by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m about halfway through the new Cheney memoir,\u00a0In My Time<\/em>, and it does not at all resemble the media\u2019s description of it \u2014 a highly controversial book preoccupied with scoring points against rivals \u2014 which suggests that many of those who have written about it have not read it. Every writer defends his own record, of course, but I haven\u2019t detected any vendettas yet. On occasion, Cheney admits errors of his own, especially unwise press announcements and rash public statements. Although he is critical of Colin Powell in the lead-up to Iraq and afterward, he is more than magnanimous in prior references to the man \u2014 no \u201ccheap shots\u201d that I could see.<\/p>\n Cheney comes across as an everyman from a mostly Democratic family who started out with no money and considers his wife and children the central focus of his life. Early on, he worked a number of hard-scrabble jobs. He is his own most severe critic about his troubled early twenties, which led to occasional drinking, bad grades at Yale, and a sense of directionlessness. At 37 he had a heart attack, and for most of his professional life was plagued by either heart trouble or worries that his health might impair his duties. Most men would have scaled back; he accelerated, and at great costs to his own health rarely turned down a call to public service. Yet he is surprisingly resigned about this sword of Damocles that has hung over him since 1978. After his tenure with President Ford, he simply, Truman-like, packed up his own car and drove it back to Wyoming.<\/p>\n It may be cute to call him Darth Vader, but his earlier career was characteristically centrist. He supported Jerry Ford rather than Ronald Reagan\u2019s primary challenge, and while he admired Newt Gingrich\u2019s audacity, he preferred a less confrontational approach in the House. Many of the profits he made as a Halliburton CEO he donated to charity, and he retains a natural comfort with the middle classes that comes from his own upbringing in Wyoming.<\/p>\n He had a lot of Democratic friends \u2014 remember how little acrimony he showed with Lieberman in the 2000 debate \u2014 and he even has some nice things to say about the late John Murtha, at least before the Iraq estrangement. Former friends who were later hypercritical of him in the press \u2014 mostly the Bush I inner circle \u2014 don\u2019t earn much lasting antipathy from him. They were on the giving rather than the receiving end of the estrangement. In other words, the book does not support either the dark images of Cheney or the idea that it is a vindictive memoir. He neither backs down from nor relishes his occasional profanity and run-ins with those like Sen. Patrick Leahy. How a non-confrontational conservative with a long record of working with Democrats was transmogrified by the media into someone demonic is one of the strangest events of our times.<\/p>\n In many of the controversies between 2001 and 2008, Cheney seems often right \u2014 early support for the admirable surgists (Fred Kagan, Jack Keane, H. R. McMaster, David Petraeus); skepticism about mere oral understandings with the North Koreans; opposition to premature pullouts from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Of course, his popularity suffered terribly from the nonstop media focus over the water-boarding of the three admitted terrorists\u00a0Khalid Sheikh Mohammed<\/a>,\u00a0Abu Zubaydah<\/a>, and\u00a0Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri<\/a>,\u00a0between 2002 and 2003, and his refusal to admit such treatment was torture. I opposed those techniques, but we still do not have the complete record of the information that came from KSM et al. \u2014 though National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair has since said \u201chigh value\u201d information came out of it \u2014 and by now we have forgotten the sense of impending attack and mayhem that followed after 9\/11.<\/p>\n The fact that President Obama, to his credit, has reversed course \u2014 keeping Guantanamo open and embracing renditions, tribunals, detentions, wiretaps, intercepts, Predators, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan \u2014 ironically will more than anything put into context the\u00a0ad hominem<\/em>\u00a0attacks on Cheney and the allegations that most of such protocols were both superfluous and anti-constitutional. That we were not attacked again after 9\/11 through 2008 was in large part due to many of the things Cheney insisted upon. I wish that he had discussed in greater depth the administration\u2019s disastrous decision not to stick with all the 23 writs of the October 2002 congressional resolutions authorizing force to remove Saddam. There was no need, when one reads those bipartisan authorizations, to focus almost solely on WMD \u2014 which, of course, liberal senators as diverse as Rockefeller and Biden were worried about. Cheney was too, but had invested in regime change on more than twenty other counts.<\/p>\n He seems content to rest his case with future historians, confident that in the long haul he will be proven right about the removal of Saddam Hussein, the subsequent salvation of Iraq through the surge, and the necessary measures taken to ensure no repeat of 9\/11. Even the decisions that sometimes put him on the wrong side of Bush \u2014 calling for the bombing of the nuclear facility in Syria, which Israel eventually did; quiet opposition to the nomination of Harriet Miers and the firing of Rumsfeld; the defense of Libby given the prior knowledge of Powell\/Armitage, etc. \u2014 don\u2019t necessarily put him in a bad light.<\/p>\n In short, while I am only half done with a careful reading of the book, I don\u2019t yet see much that would make \u2018heads explode\u2019 or challenge the once-accepted image of Cheney as a pragmatic conservative whose style was Western and simple and who improbably, given his modest origins, found himself at the very center of American power over three administrations and many Congresses, where his tragic notion of human nature served the country well for almost 40 years.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner I\u2019m about halfway through the new Cheney memoir,\u00a0In My Time, and it does not at all resemble the media\u2019s description of it \u2014 a highly controversial book preoccupied with scoring points against rivals \u2014 which suggests that many of those who have written about it have not read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87],"tags":[1051,12,165,654,293,656,1067,1044,658,180,657,76],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Cq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2783,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/cheney-agonistes\/","url_meta":{"origin":2382,"position":0},"title":"Cheney Agonistes","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner What is strange about the furor over the Cheney interviews is that so many of the arguments against them simply have no precedent or logic. If one were to say the vice president emeritus, as a matter of understood decorum, should refrain from criticism\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2009"","block_context":{"text":"May 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/may-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3456,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/rumsfelds-rebuttal\/","url_meta":{"origin":2382,"position":1},"title":"Rumsfeld’s Rebuttal","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal A review of\u00a0Known and Unknown: A Memoir\u00a0by Donald Rumsfeld (Sentinel, 832 pp.) The wonder is not that Donald Rumsfeld was one of the longest-serving defense secretaries in history, but that George W. Bush nominated him in 2001 in the first place. As he makes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1835,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-commandments-on-the-animal-farm-barn-wall\/","url_meta":{"origin":2382,"position":2},"title":"The New Commandments on the Animal Farm Barn Wall","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner 1. Savvy Americans\u00a0always see through the fraud in the end and\u00a0do the right thing\u00a0are infantile and don\u2019t know what\u2019s good for them. 2. Democracy is\u00a0finally working again\u00a0in decline and the people are ungovernable. 3.\u00a0The filibuster is\u00a0a much-needed check on the Bush-Cheney steamrolling nexus\u00a0evil. 4.\u00a0Bloggers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2010"","block_context":{"text":"February 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/february-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6766,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-tenth-life-of-and-obamacat\/","url_meta":{"origin":2382,"position":3},"title":"The Tenth Life of an Obamacat","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 An Obamcat administration is given nine, but not ten, lives: 1) The dismal economy 2) Guantanamo, renditions, and tribunals that were to be relegated to the Bush-Cheney ash heap 3) Fast and\u00a0Furious 4) The \u201clead from behind\u201d fiasco in Libya 5) Benghazi 6)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/commentary-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2116,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-manifest-disaster\/","url_meta":{"origin":2382,"position":4},"title":"A Manifest Disaster","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 28, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Two points about the strange decision to bring the 9\/11 terrorists to New York:\u00a0 One, Senator Grassley's point about federal attorneys and their past advocacy for detainees is worth listening to. I'll leave it to Andy McCarthy to ascertain the legal ramifications of Grassley's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2009"","block_context":{"text":"November 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/november-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3834,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/goodbye-to-all-that-2004-2007\/","url_meta":{"origin":2382,"position":5},"title":"Goodbye to All That: 2004-2007","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Days of Rage In times to come, the period between the failed campaign of John Kerry and the Democratic control of the Congress, coupled with the beginning of the successful surge, should be known as \u201cThe Insane Years.\u201d This was the era in which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2382"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2384,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions\/2384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}