Leaving Regrets to Others, Vice President Dick Cheney Speaks

August 26, 2011

www.nytimes.com

NY Time Book Review

Dick Cheney: In My Time

By Michiko Kakutani

Published: August 25, 2011

IN MY TIME
A Personal and Political Memoir
By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney
Illustrated. 565 pages. Threshold Editions. $35.

In an interview on NBCs Dateline, former Vice President Dick Cheney says that his new book, In My Time, will have heads exploding all over Washington. Whatever readers think of Mr. Cheneys politics, their heads are more likely to explode from frustration than from any sense of revelation. Indeed, the memoir delivered in dry, often truculent prose turns out to be mostly a predictable mix of spin, stonewalling, score settling and highly selective reminiscences.

The book, written with his daughter Liz, reiterates Mr. Cheneys aggressive approach to foreign policy and his hard-line views on national security, while sidestepping questions about many of the Bush administrations more controversial decisions, either by cherry-picking information (much the way critics say the White House cherry-picked intelligence in making the case to go to war against Iraq) or by hopping and skipping over awkward subjects with loudly voiced assertions. Its ironic that Mr. Cheney who succeeded in promulgating so many of his policy ideas through his sheer mastery of bureaucratic detail should have written a book that is often so lacking in detail that it feels like a blurred photograph.

Mr. Cheney writes that the liberation of Iraq was one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bushs presidency never mind the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that were cited as a chief reason for the invasion, or a botched occupation that allowed an insurgency to metastasize for years. He describes Guantnamo as a model facility safe, secure, and humane and writes that the C.I.A.s program of enhanced interrogation techniques was safe, legal, and effective. As for Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Cheney praises President Bush for personally dedicating hundreds of hours not only to ensuring an effective federal response but to reaching out to people who needed to know that their government cared about them.

The famously tight-lipped Mr. Cheney does serve up some interesting tidbits in these pages. We learn that the undisclosed locations at which he spent so much time were often Camp David or the vice presidents residence; that he wrote a letter of resignation dated March 28, 2001, and told an aide to give it to the president were he ever to suffer a heart attack or stroke that left him incapacitated; and that he spent several weeks unconscious in 2010 after heart surgery.

In addition to genuinely moving accounts of his health difficulties, there are some affectionate portraits of family members in these pages, and an apology of sorts to his friend Harry Whittington, whom he shot in the face while quail hunting: I, of course, was deeply sorry for what Harry and his family had gone through. The day of the hunting accident was one of the saddest of my life.

In fact, the tartest sections of this book reflect Mr. Cheneys frustration when things did not g! o his wa y. Although he is, for the most part, complimentary about President Bush (hailing him as a visceral and forthright commander who strengthened all of us with his conviction), he assumes a faintly patronizing tone in talking about cases in which Mr. Bush failed to take his advice: rejecting, say, his recommendation in June 2007 that the United States bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site to send an important message not only to the Syrians and North Koreans, but also to the Iranians.

In addition, Mr. Cheney gripes that the presidents siding with Ms. Rice on questions relating to North Korea seemed out of keeping with the clearheaded way Id seen him make decisions in the past, and notes that Mr. Bush did not consult him in late 2006 about naming Robert M. Gates to replace Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom hed previously described to the president as doing a tremendous job.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld had been friends and operational allies since their days together in the Ford administration (where the two honed their skills at bureaucratic maneuvering), and in these pages Mr. Cheney remains firmly in denial about the Pentagons mishandling of the Iraq war, from Mr. Rumsfelds determination to conduct it on the cheap with a light, fast force, which proved insufficient to restore law and order, to his reluctance to correct course later on.

The former vice president tries to focus blame on the State Department for the lack of postwar planning, even though it has been widely reported that its Future of Iraq blueprints were sidelined by the Pentagon, and he insists that he thought the insurgents were in the last throes in 2005, even though there had been myriad warnings from both military and civilian sources that things were spiraling ou! t of con trol.

Just as reporters and former administration insiders have noted that dissenting opinions tended to be unwelcome in the Bush White House, so Mr. Cheney demonstrates here a distinct antipathy toward people who opposed him on matters of policy. Colin L. Powell who clashed with Mr. Cheney over Iraq and who was characterized in one of Bob Woodwards books as thinking that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact is repeatedly dissed in this volume. Mr. Cheney says he thought it was for the best that President Bush had accepted Mr. Powells resignation as secretary of state in 2004; he says that Mr. Powell handled policy differences not by voicing objections in meetings, but by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government.

Treasury Secretary Paul ONeill, who opposed the big tax cuts favored by Mr. Cheney, is treated similarly brusquely much the way he was dismissed from his job in December 2002. Mr. Cheney does not discuss Mr. ONeills concern that such tax cuts might lead to a dangerous deficit; rather, he makes the following odd argument, which ratifies other administration insiders views that the policy-making process in the Bush administration was both dysfunctional and ad hoc:

Economic policy was being run out of the White House, and meetings to make big decisions often did not include the Treasury secretary. ONeill should have demanded as Hank Paulson would later demand to be included in any White House meeting about economic policy. On the other hand, either the presid! ent or I could have said: Wheres ONeill? We should not be having this meeting without the treasury secretary.

During Mr. Cheneys tenure as vice president, there was considerable discussion among journalists and his former colleagues about whether the man whod once worked for Gerald Ford and George Herbert Walker Bush had changed over the years becoming more hawkish, more ideological or more given to doomsday scenarios because of his multiple heart attacks, because hed made common cause with neo-conservatives, or simply because his political views had evolved.

Mr. Cheney maintains in this book that he hasnt changed at all, that its the world that has changed since 9/11. He also says he told Mr. Bush, then governor, during discussions about his joining the ticket that he needed to understand how deeply conservative I was: He said, Dick, we know that. And I said, No, I mean really conservative.

On substantive matters of policy, however, this volume tends to rehash well-known debates even as it circumvents important questions. Mr. Cheney offers no real explanation for why the Bush administration did not do more to try to prevent the 9/11 attacks, given the warnings from the counterterrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, and an Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence brief titled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

He does not explain why he said in 1994 that the United States was right not to go all the way to Baghdad to oust Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War because that would have resulted in a quagmire, but foresaw no such complications in 2003. And while Mr. Cheney discusses how his views on the importance of executive power developed during the Iran-Contra scandal, he sheds little light on how he and his legal adviser and chief of staff, David S. Addington, would set about realizing this doctrine after 9/11.

George W. Bush, Mr. Cheney writes, had a strong sense of his own strengths and weaknesses, and in a vice president was looking for someone who could help him govern, a person with ! experien ce in the kind of national security and foreign policy issues he knew every president must face.

One of the few insights he delivers here about his own role as Oval Office gatekeeper as the one who framed policy choices for the decider concerns the Presidents Daily Brief, or P.D.B., which contains reports on the most critical intelligence issues of the day.

Mr. Cheney recalls that he was usually briefed around 6:30 a.m., before joining the president for his briefing; in addition to the material the president got, Mr. Cheney received extra material, including responses to questions Id asked or items my briefers knew I was interested in; on at least one occasion, he says, he would have the briefer add some of this bonus material to what the president saw.

In the last years of the Bush administration, the power of the most powerful vice president in history waned, as his predictions about Iraq turned sour, as the Supreme Court repudiated the White House on executive power and detainee rights, and as Mr. Cheneys own approval ratings slid to 13 percent. The man whom Karl Rove nicknamed Management (as in better check with Management) and whom the C.I.A. referred to as Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen, puppet master of Charlie McCarthy) began to take a back seat to more moderate voices in the administration, like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whom Mr. Cheney depicts in these pages as nave and inexperienced in her efforts to reach a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea.

A version of this review appeared in print on August 26, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Leaving Regrets To Others, Cheney Speaks.

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