I think at this point my admiration for Angler, and that of my colleagues, is amply clear. So I wanted in this next post to raise what I see as some unanswered questions about Cheney's White House operations. None of these questions, I hasten to add, should be seen as denigrating Bart's reporting, which is first-rate and revealing. Nonetheless, I had some questions after finishing Angler.

Some concern the outcomes of Cheney's handiwork. For example, after the stranger-than-fiction showdown with Cheney's allies at the hospital bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller persuaded Bush to revise his illegal wiretapping program. But while it's portrayed as a win for FBI and Justice, we never really learn the terms of the victory. "Over the next weeks and months, the program changed. It stopped doing some things, and it did other things differently." I'm curious, Bart--and maybe I should just use the second person hereafter--to know whether you were able to learn what, precisely was stopped, what changed, and what continued. How much of a victory for Justice over Cheney's team did these changes represent? If you learned these details, why did you omit them? Did you expect that including these minutiae would bore readers? Were there national security concerns?

I'd also love to know more about Cheney's motives. You suggest that Cheney favored war with Iraq not because he feared Saddam Hussein's intentions, but because he wanted to knock off an easy target and send a message around the Middle East. I don't doubt that such thinking may have been a factor find in Cheney's enthusiasm for war, but I'm inclined to think Ron Suskind came closer to identifying the primary motive in emphasizing Cheney's "1 percent doctrine"--the idea that after September 11 the government had to take even minute probabilities of danger much more seriously. And in other places you write that Cheney considered the "nexus" of terrorism, rogue states, and deadly weapons to be his paramount concern--suggesting a genuine fear of a nuclear-armed rogue dictator, not the reckless gamble of using a war to test a theory. Of course, without documents or more inside reporting from Cheney's inner circle, we can't know for sure. But I'd like to know, Bart, how you would describe Cheney's thinking.

I'd also like to have seen, in Angler, more of the president, who is offstage too much of the time, and indeed of Cheney himself, who often lurks only in the shadows. In particular, I remain in the dark about Cheney's relationship to Bush. How much did the president know about Cheney's active role in fashioning and refashioning policies? Did he approve? Was he aware of the bureaucratic maneuvers that, for example, gave Addington influence over the nominally more senior White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales? Why did the president--as you report--draw from the short list that Cheney had made of acceptable Supreme Court justices in picking John Roberts, only then to depart from it in nominating Harriet Miers, and then return to it for the choice of Sam Alito? And how did Cheney view Bush in all of this--with respect, affection, or disdain?

To be fair, it would take a combination of Lincoln Steffens, Joe Alsop, and Bob Woodward to crack the secretive bond between the nation's two most powerful men, neither of whom has much fondness for the news media. But let me speculate. The portrait offered by Angler suggests that Bush was all too happy to defer to Cheney on the defining issues of his presidency, for the two men usually saw eye to eye. Bart, you point out their many differences--in their appetite for studying detail, in their personal styles, in their political judgments. But they also share certain traits: a supreme confidence that their goals are correct, a willingness to bend or break rules to reach them, and an inflexibility about changing course. As you notes in the book, despite the White House flacks' claim that Bush likes to hear clashing opinions, he actually prefers consensus and finality. You report that, according to a Cheney aide, the president liked to be told "your senior advisers believe X"--and then to stick with that decision. What Angler makes clear is that this message was one that, when the crises of the Bush years came, Vice President Cheney rarely failed to deliver.