Dick Cheney presents a problem and a question for people on the left side of the American political spectrum. On the one hand, we want to remind ourselves that aggressive war, torture in various forms, the denial of civil liberties, and other reprehensible government actions are not unique to the Bush Administration. By singling out the Bush years we risk hindering an understanding of where we come from and what needs to be done to make ours a more fully just nation.
On the other hand, we want to acknowledge that there is / was something unique at work in the Bush years. Putting this unique thing, this singularity, into words, without fudging our acknowledgment of the past, is a worthwhile project. It's worthwhile because we want to understand just what happened in the first years of the 21st century and why it felt and feels so singularly dangerous -- a feeling as of standing on a precipice and feeling the chill breeze of oblivion greet us from below.
Let me put this another way. It is not up for debate, it is simply true that slavery, the slaughter of millions of people who lived here before us, are crimes surpassable, if at all, only by full-scale nuclear war or the willful destruction of the planetary habitation needed by billions. At this point moral judgment cringes. We do not want to be asked to compare such things. It seems a sin against humanity even to try.
The palpable sense that the Bush years are somehow a singularity must therefore have another source. It must not reside in such hopeless comparisons. Still, the bracing sense that something unspeakable very nearly happened during the Bush years, in addition to the things that did in fact happen, looms. An interloper knocked on the door.
The strangest thing, or anyway among the strangest things, the problem and the question I mentioned above, is that this interloper seems so identifiable. It seems as though we can name it, "Dick Cheney." And despite all desire to be clear-headed, to not give such a damnably simplistic interpretation to such a momentous turn, it really seems like this might not be a mistake. How could that be?
David Bromwich, writing in the current New York Review of Books, gives us a start on providing an answer.
Cheney's ruling passion appears to be a love of presidential power. Go under the surface a little and this reveals itself as something more mysterious: a ceaseless desire of power after power. It is a quality of the will that seems accidentally tied to an office, a country, or a given system of political arrangements.
Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Office of Legal Council who fought hard against encroachments on the laws by Cheney and his assistant David Addington, remarked later with consternation and a shade of awe: "Cheney is not subtle, and he has never hidden the ball. The amazing thing is that he does what he says. Relentlessness is a quality I saw in him and Addington that I never saw before in my life." Yet there is nothing particularly American about Cheney's idea of government, just as there is nothing particularly constitutional about his view of the law; and no more broadly characterizing adjective, such as "Christian," will cover his ideas of right and wrong.
This gets us somewhere nearer the source. Cheney does not seem to care about America. Not in any sense – not in the right-wing "love it or leave it" America-Firster’s sense and not in the libertarian land-of-opportunity lover’s sense. That Cheney was born into this country seems entirely incidental to his desire to rule it. There is nothing even a little bit familial about his particular style of powermongering. We might as well have been French, or Chilean, for all that Cheney cares. The only thing the American system did was slow him down.
Something deep and unspoken in Cheney plainly rebels against the idea that conventional lawmakers, whose only power lies in their numbers, could ever check or by law prevent the actions of a leader vested with great power. He thought Nixon should not have resigned, and advised George H.W. Bush not to seek approval from Congress for the first Gulf War. Even at the time of the Church investigations, Cheney made an exception for the chief executive to the Freedom of Information Act, and secreted in a vault the government's "family jewels": findings of an internal investigation that he believed should be a state secret. These papers, declassified by the CIA in June 2007, included evidence of CIA kidnappings, assassination plots, and illegal domestic spying.
The "relentlessness" of this blank will-to-power is not instantly comprehensible. It takes some getting used to. You have to read passages like the this one twice, to let them and the implied – what? sociopathy? no, something else – sink in:
By 1977, one thing was clear alike to Cheney's allies and his opponents. He wanted a great deal of power to be held as closely as possible by the president. When he ran for Congress in 1978, and won election for the first of five terms, he got himself quickly appointed to an odd combination of committees: Ethics and Intelligence. They had in common the access they offered to secrets of entirely different kinds.
On this telling, Cheney used his years in Congress only to weaken Congress (see his minority report on Iran-Contra) and to gather up information that could be used against others later. That’s it. The suggestion of such premeditation and single-bloody-mindedness invites rejection. No one is really like that. But, then again . . .
Perhaps it is just this refusal to acknowledge the alien sensibility that allowed Cheney to get so far. He is not out for personal glory – he shuns it. He is not out for money – he has money. He is not out to make America better place to live in any sense. So what is it? He seems to have only one, nonsensical goal: to make the Presidency into a dictatorship. But to what end?
Bromwich offers the following as an explanation for why the vice-president was never called to justice; never stopped:
About none of these actions has Cheney ever been called, by a subpoena from Congress or an urgent demand from the press, to answer questions regarding the extent and legality of his innovations. It is as if people do not think of asking him. Why not? The reluctance shows a tremendous failure of nerve, from the point of view of democracy and public life. But there is a logic to the sense of futility that inhibits so many citizens who have been turned into spectators. It comes from the dynamic of the co-presidency itself, to which the press has grown acclimatized. Bush is the front man, and is known as such. He takes questions. If he answers them badly, still he is there for us to see. To address Cheney separately would be to challenge the supremacy of the President—a breach of etiquette that itself supposes a lack of the evidence that would justify the challenge.
As partial explanations go, that isn’t bad. But it seems wholly inadequate. That Cheney could rise to such power and very nearly destroy the country or at least the reasons for having a country in the first place and not be so much as impeached because of etiquette strains credulity.
There is something else at work here. Perhaps it is awe in the face of such faceless motivation. Perhaps what so nearly brought us to ruin was that, as members of Congress and America watched the rise and rule of Dick Cheney, they, we, found ourselves with no stories to tell. We looked at him, and for too long we felt only a chilling and lonely, which is to say a mortal, bewilderment.