Dominic Sandbrook
CLASS OF 1979
Angler: The Shadow Presidency of Dick Cheney
By Barton Gellman (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 483pp £25)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

In 1979, Lynne Cheney, the wife of the present American vice president, published a novel, Executive Privilege. It was no jewel of fine writing, but merely another entry in a popular genre of the day, the presidential-conspiracy-thriller bonkbuster. (Even Spiro Agnew got in on the act with his own literary masterpiece, The Canfield Decision, now sadly forgotten.) Her story tells of a new president from the western state of Montana, brisk and determined, dedicated to regime change abroad in the interests of his native land. Zern Jenner is a modest and understated man, a workaholic whose guiding principles are 'tenacity and self-control'. He stands tall against his enemies in the press, the Senate and the environmentalist movement; he insists on confidentiality, executive privilege and 'martial law tribunals' for terrorists. And when a group of Indian activists claim their rights over coal-rich territory in Wyoming, Jenner contemptuously brushes them aside. 'This country', he says, 'needs that coal.'

Lynne Cheney was writing at a time when the American presidency had never seemed weaker, its power and credibility sapped by the revelations of Kennedy's amorous intrigues and Nixon's brooding conspiracies. The president of the day, Jimmy Carter, had brought the office to a new low, collapsing in front of the cameras while pushing himself too hard in a road race, flailing impotently in the face of soaring inflation and Iranian hostage-takers, and suffering the ultimate indignity of an attack by an aquatic 'killer rabbit' while fishing on holiday. Lynne's husband Dick had seen the weakness of the presidency at first hand, having served as Gerald Ford's understated chief of staff a few years before. He had not greatly enjoyed the experience, but at least it was better than being vice president. The number two spot, he said in 1980, was a 'really rotten, stinking job'.

The picture of Dick Cheney that emerges from Barton Gellman's fascinating book is one of a man for whom it is forever 1979, with the presidency weakened and helpless, the nation at bay, and Americans everywhere menaced by terrorists, leftists and militant do-gooders. The guiding principle of his time in office, he told another biographer, has been to 'restore the powers of the presidency', asserting executive mastery of foreign and economic policy alike. For Cheney, it is as though the Reagan and Clinton years, which restored the presidency's powers if not quite its prestige, had never happened. The ghost of Jimmy Carter - or, indeed, Carter himself - is always at the gates.

Perhaps this explains why Cheney, a rich, successful and emotionally secure man who had already held some of the most prestigious public offices in the nation, forced his way onto George W Bush's ticket eight years ago. Although Bush had already suggested that Cheney might be a strong contender for the vice presidency, the two men were hardly political soulmates and most people anticipated a different candidate. But the episode was an object lesson in Cheney's sheer bureaucratic skill and cunning. As chief of the selection process, he sent extraordinarily detailed and searching questionnaires to the other candidates, using their answers to eliminate them, one by one. Needless to say, he never filled in such a questionnaire himself. At the end, only Cheney was left, the last man standing. And then, in the months that followed, he used the information in the questionnaires against his undeclared rivals, disqualifying them from government posts and damning them in their home states. Machiavelli would have been proud of him.

The obvious flaw with Gellman's account, which begins in the summer of 2000 and ends eight years later, is that it never really gives us a sense of the inner man. (It is hard to believe, given Cheney's obvious brains, that there is no inner man.) For Gellman, a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer for his reports on Cheney, the vice president is less the Darth Vader figure of popular culture than a dogged, bare-knuckle, bureaucratic fighter, a committed patriot who believes in strong, secretive government and is preoccupied by threats from abroad. There are occasional flashes of dry humour, but he could hardly be called a colourful man. And what really makes him tick - what he thinks behind the taciturn mask, what he loves and hates, what he might dream about at night - is never clear.

As a meticulous, forensic account of Cheney's role in the endless turf wars within the Bush White House, however, this could hardly be bettered. Gellman shows how, step by step, Cheney ensured that his own men took the key positions within the administration, and then managed to cut off alternative sources of advice to the president, so that when Bush thought he was thinking for himself, he was actually choosing from options already selected by his deputy. Environmental policy is a case in point. Bush had actually run in 2000 on a relatively moderate platform, accepting the argument for climate change and promising to do something about it. Within weeks of taking office, however, he had allowed Cheney to push him hard to the right. His appointed environmental chief, Christine Todd Whitman, a loyal Republican, eventually resigned in despair. Cheney had got his way - yet again.

The tragedy is that although Cheney prided himself on his administrative competence, almost everything he touched has now turned to ashes. He calls himself a conservative, but true conservatives were horrified by his contempt for the Constitution and apparent enthusiasm for illegal torture and domestic surveillance. And although Cheney's priority was to restore the power and prestige of the presidency, George W Bush will leave office as the least popular, most derided and probably least successful chief executive in history, his tenure defined by three ghastly failures: the occupation of Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the global economic meltdown. The irony is that throughout his administration, Dick Cheney was desperate to banish the shadow of the 1970s. Today, unfortunately, it really does feel like 1979.

Dominic Sandbrook's latest book, 'A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties', is published by Little, Brown.