A vice president with unprecedented power

Just 24 hours before, Cheney's old friend, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, the Republicans' majority leader in the House, had wavered over whether to vote for war. The vice president took him aside in a room off the House floor and bludgeoned him with what subsequently turned out to be a series of lies about Hussein's capabilities and intentions.

Much of the publicity around Gellman's book has centered on how Cheney and his chief aide, David Addington, triggered what turned out to be a lawyers' revolt over plans to unilaterally adopt a program of torture and domestic spying that the Justice Department, FBI, Office of Legal Counsel and the lawyers for all the intelligence agencies believed was illegal. Had Bush not intervened at the last moment -- and almost by accident -- the administration would have suffered an unprecedented mass resignation, something Cheney and the loyal Addington were prepared to accept, Gellman writes.

Indeed, one of the insights "Angler" provides is how the vice president and his staff already had created a kind of national security state in miniature within the White House, secretly intercepting and reading colleagues' e-mails as well as NSA intercepts of operatives' conversations abroad.

Armey, still smarting from his old friend's blatant deception, told Gellman that he believes history will treat Bush and Cheney "unkindly in equal part." That's true, though probably for different reasons. Somehow, the verdict that seems most appropriate in the vice president's case is the one Grant delivered on Lee, whose immense abilities simply amplified the awful destruction of the historical moment in which he found himself. Lee, Grant said, had served his cause with the full measure of devotion, "though I believe that cause to be the worst to which any man ever gave himself."

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com