Pimlico £20 pp261

If the authors of Vice are to be believed, Dick Cheney is a cynical manipulator of the truth who ranks as the most unpopular vice-president of the United States ever. The most divisive might be a more accurate description. The New York Times reported recently with astonishment and amusement that he has rock-star status in the conservative fly-over states of middle America. Gratifying for him, naturally, but the thing about Cheney is he just doesn’t care.

A prominent Republican consultant told me recently that Cheney was at a rubber-chicken lunch with the party faithful when he suddenly got up and left the table. They assumed he had gone to the bathroom, but then saw his motorcade speeding off. He had not bothered to say thanks and goodbye. As he once muttered to a senator who questioned him about his links to his old firm Halliburton, his attitude towards most mortals is “Go f*** yourself”. He doesn’t need them.

Cheney, in short, is a walking advertisement for the benefits of representative democracy, in which politicians have to submit to the scrutiny of the electorate, often in humbling and humiliating ways. We all know he is not using his position as deputy to take over the top spot at the White House in 2008 (he has had too many heart attacks for that). The fact that he regards himself as above the fray has exacerbated his unfortunate passion for secrecy and reliance on a tightly sealed group of advisers who were his echo chamber on the war on terror. To his own way of thinking, however, he is free to be a tough-minded, independent dispenser of advice.

Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein would rather score points against a man and an administration they detest than explore this fascinating conundrum at the heart of government. Everything Cheney has done, in their eyes, has been purposely malign, from his days as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in the mid-1970s (when his alliance with Donald Rumsfeld was cemented) to the war on terror.

What the authors unwittingly reveal is how venom towards the Bush administration has distorted the values of the American left. Tellingly, they describe disapprovingly how a young Cheney tried to overrule Henry Kissinger and insist Gerald Ford meet Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet writer and dissident. Was that really so inappropriate? They go on to write darkly that, “at Cheney’s urging, a reluctant Ford and Kissinger accepted a ‘morality in foreign policy plank’.” Its ambition was sweeping: “We shall go forward as a united people to forge a lasting peace in the world based upon our deep belief in the rights of man, the rule of law and guidance by the hand of God.” It was, they warn, a harbinger of neoconservatism.

Leaving the divine bit aside for a moment the values seem fairly admirable to me, but I was forgetting. In Dubose and Bernstein’s world, only the left can be permitted to devise an “ethical” foreign policy – whether or not it ends up giving a free pass to the world’s greatest human rights abusers.

The book would be a more telling critique if it took Cheney to task for defiling his own principles. An interesting narrative could be written about how a supporter of Solzhenitsyn became an advocate of the secret, indefinite detention of terrorist suspects and the uses of torture such as waterboarding (simulated drowning) for high-level Al-Qaeda detainees, but you won’t find it here. The common thread is what Cheney would call defence of the national interest, but he has undermined America’s values in the process.

Dubose and Bernstein are puzzled by Cheney’s journey from the realpolitik of George Bush père, when he was considered an able defence secretary, to the messianism of Bush fils. They can only account for it by pumping up an obsession with oil, worsened by his years of personal enrichment running Halliburton, or — I kid you not — possible brain damage brought on by his heart attacks.

Yet the answer is in the book for all to see. In 1992 a group of protégés, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, the current US ambassador to Iraq, drew up a defence-planning report that Cheney admired. It anticipated that future threats to America would come from the proliferation of WMD and ballistic missiles, terrorist threats to US citizens, rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea and threatened access to Persian gulf oil. It was a prescient piece of work.

Then on September 11, 2001, Cheney was left in charge of America while Bush was reading a book to schoolchildren, and embarked on a course of action that he believed would make the United States safer. Whether it has or not is rightly a matter of heated debate, which is not improved by sloganising about oil and Halliburton.

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