Portrait of a politician as a sour young man

Guess who this is:

[He] was born on January 30, 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, to a family of New Deal Democrats who struggled through the Great Depression and were proud their oldest son was born on Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday. His grandparents lost everything in the crisis except their house.  His father…dropped out of college and worked for decades for the Soil Conservation Service teaching farmers how to rotate their crops.  His mother…waited tables at the family-owned Dickey’s Cafe in Syracuse, Nebraska, until meeting the young public servant. At various points growing up [our man] lived on an uncle’s farm in a family friend’s basement.

You got it in one, right?

Dick Cheney.

Just started reading Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker. I’m not very deep into it but so far Baker hasn’t explained or even given a serious look at the question, How did that happen? How did the son of New Deal Democrats grow up into not just a Republican conservative but the arch-Republican conservative of the first decade of the 21st Century? Maybe he’ll get into it later. The focus of the book is the eight years of George W. Bush’s Presidency and at this point Baker’s on a quick march through the five decades leading up to it, providing both personal and historical background, and he hasn’t slowed down often to editorialize, psychoanalyze personalities, or philosophize about politics. All he’s offered is that Cheney worked for Donald Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld headed Nixon’s “Office of Economic Opportunity overseeing the war on poverty” and then:

Cheney stayed with Rumsfeld when he took over the inflation-fighting Cost of Living Council. Both jobs soured Cheney on government intervention in the economy and the son of New Deal Democrats became a conservative Republican.

Which not only doesn’t explain anything, it seems wrong.  Cheney was already a conservative Republican by then. That’s how he came to be working for Rumsfeld and Nixon. And along with that, Nixon’s way of fighting the war on poverty was to scale back Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society wherever and however he could---that was what “benign neglect” meant---and Cheney would have known that and approved. In fact, most likely he’d have seen his job as helping to sour others on government intervention in the economy and if anything his experiences would have soured him on the kind of Republican moderates and liberals who were in the Administration and Congress at the time and Cheney would probably have thought insufficiently neglectful and way too benign about it. (Baker does a good and swift job of establishing Cheney’s contempt for Nelson Rockefeller and implies that contempt extended, at least in the late  1970s, to George Herbert Walker Bush.) There’s an irony here that Baker also doesn’t explore. Cheney’s father’s job was essentially to implement the government’s interference in the economy at the most local level.

Like I said, so far Baker hasn’t shown interest in looking at how Cheney went over to the Dark Side and I have a feeling he’s not going to get into even when his story opens up and there’s room for it.  Days of Fire is shaping up as a straight-forward chronicle of the Bush years told from the inside, which means that almost all of Baker’s sources were there and they have good reasons for putting the best face on everything about those days including their bosses.  Who wants to go down in history as having worked for the most inept and corrupt Presidency since Warren G. Harding’s? And Baker, well-trained journalist that he is, perhaps too well-trained---he’s the White House correspondent for the New York Times---doesn’t seem inclined to report anything he didn’t get from straight from his sources. Baker zips right through W’s National Guard service without mentioning how he managed to come out of it without becoming the fighter pilot he later like to boast he was.  So I suspect Days of Fire’s going to be a tough-read for a partisan like me who demands the kind of criticism and complaint I suspect are going to be in short supply.

At any rate, Baker leaves us to guess how and why Cheney came to reject his parents’ politics. We have a pretty good idea how that former staunch New Deal Democrat Ronald Reagan came to be the leader and prophet and now patron saint of Movement Conservatism. It started with his anti-communism and was completed when his work as a shill for General Electric showed him how much fun it was to be rich.  There’s nothing that clear-cut in Cheney’s biography as reported by Baker in Days of Fire. Cheney’s story may have as its moral that where we grow up and the friends we make in high school and college---or didn’t make; Cheney didn’t much care for what he saw at Yale before he flunked out---have more influence on what kinds of adults we become than do our parents.  It may be the case that Cheney’s relationship with his parents soured him on New Deal Democrats.  It may be that he just inherited a dominant conservative gene from one ancient ancestor or another who didn’t like to share his mastodon steaks and thought the best way to handle possibly threatening visitors from other clans was to preemptively club them to death.

Probably not going to find any of that out from Days of Fire and that’s ok.  But there is something I would like explained.  Not necessarily by Baker but by Cheney himself.

Cheney’s days in the Ford White House proved formative to his governing philosophy.  In the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, he served at the nadir of the Presidency, when Congress was chipping away at executive power through the War Powers Resolution and other legislation that altered the balance of power in American government.  The Church Committee investigation into abuses by the CIA, he felt, undercut the nation’s premier spy agency. Bryce Harlow, a veteran of the Eisenhower White House and a colleague in Ford’s, warned Cheney about the need to protect the prerogatives of the executive.  “One of the things he would say is, ‘Look, we have to make sure we leave the institution of the Presidency with the same authorities and powers that the Constitution intended,’” Rumsfeld later recalled. “Once an executive acquiesces in something that infringes on that or is weak or the Congress is a quid pro quo for something, it doesn’t just affect your Presidency; it affects the institution.” That, Rumsfeld said, made a lasting impression on him and Cheney. “I felt that way, and I know he felt that way,” Rumsfeld said. Cheney later told reporters as vice-president, “A lot of things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the 70s served to erode the authority, I think. The President needs to be effective, especially in the national security area.”

We know how this attitude played out over the course of Cheney’s vice-presidency and it’s bound to be a theme of the main part of Days of Fire. The question I want asked, not necessarily by Baker, unless he gets the chance, is “If this is how you feel, Mr Vice-President, why have you taken every opportunity you’ve had since 2009 to encourage disrespect, even contempt for President Obama and undermine his authority and cheer the Republicans in Congress on as they attempt to embarrass, weaken, and humiliate him?”

Makes it tough for the President to be effective, especially in the national security area, don’t you think?

Comments

[Davis X. Machina]

...why have you taken every opportunity you’ve had since 2009 to encourage disrespect, even contempt for President Obama

To serve the Party.

The organs of the state, even one as visible as the Presidency exist solely to serve the party, and not the other way round, because it is the Party, and only the Party, that is the vanguard of the Revolution. Upon the Revolution succeeding, the state is fated to wither away.

Cheney is a Leninist, like most career Republicans.

[Horace Boothroyd III]

Slightly off topic, but I have been seeing Peter F'ing Beinart's name on my computer screen lately, and I can't say that I like it. His stupid little book provided cover for a great many liberals to climb aboard the Iraq war bandwagon, and I am not ready to forgive him until he grovels out quite a bit more apology than the precisely zero that he has seen fit to make to date.

Some of us have long memories indeed.