Three Cheers for Dick Cheney!

If you first came to this country, say, sometime in the last five years, and are interested in politics, you might be a bit overwhelmed at the universal revulsion expressed in the media and among Democrats -- not exactly two warring camps -- directed at the personage of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

You might have thought he took bribes. (No, that was another vice president, Spiro Agnew.) Or perhaps you'd think Cheney shot a political opponent to death, while planning armed insurrection against the United States so he could be king. (That was Vice President Aaron Burr.) Or maybe Cheney so alarmed the incumbent president that he dumped him from the ticket months before running for re-election and let party bosses choose his running mate. (That was Henry Wallace's fate, not Cheney's, and it's how Harry Truman became president.)

None of that historic perspective has prevented the punditry and the loyal opposition from routinely declaring Cheney the most horrid Veep in history. The vast chorus of critics includes Cheney's successor, from whom one might expect more perspective, not to mention prudence. (Early in Joe Biden's debate last autumn with Sarah Palin, Delaware's favorite son blithely pronounced Cheney "the most dangerous vice president we've had, probably in American history." As that face-off progressed, it became clear that airbrushing Aaron Burr out of history was a portent of a veritable gusher of specious information from the brain of Barack Obama's running mate). But that is another story. This essay is offered in defense of Richard Cheney.

Well, not quite. As I formulate this argument, I realize that I disagree with Cheney on the two great issues he confronted as vice president. The first was his conception of executive power. The second concerns the tactics the United States should employ in the war on terror. So let me be clear in saying that what I would like to defend is Dick Cheney's character.

When first tapped to be George W. Bush's running mate, Richard Cheney received the kind of press you cannot buy. In what might be seen now as the last hurrah of the old mainstream media, Cheney was heralded as an accomplished man, prudent and wise, experienced in the ways of Washington. He had a reputation for returning reporters' phone calls, negotiating in good faith with Democrats, and working for some of the most non-ideological Republicans around, notably Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush. He'd been a congressman from Wyoming, a White House chief of staff, and Secretary of Defense. Cheney was conservative, sure, but he was solid-that was the story line.

"Mr. Cheney," even The New York Times conceded, "is an immensely respected political veteran."

Okay, that was then, and this is now. Nine years later, the most frequent comments about the former vice president cannot be published in a family newspaper like The Times. Today, when Democrats, bloggers, and liberals discuss Dick Cheney they are plotting how he can be prosecuted. Even his dwindling band of friends-former friends, I suppose-often open their end of the conversation by saying that Cheney has "changed," or simply asking, "What happened to Dick Cheney?"

I've known Cheney most of my adult life. We aren't friends, and don't fly-fish together or anything like that, but I've covered him, interviewed him, and frankly always liked the guy. And I think I have a pretty good idea of what happened to him. It's not from anything he told me, and I'm certainly not going all Gail Sheehy on you: My theory comes out of the 9/11 report, available to anyone who wants to read it, and from Cheney's public statements.

At about 10 a.m. that awful morning, the vice president entered a secure White House shelter. He was told that the Air Force was attempting to scramble planes to defend the air space over Washington. That raised another question, one pertaining to the missing plane White House officials assumed was heading their way: Who was going to authorize shooting it down? Cheney, with Bush's concurrence, gave such an order. Minutes later, officials in the shelter learned a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. In the unemotional prose of the report, the 9/11 commission noted: "Those in the shelter wondered if the aircraft had been shot down pursuant to this authorization."

At 10:39 a.m., Cheney spoke with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It's clear from the transcript of that call that Cheney believes he may have authorized the shooting down of an American passenger jet. Rumsfeld seems skeptical, but he doesn't really know either. I'm not sure "changed" is the right word, but I believe that in those 40 minutes--with the nation under attack, with Cheney not knowing if his daughters and grandchildren are safe, with his impression that he's directed a very hard order to some flyboy in the U.S. Air Force, possibly killing another 200 Americans--that Dick Cheney resolved to do whatever it would take to protect this country, regardless of the cost to his reputation or popularity. I respect him for that, and I empathize with him.

It is at this point in the discussion that I must say that I thoroughly disagree with Cheney on the authorization of torture in this war we are fighting. In fact, our differences run deeper and from a starting point that pre-dates 9/11. Cheney came into office convinced that the previous president, sometimes haphazardly, sometimes to save his own neck, had squandered away the prerogatives of the executive branch. Although I covered Bill Clinton's soap opera, I never understood this concern. I thought the moral of the Clinton saga was the amazing resilience of the Office of the Presidency, even when the chief executive stumbles.

That was my view, not Cheney's. From the beginning, he set about reasserting what he perceived to be lost power of the executive branch, and claiming some of it for the vice presidency. Cheney established a parallel foreign policy apparatus that reported directly to him, quietly exerted influence with the president on policy without going through cabinet officials, superseded the White House chief of staff on some personnel decisions--including the fate of his old pal Rumsfeld--and had his own speechwriting staff that occasionally put the vice president out in front of stated administration policy. To me, having a vice president function in this way, as a kind of über chief of staff, took the natural evolution of the office of the vice presidency too far. I find it constitutionally problematic, and believe that it established an unworkable management structure in the Bush White House. I don't question Cheney's motives. I just think he was mistaken.

The same is true for me regarding torture. Cheney says valuable information was wrung out of 9/11 masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah via "waterboarding" and other methods. I know of no reason to doubt this claim, but studies have shown that prisoners being tortured will say whatever they believe their interrogators want to hear, just to end the pain. In other words, the information is often unreliable. In addition, I would add that using torture results in forfeiting the moral high ground in world public opinion, serves as a potent recruiting tool for terrorists, makes it more difficult to generate world outrage if American hostages are tortured, and is simply not who we are as a people. The Bill of Rights is who we are, and enshrined in the Eighth Amendment is a prohibition against "cruel" or "unusual" punishments. Torture is both. Should foreign terrorists who have declared war on our way of life be granted the protections of the U.S. Constitution? I don't know. I do believe that Americans should not descend to the barbaric level of our enemies.

So on that point, I agree with Cheney's critics. What I don't agree with, and find despicable, actually, is the type of rhetoric directed against him. When Hillary Clinton, now the Secretary of State, is asked during a Senate hearing about Cheney's expressed views that the tactics of the previous administration made the nation safer, she rolls her eyes histrionically, snickers and mutters something about Cheney's lack of "credibility." That was rich, coming from a person who claimed with a straight face during last year's campaign to have braved gunfire in Bosnia, played an instrumental role in the Irish peace process, and warned her husband about the evils of free trade. When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked a similar question about Cheney's contention, he replied sarcastically that Rush Limbaugh must have been busy, "so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal."

In my view, that's a low way to conduct political discourse. I'm with Liz Cheney, who said this week, "He's always got a cute one-liner, usually about the vice president," adding that Gibbs doesn't engage legitimate questions about national security. "It's a dangerous game they're playing," said the former vice president's daughter. I agree. That game is called politics, and playing it with national security is indeed dangerous. Yet, the Democrats' gambit had been effective. I was dismayed the other day when Eugene Robinson, a recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, penned a column for The Washington Post essentially calling Cheney crazy and postulating that his argument cannot truly be called an argument at all.

Am I wrong to get worked up about the rhetorical excesses of Cheney's critics, when the stakes of governmental misjudgments in the previous administration seem so high? If so, I'm in good company. In 1944, as Allied bombers devastated German cities, George Orwell received a letter from a reader who said that although he realized "the Hun (has) got to be beaten," he was troubled by the civilian casualties suffered in cities such as Dresden and Hamburg. Replied Orwell in his newspaper column, "It seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by calling them 'Huns.'"

Surely that's hyperbole, but we definitely do damage to ourselves when we substitute political debate with name-calling and ad-hominem attacks. I think Dick Cheney is wrong on important matters. I also think he is a patriot. And I hate to think that we have lost the ability to hold two such opinions in our heads at one time.