Sidney Blumenthal: Cheney Picks a Biographer
With two and a half years remaining in the Bush administration, Dick Cheney has appointed his own official biographer - a choice that illuminates the vice president's deeply held view of truth and history.
Cheney's rise from a modest background in Casper, Wyoming to become the most powerful vice president in American history is a story that contains many unresolved and still murky aspects that would demand the most diligent scholarship and acute judgment on the part of a biographer. Cheney's complex relationships with a cast of characters over decades, providing a tour d'horizon of the Republican ascendancy, would also require intensive investigation. For example, Cheney's long alliance with Donald Rumsfeld, beginning in the Nixon White House when he was hired to serve as Rumsfeld's deputy, would call for the deepest scrutiny.
Cheney's ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with George Bush Sr, would need assiduous and careful telling. When Cheney was President Ford's chief of staff he helped elevate Bush to President Ford's CIA director while at the same time frustrating Bush's ambition to become Ford's vice president. He then received appointment as President Bush's secretary of defence, supportive of halting the war before seizing Baghdad, and then as vice president purging elder Bush's associates for their realism. Cheney's long cold war with Colin Powell, with whom he battled from the Gulf War, when General Powell was Bush Sr's chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to the Iraq war, when Powell was secretary of state, would entail utmost attention. Other relationships would also demand study, including Cheney's mentorship when he was the house Republican whip of the far-right backbencher Newt Gingrich and his guidance of Gingrich into the Republican leadership. Of course, Cheney's secretive exercise of extraordinary power in the current Bush administration must be the central focus of the historian's effort.
For this Herculean task, Cheney has passed over every single professional historian and instead selected Stephen Hayes, a writer for the neoconservative organ, the Weekly Standard. "I'm not a historian," Hayes told US News, modestly.
For years, Hayes has doggedly attempted to prove links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida in order to buttress Cheney's uncorroborated claims. From the run-up to the Iraq invasion to the present he has been relentless in publishing articles purporting to disclose conclusive evidence that has been repeatedly, consistently and thoroughly debunked by major news organisations.
"Dick Cheney Was Right" ran the headline on a Hayes piece of October 20 2003, followed by a cover story in The Weekly Standard on November 14, 2003, entitled "Case Closed". Unfortunately, the Washington Post and Newsweek promptly discredited his "proof," a leaked memo written by the neoconservative undersecretary of defence Douglas Feith. Newsweek's report, "Case Decidedly Not Closed: The defense dept. memo allegedly proving a link between al-Qaida and Saddam does nothing of the sort," stated that Hayes's account was "mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago - and were largely discounted at the time by the US intelligence community, according to current and former US intelligence officials."
Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration set up an intelligence operation to parallel established US intelligence in order to avoid having material siphoned by Iraqi exiles and freebooters like Ahmed Chalabi being subjected to objective standards of analysis. Within the administration, the information, later revealed as disinformation, was stove-piped from Cheney's office to Feith's hastily assembled office of special planning at the Pentagon, back to Cheney's office, and then to Condoleezza Rice's compliant national security council, and finally, if at all, to the president.
Outside the administration, the disinformation flowed from Cheney and Feith's spigots to favoured reporters, like Judith Miller of the New York Times, whose stories were then cited by Cheney and other officials as conclusive evidence of the falsehoods they themselves had managed to insert into the Times' news pages (and Washington Post's editorials).
But when the Times or other significant news outlets failed to carry the disinformation because it was too transparently discreditable and impossible to gloss with the aura of verisimilitude, the administration's disinformation operation dropped the material on the ever-reliable Stephen Hayes and the Weekly Standard, who could invariably be counted on to publish it and argue vehemently on its behalf. Hayes was the bottom feeder of the disinformation food chain.
Some of the material that found its way under Hayes's byline had been rejected by secretary of state, Powell, in the preparation of his February 5 2003 speech on Iraq's WMD before the UN security council. Beforehand Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had given Powell a 60-page memo that was a compendium of disinformation. As it turned out, even though Powell dismissed the Libby memo his speech contained 26 major errors of fact rooted in intelligence disinformation. In a footnote to the Powell disaster, the detritus of the disinformation that he had discarded was channelled to Hayes, who credulously trumpeted it.
Once Hayes published the disinformation, Cheney called attention to it. On January 9 2004, for example, Cheney insisted in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News of Denver that Hayes' Case Closed article was accurate. "You ought to go look at an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks ago," the vice president said. "That's your best source of information." Cheney, who often decries intelligence leaks, was eager to confirm this leak that had already been shown to be false.
In the 2004 presidential campaign year, Hayes packaged his discredited pieces into a book, The Connection: How al-Qaida's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. Though its publication prompted another round of debunking, Hayes has not been deterred from writing articles supposedly proving the invisible connection. Early in 2006, he published yet another piece, which Cheney immediately hyped. On January 11 of this year, interviewed on the radio by Tony Snow (then a talk show host, now White House press secretary), Cheney heralded Hayes's superb investigation. "You've heard it said many times there's no linkage between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein," said Snow. "You've heard Democrats beat you and the president about the head and shoulders with this. Were there links between Saddam Hussein and alQaida?" "Well," replied the vice president, "I think Steve Hayes has done an effective job in his article of laying out a lot of those connections."
However, on August 21, in a press conference, when asked what the exact link was between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida in the terrorist attacks of September 11, President Bush blurted out, "Nothing." Within days, Hayes confirmed that he has been tapped as Cheney's authorised biographer.
It is highly unusual for a president, much less a vice president, to choose a biographer. Campaign biographies, of course, have long been standard. Perhaps the most famous campaign biographer was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote a glowing tract about his college classmate, Franklin Pierce, for the 1852 campaign. The distinguished historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, who served as special assistant to John F Kennedy, wrote an acclaimed account of the presidency after Kennedy's assassination, A Thousand Days. The Reagan White House selected Edmund Morris, who had written a fine biography of Theodore Roosevelt, to serve as Reagan's authorized biographer and granted him extraordinary access during Reagan's last years in office. But Morris's book, "Dutch," published in 1999, bizarrely went off the rails. Morris was obviously confounded by his closeness to Reagan's mysterious personality and he fictionalised parts of the book, including inventing imaginary characters.
In his naming of a propagandist as his biographer, Cheney demonstrates his will to power. For him, history, like the political present, will be subject to his control. Just as he has contempt for the objective standards of intelligence, he has disdain for the methods of historians. His intention in selecting a lowly ideological publicist to record his notable life is to create a parallel universe that true believers can embrace against potentially disillusioning facts that might emerge. Cheney has decided to fortify his reputation through a campaign of disinformation far into the future. For historians, however, this episode will be a small but telling part of the Cheney story.
Read entire article at Guardian
Cheney's rise from a modest background in Casper, Wyoming to become the most powerful vice president in American history is a story that contains many unresolved and still murky aspects that would demand the most diligent scholarship and acute judgment on the part of a biographer. Cheney's complex relationships with a cast of characters over decades, providing a tour d'horizon of the Republican ascendancy, would also require intensive investigation. For example, Cheney's long alliance with Donald Rumsfeld, beginning in the Nixon White House when he was hired to serve as Rumsfeld's deputy, would call for the deepest scrutiny.
Cheney's ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with George Bush Sr, would need assiduous and careful telling. When Cheney was President Ford's chief of staff he helped elevate Bush to President Ford's CIA director while at the same time frustrating Bush's ambition to become Ford's vice president. He then received appointment as President Bush's secretary of defence, supportive of halting the war before seizing Baghdad, and then as vice president purging elder Bush's associates for their realism. Cheney's long cold war with Colin Powell, with whom he battled from the Gulf War, when General Powell was Bush Sr's chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to the Iraq war, when Powell was secretary of state, would entail utmost attention. Other relationships would also demand study, including Cheney's mentorship when he was the house Republican whip of the far-right backbencher Newt Gingrich and his guidance of Gingrich into the Republican leadership. Of course, Cheney's secretive exercise of extraordinary power in the current Bush administration must be the central focus of the historian's effort.
For this Herculean task, Cheney has passed over every single professional historian and instead selected Stephen Hayes, a writer for the neoconservative organ, the Weekly Standard. "I'm not a historian," Hayes told US News, modestly.
For years, Hayes has doggedly attempted to prove links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida in order to buttress Cheney's uncorroborated claims. From the run-up to the Iraq invasion to the present he has been relentless in publishing articles purporting to disclose conclusive evidence that has been repeatedly, consistently and thoroughly debunked by major news organisations.
"Dick Cheney Was Right" ran the headline on a Hayes piece of October 20 2003, followed by a cover story in The Weekly Standard on November 14, 2003, entitled "Case Closed". Unfortunately, the Washington Post and Newsweek promptly discredited his "proof," a leaked memo written by the neoconservative undersecretary of defence Douglas Feith. Newsweek's report, "Case Decidedly Not Closed: The defense dept. memo allegedly proving a link between al-Qaida and Saddam does nothing of the sort," stated that Hayes's account was "mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago - and were largely discounted at the time by the US intelligence community, according to current and former US intelligence officials."
Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration set up an intelligence operation to parallel established US intelligence in order to avoid having material siphoned by Iraqi exiles and freebooters like Ahmed Chalabi being subjected to objective standards of analysis. Within the administration, the information, later revealed as disinformation, was stove-piped from Cheney's office to Feith's hastily assembled office of special planning at the Pentagon, back to Cheney's office, and then to Condoleezza Rice's compliant national security council, and finally, if at all, to the president.
Outside the administration, the disinformation flowed from Cheney and Feith's spigots to favoured reporters, like Judith Miller of the New York Times, whose stories were then cited by Cheney and other officials as conclusive evidence of the falsehoods they themselves had managed to insert into the Times' news pages (and Washington Post's editorials).
But when the Times or other significant news outlets failed to carry the disinformation because it was too transparently discreditable and impossible to gloss with the aura of verisimilitude, the administration's disinformation operation dropped the material on the ever-reliable Stephen Hayes and the Weekly Standard, who could invariably be counted on to publish it and argue vehemently on its behalf. Hayes was the bottom feeder of the disinformation food chain.
Some of the material that found its way under Hayes's byline had been rejected by secretary of state, Powell, in the preparation of his February 5 2003 speech on Iraq's WMD before the UN security council. Beforehand Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had given Powell a 60-page memo that was a compendium of disinformation. As it turned out, even though Powell dismissed the Libby memo his speech contained 26 major errors of fact rooted in intelligence disinformation. In a footnote to the Powell disaster, the detritus of the disinformation that he had discarded was channelled to Hayes, who credulously trumpeted it.
Once Hayes published the disinformation, Cheney called attention to it. On January 9 2004, for example, Cheney insisted in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News of Denver that Hayes' Case Closed article was accurate. "You ought to go look at an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks ago," the vice president said. "That's your best source of information." Cheney, who often decries intelligence leaks, was eager to confirm this leak that had already been shown to be false.
In the 2004 presidential campaign year, Hayes packaged his discredited pieces into a book, The Connection: How al-Qaida's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. Though its publication prompted another round of debunking, Hayes has not been deterred from writing articles supposedly proving the invisible connection. Early in 2006, he published yet another piece, which Cheney immediately hyped. On January 11 of this year, interviewed on the radio by Tony Snow (then a talk show host, now White House press secretary), Cheney heralded Hayes's superb investigation. "You've heard it said many times there's no linkage between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein," said Snow. "You've heard Democrats beat you and the president about the head and shoulders with this. Were there links between Saddam Hussein and alQaida?" "Well," replied the vice president, "I think Steve Hayes has done an effective job in his article of laying out a lot of those connections."
However, on August 21, in a press conference, when asked what the exact link was between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida in the terrorist attacks of September 11, President Bush blurted out, "Nothing." Within days, Hayes confirmed that he has been tapped as Cheney's authorised biographer.
It is highly unusual for a president, much less a vice president, to choose a biographer. Campaign biographies, of course, have long been standard. Perhaps the most famous campaign biographer was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote a glowing tract about his college classmate, Franklin Pierce, for the 1852 campaign. The distinguished historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, who served as special assistant to John F Kennedy, wrote an acclaimed account of the presidency after Kennedy's assassination, A Thousand Days. The Reagan White House selected Edmund Morris, who had written a fine biography of Theodore Roosevelt, to serve as Reagan's authorized biographer and granted him extraordinary access during Reagan's last years in office. But Morris's book, "Dutch," published in 1999, bizarrely went off the rails. Morris was obviously confounded by his closeness to Reagan's mysterious personality and he fictionalised parts of the book, including inventing imaginary characters.
In his naming of a propagandist as his biographer, Cheney demonstrates his will to power. For him, history, like the political present, will be subject to his control. Just as he has contempt for the objective standards of intelligence, he has disdain for the methods of historians. His intention in selecting a lowly ideological publicist to record his notable life is to create a parallel universe that true believers can embrace against potentially disillusioning facts that might emerge. Cheney has decided to fortify his reputation through a campaign of disinformation far into the future. For historians, however, this episode will be a small but telling part of the Cheney story.