Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman is the author of
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, a comprehensive
investigation into the role that Dick Cheney played in the Bush
administration. Gellman, who has worked in war zones around the world
and covered the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, will
speak at 7 p.m., Monday, April 13, at the Catalina Foothills High
School Little Theatre, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive. Tickets to the fundraiser
for the Pima County Library Foundation are $35. For more information,
call 299-6855. Visit The Range at blog.tucsonweekly.com for an
expanded interview with Gellman.
How did Dick Cheney change the vice presidency?
He fundamentally transformed it. There had been a gradual trend from
about the second term of FDR, and certainly beginning with (Jimmy)
Carter and (Walter) Mondale, in which vice presidencies became more
important in executive roles, or at least (vice presidents) had more
access. But Cheney made it into basically the job of deputy president
and super chief of staff. That had never happened before. I think you
can’t understand the last eight years without understanding what he
did. I would say he was the most powerful person who has ever served in
government who was not himself the president.
In the process, he also seems to have expanded the power
of the executive branch in general.
Certainly, that was his aim. He has very strong and somewhat extreme
views about the supremacy of the executive branch in our constitutional
order. He usually starts with a proposition that is pretty widely
accepted—such as, for example, the president is commander in
chief, and you can’t second-guess all his decisions on the
battlefield—and he takes that past all the usual boundaries to
say that no other branch of government has any say at all in the way
that he uses those powers. … He was able to get George W. Bush to go
along with a lot of those ideas. In the process, he makes some very
strong claims for executive authority. Now, there was backlash and
pushback by the second term. Both Congress and the Supreme Court
asserted themselves and bent back the executive branch. But I would say
that often, without people much knowing it, Cheney managed to win …
most of the battles.
What was Cheney’s role in developing the legal framework that
allowed the enhanced- interrogation techniques used on
detainees?
Cheney played the dominant role. Cheney, his chief of staff and his
lawyer—respectively, Scooter Libby and David Addington—were
the primary drivers of the idea that in order to break the will of
enemy captives quickly, you had to get rid of all restraints against
cruelty in interrogation. Now, they would argue that they did not cross
the line into torture. But they also were instrumental in creating a
legal definition of torture that was so narrow that it was actually
almost impossible to commit it. The more important thing to them was
that in the Geneva Conventions, there is a ban on cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment of prisoners. And that also was written into U.S.
law. And they set about removing that obstacle.
What kind of relationship did Cheney have with Bush at the end of
the administration?
Angler describes a sort of trajectory of the Bush
administration, in which (Cheney) creates this enormously powerful
office and has enormous influence over a much younger and much
less-experienced president in the first term, and gradually, (Cheney’s)
power diminishes, for lots of reasons. One of them is that Bush lost
some confidence in (Cheney’s) judgment. There was a moment that’s sort
of the dramatic center of the book, in which Cheney … just about
brought Bush to the point where his whole Justice Department and the
head of the FBI were about to resign, which would have been politically
devastating, … and according to Bush’s top advisers, would have cost
him re-election. Bush realized he would have been a one-term president
if he had followed everything that Cheney advised him to do. He still
valued Cheney’s expertise, but he understood that Cheney was a zealot.
Cheney is as close to an anti-politician as we’ve ever had in high
office. … Cheney doesn’t care what Congress or the public thinks. The
most important thing is to get the policy right, and he thinks he knows
that better than other people do. The thing about Angler is, I
give him his principles. He is not a bad man or a cartoon caricature.
He believes that he is serving the national interest.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.
