E-mail a friendBart Gellman
airdate September 17, 2008
A journalist and author, Bart Gellman is a special projects reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post. In '02, he was a member of the Post team that received the Pulitzer Prize for comprehensive coverage of 9/11 and America's war on terrorism. A Rhodes Scholar, he's also served as Jerusalem bureau chief, Pentagon correspondent and DC Superior Court reporter. Gellman's new book, Angler, is an investigative look into how Dick Cheney has reshaped the role of the U.S. vice president.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Angler author offers his opinion on Cheney's worst hour as vice president. (2:34)
Full interview. (11:30)
Bart Gellman
Tavis: Bart Gellman is a special projects reporter for "The Washington Post" who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on Dick Cheney. The controversial vice president is the subject of his new book, "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency." He joins us tonight from New York. Bart, nice to have you on the program.
Bart Gellman: Thank you.
Tavis: Let me ask how the book came to be. As I mentioned a moment ago, you won the Pulitzer Prize for the series in the "Post" on Cheney. I guess you took it a step further and turned it into a book?
Gellman: Yeah, we decided a couple of years ago at "The Washington Post" that Cheney was both the most powerful and obviously also the most mysterious vice president we've ever had and warranted a much closer look. I worked with a partner named Jo Becker and we did the series, and I decided to expand it into a book.
Tavis: When you say the most mysterious vice president, you mean by that what?
Gellman: I mean secretive, disinclined to show us what he's doing, disinclined to advertise his role - and it's a very substantial role - in decision-making.
Tavis: How different is that from other vice presidents, and does he have a responsibility to do otherwise?
Gellman: Well, vice presidents have each had their own style abo9ut how much they talk and how powerful they are. There's been a general trend toward greater importance for vice presidents ever since about Walter Mondale's time with Jimmy Carter, but there's never been a vice president as powerful and there's never been a vice president as secretive.
It's hard to say what the responsibilities are; we've never had to worry about accountability for a vice president before, because they don't have any inherent power.
Tavis: How dangerous a combination is that as you see it - that is to say, the combination in a vice president of power and secrecy?
Gellman: Well, potentially dangerous. The important thing is if you want to hold people accountable for what they do with their power; you have to find out first what they're doing.
Tavis: So how did Dick Cheney amass all of this power?
Gellman: It was a combination of a lot of things. He won the confidence of President Bush when he became running mate. He created what he told Dan Quayle was, quote, "A different understanding with the president," in which he would not play the traditional ceremonial roles - going to funerals and fundraisers and so on - as much as he would stay in the White House and have substantial influence over policy.
He had more experience and knowledge of government than pretty much anyone else at the upper reaches of the Bush administration, and certainly more than the novice president did when eh first came into office, and he had an unparalleled ability to work the sort of details and the levers of bureaucracy.
He knew the pivot points where decisions would be made, and he knew how to get to them.
Tavis: I'm trying to figure out what it was about Cheney, or maybe the question is what was it about the guy he worked for, George Bush, as opposed to Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Al Gore came into the White House with a lot of experience, having been in Washington his whole life. He'd been in Congress, he'd been in the Senate, he'd run for president himself.
So Gore comes to the White House with perhaps as much experience as any vice president we'd ever seen prior to him, and yet he wasn't able to craft the kind of relationship with Clinton that you argue in the book that Cheney did with Bush. What gives?
Gellman: Well, every relationship is unique. Gore was very experienced and knew a lot about government, but he had not served in a major executive role. Cheney had been secretary of Defense and chief of staff at the White House. The guy knew where every button was to be pushed.
He worked for a president - George Bush - who was not detail-oriented, preferred to express big visions and leave the implementation to others. Cheney's always lived at the intersection of ends and means. He knows how to operate.
Bill Clinton, by contrast to George Bush, was a detail man and was sort of intricately conversant with the issues and the decisions and the personnel. The other big difference is that Al Gore was a politician who was still young and had his own ambitions, as we saw, to become president himself. And so there's a natural divergence of interests from time to time between a president and an ambitious vice president. Dick Cheney had no intention of running for president, and that was a different thing.
Tavis: Tell me more about the Cheney-Bush relationship. I'm particularly interested in what you detail in the book about how Cheney, over these eight years, has gotten Bush to accept his point of view.
Gellman: He has very often, but certainly not always. The cartoon of the idea that this was a Cheney administration is not true. Bush really was the decider when he wanted to be, and when an issue rose to the sort of level of his interest or notice in the Oval Office, the thing about it was that there were a lot of things that didn't interest him that much.
Let's take the federal budget - this is where the government puts its money where its mouth is. This is the kind of thing that makes George Bush's eyes glaze over. Now traditionally, when a Cabinet officer wants to appeal the amount of money he's getting from OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, that Cabinet officer, whether it's the secretary of State or Treasury or wherever else, will go to the president and say, "Mr. President, I've got a problem. I need more money."
That didn't happen here. Early on, Cheney set up something called a budget review board which he chaired, and that's where the buck stopped. Now, I'm not saying he did that to undermine the president, or without the president's knowledge. George Bush said, "Sure, go ahead - I don't need those headaches."
Tavis: More than just the budget, you argue in the text that it really was Cheney - again, because Mr. Bush, not interested in details - it really was Cheney who kind of steered the ship in terms of what this administration was going to look like vis-à-vis personnel.
Gellman: Oh, yeah. Look, the breadth of decisions over which he had big influence, it's hard to exaggerate. He did way more than anyone else to populate the Bush administration. He even started doing that during the recount, arguing to the president or to George Bush, who was then either not or was the president elect, said, "Look, we can't wait for the recount to finish to start choosing major appointments. There's thousands of them to make. We've got to get a running start. How do you like me to start doing that?"
Bush said, "Fine." So Cheney brought in all kinds of allies in major, major Cabinet posts from Defense and Treasury, going down to the Environmental Protection Agency, and he also knew that if you want influence over what the government does, you don't stop with the Cabinet.
He was putting people into deputy assistant secretary roles because a lot of big decisions made by government never rise to the Cabinet level.
Tavis: How did he use his influence with the president to cut out other people? To cut out or to cut off other people - indeed, high level persons in this administration - from this president?
Gellman: It's very hard for me to tell how often George Bush knew and how often he didn't know that Cheney had not gone through the usual process of vetting proposals around the Cabinet, around other senior White House advisers. I suspect that some of the time, Bush did know. He kind of liked springing surprises. And I think some of the time, he did not know.
Sort of the first big example was soon after September 11th when Cheney favored the idea of trying alleged terrorists before military commissions. Now, there was a whole interagency group that was studying that question - do they get civilian courts or courts martial or commissions?
Cheney was impatient with that process. He knew what the answer was or should be. He simply brought a four-page draft that was written by his lawyer and that hardly anyone else had seen, he brought that to lunch with the president one day, the president said, "Sure," and Cheney sends it around the West Wing in a kind of hand-off to three or four people, at the end of which it gets brought back into the Oval Office for signature by a guy who doesn't even know Cheney had anything do to with it.
Tavis: He has been called all kind of names, as most people in politics are, but he, because of his mysterious and secretive and somewhat argue overreaching role inside the White House has been called a lot of things - Darth Vader comes to mind immediately.
What's your sense, having written this book about him now and won this Pulitzer Prize for writing about him - describe for me as best you can his personality. What is he like? Who is the guy?
Gellman: Well, it's funny, because the public image of Dick Cheney and George Bush is off, I think, in important ways. Bush is smarter and a little nastier behind closed doors than people would think, and Cheney is actually a lot nicer guy. When it comes to business, he's all business. He'll roll right over you if you get in his way. But personally, he is gracious, funny, does not lose his temper or humiliate staff, and you can't that those last things are true of George Bush.
Tavis: If the story were written today and this were the final chapter today, what has been Dick Cheney's worst hour as vice president?
Gellman: The worst hour has got to be the day that Scooter Libby, his chief of staff, was indicted. He, at that moment, lost a good friend and someone who was invaluable to him in making things happen in the government. Scooter Libby was both his chief of staff and his national security adviser, and he was kind of an intellectual alter-ego as well.
Tavis: Special projects reporter for "The Washington Post," winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and now author of the new book called "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency." His name, of course, Bart Gellman. Bart, congrats on the book and nice to have you on the program.
Gellman: Thank you very much.
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