Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. This article begins a four-part series that explores his methods and impact, drawing on interviews with more than 200 men and women who worked for, with or in opposition to Cheney's office. Many of those interviewed recounted events that have not been made public until now, sharing notes,e-mails, personal calendars and other records of their interaction with Cheney and his senior staff. The vice president declined to be interviewed.Some highlights at Sadly, No! include how Cheney basically wrote executive and military orders himself (with his own secretive staff) and then gave them over to Bush to sign, with nobody else even allowed to see what they were. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice found out that all captured "terrorists" would be stripped of legal rights -- by seeing the announcement on CNN. Powell's reaction: "What the hell just happened?" When Ashcroft - whose Justice Department was cut out of decisions regarding who got what kind of treatment - tried to meet with Bush to complain, it was Cheney at the conference table instead. Ashcroft was never able to get a meeting with Bush on this subject.
The Post tries to minimize that Cheney is a "shadow president" -- they want the buck to stop with Bush. After all, if Cheney wasn't doing what Bush wanted, Bush would check his power. But we have to understand the limits of Bush's actual decision-making power when, as so well documented in this story, all his information and advice are vetted through Cheney first. As the Post put it:
Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney.Additionally, Cheney is far more involved in the daily and detailed workings of Cabinets and other agencies than Bush:
Other recent vice presidents have enjoyed a standing invitation to join the president at "policy time." But Cheney's interventions have also come in the president's absence, at Cabinet and sub-Cabinet levels where his predecessors were seldom seen. He found pressure points and changed the course of events by "reaching down," a phrase that recurs often in interviews with current and former aides.So Cheney not only overshadows Bush during their joint briefings, he "reaches down" to make sure the sub-levels are operating the way he wants. Like with the creation of the Office of Special Plans -- he wasn't satisfied with how the intelligence agencies were operating so he created his own.
If that's the case, then Bush really has little independence at all.
Interestingly, Cheney himself warned against the type of secrecy and manipulation he now practices. In interviews and speeches before 2000, he cautioned that all decisions had to be made with open information flow, because that protects the President from making ill-considered choices. You don't want policy to be made as 'oh, by the way.' As he said at a 1999 conference of White House historians:
"The process of moving paper in and out of the Oval Office, who gets involved in the meetings, who does the president listen to, who gets a chance to talk to him before he makes a decision, is absolutely critical. It has to be managed in such a way that it has integrity."He knew this, and once he became VP abused it for his own power.
The final example of the detainee memo (the "Gonzales memo" as it came to be known) illustrates all this in horrifying detail. Cheney used his position not only to secure the result he wanted, but to further estrange from influence people not under his control, specifically Powell and his allies at State. It's a very scary thing to contemplate, how he was able to have so much influence so secretively. We may never find out much of what he did or how, given his thus-far successful resistance to any kind of disclosure. Of course, as everyone (even Instapundit, of all people!) is mocking this week, he considers his office not part of the executive branch. So the rules don't apply. This is a scary and evil man.
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