Dick: The Man Who Is President – John Nichols

Dick: The Man Who Is President – John Nichols, The New Press (2004) 248pp. (S) *****

For those who have been patiently, yet eagerly awaiting, this book is a genuine treat. Never before has someone who has occupied the number two spot at the Presidency, commanded and executed as much power as Richard B. Cheney, a man who Nichols describes as “a shadowy Zelig figure.” From his beginnings in the Ford administration, where he and a precocious Donald Rumsfeld formed a dynamic duo that ousted Robert Hartmann, then proceeded to go after Kissinger, and ultimately pushed to have Nelson Rockefeller dumped from the ’76 ticket, Cheney is a man who “at the heart of [his] calculus . . . is a complex determination to exercise power with the purpose of attaining more power.”(p. 192) More recently, Nichols writes that “everyone knew that George W. Bush would need a minder. It was not that he was stupid per se, just careless. He had broken just about everything he had ever touched – including four oil industry firms and the state of Texas.”(p. 165) To which Cheney’s job is described thusly, “Cheney plays the role of ideological commissar, constricting and manipulating the flow of information and ideas to conform to his political and personal purposes.”(p. 119) It could be said that Cheney serves as an information filter to the presidency, whereby the presidency is greatly sheltered and insulated.

Not only does Cheney so devotedly serve his superiors, but he also demonstrates a remarkable penchant for self-promotion and aggrandizement (as his heading of Bush’s vice-presidential search committee clearly indicates – he having selected himself as the most qualified candidate). In 1992, as secretary of defense, he commissioned Halliburton to do a study on the efficacy of privatizing elements of the military. Of course, as CEO of Halliburton, after a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Cheney went ahead to implement just such a policy of privatization, dealing along the way with the likes of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, and Nigeria in the 1995 to 2000 time period. Later, during the 2000 transition period “Cheney was grabbing so much power so quickly that he worked himself up to another heart attack.”(p. 166)

During the early and mid 1980s, Cheney’s Congressional voting record was more conservative than Gingrich’s, and rivaled Jesse Helm’s in the Senate. As a member of the House committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, Cheney provided a “fifth column” for the Reagan administration, siding with the expansion of executive power at the direct expense of legislative power. As secretary of defense under Bush Sr., he and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz went to Saudi Arabia to present leaders there with cooked satellite images showing Iraqi troops at their border. It was also at this time that “Operation Scorpion” was hatched in the Pentagon, a plan that would have taken out Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. In 1992, at Cheney’s behest, Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad worked on a document entitled “Defense Planning Guidance” that for the first time introduced the policy objective of “preemption.” Unfortunately for Cheney, this paper was leaked to the New York Times and was met with displeasure by his superiors at the White House. Thus the kernel was sown for the second Gulf War.

Despite its campy jacket cover with vibrant colors and Nichols’ sometimes penchant to play the joker and to keep the tone light, his subject matter could not be more serious. All too frequently, in the popular, unthinking media but also in the more sophisticated press as well, Bush is given precedence in coverage, as if policy begins and ends with he alone. What Nichols has graciously done is to tear apart this façade to expose the proverbial “man behind the curtain.” Dick Cheney is that man.