With the Bush administration on the verge of vacating the White House after two rather disastrous and embarrassing terms in power, perhaps it’s time for Americans, and for the rest of the world, to take proper stock of what the heck went on for the last eight years, and where it is we find ourselves now. Change may be on the horizon, but as it stands we have a mountain of mud to tunnel through, and the repercussions of Bush’s failed policies to countervail for the foreseeable future. Bush may go down in history more as a dope than a villain, but Dick Cheney’s machinations while in office will win him a spot on anyone’s podium of villains. And judging from award-winning reporter Barton Gellman’s brilliant new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Cheney may turn out to be one of the central players in the theatre of early 21st Century politics.

Expanding on the Pulitzer Prize-winning series (co-authored with Jo Becker) published last year in the Washington Post, Gellman investigates Dick Cheney´s reign as the most powerful and influential vice president in American history. “Angler”, Cheney’s Secret Service nickname, perfectly describes the man who arguably “angled” his way into a history-changing role – shaping the White House as no vice president would have previously dared, yet remaining almost completely hidden in his dealings, and nearly impervious to public scrutiny. Some of his “angling” has been well-documented, including vetting the vice-presidential candidates before tossing his own hat in the ring, urging an attack on Iraq simply as a way to demonstrate American military power (arguing falsely along the way that Iraq possessed the ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction) and playing a large role in the warrant-less surveillance program, to mention just a few. Given the sinister nature of some of Cheney’s initiatives, it’s no wonder that he also had another nickname: “Dark Side.” But despite all the negatives easily stuffed into the Cheney portfolio, Gellman gives us a balanced view of a man who by hook or by crook made history.

TORO met with Barton Gellman in downtown Toronto a few weeks before the presidential election to discuss Angler and other things.

Q: I really loved this book. But I must admit my reaction to it was quite visceral. I felt as though I’d just read a portrait of one of the more sinister and manipulative men in history. I know this wasn’t your specific aim. But is my impression of Cheney being sinister incorrect?
A: The book is like a Rorschach test for people. I’ve had very conservative people, right-wing Republicans who read the book and say, "Good for Cheney." Somebody had to stand up to terrorists, somebody had to fix the economy, and understand the importance of tax cuts. Somebody had to cut out those weak-kneed liberals over at the State Department. And they’re quite happy with him. The objective of the book is to say what happened and how it happened. It’s not a political book, it’s a book of stories.

Q: I didn’t get the impression that it was a political book – rather a richly-detailed portrait of a very cunning, if not sinister, man.
A: A lot of people have had your reaction.

Q: There’s a term in Italian – furbo – which translates roughly to cunning, slyness, or cleverness, though it can mean much more than that. The word has been used to describe the best Sicilian mobsters. Cheney strikes me as being as furbo as they come. That mixed with his obvious Machiavellian streak makes him seem to me almost like a figure from the political intrigues of the Italian Renaissance.
A: That’s interesting because I often say with Cheney, it’s nothing personal. The big three of Machiavelli is high court politics, palace intrigue and street smarts, and I think it’s a pretty good key to Cheney.

Q: Did you meet with any resistance or pressure while researching the book?
A: It’s not pressure so much. It’s not don’t go there or else. It’s not – we’re going to campaign against the book, although you know they might. It’s just that Dick Cheney erected so many barriers – he lived his whole political life precisely to prevent someone from writing a book like this. He wanted to keep us out, he wanted to do it behind closed doors. And so, this has been the hardest investigative work I’ve ever done. It took me two years to get the stories in this book.

Q: I think that’s what’s most impressive about the book – that you managed to get as much detail as you did. I mean, the people that you’re dealing with – trying to extract the truth from them must have been quite a challenge.
A: The trick is that most of the information that I get, and most of the stories that I tell, I know about first, and often in greatest detail from lower level people. And then I eventually try to persuade high level people to talk to me and then I have to spend a whole other chunk of time persuading them to go on the record. Because I think, for good reasons, people are skeptical of all this anonymity. There’s times when it just can’t be helped, but I managed to get John Ashcroft and Karl Rove, Andy Card and Condi Rice to talk on the record and that was important.

Q: This may be a foolish question – but has Cheney given you a response to the book?
A: Not directly – but I have heard his response. And it was fascinating. It really does tell you how secure he is in what he’s doing. Because he likes the book – he likes the book. So many people see it as an indictment.

Q: No, not an indictment – but as mentioned, I reacted viscerally to the portrait of Cheney, not because you were tilting things one way or the other, but because you were giving me the larger narrative of things I had picked up piecemeal, in some instances illustrating or amplifying what I only suspected to be true. But I can see how the very things I found objectionable about Cheney a Republican might find admirable.
A: He gave a talk to a closed door meeting of a few dozen captains of industry – and he brought it up. He asked if anybody had read Angler. And then he said, “I recommend it.” He didn’t agree with this, this, and this, but he said I did my homework. And look, the thing about it is – he learned a bunch of things he didn’t know before he read the book. He knows what he did – but he didn’t know what came before or after. He didn’t know the ripple effects. So I’m sure he found it pretty interesting to see what became of things after they left his office.

Q: In the last few weeks my BlackBerry has been buzzing every five minutes with New York Times updates on the ongoing financial crisis. I can’t help but feel that, like so many things going on these days, including the war in Iraq, the war on terror, wiretapping, Guantanamo – that Cheney had a hand in it. Am I wrong to think that?
A: There are things we always knew he was involved in, things we suspected and things we had no earthly idea that he was in the middle of. In terms of the financial crisis – he was always a deregulator and he wasn’t always a supply-sider but he is now. If you look at the way the U.S. Treasury tried to design a rescue plan, a bail-out plan – the initial proposal was a three-page draft that said the Treasury Secretary’s decision, on behalf of the President, about what to do with $700 billion, would be unreviewable by any other body, legislative, judicial or otherwise – that is classic Cheney. We need to act swiftly, we need to act with certainty, unity of effort, secrecy in many ways, and nobody’s the boss of me. So, that’s exactly what his approach would have been. I’ve not been reporting on the crisis, so I don’t know whether in fact he was deeply involved in it. I would say that there’s kind of a trajectory to his vice presidency in which he did in effect lose some of his influence. In Henry Paulson, and the current White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton, you have much stronger figures who are less inclined to bend to his will.

Q: Given that his influence diminished, when do you think it was at its peak?
A: You can sort of divide things into his productive period and his, I don’t know, conservation period. So, from the first days – actually from before the Bush administration started – I have a whole chapter on how he basically populated the federal government while the Florida recount was underway. If anyone had their eye on the ball of who was going to be the next president – Cheney said to Bush, well let’s assume you are the next president, someone needs to start staffing up your government, I can do that. And Bush said, sure. And so suddenly you have the vice president or vice president wannabe choosing a cabinet, by and large. So, from before the thing actually started and up until about the middle of 2004, Cheney’s influence was at its peak. There was an episode that caused President Bush to lose some confidence in him. And there was a kind of Newtonian reaction where others arose in the government to step him back over time. Now his influence is by no means gone – but to use a crude analogy, he put his foot on the gas pedal in the first term but he’s got his foot on the brakes in the second, so that people don’t undo what he sees as his accomplishments.

Q: I’m curious about "Federalist No. 70" – the document written by Alexander Hamilton, from which Cheney drew his view of presidential powers. As you point out, Cheney’s admiration for Hamilton did not extend to the Founding Father’s prior writings ... because in "Federalist No. 69", published four days before No. 70, Hamilton weighed executive powers explicitly against those of Congress, in order to demonstrate the limits of the former – even in war. Any comment?
A: Cheney reads a lot of history and he studies things deeply. "Federalist No. 70" was one of Alexander Hamilton’s arguments in favour of the recently-drafted Constitution, and in it he used the phrase, “energy in the executive”, the idea that the executive branch’s unique needs were to be swift and secret and unified in its decision making. Actually what he was arguing against was a model that other people were advocating which was a sort of a troika – a joint presidency. He said no, it’s got to be one man. Cheney took those arguments to mean that one man’s decision was more important than the feckless and confusing decisions of the many and he compared it to the legislature. But the thing is Hamilton wasn’t talking about President versus Congress there, that was in a different Federalist paper – more like in No. 69 and No. 73. And he did not in fact believe the executive was supreme.

Q: Like the monarchy they rejected.
A: That’s right. Even some of the top lawyers who worked for Ronald Reagan – a very conservative president – said that Cheney’s vision is of really monarchical powers. But these beliefs are sincerely held. He made the same arguments for Jimmy Carter.

Q: So he hasn’t taken the position to accommodate himself. He’s a true believer.
A: He’s a true believer. People don’t want to acknowledge his true principles. If you don’t like what he does you see him as a lying manipulator, purely interested in his own self ends, and if you really want to get what’s happened these last eight years, knowing he’s a true believer is part of it. Think about it. Zealots always have more impact on history than hypocrites do.

Q: As a Canadian I’ve found the recent polarization of American politics extreme.
A: It used to be that American politics was much more like Canadian politics. Gerald Ford, for instance. You had the Rockefeller Republicans. You had the moderates. And there’s just a tiny remnant left. There were five self-identifying moderate Republicans in the Senate when Cheney and Bush first came into office. Two of them are gone and one of them has been pretty much neutered. They used to meet in a little luncheon group and they called themselves the Mod Squad. [laughs] And Cheney’s been picking them off one by one.

Q: Dismissing any conspiracy theories, was Cheney served well by 9/11?
A: Yeah, that’s the meta-question. 9/11 both ratified in Cheney’s mind his lifelong convictions about national security and the dangerous world we live in and the need for executive power in the hands of the commander-in-chief, and on the other hand it gave him greater urgency and opportunity. I mean Cheney had fought and lost, time and again, for decades, on these issues of presidential power – he fought against all the new regulation and restraint of executive power, of the intelligence agencies. He thought that all that stuff had been over-legalized. So that you’re a supposedly clandestine tough guy, overseas for the United States of America, and you’re calling back to talk to your lawyer all the time to see if you can do this or do that. Cheney thought this was nonsense. So he had a chance to blow through all those decades of new restraints because of 9/11. And so it was opportune for his agenda and reconfirmed in his own mind that the agenda was necessary.

Q: Why did he take his eye off the ball when it came to Afghanistan? Was it that he had intentions on Iraq all along – like the neo-cons – and it afforded an opportune moment to act on them?
A: Cheney’s influence was very important in making the move, and his reasons were different from the neo-cons and different from Bush’s. The neo-cons, and Bush, believed that you really can transform the Middle East to a more democratic region, and you can pull the problem of terrorism up by the roots because you transform societies, and Bush was a big believer in that. Cheney wasn’t. He was skeptical of that agenda. For Cheney, the biggest fear, the biggest concern, is what he would always call a nexus of three things: of terrorists, a hostile state that’s capable, and weapons of mass destruction – that this hostile state might produce and allow them to fall into the hands of a terrorist. A terrorist armed with a suitcase nuke is a pretty big deal. And given that these guys had already demonstrated what they were willing to do ... so Afghanistan wasn’t that kind of threat. Afghanistan was a Stone-Age society. Cheney was worried more – he was worried most actually – about Iran and North Korea. Iraq was no more than third in his hierarchy, but he wanted to fight that war because we could, because Saddam was going to be easy to knock over and there were more military options. And he wanted what his senior foreign-policy experts tell me in the book was a “demonstration effect.” You set an example and maybe the other guys won’t be so willing to play. Now the problem with that is, what if you go in, get tied down, and the whole thing is a great big giant mess, what example are you setting there?

Q: Did Bush get the Vice President he deserved?
A: Every President gets the administration he deserves. The puck really does stop in the Oval Office. The President is the decider, and was the decider in this administration, and he gave Cheney a lot of leash, and Cheney ran with it. He also stepped Cheney back from time to time. You can’t get these last eight years without knowing how much Cheney drove policy but you also can’t get it without knowing that Bush stopped him, quite a few times.

Q: I must admit that many negative feelings I had about Bush were, after reading your book, tempered by my impression of Cheney. I mean, Bush looked to Cheney for wisdom and guidance, but Cheney took advantage of that to pursue his own agenda. Correct?
A: Yeah, there’s a concept that U.S. military has that I find very appealing in explaining the Bush/Cheney relationship. And your readers can try this with their own bosses if they want, but it’s a high-risk strategy. The U.S. military acronym, it’s sort of an acronym, is UNODIR: unless otherwise directed. And Cheney made a lot of use of this. He would say to the President, Well, I’m carrying out your goal of this or that. I’ve started moving over here, and these are the means I’m going to use – and unless otherwise directed, I’ll keep doing it. It’s something that the best generals do in the U.S. military, but it’s also an easy way to end your career. You are doing something you don’t exactly have authority to do, but you haven’t been ordered not to do it either.

Q: What’s the state of warrant-less surveillance right now in the U.S.?
A: I’d have to say that at some fundamental level we don’t know. We know that the program – or programs – continue. And calling it a terrorist surveillance program, as the President did, is basically a public relations name. It’s not surveilling people who are known to be terrorists. That was already lawful. It’s trying to find terrorists you don’t know about. And it’s not one program. It’s not just listening to phone calls, it’s an accumulation of an enormous amount of data across the whole physical and electronic spectrum. It’s not just your phone calls, it’s not just even the record of who you call, when and how long you talked. It almost certainly involves surveillance of some transactional stuff, and physical surveillance – I mean, we don’t know what. It’s a black box. I broke my story trying to find out exactly what it was doing and what was illegal and what they had stopped doing based on the Justice Department objections. What I found is you can tell a very important story without knowing exactly what was in the box because it turned out that George Bush didn’t know his own Justice Department thought it was illegal for three months.

Q: And what about water-boarding?
A; The last time anyone discussed it in public, the U.S. government stated flatly that it was not now water-boarding anybody. It did not promise not to water-board anyone in the future, it did not say that it believes water-boarding to be unlawful. And so I think that the Bush/Cheney White House, under current CIA rules, would feel free to pursue it under certain circumstances. And since we haven’t heard from CIA director Mike Hayden or anybody else for six or seven weeks, we don’t know for sure that they’re not doing it now.

Q: You had an interesting statement in your footnotes about constitutional suicide. That is, arguments from people like Lincoln – who suspended habeas corpus – about bending the Constitution to meet an urgent situation. Is that where they’ve dug up the authority to commit acts of torture?
A: There is some aspect of the argument to which you refer – that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If it tells you to do something that would be enormously damaging in practice, then you don’t have to do it. That was the Abraham Lincoln argument. That’s not exactly Cheney’s view. They haven’t done what Lincoln did. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus while Congress was out of session. Then he came back and threw himself on the mercy of the legislative branch and he said, Look I had to do it, here’s why. Was I right? Will you ratify this? And they did. They said, Okay, sure. And that was the right call at the right time. Cheney’s view is that if it has anything to do with a war, then the commander-in-chief is supreme.

Q: I have to also ask if the Bush/Cheney administration is what the American people deserved – or more correctly, did they get what they voted for?
A: There’s a case to be made in 2000, in an exceptionally close election, that it wasn’t and isn’t entirely clear who actually won it. What is clear is that if you counted every vote in Florida, Gore would have won it. There’s also a case to be made that there was a bit of a bait and switch in 2000, that George W. Bush ran as a unifier and as a compassionate conservative, and he had a record in Texas of working with the Democrats and compromising. And that’s not the administration we got. Now in the 2004 election Bush won fair and square and by a substantial margin. And people had plenty of data by then about what he stood for and how he operated and that’s what they chose.

Q: What’s your feeling about what’s coming for the U.S.?
A: Part of why I wanted to write this book was to tell the stories of what really happened, how it happened, why it happened – as a narrative. If you don’t know your own history, your recent history, then you can’t learn from it. And the next president, whoever it is, is going to face some of the same big problems, and perhaps even bigger problems, that are left as a legacy of the Bush years. You see across-the-board deregulation in the financial sector, you see the results of the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare in Iraq, you see that things Bush and Cheney wanted to accomplish have come back and bitten them. You don’t know exactly what went wrong and you don’t know how to fix it. So the stories in here I hope will be of some use. I think everyone should be very glad that I’m not the one to decide how to fix it [laughs].

Q: How long do you think it will take to repair what has been messed up by this administration? Or is this destructive cycle not yet complete?
A: It would be hard to be confident that we’ve hit bottom. For instance, with the economy we almost certainly haven’t, in the loss of influence and the costliness of interventions overseas – maybe not. You can easily imagine ways in which Iraq and Afghanistan could get worse before they get better. And I’m glad I’m not very big on or good with predictions – I’m very much an empiricist. I mean, it looks like the impact of these last eight years will project for quite a long time.

Q: At the end of the day, what do you think Cheney’s legacy will be? Will history be kind to him?
A: I know that a lot of people who started out on Cheney’s side think that history will judge him harshly. I don’t think I’m qualified to say what history will say about him. But I will say that once a consensus forms that the war was a huge strategic error – for example, in Iraq – history does not tend to reverse that judgment. One can talk about the Civil War, or McArthur dragging China into the Korean war, or Vietnam. Nobody comes after the fact and says, Actually that was good, when it’s been judged bad. Almost everyone is in agreement that the war was a giant mistake. That’s probably not going to get reversed. As for Cheney himself, I think that ultimately he’ll be remembered very likely as a guy who stood up for what he believed in. He did what he thought was right. But so have a lot of really damaging figures in history.

ANGLER: The Cheney Vice Presidency
By Barton Gellman
Illustrated
483 pages
The Penguin Press
$31

Salvatore Difalco is, among many things, senior writer for TORO and the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories.