This puts together two recent news threads, in hopes someone else will be inspired to write more on this.
(1) In 1933-34, Prescott Bush allegedly had a minor role in a conspiracy to install a "secretary of general welfare" who would in effect be more powerful than the US President. Wealthy financiers backed by the DuPonts, JP Morgan, Remington Arms, Bush's Hamburg-America Line, etc. approached General Smedley Butler to lead 500,000 troops in this explicitly pro-fascist de facto coup. BBC recently had a story on this (click on audio link), Wikisource has General Butler's original Congressional testimony, and of course Wikipedians work on this "business plot" story. Most readers have at least heard of it, though the details are fuzzy as to how serious and how far along it went.
(2) Today, former VP Walter Mondale has a scathing critique of Cheney in the Washington Post: "Answering to No One"
Mondale writes:
[The Vice Presidency] has gone seriously off track. [...] Cheney set out to create a largely independent power center in the office of the vice president. His was an unprecedented attempt not only to shape administration policy but, alarmingly, to limit the policy options sent to the president. [...] Through his vast government experience, through the friends he had been able to place in key positions and through his considerable political skills, he has been increasingly able to determine the answers to questions put to the president -- because he has been able to determine the questions. [...] The corollary to Cheney's zealous embrace of secrecy is his near total aversion to the notion of accountability. I've never seen a former member of the House of Representatives demonstrate such contempt for Congress -- even when it was controlled by his own party. His insistence on invoking executive privilege to block virtually every congressional request for information has been stupefying -- it's almost as if he denies the legitimacy of an equal branch of government. [...] Whatever authority a vice president has is derived from the president under whom he serves. There are no powers inherent in the office; they must be delegated by the president. Somehow, not only has Cheney been given vast authority by President Bush -- including, apparently, the entire intelligence portfolio -- but he also pursues his own agenda. The real question is why the president allows this to happen.
Compare that to the 1934 Congressional hearings, with testimony by Gen. Butler and others, who testified under oath of a pro-fascist plot supported by powerful business interests and 'the troops':
We need a Fascist government in this country, [MacGuire] insisted, to save the Nation from the communists [terrorists?] who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men over night. During the conversation he told me he had been in Italy and Germany during the summer of 1934 and the spring of 1934 and had made an intensive study of the background of the Nazi and Fascist movements and how the veterans had played a part in them. He said he had obtained enough information on the Fascist and Nazi movements and of the part played by the veterans, to properly set up one in this country. He emphasized throughout his conversation with me that the whole thing was tremendously patriotic, that it was saving the Nation from communists [terrorists?], and that the men they deal with have that crackbrained idea that the Communists are going to take it apart. He said the only safeguard would be the soldiers. [...]
Butler claims that MacGuire then told him that the President was overworked, that he needed an assistant to take over the many heavy duties, and that such a position would be created and would probably be called "a secretary of general affairs ", and that then all that was accomplished the President of the United States would be like the President of France. [...] He went on to say that it did not take any constitutional change to authorize another Cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office - take them off the President's shoulders. He mentioned that the position would be a secretary of general affairs — a sort of a super secretary.
Butler: That is the term used by him—or a secretary of general welfare—I cannot recall which. [... H]e said: "You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspaper. We will start a campaign that the President's health is failing. Everybody can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second." [I said:] "Yes; and then you will put somebody in there you can run; is that the idea? The President will go around and christen babies and dedicate bridges, and kiss children."
I'm just asking the question: how far is Mondale from acknowledging that Dick Cheney has already pulled off a silent "secretary of general welfare" 'coup', somewhat similar to what JP Morgan, the DuPonts, General Motors, Heinz, General Foods, Hamburg-America Line (headed by Prescott Bush) and others schemed in 1933? It's hard to ask these questions without sounding like a paranoid, conspiracy, tin-foil hat, nutcase. But one wonders about the role of the major financial backers of Bush in 2000 and 2004, about the process of Cheney nominating himself as the top choice for Vice President, the role of ExxonMobil et al. (Of course Cheney will relinquish power in January 2009, that's not the question.)