The Powerful Mr. Cheney
This week Barton Gellman and Jo Becker of The Washington Post are presenting an extraordinarily deep portrait of Dick Cheney. Their "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency" runs for four days and shows with terrific details how Cheney has accumulated and wielded power in a way that no other vice president has done before. Relying on interviews with more than 200 people, Gellman and Becker fill their stories with scenes describing how Cheney has bent the machinery of government to his will on matters of war, terrorism, budgets and the environment:
The vice president's unseen victories attest to traits that are often ascribed to him but are hard to demonstrate from the public record: thoroughgoing secrecy, persistence of focus, tactical flexibility in service of rigid aims and close knowledge of the power map of government. On critical decisions for more than six years, Cheney has often controlled the pivot points -- tipping the outcome when he could, engineering stalemate when he could not and reopening debates that rivals thought were resolved.
Tuesday's story, for example, details how Cheney was able to make an end run around National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to allow extreme interrogation methods against detainees considered enemy combatants. Researcher Julie Tate contributed to the project. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/