The first thought I had on opening Angler was that for most of American history, no one would have dreamed of writing a vice-presidential biography. From 1804, when the 12th Amendment established our current method of choosing VPs, until 1901, when William McKinley's assassination placed Theodore Roosevelt in the Oval Office, the No. 2 position was a steppingstone to oblivion. T.R., who was elected in his own right in 1904, broke the pattern, and Calvin Coolidge followed suit. By the mid-1970s, VPs were routinely going on to become their parties' standard-bearers. Walter Mondale and Al Gore epitomized the vice president in the era of big government--forces to be reckoned with, armed with experience to match the president's and portfolios and constituencies all their own. Even so, Mondale and Gore occasioned biographies because they won their parties' presidential nominations, not because they served as second fiddle to Presidents Carter and Clinton.

Dick Cheney is something else altogether. What I liked most about Angler is that Bart Gellman appreciates that Cheney's enlargement of the vice presidential role stems not form any warlock-like powers, which some people have ascribed to him, but above all from the situation in which he has served. Mondale and Gore worked for detail men, presidents who would never let underlings set their most important policies. Cheney has served a man who likes to delegate--and to delegate to Cheney in particular. Bart leaves no doubt that what influence Cheney has had--which has been plenty--he has enjoyed thanks to Bush's indulgence. "The president made it clear from the outset that the vice president is welcome at every table and at every meeting," White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten says in the book. And when, after the 2006 election, Cheney's control of the foreign policy agenda weakened, it was, Bart explains, "because the president wanted to try a new direction."

That is not to deny Cheney's own strong role in seizing power. Was I wrong to detect a hint of mischievousness in the praise showered on the vice president in Angler? In contrast to the unreflective, superficial Bush, Cheney is routinely described with awe and reverence by many of the sources here--and by and large Bart lets these judgments stand without challenge. Old colleagues and new visitors to Cheney's office alike paint the vice president as a quick study, exhibiting a command of policy minutiae, an iron will, and a finely honed strategic sense. In an administration that has become infamous for its incompetence, Cheney is the man who knows what he's doing.

But so does Gellman--or so I'd surmise. The praise for Cheney's strengths as an infighter and policymaker, though no doubt sincere, also struck me as a backhanded form of damnation, since they complete a portrait of a stealthily ruthless, hypercompetent majordomo. There can be no doubt after reading this fair but quietly withering book that Cheney's role in shaping Bush's presidency--governing from the right, not the center; skirting procedures to achieve his goals on taxes and the environment; and above all setting an extremist course in the war against al-Qaida--has been overwhelmingly malign.

The basic picture is plenty familiar. Like many regular newspaper readers, I had known for a long time that Cheney had supported the administration's most legally questionable policies, from the warrantless domestic wiretapping to the treatment of military prisoners. But I don't think I'd realized until reading Angler that so many of these policies originated with Cheney and his right-hand man David Addington (who, it should be noted, is as central a character to this book as the vice president himself). And while Gellman is hardly the first to make much of Cheney's remark after Sept. 11 that "We also have to work ... the dark side," I don't think that any other journalist, with the exception of The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, has assembled so concisely and carefully the portrait of a man determined after 9/11 to use any means necessary--and some unnecessary--to go after Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida or anyone who might have anything to do with them.

Moreover, Angler also exposes at least one case in which the vice president seems to have put his personal agenda ahead of his patron's. In the effort to pass the 2003 tax bill--Bush's second big round of cuts for the wealthy--the president had previously decided against deeper, politically unpopular reductions in the capital-gains tax. But the book shows how Cheney worked behind Bush's back to help House Republicans replace the administration bill with an alternative that included the controversial cuts--a fact that "hardly anyone, in or out of the White House, knew," Gellman reports. Cheney himself ultimately cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to get it passed.

Little stories like this one, piled one after the next, form a picture of a man determined to use to the fullest all the power that Bush would allow him and then some. In keeping with other accounts, Cheney emerges here as a canny survivor of the Nixon and Ford White Houses, who has for decades longed to restore to the presidency the sorts of unchecked powers, at home and abroad, that Congress, the courts, and the public had worked to curtail after Watergate. And his decision at the start to rule out succeeding his boss ironically served the cause: It was a choice that buffered him from the political consequences of the policies he has worked to implement. As much as anyone, Cheney is responsible for the Nixonian miasma that enveloped the Bush White House from early on.

As readers can tell, I admired this book quite a lot (as anyone who read my Slate review last month, from which this post is adapted, could see). Nonetheless, I wouldn't be worth my salt as a reviewer if I didn't essay a few questions and quibbles, which I'll do in my next entry.