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With his laughable declaration of a "Fourth Branch" of government, Dick Cheney made his bid for power clear.

But that declaration was not how he actually accrued more power than any other Vice President in history. Instead, Cheney grabbed power by mobilizing his superior understanding of the federal bureaucracy. That's the great value of Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency--the way Gellman meticulously catalogs the methods by which Cheney manipulated the federal bureaucracy to work his will (see his website for updates).

These include:

  • Collecting and using intelligence on others--as when Cheney used VP vetting information he had collected to undercut Frank Keating's candidacy to be Attorney General; or when OVP collected NSA transcripts of other government appointees; or when OVP copied itself in on all emails going to the National Security Council.
  • Halting the Government Printing Office publication of executive orders--the ones Clinton signed in his last days in office--to prevent them from going into effect.
  • Firing people, as when (Gellman implies) Cheney intervened to have Paul O'Neill fired so he could push through an unnecessary tax cut.
  • Capitalizing on his history as a briefer--using (among other things) his skill at reading documents upside down.
  • Lying blatantly, as when he told Dick Armey the Iraqis had suitcase nukes.

  • Asking questions--to offer direction without leaving the tracks of having done so, and to ascertain the positions of all others without revealing his own.
  • Mobilizing surrogates to sponsor his favored policies so as to hide his own sponsorship of those policies.
  • Maximizing ambiguity in scientific thought (on both the economy and environmental issues) to undercut policy and regulation.

Boring stuff, some of it. Just as an example of how banal this all is, consider the way Cheney found and contacted Ellen Wooldridge to intervene in the Klamath River dispute, to make sure farmers' water rights got higher priority than the fishing rights of Native Americans and the needs of fish listed as endangered species.

Dick Cheney found his way through that labyrinth, to just the right woman in just the right place, because the thing on his mind at that moment was about to land on her desk. How he knew that, Cheney did not say. He liked to "reach down"--that was his term--through layers of management. He wanted his information direct, unfiltered. If a decision was coming, Cheney made sure to find out when and where it would be made.

"The vice president of the United States was and remains the consummate staffer," [Cheney domestic policy advisor Ron] Christie said. "He understands how the bureaucracy works and, when the bureaucracy is not working, how to cut through it.  

Jack Goldsmith provides another description of Cheney's bureaucratic skills.

[Cheney and Addington] "were geniuses at this," Goldsmith said. "They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want."

As this book makes clear, it was through Cheney's mastery of this kind of minutia that he succeeded in dominating our national policy for the last seven years--and in the process, getting us into a  disastrous war of choice, diminishing our national reputation with his barely-concealed endorsement of torture, and gutting our national economy.

There's much more in this book. The additional detail about the March 10, 2001 hospital confrontation--beyond even those included in the WaPo excerpts--makes buying the book worthwhile by itself.

Then there's the stuff not getting press: a description of a November 2002 UN inspection disproving the aluminum tube story that the Administration used to get us into war; new details about how Cheney manipulated the White House email system to accrue power; and description of a Code Red panic within the White House in December 2003. 

But the lasting value of the book, I think, is the way it exposes the many vulnerabilities in our federal bureaucracy that allow one man and his allies to seize control over much of the executive branch of government.

Barton Gellman has just one hour for this book salon, so I wanted to get him started with several questions:

David Addington is--as we speak--asking the DC Appeals Court to intervene so he can avoid giving a deposition to CREW about the Office of Vice President's compliance with the Presidential Records Act. Assuming CREW gets to depose Addington, what questions would you recommend they ask about the OVPs archiving--particularly with regards to email?

You don't mention Tom Delay's briefing on the warrantless wiretap program the day after the hospital confrontation. Do you have any idea why the Administration briefed Delay or what transpired in that briefing?

I was struck by something you quote Scooter Libby as saying after he hired Cesar Conda as Cheney's chief domestic advisor: "Focus on the economy, because that's what the client wants."  [my emphasis] Did the word client strike you as at all strange? Do you understand the word "client" to refer to Cheney--or is it someone else?

As a reminder, please take off-topic discussions to a different thread.

Gellman can be reached at bartongellman.com