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Letter to the editor

Dick Cheney: the inside story

At nearly 600 pages, Stephen Hayes' new biography is thorough to excess, and a genuinely sympathetic portrait of a polarizing figure.

By Edward B. Colby, Special to the Times
Published August 26, 2007

REVIEW
Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President

By Stephen F. Hayes
HarperCollins, 578 pages, $27.95

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Well into his new biography of Dick Cheney, Stephen F. Hayes provides a gripping, minute-by-minute account of events in the White House on Sept. 11, 2001.

After a second plane hits the World Trade Center, top White House officials gather in the vice president's office, and he speaks softly to President Bush on the phone. At 9:36 a.m. a Secret Service agent grabs Cheney ("by the back of my belt") and leads him to an underground command center, where Cheney calls Bush and urges him not to return to Washington.

Shortly thereafter, Cheney and Bush agree to "shoot down civilian aircraft that could be used to conduct further attacks" in Washington, and with an unidentified aircraft only 80 miles away, Cheney unblinkingly gives a military aide authorization to take it out. Surprised by the quick response, the aide asks twice more, and Cheney again gives the go-ahead.

For "several impossible minutes," Cheney believes that his order has brought down a plane in Pennsylvania. Yet, as Cheney explains to Hayes, "It wasn't a close call. I think a lot of people emotionally look at that and say, my gosh, you just shot down a planeload of Americans. On the other hand, you maybe saved thousands of lives. And so it was a matter that required a decision, that required action. It was the right call."

That passage is the journalistic and dramatic high point of a methodical biography that is, if anything, too thorough. While the following chapter, titled "Secure, Undisclosed," is also highly intriguing ("He was off being the continuity of government," Condoleezza Rice says of Cheney's videoconference appearances post-9/11), the first half of the book is long and slow.

For the political reader, the book has much to offer - portraying Cheney's incredible journey from Yale dropout to young White House staffer to member of Congress and eventually vice president - but it would have benefited from more selective storytelling. The book has awkward transitions, as disjointed topics are mashed together in the name of chronological narrative, and its chapter endings tend to be overdone.

Still, the book relies on deep reporting (including nearly 30 hours of one-on-one interviews with Cheney, and 600-plus interviews overall) and as such Hayes writes authoritatively as he narrates Cheney's first campaign for Congress from Wyoming, or the Cheney-guided negotiations among Republican leaders that produced a $350-billion tax cut in 2003.

The book is also full of funny moments and surprises. Describing an evasive-driving practice session from 2001, Hayes writes, "Even as he whipped around in a Hollywood car-chase turn, Cheney was expressionless."

On his summer fishing trips with friends, "Cheney sips Johnny Walker Red and snacks from a jar of Planters dry-roasted peanuts," not sharing. And "Cheney is not a hugger," according to the current President Bush. "But he loves deeply."

Hayes, a Weekly Standard senior writer and author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America, distances himself here from the mainstream media and what he considers its sometimes skewed reporting, critiquing its coverage of the Valerie Plame case and "the misleading reporting on Cheney's claims about Iraq and al Qaeda."

But as he recounts the many controversies involving the vice president in recent years, Hayes habitually sides with Cheney. He notes that he "came to the book sympathetic to Cheney's views," and the result is a flattering portrait, one that not surprisingly includes little criticism from Cheney's colleagues.

Yet Hayes does succeed, overall, in helping readers greatly to understand this reserved man with a penchant for secrecy and executive power. Until a more dispassionate biography is written, it will do.

Edward B. Colby is a writer in New York.

[Last modified August 23, 2007, 14:45:03]