It didn’t have to be that way. As governor of Texas, Bush hewed to a centrist course, working, as he often boasted, with the Democratic­-led State Legislature. As a candidate for the presidency, he promised more of the same. But as president, he struck out on a more radical and polarizing course, one that Barton Gellman, in his engrossing and informative “Angler,” suggests he would not have followed absent Cheney. (Angler is Cheney’s Secret Service code name.) Gellman, a reporter at The Washington Post, has interviewed numerous associates and antagonists of the vice president, offering the most penetrating portrait of him yet. The result is that Cheney doesn’t seem as bad as you might think. He’s even worse.

Image Credit... Vincent Laforet/The New York Times

As Gellman shows, Cheney’s intriguing began as soon as Bush entrusted him with the vice-­presidential vetting proc­ess. He treated the candidates, ranging from Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma to Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, almost as if they were terrorist suspects, demanding personal information about their extended families that no previous campaign had ever requested, including whether they were “vulnerable to blackmail.” According to Gellman, David Addington, Cheney’s longtime hatchet man, “oversaw the disassembly of candidates, cataloging their blemishes and mounting them for inspection.” Once Bush chose Cheney — after failing to interview any other candidate or to consult his staff — his running mate didn’t even bother to answer his own questionnaire, let alone supply medical or financial records. The pattern of Bush and Cheney operating together in secret was set.

Next came staffing the administration itself. Once again, Bush gave Cheney a free hand. And once again, it was Cheney and Addington who went to work creating a network of loyalists even before the Florida recount had been adjudicated. Cheney had a keen sense of the importance of titles and positions: Libby, for instance, got three titles — the vice president’s chief of staff and national security adviser, and assistant to the president. This, Gellman notes, meant that “no one save Cheney and Bush themselves were his superiors.” Appointees who proved ideologically unreliable, like Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, were quickly and ruthlessly eliminated by Cheney.

This might be seen as nothing more than rough-and-tumble bureaucratic politics. But when it came to national security, Cheney, as Gellman reminds us, established what amounted to a parallel government. Together with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, his old boss from the Nixon administration, Cheney ran rings around the bureaucracy, which he viewed as an entrenched enemy filled with traitorous liberals. One Cheney ally explains to Gellman that the State Department is “basically an Al Qaeda cell.” Richard Haass, then the director of policy planning at the State Department, was generally viewed as an enemy agent: Cheney’s office was requesting secret National Security Agency transcripts of Haass’s conversations abroad. “In the first term,” Gellman writes, “most White House staff members were unaware that many of their e-mails were blind-copied to Cheney’s staff.” The snooping habits of these aides prompted their “nervous counterparts” at other agencies to call them the Watchers.

Gellman might have emphasized more fully that Cheney and Rumsfeld were essentially reprising their role during the Ford years, when this duo sought to rub out moderates like Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, whom Gerald Ford dumped in 1976, and move the administration to the right. While Rumsfeld’s Pentagon created spider-web charts showing links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Cheney worked over skeptical Republicans like the House majority leader, Dick Armey, informing him, in Gellman’s words, that “Saddam could put drone aircraft on a freighter, steam them across the Atlantic and use the route-planning software to dispatch lethal microbes anywhere from Miami to Boston.”