'Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency' by Barton Gellman'
BOOK REVIEW
The book, which grew out of a Pulitzer Prize- winning series in the Washington Post, paints Cheney as a man driven not by ego, but by his ideas.
IF YOU decide to reorganize your library, it probably won't take much of a shelf to accommodate all your vice presidential biographies.
There are, of course, plenty of books about men who served as vice presidents. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, among others, come easily to mind. Their stories, however, tend to focus on what happened before and after their occupancy of the nation's second-highest executive office.
Barton Gellman's carefully reported and vigorously written account of Dick Cheney's role in George W. Bush's administration, "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," is unique because the subject and his conduct in office are singular. No previous vice president has wielded the sort of influence and exercised the sort of power Cheney has for most of the last eight years. It now seems likely, in fact, that many -- perhaps most -- of the policies and initiatives for which the Bush administration will be remembered originated with Cheney and his hand-picked, like-minded, fiercely loyal staff.
The general outlines of Gellman's account of what ought to be called the Bush-Cheney administration will be familiar to anyone who follows national news closely, because the book grew out of a lengthy series of Pulitzer Prize-winning reports the author and then-partner Jo Becker produced for the Washington Post. Arranging those reports in narrative fashion, however, creates immensely valuable clarity and perspective and enables Gellman to supplement his reportage with information gleaned by Post colleague Bob Woodward, the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and the New Yorker's Jane Mayer and Sy Hersh.
The Cheney who emerges from Gellman's portrait is something rare in American politics -- a man who systematically sought power because he was ambitious for his ideas rather than himself. Indeed, despite all the muttering that's occurred over the years about Cheney's connections to his former employer, Halliburton, and to the oil and gas industries, Gellman shows conclusively that he never profited from either. In other words, in an era, and setting, in which venal self-dealing is virtually a given, Cheney's record is free of taint.
