Joan Didion on Cheney and "The Fatal Touch" [View All]

[BurtWorm]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376


Cheney: The Fatal Touch
By Joan Didion

BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ARTICLE
A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs
by Theodore Draper
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
by Richard A. Clarke
Free Press, 304 pp., $27.00

Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence
by Admiral Stansfield Turner
Hyperion, 308 pp., $23.95

Disarming Iraq
by Hans Blix
Pantheon, 285 pp., $24.00

The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money
by Dan Briody
Wiley, 290 pp., $16.95 (paper)

My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope
by L. Paul Bremer III, with Malcolm McConnell
Simon and Schuster,417 pp., $27.00

Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life
by Mary Cheney
Threshold, 239 pp., $25.00

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
by Ron Suskind
Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $27.00

Plan of Attack
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 467 pp., $28.00

The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History
by John Nichols
New Press, 268 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
by James Mann
Penguin, 426 pp., $16.00 (paper)

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, with Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views
Government Printing Office, 690 pp. (1987)

31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today
by Barry Werth
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,398 pp., $26.00

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
by Mark Danner
New York Review Books, 580 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush
by John W. Dean
Warner, 281 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Years of Renewal
by Henry Kissinger
Touchstone, 1,151 pp., $24.00 (paper)



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The question of where the President gets the notions known to the nation as "I'm the decider" and within the White House as "the unitary executive theory" leads pretty fast to the blackout zone that is the Vice President and his office. It was the Vice President who took the early offensive on the contention that whatever the decider decides to do is by definition legal. "We believe, Jim, that we have all the legal authority we need," the Vice President told Jim Lehrer on PBS after it was reported that the National Security Agency was conducting warrantless wiretapping in violation of existing statutes. It was the Vice President who pioneered the tactic of not only declaring such apparently illegal activities legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their behalf.

"Bottom line is we've been very active and very aggressive defending the nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that," the Vice President advised reporters on a flight to Oman last December. It was the Vice President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S. Addington, that supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the Geneva Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA between 1977 and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for torture," it was the Vice President's office that issued this characteristically nonresponsive statement: "Our country is at war and our government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us."

Addington, who emerged into government from Georgetown University and Duke Law School in 1981, the most febrile moment of the Reagan Revolution, is an instructive study in the focus Cheney favors in the protection of territory. As secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush, Cheney made Addington his special assistant and ultimately his general counsel. As vice-president for George W. Bush, Cheney again turned to Addington, and named him, after the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in connection with the exposure of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, his chief of staff. "You're giving away executive power," Addington has been reported to snap at less committed colleagues. He is said to keep a photograph in his office of Cheney firing a gun. He vets every line of the federal budget to eradicate any wording that might restrain the President. He also authors the "signing statements" now routinely issued to free the President of whatever restrictive intent might have been present in whichever piece of legislation he just signed into law. A typical signing statement, as written by Addington, will refer repeatedly to the "constitutional authority" of "the unitary executive branch," and will often mention multiple points in a single bill that the President declines to enforce.

Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill Clinton left office, the device had been used, by the first forty-two presidents combined, fewer than six hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued more than eight hundred such takebacks during the first six years of his administra-tion. Those who object to this or any other assumption of absolute executive power are reflexively said by those who speak for the Vice President to be "tying the president's hands," or "eroding his ability to do his job," or, more ominously, "aiding those who don't want him to do his job."

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