By 2008, the Bush Book had become one of my favorite genres. Looking back at the series of bestsellers and almost-bestsellers produced to feed the public hunger for knowledge about a presidential administration that demanded as much blind public support as it was notoriously uncommunicative, the titles alone reveal a lot about how public opinion and the mood of the Bush Administration itself rose and fell over eight long years. From Bob Woodward’s Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004) to Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s Hubris (2006) to Jacob Weisberg’s The Bush Tragedy (2008), the titles chart the spectacular rise in the aftermath of 9/11, the rebuke that was the 2006 midterm elections, and the humiliating two years of lame-duck status.
Published just two months before Barack Obama’s election, Barton Gellman’s Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency is a late but worthy addition to the Bush Book canon. It’s based on a series of Washington Post articles for which Gellman and co-author Jo Becker received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for reporting; it is full of details about the mechanisms that Cheney used to seize power during Bush’s first term and lose it in his second term that will surprise neophytes and Bush Book fanboys alike.
Furthermore, Angler can fairly be termed a postmodern Bush Book, in the same way that Unforgiven, critical as it is of the Western genre, could be termed a postmodern Western and the hyperreferential Buffy the Vampire Slayer could be termed postmodern horror. Like both of those—themselves late additions to their respective genres—Angler winks at the audience knowingly when it makes use of the clichés that have become associated with the Bush Book genre.
That said, it is because Angler can’t avoid certain Bush Book tropes that it ultimately proves frustrating, even if its self-aware approach works for much of the time.
By now, it should come as no surprise when Gellman writes, “Cheney’s most troubling quality was a sense of mission so acute that it drove him to seek power without limit.” Yet the Cheney of Angler also has a sense of humor: He knows how the public views him, and Gellman stops just short of suggesting that Cheney actually enjoys it. In a chapter entitled “Dark Side”, Gellman takes one of Cheney’s most infamous post-9/11 pronouncements—“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will”—and puts it in the broadest pop-cultural context. “The Dark Side meant something in popular culture,” Gellman writes. “Twenty-four years after its debut, the Star Wars movie franchise had brought an enduring vocabulary to American politics.” Gellman then goes on to note that “by 2007, Cheney was dressing his dog as the Lord of the Sith for Halloween and alluding to Vader as a warm-up joke in speeches.”
Angler is full of moments like these, in which Gellman comes close to a statement about the person who Cheney is at his very core—the essence of the man—but then pulls back. Does this mean that Cheney actually enjoyed thinking of himself as Darth Vader? We don’t know. We can’t know. Similarly, Gellman makes much of a dramatic pause by Cheney in the middle of a 1986 conference speech. Here, Cheney is talking about his experience with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, during Cheney’s Ford Administration days, when suddenly he stops. The implication is that Cheney has had a light-bulb moment:
“And by virtue of the fact he [the Vice President] is a constitutional officer, that he isn’t subject to the same kinds of—”
Cheney stopped and rewound the sentence. Point was, even the president could not fire the vice.
“—that it’s a different relationship, that other staff people will sometimes defer to him as vice president …”
This moment comes as Gellman is explaining at length Cheney’s conception of the Presidency, the Vice Presidency, and how they both fit into Cheney’s theory of the unitary executive. While the Cheney of 1986 was skeptical about how to integrate a VP into White House decision-making, the Cheney of 2000 had already decided that the VP’s role as a constitutional officer made him so hard to control, so impossible to discipline, that it might be the ideal job for him.
That is not what makes this passage so entertaining, though. It’s fun because it takes the reader right up to the edge of thinking that Cheney is the kind of person who actually makes life decisions this way. Standing in front of a huge group of people, making a speech when suddenly inspiration strikes.
Is this true? Did Cheney actually have a eureka experience while giving a speech about the Ford White House in 1986? Maybe, maybe not. Here, as in the Darth Vader passage, Gellman changes the subject before he can either confirm or deny the impression that he has given the reader.
In moments like these, the reader of Angler is forced to decide between two Cheneys. There is the Cheney of the public record, and Cheney the cartoon character, a staggeringly odd man whose behavior and innermost thoughts defy description in any but the most parodic, exaggerated, comic terms.
The external, serious, political Cheney and this mysterious other Cheney almost unite in what is probably Angler’s centerpiece, a conversation between Gellman and Republican Congressman Dick Armey (R-Texas). Armey explains how, as House Majority Leader in 2002, he was skeptical about the merits of invading Iraq, and Cheney met with him in private to discuss intelligence that Cheney claimed had not yet been shared either with the public or Congress. “The vice president was ready to open the bag, let Armey in on secrets he had never heard before,” Gellman writes; and in what follows, the implication is that Cheney, faced with the prospect of revolt by a leading member of his own party, took as his last resort outright fiction: “Cheney leveled claims he had not made before and would not make again. Two of them crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation.”
Toward the end of Angler, Gellman attempts to be even-handed in the summary that he provides of Cheney as presented in the foregoing book. For whatever else Cheney might have done, the man also exhibits a brand of incorruptibility suggestive of true ideological conviction: “Cheney had defended the nation and the powers of its commander in chief. He fought the fight and never bent and did what had to be done,” simple as that.
But this is hardly consistent with the Cheney that, as Gellman and Armey himself suggest, actually had the audacity to make up an entirely fictitious nuclear-holocaust scenario to ensure Armey’s loyalty when the war authorization went to a vote. After the meeting ended, Armey recalls, “I remember leaving the meeting with a very deep sadness about my relationship with Dick Cheney … I felt like I deserved better from Cheney than to be bullshitted by him.”
Like many other moments in Angler, this one is revealing and the depth of Gellman’s research is impressive. Also like other moments in Angler, however, it takes the reader to a point where all that she is really left with is a profound sense of foreboding. It intimates about the real Cheney, Cheney’s essence as a man, but in the end nothing is stated for certain.As we have seen, Angler incorporates these moments of uncertainty into its style to powerful effect, but the aesthetic lemonade that Gellman makes from the lack of crucial information—despite Gellman’s many interviews with high-ranking sources—doesn’t make Angler feel any less incomplete.
These gaps and the speculation that they make possible are what separate a mere Bush Book from a comprehensive account such as Robert Caro’s Robert Moses biography The Power Broker. Inasmuch as Angler earns itself a position among the genre’s best, the sad fact is that we will have to wait before Cheney finally gets the Caro treatment. The ultimate trope of the Bush Book genre is, after all, the fact that they were published while Bush, Cheney, and the rest were still in power. For the time being, at least we can say that Cheney’s rule is history, and that’s progress.