Bart's lengthy and admirably lucid response raises one central point that I would like to underscore: Cheney's concentration of power was not a good thing--not for him, not for Bush, not for the U.S. Exactly as Bart notes, it meant that policy was made without the participation of other top officials. Had the Iraq War been thoroughly debated and studied rather than planned by a small coterie of officials, it would surely have been prepared for more carefully.

Fortunately, a number of conservatives have been critical of the Bush administration, noting that it has run roughshod over traditional constitutional restraints by, again and again, invoking the war on terror. Bush has not governed conservatively. If anything, his goals have been Wilsonian--and it was Woodrow Wilson who locked up thousands during World War I for disagreeing with him, an unhappy precedent for the Bush administration, which has apparently conducted thousands of "renditions", i.e., kidnappings, of foreigners. This will be a permanent blot on the escutcheon of the U.S.

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So many intriguing points, so little time.

Jake asked if I took on Cheney's working style and wrote from a subterranean lair. Can't disclose that. ;-)

On Spencer's quest for a grand unified theory, I generally agree that Cheney did not transform himself from the administration of Bush the father to Bush the son, and that much of the apparent change can be explained by the absence of counterweights the second time around. I also agree that Cheney believes the expansion of executive power is a good thing, regardless of the particular dispute at hand, but I can't endorse Spencer's view that this is a quest for power for its own sake alone. Cheney believes the executive branch, and the president as its chief, is the only one capable of responding with the swiftness and unity of purpose required to defend vital national interests. Anyone would travel part of the way with Cheney on this -- nobody serious could argue for government by plebiscite, or that every executive decision must first be put to Congress and the Supreme Court -- but my book argues that Cheney misreads the Federalist papers and takes the point way too far.

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I doubt I can break much ground on whether Angler is pro- or anti-Cheney, or sufficiently balanced, or correct in its judgments. I'm happy to leave that judgment to readers. I do not claim, as I think my interlocutors here understand, that Angler is objective if that means it has no point of view. Not only is that impossible, but it's not what I wanted. Most of the work of the book is to tell new stories about what really happened, but Angler also tries to say why and how it happened, too, and in some cases to describe the consequences. I intended to make judgments on those things from a critical distance. I don't preoccupy myself as often with the normative, but I don't think that lands me in a "soup of relativisim," either. Reporting, analysis and commentary are not fully separable, probably, but that does not mean they are not fundamentally different things.

That's why I'm unpersuaded by many of Paul's examples:

He finds that Cheney ... produced a backlash that nearly brought down President Bush....

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Let me begin my final post by thanking TPMCafe and Bart for inviting me into this discussion, and the other members of the discussion group for their thoughtful and respectful posts.

Second, I'd like to revise a statement I made at the outset, namely that I would recommend Angler only to those who wish to read an "anti-Cheney brief." Actually, I would recommend Angler to anyone who wants to read about Cheney, but with the proviso that, in my view, it is somewhat slanted against the vice president.

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David Greenberg eloquently defends Bart's approach to Cheney and I think we see eye-to-eye. The sheer accumulation of detail and fact makes for an overwhelming portrait of executive manipulation redolent of the Nixon White House. But--you knew that "but" was coming--Paul might seem to have something when he pleads for more context. But I don't think Paul would be happy with the result. Had Bart delved more fully into the relationship between Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, for example, I suspect he would have unearthed even more unflattering information.

Where David's defense might run aground, I think, is that it skirts the shoals of self-complacency. There's a fine line between adversarial journalism and a journalistic lynching. Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker had what we would today call "agendas"--Steffens to expose the iniquity of Wall Street potentates, Baker to burnish Woodrow Wilson's reputation. Bart, by contrast, does not seem to have an axe to grind, at least not one that I could detect.

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I really have no interest in debating whether Angler is slanted against Dick Cheney. David really says it all. What I do have an interest in is settling a score with an old Cheney staffer, and, in the process, illustrating a small slice of how the Office of the Vice President worked under Dick Cheney.

In 2003, Frank Foer and I worked for months on a profile of Cheney for The New Republic. (Sadly, TNR's web archives are all messed up, but you can read our 7000-word piece from the Dec. 1, 2003 issue of the magazine here.) We interviewed a lot of people for the piece, and at the end of the process, we reached out to Cheney's office. We wanted to check some basic facts, to get their perspective for the piece and to have them respond to some of the criticisms we'd turned up. Pretty basic journalistic fare. Then we met a man named Kevin Kellems.

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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.

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I want to join the debate about whether Bart's picture of Cheney is negative or objective (or, if you find "objective" too problematic a term, let's say fair, impartial, unbiased, or some other similar word). I think it's both.

First a little background: I think it's a good thing that we have news media outlets in this country that aspire to be objective and non-partisan, and it's good that the journalists who work for them strive to keep their personal political opinions from influencing their duty to report the news without fear or favor. For all the heat that the Washington Post and the New York Times take from the left and the right, they are national treasures. You might find bias in a gossipy story about a picked-over issue like Hillary Clinton's possible appointment at State (the Times recently used the occasion to flog a long-dead story about a speech Bill Clinton once gave in Kazakhstan), but when Lehman Brothers collapses or war ravages the Congo, we turn desperately to these papers--implicitly acknowledging their indispensable role as disinterested providers of news. And when Bart and Jo Becker, or James Risen, or Dana Priest, or Charlie Savage any number of the other superb reporters at these (and other) papers disclose valuable information to the public about lawless, duplicitous, or improper actions about the Bush administration, they are not acting from any liberal or anti-Bush bias. They are acting from a sense of professional duty.

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I'd like to tag onto Paul's most recent observations. Bart, what struck me about your book perhaps most forcefully was the opening. You depict Cheney in the darkest light possible, as edging out any possible competitors for the vice-presidency, mounting and stuffing them (I believe those were the words you used) with the help of David Addington. The bit about Frank Keating being knee-capped by Cheney speaks volumes, I should think. Clearly Cheney set out to ruin Keating's reputation, even after he was no longer a candidate for the slot, so as to warn everyone else: don't even think about messing with Dick. Doesn't that amount to a kind of deep organ tremolo, warning the audience of what's to come?

Let me respond to the first of Bart's posts from yesterday.

First: I agree with the vice president that Bart has "done his homework." In fact, he has done a remarkable job of research.

Second: Bart asks, "is there any doubt that the government's reaction to [the] threat [announced on 9/11] did more than the attacks themselves to change the nation and the world?" But this isn't quite the claim he makes in Angler. As I read him, Bart compares the impact of the administration's response to 9/11 with the impact of the threat announced by 9/11, not just the events that occurred that day. ("A familiar threat announced itself that day with frightening new proximity and ambition. But decisions made in the White House, in response, had incomparably greater impact on American interests and society.") (page 132)

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Spencer Ackerman raises the question of whether Cheney is, in fact, a victim of success, on the order of LBJ. I think it should be reversed. Cheney profited from failure. The Bush administration was obsessed with missile defense rather than stopping terrorism before 9/11. It seems to have viewed the terrorist threat as a sideshow to the big issues of foreign policy. After 9/11, however, Bush and Cheney did exactly what Colin Powell warned them not to do--overreact.

The administration went so far as to confect a bogus case for war in Iraq, whipping up ties between Osama bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein. Without the war on terror, however, I am convinced that Bush would not have won reelection in 2004. A case could be made that Cheney and the neocons retarded rather than accelerated the collapse of the GOP--that it would have occurred even sooner absent the terrorist threat.

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Let me try and break the apparent logjam between Jake, Paul and Bart. Leave aside for a moment the question of whether Cheney is a singular figure or whether other people in the administration resisted his whims. Maybe a better way of contextualizing Cheney arrives by asking whether/which previous government officers were as able to enact their agendas as Cheney was.

I'll be clear I'm not a historian. And for purposes of this discussion we're pretty much eliding the question of Bush's relationship to Cheney, which isn't an insignificant consideration. But I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone who got his way more often and more thoroughly than Cheney since Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to late 1966. Like Johnson, Cheney knew the institutional obstacles to his agenda, and he knew their fracture points: how to circumvent and undermine the CIA; how to manipulate the GOP congressional leadership; when to appease, for instance, the Saudis and when to flout them.

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My goodness, it looks like a little crockery is starting to get flung around the genteel confines of the cafe. It's about time that this book club turned into a fight club.

Bart defends himself from Paul Mirengoff's contention that he created a "Potemkin Washington", DC by pointing to his book as trying to achieve an objective look at Cheney with a kind of Thucydidean detachment. For the most part, I'm sympathetic to Bart, and it is, of course, the traditional aspiration of American journalists to "show, don't tell," as the old saying has it.

But Mirengoff is surely on to something when he says that the marshaling of evidence, the structure of the book itself is, to some extent, going to shape the narrative. I don't see anything wrong with that. Otherwise, Bart would end up in a soup of relativism, wouldn't he? The testimony he elicits from, for example, Dick Armey (not exactly a darling of the Washing Post) portrays Cheney in a very dim light--as willing, for the purposes of selling the Iraq War, to deceive an old chum. Goodness knows, Cheney isn't the first high official to engage in such tactics: Gordon M. Goldstein's new book, Lessons In Disaster, notes that McGeorge Bundy flummoxed Lyndon B. Johnson by suggesting that he should simply tell the American public the truth about sending more troops to Vietnam. Bundy observed, "Lyndon Johnson's view of the truth is like a Boston trustee's view of capital. It's much too valuable ever to be used."

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I replied to Paul's first post before reading the most recent. So a few more words on the "Potemkin Washington" that Paul sees in my book.

Paul says that in Angler-world "the only pairs of sharp elbows appear to belong to the vice president and his counsel," while "everyone else plays 'fair,' never seeking an edge for the purpose of advancing an agenda." He recalls no one in the book, Cheney's office aside, "playing 'hardball' until somewhere around page 300." That is not quite accurate, though I concede that Paul has a point. In fact, Angler depicts quite a few rivals who try to block Cheney's path, using many of the same time-honored techniques. One example: John Bellinger, Gordon England, Phil Zelikow and Condi Rice team up to try to close down Guantanamo, with Rice giving a memo privately to Bush and then sneaking it onto a Principals Committee agenda. Also in Angler, Matt Waxman and other allies maneuver to restore Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention as Pentagon policy, attempting a fait accompli reversal of Cheney's success in making legal room for "cruelty" in interrogations. Christie Whitman seeks a one-on-one meeting with Bush to argue against Cheney's proposal to drop a campaign pledge about carbon dioxide regulation. Alan Greenspan works with Congress and White House friends to warn against a second round of tax cuts. Senators Specter and Chafee try to use the five votes of their "Mod Squad" caucus as a pivot point in a closely divided Senate, aiming to water down Cheney's hard-line initiatives.

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Uh oh. I waited too long to weigh back in, and now there's way too much to talk about. I'll address two points now and post again as soon as I can.

Jake asks what's so new about a big shot cutting corners and maneuvering for power. In principle, nothing. Senior advisers to presidents contend for turf and influence, and they don't always play nicely. There are official meetings and real meetings, the latter setting policy without nettlesome opponents in the room. Powerful people use back channels and proxies, preempting rivals. They reach down to subordinates to shape the options sent back up to the boss. They promote allies and dispose of obstacles. Cheney did not invent the Cheney Rules, as I described them tongue-in-cheek in the Washington Post's "Outlook" section recently; the rules go back to The Prince and doubtless earlier.

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My opinion of Angler has become more favorable during the course of this discussion as I see some of the paths Bart didn't take. Before I fall into the tank completely, I should post some of my promised criticism of the book.

One of my main complaints has to do with the portrayal of official Washington. That, of course, is the setting of the events Bart describes. It seems to me, then, that one cannot fully understand the Cheney vice presidency without a fair account of Washington and its bureaucracy.

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David has with unerring professorial precision raised a question that I think is at the heart of the Bush presidency: to what extent was Cheney reflecting Bush's wishes? The opening scene of Angler, where Cheney colludes with Bush to create the appearance of a true search for a vice-presidential nominee suggests, I think, that Bush didn't have any illusions about Cheney. To what degree was Cheney simply Bush's errand boy as opposed to an independent actor?

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?

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Paul Mirengoff takes me to task for likening Dick Cheney to Artur Sammler. He has a point. It's a bit of stretch to compare them because I made it sound like Sammler was a product, like Cheney, of the 1960s. Not so. Sammler was responding to the lunacy. And Cheney?

I'm not sure I should plead nolo contendere to Mirengoff's assertion that Cheney was never a culture warrior. Well, no, he obviously doesn't appear to be a fire-breathing social conservative. That's not his bag. National security is. But for many of the neocons, the McGovern era liberalism is, in fact, synonymous with a failure of nerve, a loss of faith in America abroad and at home.

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It seems to me that Angler undercuts Jacob Heilbrunn's attempt to cast Vice President Cheney as a Dr. Sammler figure on a mission to combat the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Bart shows that Cheney had little interest in "cultural" issues. At the beginning of President Bush's first term, Cheney focused on economic policy and energy policy, two areas well removed from the "culture war." After 9/11, he focused, not surprisingly, on issues relating to terrorism. Terrorism was not an issue in the 1960s and 1970s either.

It is true, as Heilbrunn observes, that Cheney was quite unhappy about one relic of the 1970s - the post-Watergate limitations on presidential power. In this respect, he was like most who served in the Reagan administration and some who served in the Clinton administration.

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Before I expand on my critique of Angler, I want to respond to Spencer Ackerman's post in which he attempts to distill "Cheneyism" into the view that "power for its own sake is an uncomplicated good, and letting it expire without use is irresponsible." By power, Ackerman says he means "executive power."

Ackerman thinks his theory explains why Cheney opposed taking down Saddam Hussein in 1991 but favored doing so after 9/11. In the earlier period, according to Ackerman, going to Baghdad would have weakened the presidency due to certain "institutional impediments," namely "the United Nations, the Democratic opposition, the country's touch-and-go wariness to a ground war." After 9/11, as Ackerman sees it, these obstacles ceased to exist and, in their absence, "the imperative of harnessing and using executive power" caused Cheney to push for war.

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Newsflash: Word is that Bart Gellmann will soon be emerging from a hidden location to respond to these posts. But before he does, I'm going to offer a few thoughts on Dick Cheney's mental world. If you'll recall, in Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet, 1960s New York is lurching out of control. The liberals have taken over. The universities are hotbeds of revolt. A black pick-pocket ends up flashing his member at a cowering Mr. Sammler, who managed to evade the Nazis while hiding out in Poland but now, decades later, as a withered old man, can't escape the social chaos created by the latest breakdown of the liberal order. While I wouldn't credit Cheney with the kind of literary perspicuity with which Bellow endows Sammler, I suspect that Cheney, no less, is a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s--someone who despises what he saw as the rise of the counterculture and set out to battle it.

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Bart's book is one of the best to be written about the Bush administration, at least until the National Archives allows the scholars of the future full access to the classified record. Actually, chances are Liz Cheney's children will still be litigating the case for continued secrecy, represented by little Addingtons, so perhaps Angler will simply stand as among the greatest accounts ever to be written of these last eight years. There are worse fates.

But here's where I'd like to press Bart and the rest of our group: what's the heart of the Cheney legacy?

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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.

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Let me begin by thanking TPMCafe for inviting me to discuss Angler and by thanking Bart Gellman for reaching out to me following the publication of his book.

As Bart notes, the other participants in this discussion have reviewed Angler; I have not. So my main purpose this week is to provide my views of the book itself. I'm less inclined to debate the Cheney vice presidency. That's really a debate about the past eight years, one that has been taking place for approximately the past seven. Opinions have hardened and are not likely to change. On the other hand, it may prove impossible to discuss Angler without some attention to the merits of its subject.

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Greetings Bart. . .and very much look forward to being back tomorrow when I'll weigh in on your must read book for those wishing to understand the core sculpting force of the Bush years.

But Jacob Heilbrunn suggested that I wrote a piece saying Biden should learn from Cheney. Actually, I think that would be a bad idea.

I didn't say Biden -- I said Obama.

Here's the intro to my post which already got quite a few razzled for mentioning Dick Cheney and Barack Obama in the same headline. So let's not add Biden just yet.

From the blog post:

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Hi Bart--excellent explication of your book that you provided. Just out of curiousity, I was once told that authors can take on the personas of their characters while writing biographies of them. Did you find yourself writing as much of the book as possible in a subterranean lair and becoming, if you will, suspicious of strangers?

OK, on to policy. First question: Yes, Cheney fought for as much power as he could get. But, as some conservative friends chided me recently, what else is new in Washington? What's so uniquely reprehensible about Cheney, they argue. Rumsfeld and Cheney behaved this way in the Ford administration--something I think you could have gone into in greater detail, though I suppose you felt the book was long enough already!--and Bush knew what he was getting into. When Cheney overreached, Bush checked him. But Cheney was no villain. He was executing the president's vision, pushing an obdurate bureaucracy to get moving, and, in general, a loyal soldier. So what's the crime?

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Let me just say to begin with that it is flattering and daunting, in more or less equal parts, to talk about my new book on Vice President Cheney with four of its published critics: Jacob Heilbrunn in the NYT Book Review, Steve Clemons in the American Conservative, David Greenberg in Slate and Spencer Ackerman on his Attackerman blog. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, who critiqued excerpts of the book that appeared in The Washington Post, has also agreed to join this conversation. That's a rare and commendable departure from the norm these days of talking mainly to people who already agree. As a reader, I'd love to see more crosstalk among thinkers across the political divide. I want to thank TPMCafe for setting that example.

It's hard to know where to start a conversation about Cheney. In ANGLER, I make the claim that you can't understand what happened these last eight years without knowing how often the vice president took the helm. But it's just as vital to know about the times when President Bush grabbed the wheel and veered off Cheney's course. Bush really was the Decider -- when he knew what was happening -- and he lost some confidence in his Number Two when Cheney nearly drove him off a cliff in the closing months of the first term. That story, which takes up the two climactic chapters of ANGLER, is one among many we did not know until now. Hundreds of people, many of them speaking on the record about previously undisclosed events, gave interviews for the book (and its predecessor, a series I wrote with partner Jo Becker). This Book Club conversation will go wherever you all please. In the next few paragraphs I'll throw out some of the stories, questions and criticisms that have come up most often in broadcasts and public events these last two months:

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