BETWEEN THE BOOKENDS: A POLITICO-LITERARY REVIEW OF:
The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History, by John Nichols. New York: New Press, 2005. ISBN 1-59558-025-5
Many of us have awaited the book about Vice President Cheney, a book that would finally reveal what motivates this man standing at the right hand of Bush, what his real background is, and what his long-term political agenda has been and will be. This book by John Nichols does all these things very thoroughly. But the real surprise after reading it is that we realize we knew the answers all along. Another surprise is that this really does seem to be the serious book about Cheney. (Dick: The Man Who is President, also by Nichols, turns out be the title of the hardcover version of this book.) The fact that no one has yet published a serious pro-Cheney biography is yet another revelation.
When we look at Cheney's
c.v. and read between the lines, we can begin to understand a lot more about this unusual man.
POLITICAL: Vice President of the United States, 2001-present [Elected 2000; re-elected 2004]. US Secretary of Defense, 1989-93. US Congressman, 1979-89 (House Minority Whip, 1988-89) [Elected 1978; Re-Elected 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988]. White House Chief of Staff to President Ford, 1975-77. Deputy Assistant White House Chief of Staff to President Ford, 1974-75. Nixon Administration staff member, 1969-74.
PROFESSIONAL: Chairman/CEO, Halliburton Company, 1995-2000.
EDUCATION: Attended Yale University, 1959. B.A. (Political Science), University of Wyoming, 1965. M.A. (Political Science), University of Wyoming, 1966. Doctoral studies, University of Wisconsin, 1966-68.
PERSONAL: Born January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Married since 1964 to Lynne Vincent Cheney (Chair, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1986-1993; author; novelist; educator; conservative activist). Two grown daughters. Methodist. Suffered minor heart attacks in 1978, 1984, 1988 and 2000.
The Nichols book fleshes all this out for us. Cheney was the son of a middle-level functionary in the US Dept. of Agriculture, a Democrat, who wound up with an assignment in Wyoming. Young Dick Cheney attended Yale for only one semester before flunking out. He showed more interest in partying and being a hanger-on of Yale's not-so-famous football team than in studying. Then he went back to Wyoming and worked as an electric power lineman for quite a while. Nichols suggests that Cheney may have gone back to college again mainly because students got draft deferments, while electric linemen did not.
Cheney was also pressed to do so by his high school sweetheart, Lynne Vincent, who was ambitious and did not wish to be a lineman's wife. In high school Lynne Vincent had been a cheerleader and majorette, a highly talented one who was capable of winning state and even national competitions. Her major feat was to twirl a baton after she set the cloth ends on fire. Cheney literally carried water for her - she would fling the baton his way when it got to hot to handle, and he would douse the flames. Cheney was, and presumably has remained, her devoted follower, for all these years.
So he first attended a community college to rebuild his academic record, and then went on to get a Bachelor's degree, and even a Master's, at the University of Wyoming. He entered a Ph.D. program at the more prestigious University of Wisconsin, Madison. He later said he had thought he might even become a professor, but was put off by campus radicalism. People who knew him at the time, though, said he had no real interest in politics other than an opportunistic one, and that he dropped the Ph.D. program like a hot potato, when he got a chance to go to Washington as an aide-intern in the office of his local congressman.
Once ensconced in Washington, Cheney began working with Donald Rumsfeld, a young politician from Illinois who had a very different background. Rumsfeld was from an affluent family, did well at an Ivy League school, and served in the US Navy as a pilot. Rumsfeld had the connections and backing that Cheney lacked, so Cheney became Rumsfeld's aide-de-camp, sometimes paid and sometimes not, for the next three decades. Though regarded as a rising star in the Nixon White house, Rumsfeld was perhaps a bit too bluntly outspoken, as he is even today, so he was sent off as an ambassador to NATO in Western Europe, and his follower Cheney was also left out in the cold.
But not for long. Rumsfeld and Cheney had the benefit of being Nixon White house insiders - who had been sent away before the Watergate mess hit the fan. Rumsfeld, aided by Cheney, made a wonderful comeback as a close assistant to the newly selected President, Gerald Ford. They gradually got most of their rivals out of the way, including the formidable Kissinger. One rival for Ford's favor, Robert Hartmann, actually had a small office adjacent to the Oval Office, with 24/7 access to Ford (when Ford was there). Cheney solved this problem by persuading Ford that the small office should be redecorated, and turned into a snug Presidential study. Hartmann was moved to a new office far away.
Rumsfeld and Cheney decided to abandon some of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy of easing East-West tensions. They thought that if Ford were seen as too dovish by the Republican Right, the more hard-line Reagan would get the 1976 Presidential nomination away from Ford. These and other Cheney-Rumsfeld policies, according to Nichols, helped the Ford Administration fail to get re-elected. Nichols also thinks that Cheney's presence in the Bush I Administration helped that to fail, and that Cheney is now helping Bush II to fail. Nichols points out that of the Republican Presidents, only Reagan - without Cheney, made it through eight more or less successful years.
When Richard Cheney got hold of greater power under Bush I, he shared it with Lynne Cheney, helping her get made the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities when he was in his last term in Congress, and then became Secretary of Defense. She was not especially qualified for such a post- she had written a couple of books, one novel aptly called Executive Privilege : a Washington Novel, in 1979, and another steamy novel, Sisters, that anticipated Brokeback Mountain, 25 years ahead of its time. But Cheney himself had never been specially qualified for most of the posts he held, either.
In 1983 Richard and Lynne had co-authored Kings of the Hill: Power and Personality in the House of Representatives, a history of House leadership, at a time when Dick thought he might become Speaker and needed some extra credentials. It should also be said that after she was Endowment Chair, Lynne started writing serious books, retrospectively qualifying herself. It seems quite probable that Lynne Cheney is the real power behind Richard B. She turned a dropout electric lineman into one of the most important political figures in the world today, like it or not. If she had been a member of Hillary Clinton's generation, she might have become a major political figure in her own right. As it is, she seems to be the power behind the throne. She may be abrasive at times, and one-sided in her thinking. But, unlike her husband, she does at least have a distinct and outgoing personality.
It seems remarkable that there are no more than a dozen publications devoted to Cheney listed in the Library of Congress, and most of these are pamphlets or posters.
There seems to be no other recent book, apart from this one by Nichols, devoted exclusively to this powerful man, apart from the irreverent Cheney Code, by Henry Beard, actually a farce by design, low on facts and high on humor. Another, even less substantial Cheney humor book is Loving the Cheney Within: A Recovery Manual, by Jeremy Hutchins. There seems to be only one admiring study of Cheney, Dick Cheney Vice President: A Life of Public Service, by Elaine Andrews - but on closer examination it turns out to be a children's book, less than 50 pages long, which has been criticized as a children's book on the grounds that it includes various spelling and grammatical errors, in its already slim text.
Republicans should be persistently asked why they have not produced a serious book about this leader of theirs.