Cheney's Chance

Of all the editorials The New York Sun has run, the one that attracted the most response was the one under the headline "Cheney's Chance." The editorial, suggesting that Vice President Cheney would be an attractive presidential candidate who would bring a lot to the race, caused a furor in the blogosphere and led to the production of an entire segment on CNN. It also led to several dinner party conversations of friends or relatives of the editorial writer devoted to whether the writer had finally lost his mind.

Well, finally there is a response to those who suggest that affection for Mr. Cheney is a sign of clinical insanity, or, at least, a response more printable than the one Mr. Cheney himself gave to Senator Leahy. It comes courtesy of Stephen Hayes, a senior writer at the Weekly Standard, who has authored the new book "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President" (Harper-Collins, 578 pages, $27.95).

Mr. Hayes's account describes a vice president who has lived the American dream. The son of a man who worked for the federal Soil Conservation Service, Mr. Cheney lived for several months as a child with his family in a friend's unfinished basement. In exchange for a scholarship to Yale, he had to work as a busboy in the freshman cafeteria. Eventually, he flunked out, earned a living stringing electricity lines across Wyoming and Utah, developed a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and amassed two arrests in less than a year for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Yet when America figured him out, it handed him up high. By age 34, he was White House chief of staff in the administration of President Ford. In that capacity, he devoted a considerable amount of time to stemming the influence of Vice President Rockefeller. "You've got to watch vice presidents," Mr. Cheney tells Mr. Hayes. "They're a sinister crowd."

Elected to Congress from Wyoming, Mr. Cheney and his wife, Lynne, won praise from the Washington press corps that would later scorn him. The Washington Post's David Broder called the Cheneys "perhaps the most literate couple in town" and, when Mr. Cheney was nominated by George H.W. Bush as defense secretary, wrote, "Cheney is smart, he is tough and he is totally trustworthy."

When Mr. Cheney and the first President Bush left Saddam Hussein in power after defeating Iraq in the first Gulf War, Mr. Cheney explained, "The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many." He warned that America might have gotten "bogged down in the problem of trying to take over and govern Iraq."

For stopping short of Baghdad and leaving Saddam in power, the first Bush administration was attacked by the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Albert Gore, who accused the Bush administration of "a blatant disregard for brutal terrorism, a dangerous blindness to the murderous ambitions of a despot."

As vice president in the administration of George W. Bush, Mr. Cheney spent much time after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, at a "secure, undisclosed location," which Mr. Hayes discloses was most often the presidential retreat at Camp David, but also was a hunting retreat in South Dakota called Paul Nelson Farm.

Some of the most illuminating material in the book comes from an interview with President Bush, who describes Mr. Cheney to Mr. Hayes as, "hard core free market. Hard core."

"Look, we don't sit around psychoanalyzing each other," Mr. Bush says. "He's from that western stock that's kind of the quiet — there's strength in quietude, in a way. That's the opposite of me. I'm an emotional guy. I cry, I go to see the fallen and spend hours with them weeping, laughing, hugging."

"Cheney is not a hugger. But he loves deeply," Mr. Bush says.

Mr. Hayes even manages to draw Mr. Cheney out into some reflection himself. The vice president acknowledges to Mr. Hayes that in ousting Saddam, "I think we should have probably gone with the provisional government of Iraqis from the very outset, maybe even before we launched. I think the Coalition Provisional Authority was a mistake, wasted valuable time."

"Cheney" makes clear, also, that the vice president disagreed with Mr. Bush's decision to replace Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

The book has virtues other than the portrait of Mr. Cheney. The account of the Valerie Plame-Joseph Wilson-I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby affair is remarkably clear-eyed and well told. Mr. Hayes has a fine eye for material on domestic policy as well, quoting a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Mark Dayton, as predicting, at the time of the passage of the Bush tax cuts, "The tax base of the American government is being destroyed." Federal revenues in the event reached new highs after the tax cuts.

While generally friendly to Mr. Cheney, this account doesn't flinch from his unpopularity. The Washington Post's polling expert, Richard Morin, noted that at 18% approval, Vice President Cheney was less popular than Michael Jackson after he was tried for child abuse and O.J. Simpson after he was tried for murder. Mr. Hayes quotes Mr. Morin as reporting that Mr. Cheney was "less popular with Americans than Joseph Stalin is with Russians." The Huffington Post printed a Thanksgiving Day prayer for Mr. Cheney's death, which, it said, would "rid the planet of its Number One Human Tumor."

Some of this may be blamed on a hostile press, and Mr. Hayes also reports on a dynamic within the Bush administration in which presidential aides sought to keep Mr. Cheney's profile low so that he didn't outshine the president. Some of it may have to do with Mr. Cheney's personality — "not a hugger," as the president put it.

The book quotes Senator McCain as saying, "Dick doesn't like campaigning." Nothing in the Hayes book suggests that Mr. Cheney is about to do it — except for that the vice president spent nearly 30 hours cooperating with the author and apparently gave the okay for many of his friends and colleagues to grant similar access. The Richard Cheney described in this book isn't vain enough to do that simply for his reputation in history. My own guess — okay, hope — is that Mr. Cheney has taken a look at the Republican presidential field and sees an opening. If Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans start receiving copies of "Cheney" in their mailboxes, Mr. Cheney's popularity may yet begin to climb.