NYT : In Glimpses, Cheney Contemplates His Legacy

In Glimpses, Cheney Contemplates His Legacy

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG | August 31, 2008

WASHINGTON — Dick Cheney is not a man given to revealing his inner thoughts. But on the cool, clear evening in April when Mr. Cheney, the 46th vice president of the United States, presided over a literary salon at his residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory here, he seemed in a reflective mood.

The featured author was Ian W. Toll, whose book, “Six Frigates,” chronicles the founding of the Navy. A collection of Washington luminaries, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, dined on salmon with pesto; the Sea Chanters, a Navy chorus, performed after dessert. As the evening wound down, the vice president offered a flash of introspection in quiet conversation with his guest of honor.

“He said that, when he was defense secretary, he felt he was presiding over a ‘huge grinding machine that was here before me and will be here after I’m gone,’ ” said Mr. Toll, who was so struck by Mr. Cheney’s remark that he wrote it down. “There was almost something wistful about it, a sense that even in this day and age, no one, not even someone who’s had a career like that of Vice President Cheney, can really hope to fundamentally reshape our institutions.”

Mr. Cheney has, of course, fundamentally reshaped at least one American institution: the vice presidency. Fueled by a belief in a strong presidency and American hegemony, and with the help of a president, George W. Bush, who gave him an extraordinarily free hand, he has stretched the limits of the job in ways his predecessors could not have imagined.

Even in the twilight of his tenure, Mr. Cheney plays the heavy. On Tuesday, a day after addressing Republicans at their convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul, he will confront Moscow head-on with a trip to threatened former Soviet republics.

But on Jan. 20, 2009, after a career in Washington that has spanned four decades, the 67-year-old vice president will have a new job description: retired. As Mr. Cheney prepares to make the transition to private citizen, a portrait is emerging of a man who is unapologetic, even defiant, but also thinking about his legacy and perhaps confronting the limits of his own power.

Historians will debate Mr. Cheney for decades. Critics say he has set a dangerous precedent; former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, a Democrat, said the Cheney model posed “disturbing risks.” Indeed, Mr. Cheney loomed large over Senators Barack Obama and John McCain as they picked their running mates.

“If someone said that your vice president is like Dick Cheney, you’ve got a Dick Cheney model in place, I don’t know if that’s something you would want or not,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is a close ally of Mr. McCain. The McCain model will be “more traditional,” Mr. Graham said, adding, “there will be no doubt nobody else is pulling the strings.”

Now Mr. Cheney may seek the last word.

After years of insisting he would not write a book, the vice president is entertaining the notion, at the urging of his older daughter, Liz, who said she had been “pretty aggressively pushing the idea.” With her father’s blessing, Liz Cheney has been indexing his pre-vice presidential papers, which are in libraries around the country, and drafting timetables and outlines for his review.

Those close to Mr. Cheney said that if he did write a book, it would be with history in mind, hardly a tell-all. As a onetime doctoral candidate in political science (he never finished his dissertation) who went on to become a White House chief of staff, a Wyoming congressman, a defense secretary and an energy executive before taking his current job, Mr. Cheney is keenly aware that future historians will need his version of events.

“Think about the events that he’s been around for: Gerald Ford taking over after Nixon resigned, the fall of Saigon, the end of communism, the war on terror,” said Mr. Cheney’s other daughter, Mary. “Whenever you get my dad to tell stories, you always learn something new.”

Divining the Cheney psyche is always tricky (“You’re from Wyoming, you keep it to yourself,” said Joe Meyer, a high school friend who is now the Wyoming state treasurer). But Mr. Cheney is giving some clues. At a National Press Club luncheon here in June, he looked back on his tenure with an openness that seemed unusual for a man who does so much in secret.

“My job as vice president is as an adviser,” Mr. Cheney said. “I don’t run anything. I’m not — it’s not like being secretary of defense when I had four million people working for me.” This comes as no surprise to those who have heard him say the Pentagon job was his favorite. He spoke of “the understandings” he reached with President Bush, that this would be no ordinary vice presidency.

“And he’s been absolutely true to his commitment to me,” Mr. Cheney said, “which was I’d have an opportunity to be a major participant in the process, to be part of his government, to get involved in whatever issues I wanted to get involved in.

“Sometimes he agrees, sometimes he doesn’t,” Mr. Cheney continued. “We don’t always come to the same conclusion by any means.”

In recent months, Mr. Cheney’s push to expand executive powers was rejected yet again by the Supreme Court. His vision for a free-market economy has been cast aside in favor of government intervention; when Mr. Bush signed housing legislation in the Oval Office, the vice president was not there. Mr. Cheney has taken a hard line against North Korea and Iran, only to be outflanked by advocates of diplomacy.

If Mr. Cheney is dismayed, he has kept it to himself, though his views are no secret. John R. Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations whose voice is often a proxy for Mr. Cheney’s, calls American policy toward North Korea and Iran “a debacle for this administration.” Even Liz Cheney, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, has been critical, though she said she was not speaking for her father.

“He has, for the entire time that he has been vice president, had the view, and continues to have the view, that he gets to make his case very strongly internally, and he does that, and he doesn’t always carry the day,” she said. “The president decides, and he supports the president.”

Mr. Cheney declined to be interviewed. But those close to him say he approaches retirement with neither reticence nor eagerness, but rather with a Zen-like confidence that even his most controversial moves, like his stance in favor of domestic wiretapping, have been necessary to keep the country safe.

“It’s not suffering defeats, it’s not nostalgia, it’s not urgency to get stuff done, it’s not, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ ” said Mary Matalin, a longtime adviser, describing Mr. Cheney’s state of mind. “I hate to use yoga terms, but he’s really in the moment.”

Liberals may caricature the vice president as Darth Vader, but within the Cheney family, the moniker has become a joke. Mr. Cheney’s wife, Lynne, gave her young grandson a Darth Vader doll, and Mr. Cheney lightens up audiences by saying that Mrs. Cheney does not mind the nickname: “She said, ‘It humanizes you.’ ”

But Mr. Cheney remains furious over the conviction of his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., after a trial that depicted the vice president as the orchestrator of a scheme to discredit a critic of the Iraq war. Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, said Mr. Cheney regarded the trial as “a grievous distortion,” and would most likely press Mr. Bush to pardon Mr. Libby.

Mr. Cheney’s strength has always derived from his unique access to Mr. Bush, and that has not changed. The two are “friendly, not buddies,” as Stephen F. Hayes, the author of a Cheney biography, put it. Mr. Cheney still sits in on Mr. Bush’s secure videoconferences with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, and still lunches privately each Thursday with Mr. Bush. He still presses his case on the national security issues that matter most to him.

At a forum on world affairs convened by the American Enterprise Institute in Colorado, this summer, Mr. Cheney took pains to correct a participant about intelligence leading to the Iraq war, said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona. At an off-the-record gathering of foreign policy experts in Washington in June, Mr. Cheney left little doubt that he would favor using force to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, said one participant.

Critics and even admirers of Mr. Cheney imagine him using his final days in office to work the levers of power and seal his policies in place, though his aides insist no such effort is under way.

“My guess is that he’s been able to put things into motion in the executive branch that transcend the next administration,” said Representative Adam H. Putnam of Florida, chairman the House Republican Conference.

As Mr. Cheney’s days in office grow fewer, some sense he is more relaxed. He was unusually flip at the press club luncheon, cracking jokes about family ties with Mr. Obama (they are distant cousins) and the state of West Virginia. If Mr. Cheney has specific post-vice presidential plans, he has not shared them, though he and his wife, who already own homes in Wyoming and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, are building a new primary residence in the Virginia suburb of McLean, to be close to their daughters and grandchildren.

More than 30 years ago, as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, a young Mr. Cheney stood on the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base with his wife and daughters and watched a presidency end. He is well aware, as his daughter Liz said, that “it’s a very abrupt kind of change.” Friends say he is ready.

“What he may miss, of course, is the ability to engage in the important issues of the day at the top levels,” said David Gribbin, a longtime friend and adviser. “But you know, he’s been doing this for 40 years. He has this makeup where when he stops doing something, he can just stop doing it. I think when Dick Cheney’s done, he’s able to be done.”