Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

"Angler was the secret service codename given to Dick Cheney. It’s a book about Dick Cheney, and particularly Dick Cheney in the White House, that details his efforts to increase presidential power. The way in which 9/11 was used to produce a dramatic increase in presidential power is an important part of the post-9/11 story. Gellman shows that amassing power for the presidency was a deep interest of Cheney’s, going back to his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when he saw presidential power as far too weak. Gellman shows in incredible detail the way Cheney was able to use the crisis of 9/11 to eat away at the constitutional restraints on presidential power in quite frightening ways. No, I don’t think it’s retained it. I think Cheney’s was an extraordinarily, maybe unprecedentedly, powerful vice presidency. Maybe because of the experience gap between the president and vice president and because Cheney, with his wealth of relationships and experience, was able to put in key positions a lot of people who were much closer to him. While Bush was close to Condi Rice it was Cheney who was close to Rumsfeld and Armitage. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There has been, in general, a trend towards more influential vice presidents. Al Gore was a pretty influential vice president. Joe Biden is a pretty influential vice president. Presidents have started to find it useful to think about the vice president as useful counselors. But Cheney’s relative power was an aberration. The post-9/11 era may have ended a little earlier, with the midterm election of 2006. By then the public lost the stomach for the wars. The Democratic Party launched a strong frontal assault on Bush foreign policy. But Bush foreign policy also just petered out. Declining violence took Iraq off front pages. There was a renewed debate about Afghanistan in the first Obama years but, given the financial crisis, we’ve moved into a much more domestically and economically focused political era starting in 2008. “There has been, in general, a trend towards more influential vice presidents but Cheney’s relative power was an aberration.” Since then we’ve seen a strange inversion of the post-9/11 focus on fighting Islamic threats abroad – a rise in isolationism and a more inward-looking focus. In this new isolationist era you see an almost paranoid focus on threats from home – the struggle over the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero and the conservative hysteria about sharia [Islamic law]. But, in general, I would say the salience of foreign policy and the War on Terror have dramatically declined. The Tea Party is pretty uninterested in these things. Sadly, I don’t think 9/11 made us better. It changed the direction of American public life in a way that produced some benefits. For instance, it produced an ephemeral sense of national unity that helped lessen racism directed toward African-Americans, reinforcing a trend that emerged in the 1990s. In a way, 9/11 helped to lay the predicate for Barack Obama ’s election. But racist and xenophobic instincts were too often turned towards Muslims and immigrants. The opportunity to make us better was wasted. For instance, the faith that Americans put in government after 9/11 was short-lived due to the incompetence and dishonesty that was a feature of Bush foreign policy. Although an extraordinary burden was placed on people in the American military, Americans were not called to common sacrifice. And, most profoundly, an enormous amount of American resources and focus was diverted to the War on Terror. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter George W Bush was wrong when he said that the War on Terror was the defining struggle of our age. It looked that way in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to many people – including myself. But I think now it’s clear that the defining struggle of our age is not with the losers in the international system, people like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, who have no vision of a society that anyone would want to live in. The defining struggle of our age is with the emerging winners of the international system – places like China and India that are challenging our way of life by showing they’re able to have prosperity on a pretty wide scale. Aside from the loss of human life that has resulted from the wars waged, the greatest tragedy of post-9/11 American politics is that we were diverted from doing the kinds of things we needed to do at home – improving our infrastructure, our regulatory system and our public finances – that would have put us in a better position for the struggles ahead."