Cheney writes about his important role in the Bush administration
From day one George Bush made clear he wanted me to help govern ... To the extent that this created a unique arrangement in our history, with a vice president playing a significant role in the key policy issues of the day, it was George Bush's arrangement.[5]
Reviews
The Washington Post ran a negative review by associate editor Robert G. Kaiser. Kaiser praised the early sections of the book showing Cheney's "rise from humble origins" as an interesting story "briskly told." However, Kaiser argued that Cheney "avoids a great deal" in Cheney's depiction of the Bush administration. Kaiser wrote,
He never comes to grips with the fact—so frustrating to him, obviously—that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. He recounts aspects of his own role in stoking the fires for war but ignores many of his most famous personal gaffes.[5]
A subtext to the latter half of the memoir is that in early 2009, when Barack Obama was deemed "godlike," Cheney—out of office, ill, mostly alone, and terribly unpopular—finally went public and took on Obama's serial criticism of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols. Those were soon to be validated when Obama embraced or expanded almost everything that Cheney had helped craft since 2001. In mythological terms, the post 9/11 Cheney was no longer a fixer like Odysseus, but became an unyielding Ajax who would rather be right than liked—or rather knew that to be right in Washington, he mostly could not be liked ... The more ill and more isolated Cheney became in the Bush administration, the more antithetical he seems to his earlier more robust and upbeat self, and the more we should admire him—in the same fashion we concede respect to the anti-heroes of classical Western films, who accept that the help that community needs in extremis will destroy the rare person who must deliver it.[4]
