A vice president with unprecedented power

What the vice president appears to have been after from the start was the power to redirect a national government he believed he had watched go badly astray while serving as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. The legislative and judicial restraints imposed on the imperial presidency in the post-Vietnam period were, in Cheney's estimation, a fundamental historical mistake. That impression was reinforced when he reentered government as President George H.W. Bush's secretary of Defense. In the years after that, Cheney found a theory to fit his conclusions -- the so-called Unitary Executive concept popular among members of the conservative Federalist Society -- and seems to have conceived a method by which it could be implemented, stealth.

As Gellman sketches things, Cheney -- assigned by Bush to vet his vice presidential hopefuls -- made the process so bureaucratically burdensome for the obvious candidates that the choice fell naturally and effortlessly on him. In this, as in the years ahead, the vice president functioned as the "ultimate staff man" -- the powerfully knowledgeable insider, pulling unseen levers with an invisible hand. He also made sure that he salted the incoming administration's various departments and agencies with well-situated loyalists and helped select a presidential staff that was less experienced and assertive than his own.

And he did it all without leaving tracks. As Gellman writes:

"Cheney, at bottom, did not promote secrecy for fear of embarrassment. Neither his advisers nor their advice embarrassed him. Cheney favored stealth, in part, because it gave him practical advantages. . . . It was easier to win a battle when the opponents did not show up. For the vice president, however, there was a much larger question of principle at stake.

"In Cheney's estimation, a president's authority was close to absolute within his rightful sphere. Congress and courts had their own spheres, separate and unshared. With its very first word, Article II of the Constitution vested 'the' executive power in the president. Like other advocates of a 'unitary executive,' Cheney believed that the president's inherent functions -- command of the Army and Navy, direction of the Cabinet, execution of the law -- were indivisible. Exercise of those powers was beyond the reach, in principle, of legislative or judicial review."