Who is David Addington?
BLAKE ESKIN: Most people have never heard of David Addington. Why is he important enough to be the subject of such an in-depth piece?
JANE MAYER: Addington has been the single most influential legal thinker, according to other Administration lawyers, in shaping the Bush Administration's legal response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He has left almost no paper trail, and has avoided all public scrutiny--as far as I know, he's granted no interviews to reporters, and he even avoids having his photo taken by the press. It seemed important to me to hold the creator of these policies accountable, so that the public could understand better who is behind them and how he thinks.
How did David Addington get to know Vice-President Cheney, and how long have they worked together?
They met on Capitol Hill in the mid-eighties, when Cheney was a Republican congressman from Wyoming and Addington was a young staff lawyer working for the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. So they have worked together for about two decades. Their partnership was cemented when they worked together on the Minority Report on the Iran-Contra affair. Both Addington and Cheney took the idiosyncratic position that it was Congress, not President Reagan, that was in the wrong. This view reflected the opinion, held by both men, that the executive branch should run foreign policy, to a great extent unimpeded by Congress. It's a recurring theme--pushing the limits of executive power and sidestepping Congress--in their partnership. One example is their position that the President, as Commander-in-Chief in times of war, had the inherent authority to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in an effort to make sure that Presidents don't violate citizens' right to privacy by spying on them without warrants.
After meeting and working together in Congress, Cheney and Addington continued their partnership at the Pentagon, where, during the Presidency of George H. W. Bush, Cheney was Secretary of Defense and Addington was his special assistant and, later, general counsel. There, Addington was known as a powerhouse, a stickler who controlled access to Cheney and marked up others' memos in red felt-tipped pen, returning the memos for rewrites that would make them sharper--and more protective of executive power.
At the Pentagon, the two exhibited a similar pessimism about world affairs, in particular about the possibility that Mikhail Gorbachev represented true change, and also an unusually deep interest in "continuity of government" planning--how the government survives in the event of a doomsday attack. Addington kept the constitutional provisions for Presidential succession in his pocket at all times, a colleague told me.
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