Cheney’s memoir: Coming down on Bush

So much for “the most secretive vice president of modern times,” said Robert Cornwell in the London Independent. Dick Cheney is working on a memoir of his time in the Bush administration, The Washington Post reported last week, and Cheney’s targets include President Bush himself—whom Cheney accuses of “going soft.” It’s a startling charge, said Barton Gellman in The Washington Post, because if there is one thing Cheney reveres more than secrecy, it is loyalty. But aides to Cheney say the former vice president simply cannot stay quiet about what he considers the “moral weakness” of the administration’s second term. In suspending the use of torture, seeking congressional approval for domestic surveillance, and refusing to pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Bush, in Cheney’s view, made “concessions to public sentiment” that revealed the president as just “an ordinary politician.”

Clearly, the basic precepts of democracy still elude this man, said William McKenzie in The Dallas Morning News. For eight long years, the brooding Cheney behaved as if the vice presidency were a fourth branch of government, accountable to no one. Now in retirement, he can’t figure out why Bush allowed himself to be swayed by public opinion, seemingly unaware that in a democracy “our governors derive their consent from the governed.” Cheney also can’t seem to grasp, said Jason Zengerle in TheNewRepublic.com, that Bush may have stopped taking his advice because it was lousy. From the disastrous war in Iraq to the sullying of America’s image around the globe, Cheney and his neocon cabal “made such a hash of things” during the first Bush term that the president had little choice but to tune them out.

Cheney’s wait for vindication “will be a very long one,” said Jay Bookman in AtlantaJournalConstitution.com. But it could at least be time to stop questioning his motives. Cheney’s critics have always insisted that his real goal was to accumulate raw power and line the pockets of his cronies in the business world. But based on the early reports about his memoir, it’s clear that Cheney was focused to the point of obsession on the terrorist threat to the United States—as he

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was right to be. No matter what one thinks of Cheney, said Richard Sammon in Kiplinger.com, he was probably “the most powerful vice president in American history.” Cheney could now be on the verge of making history in another way: writing a book about being vice president that many people will actually want to read.