Dick Cheney, who died in November, was by far the most powerful U.S. Vice President in history, and not coincidentally, was one of the Americans who most harmed the United States (and the world) in living memory. That ignominious club includes Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, and although it's arguable who's done the most damage, Cheney's lasting legacy is overwhelming negative and dark. Although George W. Bush bears ultimate responsibility for the decisions he made and the many he abdicated to Cheney during their administration, and Cheney had many allies who also deserve blame, Cheney was the driving force behind many if not all of the Bush administration's multiple disasters, horrible policies and frankly evil actions. And although Dick Cheney criticized Trump and even voted against him in 2024, many of the Trump administration's illegal assertions of monarchial power – and certainly its contempt for due process – were proudly modeled by the Bush-Cheney regime.
Cheney pushed for a war of choice in Iraq, an inherently unconscionable action even if it hadn't turned out disastrously. He shamelessly deceived Congress, reporters and the American people to sell that war. He, his friend Donald Rumsfeld, and others allies created a torture regime, one of the darkest stains on the United States. He fought against due process, and for indefinite detention. He supported warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He pushed for not one but two budget-busting tax cuts for the rich, knowing they were fiscally irresponsible and despite the already extreme wealth inequality in the United States. He fought against disclosure, oversight and accountability. He seeded the government with his lackeys and allowed the politicization of the civil service. The Bush administration made a staggering number of decisions that were bad for America, in large part because Cheney and his team arrogantly assumed they were always correct and actively undermined the checks, balances, discussions and dissents that allow for good decision making.
It's not possible to cover every failing of Dick Cheney in detail in one post. The best book on Cheney I've found is
Angler by Barton Gellman, which expanded on a
Pulitzer-winning series by Jo Becker and Gellman. I also think it's one of the best books for understanding the Bush administration as a whole, along with
The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, which adeptly and chillingly chronicles the Bush administration's torture program, championed by Cheney and others. Mayer's book expanded on her reporting for
The New Yorker and fed into the excellent
Frontline episode
"The Dark Side." Another episode,
"Cheney's Law," is very good at looking at Cheney specifically, and the
Frontline archive on the Iraq War is both comprehensive and damning. Most of my posts involving Cheney can be found in one or more of the categories
Cheney,
Bush,
torture,
Iraq,
war and
the war series. My fellow bloggers have certainly penned plenty as well. In the meantime, we'll try to recount some of Dick Cheney's most despicable legacies below.
The Iraq War
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney, August 26th, 2002.
We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
– Dick Cheney, March 16th, 2003.
I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.
- Dick Cheney, June 30th, 2005.
Jim Lehrer: You drew a lot of heat and ridicule when you said eight months ago, insurgency is in its last throes. You regret having said that?
Cheney: No. I think the way I think about it, as I just described. I think about when we look back and get some historical perspective on this period, I'll believe that the period we were in through 2005 was in fact a turning point, that putting in place a democratic government in Iraq was the, sort of the cornerstone, if you will, of victory against the insurgency.
- February 7th, 2006.
I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered.
- Dick Cheney, June 20th, 2005.
"War is hell" is a cliché that happens to be true. War entails death and destruction, pain and suffering, and often involves dismemberment, disfigurement, sexual assault, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other ills. At best, war is a necessary evil, and you should be wary of anyone who
wants to go to war. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, is inherently immoral, and lying and misleading others to start such a war is likewise immoral.
The Iraq War officially started in 2003 and ended in 2011, and was largely a disaster. I have a
20th anniversary roundup providing retrospectives and useful links, some which bear repeating directly here. As of this writing, the Cost of War project
estimates that the "cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere totals about $8 trillion. This does not include future interest costs on borrowing for the wars." The Pew Research Center has a superb piece called
"A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq" (3/14/23). See also the
National Security Archive's pieces that the public relations push for the Iraq war preceded intelligence findings, Britain's
Downing Street memo that stated that the Bush administration's "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of going to war,
Mother Jones'
"Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq" (September 2006), and a similar piece from The Center for Public Integrity,
"False Pretenses" (1/23/08).
Dick Cheney was one of the most ardent advocates for war with Iraq and one of the most unconscionable about selling it. In one particularly infamous appearance on
Meet the Press, Cheney claimed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had reconstituted Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and pointed to
The New York Times as independently supporting his claims, when in fact he had fed those very claims to
New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon. (FAIR has some excellent pieces on this and related incidents, including
"Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline" [3/19/07] and the retrospective
"20 Years Later, NYT Still Can’t Face Its Iraq War Shame" [3/22/23].) As the above quotations show, Cheney not only sold bullshit and delusion, but refused to acknowledge the reality of the disaster in Iraq.
Cheney also relied heavily on bigotry and American ignorance of Middle Eastern history and politics. To quote from an older post,
"Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels" (11/11/09):
Bush officials, Cheney most of all, were going around conflating 9/11 and Al Qaeda with one of bin Laden's regional enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. While many of the pre-war assertions were noteworthy for their bullshit factor, one of the most amazing came from Dick Cheney on Meet the Press in September 2003, after the Iraq War had been going roughly six months:
"If we're successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Honestly, this is one of the most bigoted, fear-mongering, deceptive and unconscionable statements I've ever seen from a high-ranking official. I've covered it before, but note that not only does Cheney indirectly suggest that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, he uses “geographic base” to conflate all Middle Eastern countries (or at least our “enemies”) and all of their inhabitants. This would be like invading Australia because of David Hicks[, an Australian who joined Al Qaeda]. Presumably Cheney's "geographic base" would include the country that produced most of the 9/11 terrorists – our erstwhile ally, Saudi Arabia. But really, who can really tell all those Middle Eastern people apart? Plus, they look and talk so funny. (It's often been quipped that invading Iraq after 9/11 was like attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor.)
We'd also be wise to remember the incompetence and corruption of the Bush-Cheney administration in Iraq. As chronicled well in the documentary
No End in Sight and elsewhere, when it came to Iraq, competent, career civil servants were overridden in favor of unqualified ideologues and loyalists. Historically, the U.S. has done very well at infrastructure projects, and reconstruction in Iraq should have gone well. But the Bush administration gave huge contracts to companies that often did shoddy work. The most glaring of these was probably
Halliburton, formerly led by Dick Cheney. Cheney received a $36 million severance package from Halliburton, had stock options in the company, and received almost $400,000 in deferred compensation while Vice President. Halliburton in turn received a $7 billion no-bid contract for work in Iraq. It didn't take long for Halliburton to pull shady moves, and chief contracting officer
Bunny Greenhouse, a long-time civil servant with an exemplary record, blew the whistle on the company. In response, the Bush-Cheney administration demoted her. Halliburton's record in Iraq was notable for routinely overcharging the U.S. government, including
a $108 million overcharge for fuel and overcharging for food at
one camp alone by $16 million over a seven-month period. (See also
"Dick Cheney and the Making of Halliburton," a lengthy excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair’s 2005 book on war-profiteering,
Grand Theft Pentagon.) A 5/16/07 NPR piece,
"What Went Wrong with the Rebuilding of Iraq?" is a useful reminder of how bad the situation was (emphasis added):
Thousands of reconstruction contracts were awarded. And there was plenty of money to go around, including an initial $18 billion appropriated by Congress. Another $20 billion was available from the so-called Development Fund for Iraq — money that was derived from, among other things, Iraqi oil sales. Federal investigations have found that the money was quickly spent, with little planning or accounting.
It was a free-for-all climate best demonstrated when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, successfully requested that $12 billion in cash be shipped to Iraq. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was astonished when he heard about it.
"It's hard even now to imagine $12 billion in hundred-dollar bills, wrapped into bricklike bundles, then put on huge pallets and brought over by troop carrier airplanes to be dispersed in a war zone," Waxman said.
"We have no idea where that money went. Of the $12 billion, $8.8 billion is unaccounted for," he said.
Bremer defended his action, suggesting it was naïve to try to impose Western-style accounting practices in Iraq during a war. Several investigations led by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, have found that the reconstruction effort was riddled with waste, fraud, corruption and shoddy construction. Bowen told NPR's All Things Considered about one particularly bad construction site he investigated — a $75 million police training academy built by Parsons Corp.
"Essentially, when they put in the plumbing, they had no fittings, so they just joined plumbing pipes, cemented them together," he said. "The connections burst once they started to be used, and the sewage thus leaked from the bathrooms down through the building — and into light fixtures and through the ceilings."
Urine and feces dripping into lights and from the ceiling is an apt metaphor for the Bush-Cheney administration's performance in Iraq, but unfortunately, it inflicted an even worse legacy.
Torture
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
– Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 9/16/01
Dick Cheney was one of the most zealous proponents for torture in the Bush administration, certainly at his level of power. Wannabe tough guys believe that torture can force someone to tell the truth, but the experts know that torture is only effective at inflicting pain, sowing fear, and eliciting false confessions. The U.S. has scholars, military personnel, and intelligence agents who are fully aware of this, and some
sounded the warning about torture to the Bush administration. But torture is about getting the answer the torturer wants to hear versus the truth, and similarly, the Bush-Cheney administration didn't want to acknowledge the truth about torture.
Most of the U.S. media and Congress was and remains reluctant to confront how monstrous the torture regime was, and also how it was used politically. A
short piece by Paul Krugman on 4/22/09 summed up a key aspect:
From Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, one of the few reporters to get the story right during the march to war:
The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
To recap and rebut the apologia for torture we heard from the Bush-Cheney administration and their allies at the time, I'll quote at some length from one of my more comprehensive posts on the subject,
"Torture Versus Freedom" (5/15/09):
Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society. As Scott Horton quipped in December 2008, "Perhaps for Christmas proper we’ll be treated to arguments for and against genocide, and on the fourth day of Christmas we’ll read the arguments for and against the practice of infanticide."
While specific false claims about torture and the Bush administration's conduct should be challenged, it's especially important to emphasize torture's immorality and its clear illegality. Torture is the very antithesis of freedom. The key dynamics are not truth, security or patriotism. They are power, dehumanization and sadism. As Rear Admiral John Hutson observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough." When someone is tortured, it means that someone else in a position of power over the victim has deliberately chosen to inflict significant pain and suffering on a fellow human being. Torture spreads and corrupts in a democracy. Not only do torturers often not recognize the truth even when it's told to them, sometimes the torturers get so carried away they don't "even bother to ask questions" and "torture becomes an end unto itself." As Soviet-era torture victim Vladimir Bukovsky put it, "Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling?" He also explains how, after several days of torture, "neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again." (See also The Lucifer Effect.)
These abuses have often resulted in permanent or serious physical and psychological damage (although torturers often prefer methods that hide the abuse they've inflicted). Torture is assault of the most cruel variety, robbing the victim of the sanctity of his or her own body, but also his or her very mind and soul. These are not actions to weigh lightly, tactics to endorse or excuse cavalierly, nor damages to forgive quickly before we even know precisely what was done. It's hard to imagine a more clear moral line.
Torture is (1) immoral, (2) illegal, (3) endangers us (especially American troops in the Middle East), and (4) doesn't "work" – unless one wants to inflict pain, terrorize the populace, produce bogus intelligence or elicit false confessions. It's not that torture never produces a true statement, but at best, torture "works" much the same way amputation "cures" all hand ailments. (That's still probably far too generous.) Experienced interrogators know that torture is unreliable and counterproductive in addition to being cruel and illegal. For obtaining reliable information, more humane, rapport-building techniques are far more effective. Furthermore, as John Sifton has pointed out, intel from prisoners typically grows "stale" quickly, and "if you’re relying on interrogations for intelligence, you’re already on the back foot. You’ve already lost the war, so to speak." Regardless, a skilled, experienced interrogator pursuing accurate information would not be approaching a prisoner asking, "How much pain can I legally inflict?" That is a self-defeating, dangerous path that leads all too easily to becoming "the enemies of all humankind."
Almost every excuse from Bush officials and their allies fits somewhere in the following pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault. Almost every new document and piece of information has exposed lies, deception and crippling inconsistencies in their self-ennobling but accountability-denying tale. The existing evidence does not support a "good faith" defense, but even if it did, an investigation would still be required by law. Anti-torture laws exist in large part to protect all of us from men and women so certain of their own righteousness or need that they torture others (normally until the tortured person says exactly what they want to hear - apparently, precisely what happened here). The "debate" on torture and specific abusive techniques are stalling tactics by torture proponents and apologists, who consistently favor fantasy over reality in their arguments, and want to prevent a full investigation or trial. They will discuss Jack Bauer and hypothetical ticking time bombs endlessly, but not Maher Arar or Binyam Mohamed (among many others). They typically ignore altogether such damning, central evidence as the Red Cross report, which stated authoritatively and unequivocally that prisoners in U.S. custody were tortured. Their specific denials shift depending on their audience, but they almost always ignore that for years we have tortured, abused and imprisoned innocent people. It's much easier to abuse people or justify their abuse, of course, if they're all viewed as guilty, dangerous, alien or subhuman. These practices have often resulted in significant, lasting physical and psychological damage - and even death. (That's not to mention their central role in selling the war in Iraq and the consequences of that.) Ignoring or outright lying about this level of cruelty and abuse embodies the banality and audacity of evil.
(The end of the post links multiple resources on torture.)
After Barack Obama was elected, Dick Cheney still continued to
lie about torture, claiming it saved lives but also that he and other members of the Bush administration weren't responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere (which included over one hundred deaths). Although his daughter Liz Cheney joined him in opposing Donald Trump's reelection and did conduct herself admirably during investigative hearings into the January 6th, 2020 insurrection, it's important to remember
how awful Liz Cheney has been otherwise, including a
utterly despicable 2009 campaign by her and Bill Kristol attacking due process itself and accusing people trying to bring prisoners to trial after years of confinement of being terrorist sympathizers. (For years, the Cheney family essentially argued that if you tried to hold Dick Cheney and his associates responsible for their actions, terrorists would kill you in your beds.)
Due Process
The Bush-Cheney administration repeatedly ignored due process – a cornerstone of civilization – and it and its allies often attacked the people fighting for the basic rule of law as terrorist sympathizers or terrorists. The Bush-Cheney administration asserted that it could simply accuse someone of being a terrorist, not provide any proof, and could imprison or "detain" that person indefinitely. (Oh, and confessions obtained through torture were admissible evidence.) The authoritarianism of all that should be glaring and troubling. It also bears mentioning that the Bush-Cheney administration was incompetent, and seemingly didn't care if innocents were imprisoned, tortured, or killed. McClatchy did a series called
Guantanamo: Beyond the Law that found, of the more than 770 terrorist suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, dozens and perhaps hundreds of them were innocent. Nonetheless, innocent Mohammed Akhtiar was held for three years, a nightmare situation. The Bush-Cheney administration also kidnapped and tortured
Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian-Syrian citizen (the torture was outsourced to Syria in his case). Innocent Dilawar Dilawar was captured and beaten to death at the U.S.'s Bagram air base in Afghanistan, as chronicled in the Oscar-winning documentary
Taxi to the Dark Side. Besides common sense and a moral compass, there were plenty of reasons not to defer to the assertions of the Bush-Cheney administration that it was both infallible and should not be challenged.
A 2008 piece,
"Using Justice Against Us," looked at the hack arguments of John Yoo against due process, most of all his attempt to get his audience to ignore that he hadn't proven that the Guantanamo prisoners actually were terrorists, and that giving them the trials Yoo opposed would be the normal way to establish any actual guilt. Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, and many of their colleagues and allies often made similar arguments. You can read the piece for more detail, but it includes a relevant passage from lawyer
Scott Horton about the 2008 court decision about Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo. Horton contrasts the Bush-Cheney approach with an American tradition of due process and justice:
The Bush Administration could have handled this matter in the tradition that the nation’s greatest modern attorney general, Robert Jackson, set out at Nuremberg. Jackson personally took charge of the first prosecutions, delivering mesmerizing opening and closing statements and a dramatic cascade of evidence that targeted some of the most heinous criminals from the Second World War. Jackson had two important objectives before he reached the question of the guilt or innocence of the individual defendants: he needed to validate the fairness of the process, and he needed to demonstrate, clearly and convincingly in the eyes of the world, that heinous crimes had been committed which justified this extraordinary tribunal process. Jackson accomplished both goals. He also secured the conviction of key kingpins in the Nazi terror state. He did it all within the first year of the Allied occupation of Germany, through a process that helped transform the German people from enemies to friends. In the end, Jackson and his team demonstrated that the American tradition of justice was a potent tool to be wielded against the nation’s enemies.
By contrast, America has now endured seven years of an administration which fears the rule of law, which operates in the shadows as it contravenes criminal statutes and long-cherished traditions and retaliates mercilessly against civil servants who stand for law and principle. George Bush and his political advisors openly castigate law and justice as weaknesses or vulnerabilities–as public suspicions grow that they have darker reasons to be concerned about the law. Instead of following the historic route and using military commissions that follow the nation’s long-standing traditions, they have crafted embarrassing kangaroo courts. When the Supreme Court brought its gavel down on one of their shameful contraptions, they simply concocted another, equally shameful one, openly proclaiming an inferior brand of justice for those who were "not citizens," exalting in the right to use torture-extracted evidence and to transact the proceedings in secret.
The Bush-Cheney administration's contempt for due process can also be seen in its
warrantless surveillance program, which completely ignored the Fourth Amendment, among other protections. Dick Cheney and his aide David Addington were some of the most strident proponents of the program, and in 2007, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey gave
vivid testimony to the
Senate Judiciary Committee about Bush-Cheney officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card being sent to bully Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital bed to renew the program. (Ashcroft, despite being extremely conservative, admirably stuck to principles and refused to do so, and pointed to Comey as the acting attorney general.)
An added tidbit:
Angler author Barton Gellman read Cheney's memoir, and makes a
convincing case that Cheney's account of the incident, that Ashcroft said he
would renew the program before Gonzales and Card came over, is a lie. Also, "the relationship between Cheney and Bush, who was unaware of the Justice Department’s objections to the program until the last minute, was never the same . . . [Gellman says it was] 'the day the president of the United States discovered that the vice president’s zeal could lead him off a cliff.' "
Plutocracy
Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.
– Dick Cheney to Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in 2002, as recounted in The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind.
The U.S. conservative playbook since at least Reagan has been to increase military spending and funnel money to the rich, increasing both the national deficit and the national debt, and then claim that it's necessary to cut the social safety net to balance the budget. This strategy even has a name:
"starving the beast." As we've covered in other posts,
Reagan did it, and the Trump tax bill was likewise an abomination meant mainly to benefit those who were already wealthy. George W. Bush had two rounds of tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, which mostly benefitted the rich. Even
Bush didn't see the reason for the 2003 cuts and his Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Paul O'Neill, also opposed them. But Cheney (and Karl Rove, among others) pushed for them, and ultimately they got their way. Cheney was smart enough to know that the 2003 cuts (and the 2001 cuts) were fiscally irresponsible and bad for Americans as a whole, but still chose to funnel more money to the wealthy (including himself) in a country with already awful wealth inequality. He chose ideology and class warfare (by the rich) over good policy.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is one of the better sites for budget analysis, and wrote many posts about the Bush budgets and tax cuts.
"Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years" (6/28/10) provided an analysis of the deficit causes (mostly the Bush tax cuts) and rebutted false claims from the conservative Heritage Foundation that the causes were Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
"Economic Downturn and Legacy of Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Deficits" (2/28/13) updated some data and provided an updated chart of the drivers of public debt:
"The Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 "Bush” Tax Cuts" (10/23/17) noted that the cuts did not boost economic growth as conservatives claimed would happen, and the post also provided a handy chart of who the tax cuts benefited:
Virtually every Republican, nominally "conservative" national political figure of the past 30 years has likewise championed policies to make the United States into even more of a plutocracy. That certainly applies to both Dick and Liz Cheney. They're not unique in that respect, but it bears pointing out that rather than serving the public, they have served Mammon, their rich donors, and themselves.
(Some of my more thorough posts on wealth inequality and conservative tax policies [and their extremity] are
"Attack of the Plutocrats" (7/18/10),
"Tax Cuts to the Rich Don't Raise Revenues" (10/26/10) and
"Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" (7/28/11).
Monarchial Powers for the President
Americans who graduated from elementary school might remember that the United States of America was founded due to a revolution against the abuses of a monarch. College-level courses will go into much more depth and nuance (and the hypocrisies of America's founding), but nonetheless, the idea that "all men are created equal" is a powerful, stirring one, and in direct opposition to the notion of aristocratic or dictatorial rule.
The more zealous proponents of the
"unitary executive theory" lack the understanding of an attentive elementary school student, preferring instead the batshit theory that America's founding fathers wanted the U.S. president to have unchecked, monarchial powers, or as Donald Trump put it, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president."
Angler has the best account I've found on Cheney's views on presidential power. Reagan and many of his top officials should have gone to jail for
the Iran-Contra Affair, but in Congress' report on the affair, Cheney and his aide David Addington wrote the dissenting opinion, and asserted that Reagan and his team had unchecked power, as the founding fathers intended. To support this argument, they cherry-picked passages from
The Federalist, demonstrating scholarship so grotesquely crappy and nakedly self-serving that it'd receive a failing grade from any competent professor and uproarious laughter from any non-authoritarians if the consequences weren't so dire.
If you can't get your hands on a copy of
Angler, the
Frontline episode
"Cheney's Law" is a good resource, as is a
supplemental page of interviews. (Historian Rick Perlstein is also planning to cover the Cheney-Addington Iran-Contra arguments in a future book.)
Cheney's cherry-picking wasn't limited to the office of the U.S. President; he also practiced it for his own job. Cheney claimed he didn't
have to comply with National Archive requests for materials because the Vice President has duties in both the executive and legislative branches, and therefore, somehow, rather than having obligations to both branches and their rules,
he was subject to neither. (Obviously, the founding fathers intended that the VP should be an unaccountable political figure.)
A Negative, Dark Legacy
I suspect that Dick Cheney convinced himself that every questionable or flatly illegal action he took was for the good of the country, even those that personally benefitted him. But for all its flaws, the U.S. government was set up in the Constitution to have a set of checks and balances. And on a good team, good ideas can survive scrutiny and discussion. They don't require lies, misrepresentation, or hiding. The torture program was evil. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, was evil. Using deception to sell the war was evil. Ignoring due process was evil. Attacking the patriotism of war skeptics and the stewards of due process was despicable. Making wealth inequality in the U.S. worse is unconscionable. Asserting that the U.S. President should have monarchial powers is anti-historical and dangerous. Dick Cheney's legacy is overwhelmingly a negative, dark, evil one. (If the word "evil" makes you uncomfortable, substitute "extremely harmful" or another term.) Cheney is not someone to be lauded and not a model to follow; he is a cautionary tale. He was convinced he was correct and had atrocious judgment. He fought, often viciously, to have his way, and we Americans and the world are the worse for it.
