Yesterday, I tried to defend my view that Angler presents not a "mixed" view of the Cheney vice presidency but a rather thoroughly negative one. Now I want to defend my view that Angler is slanted to some extent against Cheney.

To make my complete case would require a closer textual analysis than is amenable to this forum. So I will focus on concepts that I think Bart either overlooks or, in my view, should have paid more attention to.

The most important of these is one I've discussed already, and which Bart has graciously acknowledged has some foundation -- the lack of discussion of the extent to which hardball is played in Washington. Unless one counts Christie Todd Whitman asking for a meeting with President Bush, Angler has no one in the executive branch outside of Cheney's circle throwing an elbow until late in the book when Bart's "law" -- that actions produce reactions -- finally kicks in. Cheney's tactics are thus made to seem like "original sin."

This is an unfair picture. Angler would be a truer, more balanced account if Bart had stipulated, as he did in one of his recent posts, that Cheney did not invent the "Cheney rules."

To understand the context in which Cheney operated, I recommend two books: War and Decision, an inside account of the early years of the war on terror by former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Failure Factory: How Unelected Bureaucrats, Liberal Democrats, and Big Government Republicans Are Undermining America's Security and Leading Us to War by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times. (Gertz takes a far less sanguine view than Bart of the CIA's good faith in assessing whether Iran stopped developing nuclear weapons).

Bart does a better job of providing context when he acknowledges that some of what Cheney did was a reaction to the post-Watergate assault on presidential power. Bart suggests, however, that Cheney overreacted because under Reagan the president's powers were "substantially restored" (page 101). But he doesn't provide any analysis of this question; instead he cites David Gergen. Yet Gergen's view is far from universally accepted, and by citing only Gergen, Bart gives short shrift, in my opinion, to the Cheney side of the story.

Bart also does not sufficiently entertain the possibility (I would say probability) that Cheney's views nearly always prevailed for a long while, not for any nefarious reason or as the result of devious methods, but because (a) as a former Secretary of Defense, former White House Chief of Staff, and important one-time member of Congress, he was hugely respected and (b) the things he was saying made great sense (correctly so, I think) to key players, especially the president, during the first administration. In the second administration, when Cheney's views stopped seeming quite so self-evident, they began to prevail far less frequently. All of this is normal.

Bart salutes this concept, but I think Angler would have been more balanced had he paid more attention to it.

But what of the fact that Bush, apparently with a push from Cheney, sometimes approved measures without consulting the relevant official, e.g., the EPA administrator or the Attorney General? Here, I think Bart puts too much emphasis on Cheney and not enough on Bush. The president knew he had an EPA administrator and an Attorney General, but apparently thought he could make certain decisions without hearing (or hearing further) from them. Unless Cheney falsely claimed that the official in question was on board, the main issue here is the president's approach, not Cheney's.

This is also true to some extent of the officials Cheney dealt with. In the discussion of the NSA surveillance program, Bart mentions several times how few officials were "read-in," i.e., were informed about the program. We are told that David Addington wouldn't hear of this or that important official being read-in.

But wouldn't it be General Hayden, then the head of the NSA, who determined in the first instance who was read-in? By what authority would Addington (or Cheney) have that power, or the power to overrule Hayden? If General Hayden did not challenge Addington, was it because he agreed that a program for which secrecy was of the essence should be "closely held" or was it because Addington (with Cheney behind him) intimidated this three-star General? If intimidation is the answer, isn't the main issue Hayden's failure to do his job?

More generally, is it possible that some of Bart's sources are blaming vice presidential intimidation or end-runs for their "complicity" in policies that seemed like good ideas at the time but are now unpopular? I wish Bart had explored these kinds of questions.