The Failure Artist

Politics

 The Failure Artist

 Dick Cheney sought to remake the world—and he did.

(Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

When George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000, conservatives let out a sigh of relief—even some paleoconservatives did so. Word was that Pat Buchanan himself thought it was a good selection. It certainly seemed Bush could have done worse—he might have chosen John McCain, his primary rival and the man the neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard really wanted to be president. He might have chosen Colin Powell or Christine Todd Whitman, prioritizing race or sex and appealing to moderates over appealing to conservatives. Cheney was a pick to shore up the ticket’s right flank. 

He added experience in government, too: Cheney had been Gerald Ford’s chief of staff and George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense. As a congressman in the Reagan years, he had been the ranking Republican on the House select committee investigating the Iran–Contra affair. Cheney had ties to every GOP president dating back to Richard Nixon, when he first got involved in the executive branch as a protege of sorts to a rising Republican administrator named Donald Rumsfeld. It was Rumsfeld’s later appointment as Ford’s secretary of defense that cleared the path for Cheney to become Ford’s chief of staff. He helped manage Ford’s 1976 election campaign, too.

Cheney’s own tenure as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense should have warned realists and paleoconservatives what was in store, however. The first Bush-Cheney combination, in power from 1989 to 1993, gave us the Panama invasion and the Persian Gulf War. George Bush fils said on the campaign trail in 2000 that he wouldn’t involve America in “nation-building” abroad. But that didn’t mean no new wars. Cheney was exactly the sort of partner a younger Bush who intended to continue his father’s foreign policy would want. Even before the 9/11 attacks, Cheney’s presence in the administration augured a readiness to pursue an activist foreign policy. A retaliatory campaign against the Taliban would have been a given under any president. Yet without Cheney—and the staff serving under and connected to him—would even George W. Bush have gone into Iraq? If Bush had any doubts, Cheney was there to quell them.

Cheney had seen the messy end of the Vietnam War in his early years in the executive branch. From the legislative branch, he saw Reagan’s foreign policy mired in the constraints Congress imposed on funding Nicaragua’s anticommunist Contras and witnessed the Watergate-like crisis that exploded when the administration was found to have sold arms to Iran to fund the Contras anyway. Those dismal episodes were a contrast with the 1991 Gulf War, in which the first President Bush had a relatively free hand and seemed to win a quick, clean victory. Cheney would say his time as secretary of defense was his most satisfying experience in government. 

It was evidently an experience that left him overconfident. Would the Gulf War have been even more popular—Bush I’s approval ratings had soared into the 90s during the conflict—if the administration had been bolder, not only expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait but going all the way to Baghdad? At the time, Cheney thought not. But if Vietnam and Iran-Contra had demoralized the country, along with three successive Republican administrations, didn’t the Gulf War show what success could look and feel like? After 9/11 the younger Bush had a chance to surpass the older, and Vice President Cheney could surpass Defense Secretary Cheney. If the fundamental choices were Vietnam and Iran–Contra or Panama and the Gulf War, what was there to choose? Bush II’s Iraq War would be masterminded, after all, by the man who’d overseen the Gulf War triumph.

Barton Gellman’s book on the Cheney vice presidency, Angler, presents the case for Cheney’s view of executive power in the George W. Bush years as a product of his experience seeing Republican presidents besieged by Congress during Watergate, the Ford interregnum, and Iran–Contra. It’s plausible: In this telling, Cheney had a long-term goal of restoring presidential power to pre-Watergate levels. Perhaps Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt was his ideal of a president possessed of unfettered executive authority—if only Johnson had been willing to do whatever it might take to win in Vietnam. 

In any event, the architects of victory in Kuwait surely couldn’t go wrong in Iraq, could they? Not only would Cheney undo the damage of Watergate, he would make war something to be proud of again. He’d already done it once before, but the Clinton administration had squandered the Gulf War’s dividends. 

Despite his general reputation as a conservative in 2000, Cheney wasn’t any particular kind of conservative. Unlike Buchanan or the many religious-right figures of the ‘80s and ‘90s who sought the White House, Cheney wasn’t specifically a hero to social conservatives. Yet he wasn’t an economic conservative, either: He would famously tell Bush II’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, as recounted in Ron Suskind’s book The Price of Loyalty, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” 

Cheney was most defined, even before he became vice president, by his role in foreign policy. He didn’t have a reputation as a neoconservative ideologue, despite the ties he and his wife had to the increasingly neocon-leaning American Enterprise Institute in the 1990s. But in foreign policy he was always the quintessential Bush Republican—so much so that “Cheney Republican” might be the more accurate label for the genus. 

George H.W. Bush’s “realism” is greatly exaggerated by his admirers, but he did at least recognize some prudential limits in his policies toward Baghdad and Moscow. His “Chicken Kiev” speech, in which he warned Ukraine against a hasty separation from the Soviet Union, calling such a move “suicidal nationalism,” earned Bush I a great deal of obloquy, not least from the New York Times columnist William Safire, but he understood the risks of antagonizing Moscow. He never actually stopped waging war against Saddam Hussein—from encouraging a doomed revolt by Iraq’s Marsh Arabs to enforcing a no-fly zone over parts of the country—but he knew better than to launch an invasion of the sort his son would launch in 2003, egged on by Cheney. By then Cheney had developed a doctrine that amounted to extending and amplifying what was worst in George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy while excising what was most sensible.

Cheney had reason to think of himself as the most successful Bush I Republican, and therefore just the man to teach his old boss’s son how to run the world. And Bush-Cheney, as almost a copresidency, would pursue a project grander than any Bush I had dared to undertake. Secretary Cheney had lived in his shadow. Vice President Cheney now had the opportunity to re-do his greatest success and make it greater—instead of being constrained by an older Bush, Cheney would be enabled by a younger, more deferential one. The artist could paint his masterpiece without his patron impeding him, because his patron would be his pupil.

What this experiment proved was that the Cheney element wasn’t the best part of the George H.W. Bush administration, but its worst, and unconstrained under the second Bush it would plunge Mesopotamia into carnage and embroil the United States in wars as demoralizing as Lyndon Johnson’s. Cheney and Cheneyism brought regime change not only to Baghdad but to Washington as well, ending the Bush dynasty and Bush Republicanism, which had become synonymous with Cheney Republicanism. And Cheney Republicanism has since ceased to be Republican at all, serving most recently as a prop for the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, who had Liz Cheney’s endorsement and her father Dick’s vote. The Cheneys and Cheneyism have wound up as a footnote to a Democrat who is herself a footnote to Joe Biden. 

That’s the context in which Cheney’s political life ended a year before his earthly expiration. He dreamed of remaking the world, and he did—not through his success but by his failure.

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