The making of Dick Cheney

A Professional and Personal Memoir

By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney

Threshold Editions. 565 pp. $35

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Reviewed by Frank Wilson

Wikipedia may not be the last word when it comes to finding information, but it does make a useful distinction regarding memoirs, namely, that they "are structured differently from formal autobiographies . . . focusing on the development of [the author's] personality." Whether former Vice President Dick Cheney thought about this or not, the fact remains that he has called his book a memoir and as such it ought to be judged.

If the headlines that greeted the book are any indication, however, such has not been the case. The book has instead been used as a pretext for revisiting policy disputes. I am not particularly qualified to size up those differences, so I read In My Time for what it purports to be: a memoir.

Now, since there is nothing more elusive than one's own identity, a memoir is of necessity a story, the tale of the character the author takes himself to be. And the only way to get at a story, as D.H. Lawrence so shrewdly observed, is to trust the story, not the storyteller.

Any memoir, of course, but especially one by a man of affairs, is also largely a chronicle of things done and experienced. Still, agere sequitur esse: Action follows from being. You act as you do because you are who you are.

So who exactly, given the story he tells about himself, is Richard Bruce Cheney, 46th vice president of the United States?

I think Cheney has been defined by three key events in his life. The first occurred when his maternal grandfather paid a visit to his family when Cheney was 14:

One morning when I was in the living room and my parents were outside working in the yard, I heard him calling from his bedroom down the hall. "Dicky, come here, I need you." I found him sitting on the bed, clearly in pain. He told me that he thought he was having another heart attack. I ran outside to get my folks, and they called for help. I ran down to the street corner to flag down the ambulance and make sure it came to the right house. In those days there wasn't much the drivers could do except put Grandpa on oxygen and rush him to the hospital. I held the screen door open as they carried him out on a stretcher. My folks followed the ambulance to the hospital, but they were back home within the hour and told Bob and me that Grandpa had died.

A typical bureaucrat, Cheney tends to tell, not show. So this passage stands out in its precision of detail - running down the street, flagging down the ambulance, holding the screen door. Small wonder Cheney "couldn't help but think of my grandfather" when, in June 1978, he had the second defining event, waking up in the middle of the night "with a tingling sensation in two fingers of my left hand." He figured it was a false alarm, but his cousin had had a heart attack just a few weeks earlier, so he decided to have a doctor check him out. The moment he sat down in the emergency room, he passed out: "When I came to I noticed that there was a great deal of activity in the ER. Then I noticed it was all focused on me."

This was the first of his four heart attacks. Heart disease runs in his family, he notes, and since age 37 Cheney has lived with a sense of mortality more acute than most of us have. That is surely the reason his book is an apologia only in the old-fashioned sense of an account of the reasons he had for taking the positions and favoring the policies that he did.

The most controversial of those positions and policies relate to what Cheney always refers to as the Global War on Terror. The third defining event, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2011, seems for Cheney to have an effect equivalent to a major national heart attack. His view of the Terrorist Surveillance Program - a key element of which "involved intercepting targeted communications into and out of the United States where there was a reasonable basis to conclude that at least one party to the communication was associated with al Qaeda or a related terrorist organization" - says it all.

Cheney notes that the program had received unanimous approval of an expanded congressional briefing whose attendees included then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, as well as Jane Harmon, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and Jay Rockefeller, her counterpart on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He calls the program "one of things of which I am proudest. I know it saved lives and prevented attacks. If I had it to do all over again, I would, in a heartbeat."

Cheney does voice a few regrets. Some are mostly over procedure, as in the case of Paul O'Neill, George W. Bush's first treasury secretary. Cheney admits that "economic policy was being run out of the White House, and meetings to make decisions often did not include the treasury secretary."

Cheney thinks O'Neill should have insisted that he be at such meetings, but adds that, "on the other hand, either the president or I could have said, 'Where's O'Neill? We should not be having this meeting without the treasury secretary."

Another regret is more substantive. Cheney was secretary of defense during the first Gulf War, and he has not forgotten that, some time after the war ended, Saddam Hussein "ordered the draining of the marshes near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, displacing thousands of the predominantly Shia Marsh Arabs. Our failure to do more to protect the Shia from Saddam contributed to a sense of betrayal and suspicion that affected our relationships 12 years later when America was confronting Saddam once again."

Cheney makes plain throughout his book that he considers himself a conservative. But his brand of conservatism is very much grounded in the individualism of the frontier. His childhood heroes were the mountain men. Among his favorite books when he was growing up were A.B. Guthrie 's The Big Sky and Bernard De Voto's Across the Wide Missouri. He tells how he and his brother loved to roam the prairie: "To a casual observer the landscape might have seemed barren and boring, but my brother and I, out there for hours, knew its different grasses, the sagebrush, the scrub pine and all the animals that lived there - antelope, deer, jackrabbits, cottontails, and an occasional rattlesnake."

It comes as no surprise when he reminds readers of his answer to a question about gay rights posed by CNN's Bernard Shaw during the 2000 vice presidential debate:

. . . we live in a free society and freedom means freedom for everybody. We don't get to choose, and shouldn't be able to choose, and say, you get to live free but you don't. That means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard.

So who exactly is Dick Cheney? Almost certainly not the person you may have been led to think he is.