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Cheney Reveals Frustration With Bush In Upcoming Book
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney is notoriously tight-lipped. We know from years of reporting that he often prefers to listen rather than speak. As a result, when he does speak people tend to listen.
According to The Washington Post, Cheney will be doing quite a bit of speaking in his upcoming memoirs.
In his first few months after leaving office, former vice president Richard B. Cheney threw himself into public combat against the "far left" agenda of the new commander in chief. More private reflections, as his memoir takes shape in slashing longhand on legal pads, have opened a second front against Cheney’s White House partner of eight years, George W. Bush.
Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.
"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."
The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.
Time Magazine reported last month on Cheney’s anger over President Bush’s refusal to grant Scooter Libby a full pardon. Cheney claims he will detail the heated exchanges he had with Bush on that issue in his book.
If the above quotes are any indication, his book should prove a fascinating read. I always take heat when I say this, but I think Dick Cheney was a great Vice President — maybe one of the greatest.
I do think he bears a significant portion of the blame for Iraq turning into the disaster it did, and the history books will rightly reflect that.
Besides Iraq, I think his steely resolve on national security issues and total disregard for his own popularity were a great asset to the Bush presidency and to our country as a whole.
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