It's pretty telling that we as a nation, in our search to find analogies to describe the current occupant of Blair House, have been forced to turn to over-the-top characters from sci-fi movies – it's as though we don't have extreme examples of outrageous vileness already extant in our history.
Thing is, we do: some of Dick Cheney's predecessors have been every bit as diabolical as he is. Perhaps it's a matter of convenience - the image of Darth Vader is both universally known and recognizable at a Jungian level for its association with evil – but really, we don't need to be traveling to the space-scapes of our imaginations to find examples of descents into inhumanity and boundless imperial ambition. A simple walk down History Lane will suffice, and truthfully, the exercise might do us some good, since relying too greatly on fictional hyperbole carries with it risks of its own.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll see that murderous conniving and treasonous plotting are not, alas, character traits that are entirely new to the Vice Presidency. And maybe, just maybe, we can start to wean ourselves of the sloppiness of analogy that the Dark Lord of the Sith has hitherto provided.
Far be it from your resident historiorantologist to argue against hyperbole in its entirety; I've (cough, cough) used a bit myself, now and then. When it's recognizable as snark, hyperbole can serve as a kind of literary shorthand, not to mention being pretty funny. A well-placed "Darth Cheney" joke or Photoshopped pics of the Vice President peering out from beneath the cowl of the Emperor and shooting lightning bolts from his fingertips at his protégé are amusing, but like all hyperbole, those depictions run the risk of becoming the standard view instead of the outrageous comparisons they were intended to be. I would propose that Lynne Cheney's appearance on The Daily Show effectively co-opted the Vader analogy...
(link to Dailyshow.com accounting of the Lynne Cheney interview here. Sorry for no embed)
...in the same way that Dana Carvey's gentle, "stay the course/not gonna doit" mocking of Bush 41 moved phrases like "unleash an orgy of death in the desert" and "400,000 brave American soldiers await my order to annihilate Iraq" into a realm of tee-hee, faux-savvy acceptability:
In a sense, the ability to recognize this simplest of satires became a badge of astuteness to people who exist in the USA Today/CNN world of political discourse, and therein lay its danger: it made disengaged folks think that they were cagily seeing behind the real rhetoric of war, that they were in on the whole "wag the dog" thing, as it were. So it was that when a few of us made noise in opposition to the use of the U.S. military to, in all its Metternich-ness, re-establish a conquered monarchy and enforce some kind of vague Concert of Southwest Asia, we were dismissed with a casual "Aw, that's what all y'all think this is about."
I don't want that to happen with Mr. Cheney's legacy. Here we have a chance to capture, preserve, and study through history a true relic: a 21st-century power monger with a genuinely Antebellum sense of ethics. After we impeach him, we should take ownership of the abysmal precedents he has set; we should study him in the way that we now look at the first Vice President to shoot a guy after being entrusted with patrician authority by the voting populace.
Unlikely Soulmates
Aaron Burr's early life was nothing like that of Dick Cheney – it's not until much later in their respective lives that the coincidences, gun-related and otherwise, start cropping up. Burr's grandfather was Great Awakening superstar Johnathan "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" Edwards, and his father, a formidable preacher in his own right, was one of the founders of what would eventually become Princeton University. Young Burr was smart: he entered his paw's school when he was only 13, though regrettably Aaron Burr, Sr. wasn't around to see it – he had died when Aaron was very young, and as a consequence the kid had been raised by an ultra-strict uncle. Though he trained to be a preacher (graduated Princeton at age 16), Aaron wound up gravitating toward the law until he heard a most un-Cheneylike call to arms during the Revolutionary War.
Cheney was born in Nebraska, but moved with his family to Casper, Wyoming, when he was still in elementary school (q.v. Lil' Bush). His father was a soil conservation agent for the Department of Agriculture – yeah, that's right: big government put the food on young Dick's table – and his mom played softball for the 1934-36 Nebraska State Champion Syracuse Bluebirds. He met his wife, Lynne, in high school, and contrary to Republican SOP, has stood by the only wedding vows he ever took. At least in this regard, Cheney seems Burr's moral superior, as the latter was known to take up with other men's wives.
Mr. Cheney's curriculum vitae are as checkered as his regard for basic Constitutional liberties. He flunked out of Yale, then dodged and deferred his way to a B.A. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Wyoming. Later, he dallied in doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but it turned out he had "other priorities" besides finishing the PhD program. All's well that ends well, though: Brigham Young University debased itself (and, by extension, anyone to whom the institution has ever granted a doctorate) earlier this year by awarding Mr. Cheney an Honorary Doctorate of – get this – Public Service in exchange for the Vice President delivering the Class of '07's commencement address.
Somewhat Divergent Views of Military Service
Whereas the current Vice President famously confronted his inner chickenhawk and found himself wanting on no less than five separate occasions, Aaron Burr understood a different view of patriotism. He joined the Continental Army early on, and was part of Benedict Arnold's ill-fated 1775 march through the woods of Maine and the disastrous Battle of Quebec which followed. He was apparently good at weaseling and spycraft; it was he who Arnold sent downriver past Quebec to make contact with General Richard Montgomery, approaching from New York with the other wing of the attack. Though the Americans were badly mauled, driven off, and saw General Montgomery killed, Burr's actions won him enough notoriety that upon his return to New York, he was promoted and given a spot, at the tender age of 21, on George Washington's staff at his headquarters on Manhattan.
All manner of vileness has been ascribed to Aaron Burr, and it's the kind of thing that can make an historioranter's job really difficult – the reality, which is probably pretty bad, becomes hard to distinguish from the rumors, which are indubitably bad. What happened during the weeks that Burr worked for Washington seems just such a matter of controversy – one report I read had Burr reading Washington's mail, but others say that this story is unfounded and that Burr was just one of those staff underlings who couldn't keep his admiration of his own theories to himself, even when doing so would have behooved him. Regardless of the specifics, Burr was quickly transferred out of Washington's sight, but later redeemed himself (he thought) by acting with gallantry during the Continental Army's skin-of-the-teeth escape from annihilation during the Battle of Harlem Heights.
For whatever reason, Washington spurned Burr by explicitly not commending him in the next day's General Orders – a slap in the face that Burr apparently never got over. Presumably getting ever more grumpy, he went on to command the regiment that guarded one of the approaches to Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, and here again the rumors and possibly-only-half-true stories start appearing - one is that although he was a commander who did look after the needs of his troops, he once hacked the arm off a man who was holding a pistol on him in hopes of starting a mutiny.
Historiorant: One can imagine that if we're not careful to preserve for history an understanding of modern events, the same lack of clarity may eventually obscure Cheney's misdeeds – what will be said in 200 years, for example, about the time Cheney, as Chief of Staff to President Ford, coordinated (at the suggestion of a younger, presumably-even-less-wise SecDef Donald Rumsfeld) a response to a phantom disease outbreak that killed dozens of Americans who had committed no other offense but to trust their government would protect them from an outbreak of the newly-dreaded Swine Flu.
Aaron Burr was still commanding troops at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, where he, like many of the other wool-uniform-wearing men on the field that incredibly hot June day, suffered a heat stroke compounded by fire from British artillery. He never really recovered fully, and he cited ill health when he resigned his commission the following year, though this might also have had something to do with Burr's support of General Charles Lee, who was deemed the scapegoat for the failure of the Continentals to pull better than a draw. Nevertheless, Burr was stirred to arms one final time a few months after resigning: he rallied students from what would someday be Dick Cheney's dropout alma mater and the city of New Haven to help repel a British attack at the West River in Connecticut.
The Path to the White House: 1792
Aaron Burr spent the rest of the Revolution studying law and running the occasional covertly patriotic spy job. By 1782, he'd been admitted to the bar, and after the British evacuated the city the following year, Burr moved to New York and hung out his shingle. In fact, 1783 turned out to be a big year all around for Aaron Burr, esq., since he was finally able to marry Theodosia Prevost, a widow 10 years his senior whose soldier husband had died in one of Britain's numerous troop surges in the Caribbean. The only one of the children of Burr and Theodosia (who had 5 children by her previous marriage) to survive to adulthood was a daughter, also named Theodosia, who died in a shipwreck and/or pirate incident off the coast of South Carolina in 1813. The elder Theodosia died of stomach cancer in 1794, afterwhich Burr embarked in earnest upon his zany, self-aggrandizing romp through American history.
He'd already been involved peripherally in politics – in 1784-85, he'd served in the New York State Assembly, but he got the full-on baptism by fire when Governor George Clinton appointed him Attorney General in 1789. He went on to a post as Revolutionary War Claims Commissioner in 1791, and later that same year he ran against – and defeated – the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton for one of New York's Senate seats.
Alexander Hamilton was Burr's main competition at the New York bar, and at first, they were friends. Burr's defeat of Philip Schuyler strained things, but it would still take a decade for things to reach the point that they started shooting at one another. As the government took shape and debated the sorts of things one debated in the 1790s, Burr engaged in Philadelphia's (Washington hadn't been built yet) social scene, and may have introduced a young widow named Dolley to future president James Madison.
Burr also tried to worm his way into the upper echelons of power, where he no doubt felt his talents would be best utilized by a grateful nation (think Cheney heading up Bush's VP search committee, only to decide that he was the best guy for the job). This caused critical rifts to develop between he and Hamilton. The future $10-guy was a close confidant of George Washington, which drove Burr batty – he'd once told Hamilton that he "despised Washington as a man of no talents and one who could not spell a sentence of common English," and he was further cut out when his proposal to write the official history of the Revolution was nixed by our first President. Washington later rejected Burr's application for a brigadier general's star during the Quasi-War with France under the John Adams administration.
Hamilton, having been born in the Indies and thus ineligible for the presidency himself, was a major mover and shaker at the federal(ist) level, but he couldn't cover all his home bases at the same time. So it was that in 1798, Burr returned to New York, got himself elected to the state legislature, and became involved with a group known as the Tammany Society, which would evolve into a political machine of the sort fantasized about by Cheneyites every time they watch Gangs of New York. Already, Tammany was becoming a political force to be reckoned with, and Burr used his connections to orchestrate a nomination for the presidency under the Democratic-Republican banner.
This was the same D-R party as that of Thomas Jefferson, but they weren't running together on a ticket. Back before Amendment XII (for which subsequent Burr-related incidents had shown the need), the veep was the guy who came in second in the electoral voting, which played right into Burr's manipulative hands.
The Path to the White House: 1972
Dick Cheney's job history lacks the political focus of Aaron Burr's, but it's no less self-absorbed. He overcame early challenges (in 1962 and 1963, specifically) to his right to operate a motor vehicle while drunk, and by 1969, had put his brushes with the law behind him and took on an internship with Congressman William Steiger. From there, he caught the eye of Donald Rumsfeld, who was heading up the Office of Economic Opportunity. Rummy wedged Cheney's foot in the door, and the future VP went on to serve in many minor functionary posts in the Nixon Administration.
As mentioned above, he was tapped by Gerald Ford to get the 70's malaise rolling with a marginal term as White House Chief of Staff, and after he Shrummed up Ford's lackluster campaign for election in his own right in 1976, Cheney persuaded the voters of Wyoming to send him back to Washington as a Representative in 1978. For the next 11 years, Cheney toiled tirelessly to foment his vision of the Empire, voting against such reprehensible commie ideas as MLK Day, Head Start, and the founding of the U.S. Department of Education.
As Minority Whip (heh), Cheney fetched votes for his Reaganite overlords, running interference whenever he could. He was the ranking minority member of the commission that investigated the criminality surrounding the Iran-Contra Scandal, and not surprisingly issued an opinion in diametric opposition to the findings of the majority of his colleagues. It turns out that in Cheneyworld, it's okay to turn U.S. foreign policy over to a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, then cower behind his officer and a gentleman-besmirching lies and obfuscations as the truth about all the mines, cocaine, arms shipments, and deals cut with terrorists starts coming out.
Cheney served as Secretary of Defense under George Herbert Walker Bush, and there got to oversee the prosecution of two wars: the invasion of Panama in the 1989, and Operation Desert Storm in 1991. This is presumably the period during which Cheney developed the absurd theory that he had some clue as to what he was doing. It apparently didn't occur to him then (nor has it yet) that the military successes of his SecDef tenure were in spite, rather than because, of his management skills. Better minds than his – Bush and James Baker come to mind – laid all the groundwork, and like most men with brains smaller than their egos, Cheney assumed that by virtue of the title on his office door he, not they, was due the credit.
After Bushco 1.0, Cheney accessed a revolving door on which he'd taken a spin or two in the past and took cushy gigs in private industry and neocon think tanks. He joined the American Enterprise Institute in 1993, and four years later helped to found his own little Tammany, The Project for the New American Century. All the while, he was exploiting connections in Washington to enrich Halliburton Energy, while at the same time taking measures to muddle the company's balance sheets and decrease transparency in the firm's accounting.
Enemies Lists You May Want to Stay Off Of
As mentioned above, Cheney found himself to be the most qualified man in America to stand a heartbeat away from the Presidency (quite an achievement for a guy with multiple heart attacks under his belt), which indicates that now we're starting to see some close parallels with the Aaron Burr experience. Burr, too, thought himself a leader of men, and he got enough of the electors in 1800 to throw the decision between he and Thomas Jefferson to the House of Representatives. Burr lobbied hard, and he damn near pulled it out, but on the 36th vote to break the tie, a few of his supporters abstained, and Jefferson was able to eke out a victory. His politicking and maneuvering had made an enemy out of Jefferson, and to-the-death rivals of the Federalists (whose dirty laundry Burr had aired when a Hamilton-written secret letter to other influential party members opposing the incumbent Federalist president, John Adams), and the high-handed way with which he tried to play the situation resulted at least one timeless quotes:
...it was badly managed not to have arranged with certainty what seems to have been left to hazard (regarding the decision to throw the election to the House)
-----Thomas Jefferson
The parallel paths of Cheney and Burr diverge again after their respective appointments to the vice presidency: whereas Cheney became the lynchpin of an enormous centralization of federal power (even unto the assertion of "Fourthbranch" status), Burr was persona non grata in Washington, especially as Jefferson's star was rising with the Louisiana Purchase and his ultimately successful dealings with the Barbary Pirates. Embittered, he returned to New York, where he found Hamilton had been busily smearing his name to the point where he, as a sitting Vice President, was unable to win his own party's nomination in the 1804 race for the New York Governor's office. He ran as independent anyway, but got crushed in the biggest landslide in the state's history to that point.
It was during that campaign that the accusations really started to fly between Hamilton and Burr. The former Treasury Secretary called Burr a "dangerous man, who ought not be trusted," in a leaked speech from a private dinner party, then was obligated to defend such speech as proper political discourse when it was printed by the Albany Register. It went back and forth like that for a while, until finally Burr had had enough of Hamilton's "base slanders," and demanded of him an "interview" (curiously, this was the euphemism used at the time for "dueling"). Hamilton, no stranger to the practice himself (Burr had once interceded in a duel between Hamilton and James Monroe over who got to continue the affair with a married woman, and Hamilton's son Philip had been killed in a duel only 3 years before), agreed, and the date was set for the 11th of July, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey.
There is again some disagreement about what happened next; this site does a good job of encapsulating the way Burr used the opportunity to satisfy bloodlust more than honor. When it was over, Alexander Hamilton lay mortally wounded on the ground (he died in New York the next day), and Aaron Burr went on to be charged with murder in both New Jersey and New York. He was never prosecuted, and later managed to slip away to the Southwest, where he had yet another crazed power grab up his sleeve – one that would finally get him brought up on treason charges.
Cheney's shooting of his friend is a lot easier to explain than Burr's shooting of Hamilton: the Vice President was drinking while "hunting" semi-domesticated birds, and got so excited when he heard a quail fluttering for its life that he whirled and fired with complete disregard for the human beings standing around him. He then suppressed reporting on the incident until such time as he had sobered up and ensured that he hadn't actually killed Harry Whittington. Quite un-Burr-like, you see.
Historiorant:
Regrettably, that tale about Burr and plot to carve out a personal empire in the Southwest is going to have to wait for a sequel diary, as time's running short and the tales are running long. Until then, feel free to drop some commentage on whether or not Burr and Cheney are an analogy made in historical heaven, or a dead horse being flogged for the zillionth time. Perhaps our old Dem friend Zell Miller will come up in conversation, and maybe somebody will want to mention that Burr did a much better job than Cheney as President of the Senate, that his supervision of the impeachment of Salman P. Chase was impartial and fair, and that his goodbye speech at the end of Jefferson's first term left not a dry eye in the House.
Still, nearly all the "concerns" floated about Aaron Burr could be pinned on Dick Cheney just as easily, so to bring this thing full circle (in a manner of speaking, to complete its orbit), lemme close with one last question: With guys like Aaron Burr in our history – and just wait 'til you meet John Breckenridge! – do we really want to be feeding the Republican noise machine by overdoing the whole "Darth Cheney" thing?
Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, and DocuDharma.