Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Barton Gellman, is almost guaranteed to start a fistfight. People who don’t like Dick Cheney will find that their worst nightmares aren’t as bad as they think and that the things we didn’t know about Cheney’s activities make their worst nightmares look like a Rainbow Brite movie. The people who like Dick Cheney, a quickly shrinking minority, will find that this book is so well-researched and the attestations so solid that they won’t be able to explain it away as a pack of lies invented by the vast left wing, liberal, media elite, commie, un-American, hippie … well … you know.

So we start with Mr. Gellman to establish some bona fides. He is a special projects reporter for the Washington Post. He graduated from Princeton and received a post-graduate degree in politics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar. Mr. Gellman has twice won or shared the Pulitzer Prize in addition to other honors too numerous to mention. I call attention to these things because his book isn’t a puff piece, nor is it a hatchet job. There is very little commentary, pro or con. It reads more like a history book. There are 70 pages of notes and a complete index.

Dick Cheney is the most powerful Vice president in the history of the USA. There is a popular image of Mr. Cheney as a kind of puppet master, a Machiavellian behind-the-scenes manipulator. That image is largely true. That popular image also includes the picture of a man who slowly and steadily usurped the power of the presidency. That part of the image is largely untrue. Mr. Gellman traces how Cheney got to that point with the approval and permission of the president. President Bush comes out of this book as a president more interested in having the office of president and much less interested in doing the job of the president. Of course, that job still had to be done, and so Dick Cheney was charged by the president to manage the day-to-day operation of the vice president’s office as well as the presidential office.

Cheney was content to do this in the background. He was very clear about not wanting to run for president when Bush’s term was up and that, according to the president, made him the perfect guy to assume control of certain aspects of running the country normally left to the president. Cheney didn’t intimidate Bush. However, Dick Cheney did intimidate nearly everyone else in this part of the galaxy. Certainly that was part of his personality, but it was also a technique. He used it to get his way. It made bluffing one’s way through a rough patch much easier if your opponent thought you might eat his children. When Bush was elected he was surrounded with people whom Mr. Gellman describes as presidentialists. This is a political philosophy that holds that the president is something near to an elected monarch. Whatever he says is law is indeed law, no matter what the legislative or judicial branches of the government say. The president can decide to break any law and there would be no repercussions. He is, in a strict sense, above the law.

He’s not the only president to feel this way. Some of you might remember Richard Nixon saying just about the same thing when he was in the middle of the Watergate scandal. Mr. Gellman methodically details how Cheney and the vice president’s counsel, a man named David Addington, set about collecting as much government power as they could gather together and installing it in the executive branch. They did this by ordinary political means, they did this by destroying anyone who got in their way, and they did this by shredding large parts of the Constitution. They used every trick in the book including, but not limited to, lying directly to Congressmen, the Congress, and the American people.

Cheney and Addington were so good at covering up that most investigations ended with everyone in Washington knowing who was responsible for the Valerie Plame leak, the WMD lie, the illegal wiretapping of American citizens by their own government, the excising of habeas corpus from the Constitution, and the catastrophic deregulation of financial markets, but having no concrete proof that the VP or Addington were even in town when all of this went down. When Scooter Libby took the fall for the VP, apparently all roads to Cheney were blocked off. Of course, in return for taking the fall, Libby was pardoned by Bush before he served any time.

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency is a mesmerizing portrait of raw political power. It is also a cautionary tale of what can happen in the Land of Old Glory when the citizenry stop paying attention. According to Mr. Gellman, it isn’t a political opinion -- but a legal one -- to say that we have now found ourselves with fewer rights than before the Bush / Cheney Administration. It must be said that Bush and Cheney aren’t the first members of the Executive to try this sort of thing. The list is long and the reasons that Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR tried might be a little more understandable than the Bush / Cheney reasons but the fact is that if other presidents like Washington, Jefferson and Madison were to come back and take a look at what Cheney, Abbington, and Bush have done to the principles the founding fathers held so dear, they might be organizing another tea party in Boston.