellman shows how Cheney and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card kept Bush in the dark about this battle royal until the very last minute. When he learned about it, Bush took DOJ’s side and ordered changes in the surveillance program.
Cheney’s account of the same episode is much briefer and far less dramatic or detailed. It ends this way:
“Faced with threats of resignation, the president decided to alter the [National Security Agency] program, even though he and his advisors were confident of his constitutional authority to continue the program unchanged.” Cheney does not say who threatened to resign, nor does he note that the entire senior staff of Bush’s Justice Department disagreed with his legal interpretation.
