In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney (Threshold Editions, 565 pages, $35) IF I HAD to sum up both the tone of this memoir and the character of its author in six words, I would quote–as he does on page 18–the words of Mi ss Korb el, his kindergarten teacher. “Richard,” she wrote on his first report card, “does not give up easily.” This simple, straightforward evaluation goes far to explaining both Dick Cheney’s many impressive achievements in public life and his occasional missteps. But before going any further, I need to make a personal disclosure. Although three years his junior, I was briefly, and only technically, Dick Cheney’s boss when we first met on Capitol Hill 42 years ago. I formed a high opinion of him then, and I still hold it today. What brought us together in 1969 was an unofficial task force of 22 rising young Republican members of Congress created and headed by Rep. Bill Brock of Tennessee (later a senator, Republican National Committee chairman, U.S. trade representative, and secretary of labor), for whom I worked at the time. As Brock’s man on the task force I served as de facto staff director, coordinating the activities of the 21 other staffers detailed by the participating congressmen. One of those congressmen was a future president and vice president, George H. W. Bush; one of the staffers was Dick Cheney–a very smart, slightly stolid young PhD candidate on a congressional fellowship in the office of Rep. Bill Steiger of Wisconsin. So, without knowing it, I had one future president and two future veeps on board. The mission of the task force was to visit college campuses around the country–a listening tour before the invention of the term–and meet with students, faculty, and administrators in as calm and non-confrontational a setting as was possible at the height of the Vietnam War. Afterward, as Dick Cheney explains in this memoir, back in Washington, “the congressmen briefed the president on their campus visits and issued a public report that offered a number of ideas, including lowering the voting age to eighteen.” Lending momentum to the drive to lower the voting age was not, however, the task force’s only historic legacy. Over lunch at the GOP Capitol Hill Club shortly after the task force wound down, Dick confided that the experience had convinced him that his future would be better spent in the corridors of power rather than in the halls of academe. Or, as he puts it in his forceful but sparely-written memoir, “I was beginning to realize that it was the political life that I preferred.” He soon hitched his wagon to one of the Congress’s fastest rising stars. Don Rumsfeld was a promising Illinois House member President Nixon had just named head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the organizational residue of Lyndon Johnson’s long lost and long forgotten–though we’re still paying for it–”War on Poverty.” Like Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld has a well-earned reputation for bluntness. Witness the way he welcomed Cheney to his OEO staff: “You, you’re congressional relations. Now get the hell out of here.” In fact, Cheney would stick close, becoming Rumsfeld’s trusted trouble-shooter at OEO and then following him to the Cost of Living Council and the Nixon White House staff. Post-Watergate, when Rumsfeld was named President Ford’s White House chief of staff, Cheney would be his deputy. Both men were alpha male Washington political types, very smart, very aggressive, and very ambitious, but they were far enough apart in age–Cheney being younger by nearly a decade–to avoid career collisions. Indeed, as the younger man, Cheney would literally follow in Rumsfeld’s footsteps, replacing him as White House chief of staff when Ford named Rumsfeld secretary of defense, then, while still a young man, successfully running for Congress just as Rumsfeld had before him. Later, he would emulate Rumsfeld by transferring to the private sector and becoming a dynamic CEO (Rumsfeld at Searle Pharmaceuticals, Cheney at the energy giant Halliburton), amassing a personal fortune that would allow him to re-enter public life whenever and however he chose. Cheney would also follow in his mentor’s footsteps at the Pentagon, serving as the senior Bush’s defense secretary just as Don Rumsfeld had served Jerry Ford. Only in 2001, more than 30 years after they first worked together, would their roles be reversed with Cheney jumping the queue to be W’s vice president and Rumsfeld returning to the Pentagon for a second stint as secretary of defense. Small wonder that the two men would think so much alike politically and militarily when facing the biggest challenge of their careers: charting the right response to 9/11. Their like-mindedness would be reinforced by a mutual reliance on a tight circle of advisors with a doctrinaire view of the world and a lock-step approach to foreign policy. To label this influential group of unelected operatives as Straussian neoconservatives is a gross oversimplification, but men like Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s right hand man at the Pentagon) and Scooter Libby (Cheney’s vice presidential chief of staff) shared a formulaic, interventionist view of Middle East policy and recognized the unique opportunity that the national trauma of 9/11 offered for putting it into effect by launching twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Billions of dollars and thousands of American lives later, what is one to make of that response? In his thoughtful, well-researched Sands of Empire , the distinguished journalist and historian Robert Merry–hardly a raving lefty–summed it up rather neatly: Administration rhetoric justifying and explaining the war policy turned out to be riddled with inaccuracies and misperceptions. The war was justified primarily on the basis of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam possessed and was building. No such weapons were ever found. Vice President Cheney insisted Saddam was linked to the al Qaeda network that perpetrated the September 11 attacks, but there was no evidence of consequence to that effect, and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet felt obliged to correct Cheney privately on more than one occasion. Donald Rumsfeld, he adds, bluntly asserted that “no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.” Subsequent events proved that statement erroneous, Merry points out; the ongoing terrorist threat “was much greater than any threat from the hapless Saddam Hussein and his military, severely attenuated by the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent U.N. Sanctions.” Believing what his advisors told him, Dick Cheney had said of the Iraqis, “I really believe we will be greeted as liberators.” The same advisors had also sold both Cheney and Rumsfeld on the merits of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, a shadowy exile group headed by convicted bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi who fed his backers doctored or fabricated intelligence inciting America to invade. Interestingly, in the many pages he devotes to defending his role as chief administration hawk, Dick Cheney omits any mention of the dubious Mr. Chalabi. IT IS UNFORTUNATE that a book with such an overwhelmingly positive story to tell–a triumphant and honorable personal rise from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of power, a warm family saga, and an instructive look behind the curtain of public politics to the way the executive and legislative branches really work–should in the end be weighed down by an obsessive attempt (as Miss Korbel recognized all those years ago, “Richard does not give up easily”) to justify understandable mistakes rather than acknowledge them. Given his parlous state of health, I can sympathize with Dick Cheney’s sense of urgency in going to press. And, like the president he served, he deserves full credit for keeping our country safe from further mass terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. But history will surely record that the greatest victories in the war on terror have been won on the ground in America where murderers with box cutters can no longer board planes at their pleasure, and through carefully targeted intelligence work and small, elite force operations like the one that took out Osama bin Laden. And let’s not forget Dick Cheney’s masterful election debate performances in 2000 and 2004. They helped keep two prime liberal goofs (Al Gore and John Kerry) and one dirty, rotten scoundrel (John Edwards) at a safe distance from the White House. In the end, that alone should earn Dick Cheney a place of honor in the conservative pantheon.
Read the original:
Two Cheers for The World According to Cheney
James Madison By Richard Brookhiser (Basic Books, 287 pages, $26.99) Over the last half century Americans have sought a more enlightened, often politically correct, evaluation of their founders. Not for us, for example, are Parson Weems’ tales about George Washington or Washington Irving’s affectionate treatment of the father of our country. But modern appraisals of America’s earliest statesmen, which too often dwell on their failings, of which they had many, rather than their virtues, of which they had many more, shed light on our own times and mores rather than those of the founding generation. It is a challenging and important task to recognize and understand the founder’s faults without losing sight of their greatness while illuminating their enduring significance along the way. No historian does this better than Richard Brookhiser. For nearly two decades, he has produced brief but profound, clear but challenging, explorations of America’s early history. His latest effort, James Madison , is a small, unvarnished monument to its diminutive namesake. Drawing from and explicating Madison’s own public and personal writings, Brookhiser, employing equal doses of his customary acumen and wit, walks readers through the man’s eight decades in little more than 200 pages. It is an honest and at times unflattering rendering, but one that reaffirms Madison’s genius, and proves authoritatively that his fingerprints remain all over our institutions. Though he is most celebrated for creating America’s Constitution, here, however, he is less its father than its “midwife.” Madison was the great multitasker and collaborator of the Founding. He could, in Brookhiser’s words, “execute double plays by himself” — laying the groundwork for the Constitutional Convention in Annapolis, then returning home to Virginia to secure the participation of his own commonwealth; producing the blueprint of the Constitution, bringing it to fruition through compromise and then to parchment with the help of Gouverneur Morris, all while recording the proceedings for posterity. He then huddled with Alexander Hamilton to seal the deal through the Federalist Papers. And finally he assumed the role of, in Brookhiser’s words, an “American Moses,” by crafting the first ten amendments to the document. This is the legacy we are most likely to recognize and honor. But as Brookhiser points out, we might be a bit more hesitant to celebrate Madison’s other progeny: When he and Thomas Jefferson (his mentor and dear friend) clashed with Alexander Hamilton, they constructed the country’s first organized political faction — the Republican Party (today’s Democrats.) To accomplish this, Madison cultivated strategic regional alliances, recruited sympathetic minds and pens, and then through a series of, by Brookhiser’s estimation, crudely written and realized essays in the National Gazette (a freshly launched Republican instrument) laid out an ideology extolling the value of an agrarian economy and the wickedness of cities and manufacturing.
If someone looked at your face while watching President Obama make a speech or hold a press conference, I’ll bet it would reflect pain and discomfort. Your facial expression might be described as a grimace. There are a number of reasons for that kind of reaction. It might not even matter whether you are liberal or conservative. There is much about Mr. Obama’s style and content that repels rather than attracts. For example, the man is tiresomely repetitive. How many times has he used the terms “millionaires and billionaires,” “shared sacrifice,” and “corporate jet owners”? He gives new meaning to the term ad nauseam . Most of what he repeats wasn’t worth saying the first time. You’re left wondering, “Is that all you’ve got?” Saying the same thing over and over makes you totally predictable and uninteresting. Mr. Obama has become tedious and boring. How many times has he told us that creating jobs is going to be his number one priority? Has it ever happened? His “credibility gap” is growing wider than LBJ’s. A particularly annoying aspect of Mr. Obama’s personality is that he has virtually no sense of humor. There are very good reasons why humor is categorized as a “sense.” Humor is akin to a sense of taste or sense of balance. Individuals vary widely in regard to these characteristics. Successful comedians have inherent and highly developed senses of what’s funny and what’s not. They are “naturals.” Of course, there are people on the other end of the spectrum, such as Mr. Obama. It’s painful when people with no sense of humor attempt to be funny. Mr. Obama frequently makes lame attempts at being funny, and people in the room usually laugh, particularly members of the press. If you listen, however, what you hear is an uncomfortable, polite, and brief kind of laugh. Mr. Obama makes use of awkward and unusual figures of speech. One glaring example that I’ve never figured out is the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope . I realize it is a phrase he took from his mentor and long-time pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wherever it came from, what in the world does it mean? It is typical of most of what Mr. Obama says. I suppose that it was meant to sound profound, but if you think about it, it’s anything but. In the midst of the health care debate Mr. Obama said, “There’s something about August going into September where everybody in Washington get’s all wee-weed up. I don’t know what it is, but that’s what happens.” So far as anyone could determine, no one had ever used the term “all wee-weed up” previously. Later the White House explained that it meant wetting the bed. That still doesn’t make any sense. Let’s just say, the man is not a great communicator. Articulate he is not. Recently in the debt limit negotiations Mr. Obama warned the Republicans, “don’t call my bluff.” That’s just weird. Anyone with half a brain knows that a basic requirement of a bluff is that you don’t let it be known that you’re bluffing. Admitting that you’re bluffing cancels its effect. If you admit that you’re bluffing, you are sure to be called on it. Mr. Obama is often cloyingly folksy. One obvious example is his insincere and frequent use of the word “folks.” A similar lame attempt at sounding like a down-home good-old-boy is the dropping of the g in words like going, doing, etc. It just makes him sound phony. Mr. Obama is attempting to act a part, but he’s not a very good actor. Watching bad acting is no fun. The odds are looking better all the time that Mr. Obama will be a one-term president. There’s a good chance we will only be burdened with his tiresome style for another eighteen months.
Excerpt from:
Why President Obama Is Painful to Watch
Light of the World : The Pope, The Church and The Signs of the Times By Pope Benedict XVI and Peter Seewaldt (Ignatius Press, 256 pages, $21.95) A well-known American Catholic theologian not noted for his fidelity to Church teaching was a commentator for a major television network during the last papal conclave. Just before the conclave closed its doors to begin the process of selecting the successor of St. Peter (and more immediately the successor to Pope John Paul II), he proclaimed confidently that one thing was certain — the next pope would not be Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. I think it fair to assume that the network has not offered him a contract for the next papal election. The election of Pope Benedict following upon John Paul II’s long and historic papacy dealt the death blow to the resistance movement within the Church’s post-Vatican II efforts to misinterpret the Council as a mere surrender to secular modernity. The most obvious product of this lengthy internal war, at least in the West, was a massive decline in priestly vocations and concurrent rise in defections. No less invidious were changes at the diocesan level in selection and formation of seminarians — changes partly responsible for precipitating the sexual abuse of children by a small percentage of Catholic priests in the U.S. and Europe. Although such deviant behavior has also been reported with greater frequency among Protestant ministers and indeed among public school teachers in the U.S. (not surprisingly in a sex-soaked culture that aggravates fallen human nature), the betrayal of many innocents by past diocesan cover-ups of abuse allegations has rightly drawn condemnation. The toll for the Catholic Church has been great and just: the bankruptcy of many dioceses, resignations of bishops, and understandable mistrust by the laity of their bishops and priests that will take years to eradicate. Pope Benedict’s gesture of meeting with victims of abuse on his many papal visits along with his constant denunciation of these crimes in his talks in Rome and most particularly a scorching letter to the hierarchy of Ireland, one of the hotbeds of clerical abuse, are already having an effect in convincing the lay faithful that disclosure of crimes and punishment of their perpetrators have replaced cover-up and faith in therapy. But beyond the sex abuse scandals, Pope Benedict’s firm and far-seeing handling of his uniquely heavy spiritual responsibilities in the past five years validates his surely Spirit-driven election to the papacy. He has calmly and confidently taken up the authentic interpretation of the Second Vatican Council and the New Evangelization that John Paul launched, and has even scored a smashing success at a World Youth Day in his native land. Benedict’s few encyclicals have not been trumpet blasts condemning heretics right and left, as many expected, but rather gentle but strong examinations of the theological virtues and how they play out in our modern world. However, over time what may most affect the lay faithful is the importance Pope Benedict places on the sacred liturgy. Some refer to Benedict’s liturgical work as the “Reform of the Renewal.” He had already outlined all this in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy , which laid out his agenda of making the 1962 (Tridentine) Mass more available and attempting to introduce more silence and reverence into the post-Vatican II Mass. If he succeeds, decades or centuries from now this reinvigoration of the sacred dimension of the liturgy will likely be seen as his most important pontifical accomplishment. Pope Benedict XVI has now been the Roman pontiff for over five years; at the age of 83 he continues to make headlines with his steadfast presentation and defense of Catholic doctrine and pastoral trips abroad, most notably his recent visit to Great Britain on the occasion of the beatification of his fellow theologian, the now Blessed John Henry Newman. By all accounts, Benedict’s sincerity, simplicity, and kindness, combined with a powerful intellect, both charmed and tamed a population that is largely pagan and atheistic and had threatened possible violence against his person. Naturally each pope is different, yet no Church historian or Vaticanista could have foreseen such an occurrence. Two popes in succession — one, arguably the greatest philosopher pope, and the second, the greatest theologian pope — who both lived and suffered through the cataclysmic events of the mid-20th century; the first of whom played a central role in the demise of Communism, the second of whom is confronting the “dictatorship of relativism” in the depopulating West while tirelessly insisting on the importance of reason in dealing with Islamic fundamentalism. PETER SEEWALD, THE GERMAN JOURNALIST whose interviews with Benedict produced Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times, knows his interviewee well. He is co-author of a biography of Pope Benedict, and interviewed the then Cardinal Ratzinger twice before at book length for Salt of the Earth and God and the World. Seewald, who was then a skeptic but is now a practicing Catholic and well-known religion writer in his native Germany, poses questions that are lengthy and even provocative. However, to clarify some of the earlier media confusion: No, this book is happily not about the morality of using condoms in certain circumstances. In response to a question from Seewald, the pope glancingly touched on the topic, which set off the predictable brief media frenzy, terminated when it became clear that the visible head of the Catholic Church had not belatedly embraced the sexual revolution. What then is the book about? The headings of its three parts indicate the subject of Seewald’s questions: “The Sign of the Times,” “The Pontificate,” and “Where Do We Go from Here?” In the first section Seewald asks the pope what he felt like when he was elected: A thought of a guillotine occurred to me: Now it falls down and hits you. I had been so sure that this office was not my calling but that God would grant me some peace and quiet after strenuous years. But then, I can only say, explain to my self: God’s will is apparently otherwise and something new and completely different is beginning for me. He will be with me. When asked in the second part about how the Church differs from a multinational company, Pope Benedict replies: Well, we are not a production plant, we are not a for profit business. We are Church. That means a community of men standing together in faith. The task is not to manufacture some product or to be a success at selling merchandise. Instead the task is to live the faith in an exemplary way and to proclaim it and at the same time to keep this voluntary association which cuts, across all cultures, nations and times and is not based on external interests, spiritually connected with Christ and God himself. In the third part, asked about his prayer at Fatima on May 11, 2010, “May the years ahead hasten the fulfillment of the prophecy of the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to the Glory of the Most Holy Trinity,” Pope Benedict replies: I said the “triumph will draw closer.” This is equivalent in meaning to our praying for the coming of God’s kingdom. The statement was not intended to express any expectation on my part that there is going to be a turnaround and that history will suddenly take on a totally different course. The point rather was that the power of evil is restrained again and again and again and the power of God himself is shown in the Mother’s power and keeps it alive! The Church is always called upon to do what God asked of Abraham, which is to see there are enough righteous men to suppress evil and destruction. I understood my words as a prayer that the energies of the good might regain their vigor. So you could say that the triumphs of God, the triumphs of Mary are quiet, but they are real nevertheless. Light of the World has a preface by George Weigel, the biographer of John Paul II who probably knows more about the contemporary Catholic scene than any man this side of the National Catholic Reporter’ s John Allen. The book’s appendix is especially valuable, as it collects several of the most important short statements and interviews of Benedict’s pontificate, along with biographical data, curriculum vitae, and a “Brief Chronicle” of the pontificate that runs right up to his November 2010 trip to Spain. Whatever your religious convictions or lack thereof, you will be charmed by the sincere, simple, and deep reflections on both the Church and the World by this man of God who also possesses one of its greatest intellects. While John Paul II is indubitably “the Great” and was in a certain sense the mentor of his successor, the greatest goal of John Paul’s pontificate was left unmet — the union of all Christians. It would be a stretch for Benedict to live to 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Revolution, but given his close relationship with the autocephalous Orthodox churches and the ongoing disintegration of traditional denominational Protestantism, the pontificate of Pope Benedict could achieve giant steps towards the greatest wish of the Founder of the Church: “That all may be one!” I would not bet against the unexpected pope from Bavaria.
Read the rest here:
A Gentle Man
Crisis reveals character. The French, a creative, artistic, and — by their own account — intelligent people, are not at their best in times that require steady nerves. The country’s costly, self-imposed crisis over pension reform reveals, once again, the flawed French character at its spiteful, wrongheaded worst. Ever skilled at Jesuitical mental dexterity to justify shooting themselves in the foot, they just can’t resist the pleasure of saying non to authority. During their centuries of absolute monarchy they developed the habit of submission to the royal whim. To counterbalance that they would occasionally rise in revolt, then return to passive acceptance. Any suggestion of change was assumed to be bad; the default response was non . In the 1970s an exasperated prime minister despairingly called his country “the blocked society.” The late political philosopher Raymond Aron lamented that instead of evolution there were sporadic explosions of mass discontent, followed by more socio-economic gridlock. This past week has seen France’s fourth crippling national strike and seventh day of violent street protests against the government’s reform proposals. Labor unions have paralyzed much of train service and other public transport, along with half the flights at Orly airport and a third at Roissy. (They often block airport access roads, making luggage-laden passengers trudge hundreds of yards to the terminal.) Riot police in RoboCop body armor grapple with hooligans spoiling for a fight; some 3,000 have been arrested so far, dozens of police officers injured. School children, egged on by their leftist teachers and mouthing labor union slogans, join the joyful chaos. (One group of apprentice Robespierres in short pants raided a bakery to steal bonbons.) University campuses are beginning to rumble, raising the specter of another May 1968. On orders from the largest French labor union, the communist-backed CGT, workers in oil refineries and ports have taken a strangle hold on energy supplies. Ten of the country’s 11 active refineries are blocked, along with many of its 219 fuel depots, while dockers refuse to offload oil tankers. Some 3,000 gas stations have run dry. Tons of rotting, uncollected garbage pile up in major cities like Nantes and Marseilles. Tens of thousands of businesses have been hit by the transport disruption and lack of fuel. The national railways have been losing $26 million a day, the chemical industry $130 million. Object of this mass hysteria? An attempt to save France’s pension system by gradually, timidly raising the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 and increasing by one year the contributions to it. (It had long been age 65 until Socialist President François Mitterrand, for purely ideological reasons, made it 60 in the early 1980s.) In Europe, Germany, Britain and Italy (Italy!) passed similar measures without trauma. Britain went further last week, with the steepest public spending cuts in over 60 years, curtailing welfare benefits, eliminating nearly half a million public sector jobs, raising consumption taxes. As one amazed French commentator sputtered in disbelief, “The British are being pragmatic, not ideological. They’re trying to find ways to make the plans work instead of blocking them.” It should have been a piece of cake, simply moving France into line with other industrialized nations. Public opinion and the unions initially understood and favored pension reform. But Nicolas Sarkozy’s government botched it by taking an uncompromising, my way or the highway line, preventing the unions and Socialist Party opposition from the usual face-saving motions. Now the unions are trying to get back in front of their extremist members, announcing more strikes and demonstrations next Thursday and in early November.
