A vice president with unprecedented power

It was a theory George W. Bush -- possessed, by all accounts, of a decidedly unreflective mind -- found convenient and was only too happy to encourage Cheney to implement. Thus, the vice president exercised unprecedented and unsupervised power over not only national security issues but also the budget, energy policies and environmental issues. Gellman's meticulous reconstruction of Cheney's decisive intervention in the controversy over water in Oregon's Klamath River basin is a particularly sharp portrait of the vice president's methods in operation.

On the question of the war in Iraq and why Cheney pushed for it as he did, Gellman adds critical insight. Whether the vice president believed that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction is an open question, though it is clear that he knowingly lied about U.S. intelligence in this regard. What he did believe was that the war was winnable and, therefore, would make a valuable "demonstration" of U.S. power that would deter any other hostile nation from allowing itself to become a "nexus" of common purpose with the Islamic extremists who attacked New York and suburban Washington, D.C., on 9/11. The possibility of such a "nexus" was, in Cheney's view, the great threat to American security. He embraced the neo-conservatives' notion of the U.S. as liberator, bringing democratic regime change to the Mideast, as a convenient rhetorical counterweight to Jihadist propaganda. Personally, he doubted democracy even was possible in the Middle East.

Another of the details Gellman teases out is Cheney's propensity for seeking private advice from the conservative fringe. The night after the Senate debate over authorizing force against Iraq, the vice president asked conservative military historian Victor Davis Hanson to address a small dinner salon at his official residence. The topic was to be "the roles of leaders in unpopular wars." A specialist on the ancient Greeks, Hanson "cited Hellenic philosophy. War was 'innate to civilizations,' a terrible thing, but not necessarily unjust. Citizens often faltered, putting leaders to the test."

When mulling tax questions -- Cheney sought to abolish levies on dividends, estates and many corporate profits -- the vice president sought the advice of supply side economist Larry Kudlow, who was fired from his job as Bear Stearns' chief economist as a result of alcohol and drug abuse and, after rehab, reestablished himself as a flamboyant television commentator.