[Kabar-indonesia] 1 of 2: NYRB: Cheney: The Fatal Touch

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The New York Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 15 • October 5, 2006

Cheney: The Fatal Touch

By Joan Didion

BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ARTICLE

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs
by Theodore Draper
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
by Richard A. Clarke
Free Press, 304 pp., $27.00

Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and
Secret Intelligence
by Admiral Stansfield Turner
Hyperion, 308 pp., $23.95

Disarming Iraq
by Hans Blix
Pantheon, 285 pp., $24.00

The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money
by Dan Briody
Wiley, 290 pp., $16.95 (paper)
\
My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of
Hope
by L. Paul Bremer III, with Malcolm McConnell
Simon and Schuster, 417 pp., $27.00

Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political
Life
by Mary Cheney
Threshold, 239 pp., $25.00

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's
Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
by Ron Suskind
Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $27.00

Plan of Attack
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 467 pp., $28.00

The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the
Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in
American History
by John Nichols
New Press, 268 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
by James Mann
Penguin, 426 pp., $16.00 (paper)

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating
the Iran-Contra Affair, with Supplemental, Minority,
and Additional Views
Government Printing Office, 690 pp. (1987)

31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We
Have Today
by Barry Werth
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,398 pp., $26.00

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on
Terror
by Mark Danner
New York Review Books, 580 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George
W. Bush
by John W. Dean
Warner, 281 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Years of Renewal
by Henry Kissinger
Touchstone, 1,151 pp., $24.00 (paper)

It was in some ways predictable that the central
player in the system of willed errors and reversals
that is the Bush administration would turn out to be
its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man
with considerable practice in the reversal of his own
errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a
natural. He reached public life with every reason to
believe that he would continue to both court failure
and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined
to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill
it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal
Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the
Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more
or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his
high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent,
introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor
named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas
Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this guy."
The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's
networking lasted three semesters, took a year off
before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.

"He was in with the freshman football players, whose
major activity was playing cards and horsing around
and talking a lot," his freshman roommate told the
Yale Daily News, not exactly addressing the enigma.
"Wasn't gonna go to college and buckle down" and "I
didn't like the East" are two versions of how Cheney
himself failed to address it. As an undergraduate at
the University of Wyoming he interned with the Wyoming
State Senate, which was, in a state dominated by
cattle ranchers and oil producers and Union Pacific
management, heavily Republican. This internship
appears to have been when Cheney began identifying
himself as a Republican. ("You can't take my vote for
granted," his father would advise him when he first
ran for Congress as a Republican.) He graduated from
Wyoming in 1965 and, in the custom of the Vietnam
years, went on to receive a master's degree. He never
wrote a dissertation ("did all the work for my
doctorate except the dissertation," as if the
dissertation were not the point) and so never got the
doctorate in political science for which he then
enrolled at the University of Wisconsin.

Still, he persevered, or Lynne Cheney did. When, in
1968, at age twenty-seven, a no-longer-draft-eligible
"academic" with a wife and a child and no Ph.D. and no
clear clamor for his presence, he left Wisconsin for
Washington, he managed to meet the already powerful
Donald Rumsfeld about a fellowship in his House
office. Cheney, by his own description and again
failing to address the enigma, "flunked the
interview." He retreated back to the only place at the
table, the office of a freshman Republican Wisconsin
congressman, Bill Steiger, for whom Cheney was said to
be not a first choice and whose enthusiasm for
increased environmental and workplace protections did
not immediately suggest the Cheney who during his own
ten years in Wyoming's single congressional seat would
vote with metronomic regularity against any
legislation tending in either direction.

The potential rewards of Washington appear to have
mobilized Cheney as those of New Haven and Madison had
not. Within the year, he was utilizing Steiger to make
another move on Rumsfeld, who had been asked by
Richard M. Nixon to join his new administration as
director of the Office of Economic Opportunity.
Cheney, James Mann wrote in Rise of the Vulcans,

    noticed a note on Steiger's desk from Rumsfeld,
looking for advice and help in his new OEO job. Cheney
spotted an opportunity. Over a weekend, he wrote an
unsolicited memo for Steiger on how to staff and run a
federal agency.

Rumsfeld hired Cheney, and, over the next few years,
as he moved up in the Nixon administration, took
Cheney with him. Again, in 1974, after the Nixon
resignation, when Rumsfeld was asked to become Gerald
Ford's chief of staff, he made Cheney his deputy.

In Cheney, Rumsfeld had found a right hand who took so
little for granted that he would later, by the account
of his daughter Mary, make a three-hour drive from
Casper to Laramie to have coffee with three voters,
two of whom had been in his wedding. In Rumsfeld, who
would be described by Henry Kissinger as "a special
Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time
politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and
substance fuse seamlessly," Cheney had found a model.
In the Ford White House, where he and Rumsfeld were
known as "the little Praetorians," Cheney cultivated a
control of detail that extended even to questioning
the use in the residence of "little dishes of salt
with funny little spoons" rather than "regular salt
shakers."

Together, Cheney and Rumsfeld contrived to marginalize
Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president and edge him off
the 1976 ticket. They convinced Ford that Kissinger
was a political liability who should no longer serve
as both secretary of state and national security
adviser. They managed the replacement of William Colby
as CIA chief with George H.W. Bush, a move interpreted
by many as a way of rendering Bush unavailable to be
Ford's running mate in 1976. They managed the
replacement of James Schlesinger as secretary of
defense with Rumsfeld himself. Cheney later described
his role in such maneuvers as "the sand in the gears,"
the person who, for example, made sure that when
Rockefeller was giving a speech the amplifier was
turned down. In 1975, when Ford named Rumsfeld
secretary of defense, it was Cheney, then thirty-four,
who replaced Rumsfeld as chief of staff.

Relationships matter in public life, until they do
not. In May, during a commencement address at
Louisiana State University, Cheney mentioned this long
relationship with Rumsfeld by way of delivering the
message that "gratitude, in general, is a good habit
to get into":

    I think, for example, of the first time I met my
friend and colleague Don Rumsfeld. It was back in the
1960s, when he was a congressman and I was
interviewing for a fellowship on Capitol Hill.
Congressman Rumsfeld agreed to talk to me, but things
didn't go all that well....

    We didn't click that day, but a few years later it
was Don Rumsfeld who noticed my work and offered me a
position in the executive branch.

Note the modest elision ("it was Don Rumsfeld who
noticed my work") of the speaker's own active role in
these events. What Cheney wanted to stress that
morning in Baton Rouge was not his own dogged tracking
of the more glamorous Rumsfeld but the paths one had
possibly "not expected to take," the "unexpected
turns," the "opportunities that come suddenly and
change one's plans overnight." The exact intention of
these commencement remarks may be unknowable (a
demonstration of loyalty? a warning? to whom? a marker
to be called in later? all of the above?), but it did
not seem accidental that they were delivered during a
period when one four-star general, one three-star
general, and four two-star generals were each issuing
calls for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as secretary
of defense. Nor did it seem accidental that the
President and the Vice President were taking equally
stubborn and equally inexplicable lines on the matter
of Rumsfeld's and by extension their own grasp on the
war in Iraq. "I hear the voices and I read the front
page and I know the speculation," George W. Bush said
in response to a reporter's question during a Rose
Garden event. "But I'm the decider and I decide what's
best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as
the secretary of defense."

The question of where the President gets the notions
known to the nation as "I'm the decider" and within
the White House as "the unitary executive theory"
leads pretty fast to the blackout zone that is the
Vice President and his office. It was the Vice
President who took the early offensive on the
contention that whatever the decider decides to do is
by definition legal. "We believe, Jim, that we have
all the legal authority we need," the Vice President
told Jim Lehrer on PBS after it was reported that the
National Security Agency was conducting warrantless
wiretapping in violation of existing statutes. It was
the Vice President who pioneered the tactic of not
only declaring such apparently illegal activities
legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands
to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the
American people by a president whose role as commander
in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed
mile he chooses to go on their behalf.

"Bottom line is we've been very active and very
aggressive defending the nation and using the tools at
our disposal to do that," the Vice President advised
reporters on a flight to Oman last December. It was
the Vice President who maintained that passage of
Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane
treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of
lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the
person of David S. Addington, that supervised the 2002
"torture memos," advising the President that the
Geneva Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral
Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA between 1977
and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for
torture," it was the Vice President's office that
issued this characteristically nonresponsive
statement: "Our country is at war and our government
has an obligation to protect the American people from
a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us."

Addington, who emerged into government from Georgetown
University and Duke Law School in 1981, the most
febrile moment of the Reagan Revolution, is an
instructive study in the focus Cheney favors in the
protection of territory. As secretary of defense for
George H.W. Bush, Cheney made Addington his special
assistant and ultimately his general counsel. As
vice-president for George W. Bush, Cheney again turned
to Addington, and named him, after the indictment of
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in connection with the
exposure of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA
agent, his chief of staff. "You're giving away
executive power," Addington has been reported to snap
at less committed colleagues. He is said to keep a
photograph in his office of Cheney firing a gun. He
vets every line of the federal budget to eradicate any
wording that might restrain the President. He also
authors the "signing statements" now routinely issued
to free the President of whatever restrictive intent
might have been present in whichever piece of
legislation he just signed into law. A typical signing
statement, as written by Addington, will refer
repeatedly to the "constitutional authority" of "the
unitary executive branch," and will often mention
multiple points in a single bill that the President
declines to enforce.

Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill
Clinton left office, the device had been used, by the
first forty-two presidents combined, fewer than six
hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued
more than eight hundred such takebacks during the
first six years of his administra-tion. Those who
object to this or any other assumption of absolute
executive power are reflexively said by those who
speak for the Vice President to be "tying the
president's hands," or "eroding his ability to do his
job," or, more ominously, "aiding those who don't want
him to do his job."

One aspect common to accounts of White House life is
the way in which negative events tend to be
interpreted as internal staffing failures, errors on
the order of the little dishes of salt with the funny
little spoons. Cheney did not take the lesson he might
have taken from being in the White House at the time
Saigon fell, which was that an administration can be
overtaken by events that defeat the ameliorative power
of adroit detail management. He took a more narrow
lesson, the one that had to do with the inability of a
White House to pursue victory if Congress "tied its
hands." "It's interesting that [Cheney] became a
member of Congress," former congressman Tom Downey
said to Todd Purdum, "because I think he always
thought we were a massive inconvenience to governing."
Bruce Fein, who served in the Meese Justice Department
during the Reagan administration, told Jane Mayer of
The New Yorker that Cheney's absence of enthusiasm for
checks and balances long predated any argument that
this was a "wartime presidency" and so had special
powers.

    This preceded 9/11. I'm not saying that
warrantless surveillance did. But the idea of reducing
Congress to a cipher was already in play. It was
Cheney and Addington's political agenda.

"I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and
the ability of the president of the United States to
do his job," the Vice President said after one year in
office. "We are weaker today as an institution because
of the unwise compromises that have been made over the
last thirty to thirty-five years." "Watergate—a lot of
the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the
'70s, served to erode the authority, I think, the
President needs to be effective," he said to reporters
accompanying him on that December 2005 flight to Oman.
Expanding on this understanding of the separation of
powers as a historical misunderstanding, the Vice
President offered this:

    If you want reference to an obscure text, go look
at the minority views that were filed with the
Iran-Contra Committee; the Iran-Contra Report in about
1987. Nobody has ever read them, but we —part of the
argument in Iran-Contra was whether or not the
President had the authority to do what was done in the
Reagan years. And those of us in the minority wrote
minority views, but they were actually authored by a
guy working for me, for my staff, that I think are
very good in laying out a robust view of the
President's prerogatives with respect to the conduct
of especially foreign policy and national security
matters.

There are some recognizable Cheney touches here,
resorts to the kind of self-deprecation (as in "I
didn't like the East" and "I flunked the interview")
that derives from a temperamental grandiosity. The
"obscure text" that "nobody has ever read" was the
two-hundred-page minority report included in the 1987
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating
the Iran-Contra Affair, a volume printed and widely
distributed by the US Government Printing Office. The
unidentified "guy working for me" was Addington, at
the time of the Iran-contra hearings a counsel to the
committees but during the events that led to
Iran-contra an assistant general counsel at William
Casey's CIA, where he would have been focused early on
locating the legal enablement for what Theodore
Draper, in his study of Iran-contra, A Very Thin Line,
called the "usurpation of power by a small,
strategically placed group within the government."

This minority report, which vehemently rejects not
only the conclusions of the majority but even the
report's ("supposedly 'factual'") narrative, does
allow that "President Reagan and his staff made
mistakes" during the course of Iran-contra. Yet the
broadest mistake, the demented "arms for hostages"
part of the scheme, the part where we deal the HAWK
missiles to Iran through Manucher Ghorbanifar and
Robert McFarlane flies to Tehran with the cake and the
Bible and the falsified Irish passports, is
strenuously defended as a "strategic opening," an
attempt to "establish a new US relationship with Iran,
thus strengthening the US strategic posture throughout
the Persian Gulf region."

We had heard before, and have heard recently, about
"strategic openings," "new relationships" that will
reorder the Middle East. "Extremists in the region
would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad," Cheney
told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 about
the benefits that were to accrue from invading Iraq.
"Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And
our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace
process would be enhanced, just as it was following
the liberation of Kuwait in 1991." We had heard
before, and have heard recently, that what might
appear to be an administration run amok is actually an
administration holding fast on constitutional
principle.

Watergate, Cheney has long maintained, was not a
criminal conspiracy but the result of a power struggle
between the legislative and executive branches. So was
the 1973 War Powers Act, which restricted executive
authority to go to war without consulting Congress and
which Cheney believed unconstitutional. So was the
attempt to get Cheney to say which energy executives
attended the 2001 meetings of his energy task force.
This issue, both Cheney and Bush explained again and
again, had nothing to do with Enron or the other
energy players who might be expecting a seat at the
table in return for their generous funding (just under
$50 million) of the 2000 Republican campaign. "The
issue that was involved there," Cheney said,
misrepresenting what had been requested, which was not
the content of the conversations but merely the names
of those present, "was simply the question of whether
or not a Vice President can sit down and talk with
citizens and gain from them their best advice and
counsel on how we might deal with a particular issue."

The 1987 minority report prefigures much else that has
happened since. There is the acknowledgment of
"mistakes" that turn out to be not exactly the
mistakes we might have expected. The "mistake" in this
administration's planning for the Iraq war, for
example, derived not from having failed to do any
planning but from arriving "too fast" in Baghdad,
thereby losing the time, this scenario seemed to
suggest, during which we had meant to think up a plan.
Similarly, the "mistakes" in Iran-contra, as construed
by the minority report, had followed not from having
done the illegal but from having allowed the illegal
to become illegal in the first place. As laid out by
the minority, a principal "mistake" made by the Reagan
administration in Iran-contra was in allowing
President Reagan to sign rather than veto the 1984
Boland II Amendment forbidding aid to contra forces:
no Boland II, no illegality. A second "mistake," to
the same point, was Reagan's "less-than-robust defense
of his office's constitutional powers, a mistake he
repeated when he acceded too readily and too
completely to waive executive privilege for our
Committees' investigation."

The very survival of the executive species, then, was
seen by Cheney and his people as dependent on its
brute ability to claim absolute power and resist all
attempts to share it. Given this imperative, the steps
to our current situation had a leaden inevitability:
if the executive branch needed a war to justify its
claim to absolute power, then Iraq, Rumsfeld would be
remembered to have said on September 12, 2001, had the
targets. If the executive branch needed a story point
to sell its war, then the Vice President would
resurrect the aluminum tubes that not even the US
Department of Energy believed to be meant for a
centrifuge: "It's now public that, in fact, [Saddam]
has been seeking to acquire...the kinds of tubes that
are necessary to build a centrifuge." The Vice
President would dismiss Joseph Wilson's report that he
had found no yellowcake in Niger: "Did his wife send
him on a junket?"

As for the weapons themselves, the Vice President
would deride the collective judgment of his own
intelligence community, which believed, according to
Paul R. Pillar, then the CIA national intelligence
officer for the Near East and South Asia, that any
development of a nuclear weapon was several years away
and would be best dealt with—given that the
community's own analysis of the war option projected
violent conflict between Sunnis and Shiites and
guerrilla attacks on any occupying power—"through an
aggressive inspections program to supplement the
sanctions already in place." "Intelligence," the Vice
President would say dismissively in an August 2002
speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "is an
uncertain business." The Vice President would override
as irrelevant the facts that Hans Blix and his UN
monitoring team were prepared to resume such
inspections and in fact did resume them, conducting
seven hundred inspections of five hundred sites,
finding nothing but stopping only when the war
intervened. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that
Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,"
he would declare in the same speech to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars.

    A person would be right to question any suggestion
that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and
then our worries will be over.... A return of
inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of
[Saddam's] compliance with UN resolutions.

If the case for war lacked a link between September 11
and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the
meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence
believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and
Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well
confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet
with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence
service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months
before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December
2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the
lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with
Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in
March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in
Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few
months before the attacks on the World Trade Center,"
he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator
has got his facts wrong," he would then say while
debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004
campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection
between Iraq and 9/11."

This was not a slip of memory in the heat of debate.
This was dishonest, a repeated misrepresentation, in
the interests of claiming power, so bald and so
systematic that the only instinctive response (Did
too!) was that of the schoolyard. By June 2004, before
the debate with Edwards, Cheney had in fact begun
edging away from the Prague story, not exactly
disclaiming it but characterizing it as still
unproven, as in, on a Cincinnati TV station, "That's
true. We do not have proof that there was such a
connection." It would be two years later, March 2006,
before he found it prudent to issue a less equivocal,
although still shifty, version. "We had one report
early on from another intelligence service that
suggested that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had
met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague,
Czechoslovakia," he told Tony Snow on Fox News. "And
that reporting waxed and waned where the degree of
confidence in it, and so forth, has been pretty well
knocked down at this stage, that that meeting ever
took place. So we've never made the case, or argued
the case, that somehow [Saddam Hussein] was directly
involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been
forthcoming."

What the Vice President was doing with the
intelligence he received has since been characterized
as "cherry-picking," a phrase suggesting that he
selectively used only the more useful of equally valid
pieces of intelligence. This fails to reflect the
situation. The White House had been told by the CIA
that no meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and
Iraqi intelligence had ever occurred. The
International Atomic Energy Agency and the US
Department of Energy had said that the aluminum tubes
in question "were not directly suitable" for uranium
enrichment. The White House had been told by the CIA
that the British report about Saddam Hussein
attempting to buy yellowcake in Nigeria was doubtful.

"The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa," the President nonetheless
declared in his 2003 State of the Union address, the
"sixteen enormously overblown words" for which
Condoleezza Rice would blame the CIA and for which
George Tenet, outplayed, would take the hit. Nor would
the President stop there: "Our intelligence sources
tell us that he has attempted to purchase
high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear
weapons production."

What the Vice President was doing, then, was not
cherry-picking the intelligence but rejecting it,
replacing it with whatever self-interested rumor
better advanced his narrative line. "Cheney's office
claimed to have sources," Ron Suskind was told by
those to whom he spoke for The One Percent Doctrine.

    And Rumsfeld's, too. They kept throwing them [at
the CIA]. The same information, five different ways.
They'd omit that a key piece had been discounted, that
the source had recanted. Sorry, our mistake. Then it
would reappear, again, in a memo the next week.

The Vice President would not then or later tolerate
any suggestion that the story he was building might
rest on cooked evidence. In a single speech at the
American Enterprise Institute in November 2005 he used
the following adjectives to describe those members of
Congress who had raised such a question: "corrupt,"
"shameless," "dishonest," "reprehensible,"
"irresponsible," "insidious," and "utterly false."
"It's not about our analysis, or finding a
preponderance of evidence," he is reported by Suskind
to have said in the November 2001 briefing during
which he articulated the doctrine that if there was "a
one percent chance" of truth in any suspicion or
allegation, it must be considered true. "It's about
our response."

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