Reviews

• 内容は面白いが文章は難しいぞ！

  今まで読んだ英語の本の中でも最難関の印象です。 単語が難しいというよりも、意味が取りづらくてすっと頭に入ってこない感じ。 私のアメリカ政界知識が不足しているからということも大きいのでしょうが。 でも内容はやっぱり面白いです。 国の意思決定のあり方についていろいろ考えさせられました。 " Bush at War "を読んでから、もう一度読み直してみたい。

• Sehr gut

  Ich verfolge auch die amerikanische Politik nunmehr seit Jahrzehnten. Bevor Cheney Vizepräsident wurde, ist er mir allerdings nie richtig aufgefallen. Nun gut, wahrscheinlich war mein "Verfolgen" nicht intensiv genug. Allerdings habe ich Cheney vom ersten Tag seiner Vizepräsidentschaft an als sinistre Persönlichkeit wahrgenommen. Und ich fühle mich durch den Verlauf seiner Amtszeit und auch durch das, was in diesem Buch geschildert wird, bestätigt. Einziger Trost war für mich, dass Bush ihm zu guter Letzt - siehe Rumsfeld-Rausschmiß - Zügel angelegt hat. Die Welt wird eine bessere werden ohne Cheney.

• The story with a very real result

  Mr. Gellman does an incredible job in this book. Some people have noted that the contents are a bit dated due to some documents etc. that has been declassified since Cheney's vice presidency. However, Gellman does a wonderful job at giving a vivid imagery of the White House in the Bush 43rd's terms and it gives quite the colorful portrait of Cheney and how his staff operated! I give this a 5 star and I recommend it to anyone interested in anything related to Bush 43rd's terms in office, although this book focuses alot more on their first term and less on the second one.

• The power behind the throne

  Angler is a superb exposé of power within the Bush administration. Having read several books on the running of the Iraq War – notably the Bob Woodward ones, Cheney is always conspicuous by his absence from the narrative. This is because he does little speaking in public, doesn’t give interviews, and usually did little speaking in meetings. Instead, he would stay behind with Bush and get the last point of view in. He is a deeply shadowy figure, but you cannot hope to understand the Bush presidency without understanding the role he really played. This book finally lays much of this bare – or at least as bare as it is ever likely to be. The real key to understanding Cheney is not to see him as some part of a Halliburton conspiracy for oil in the middle-east. At least, the book finds no evidence of this. Rather, he is or was, a fully-paid up neocon. From this viewpoint, economics must be as liberal as possible with no constraints placed on big business and the making of money, no matter how detrimental this might be to the environment or anything else. America is the world’s only power, and should be exercising that power. It is also a country under imminent threat from jihadists and terrorists of all stripes. Cheney’s vice-presidency was a constant struggle to impose this view, give enemies, whether without or within, no quarter, and to maximize the power available to the president. Taking advantage of Bush’s total uninterest in detail and his alacrity for delegation, Cheney ended up, willingly, doing many of the things that a president is expected to do. His office was massively powerful in a way that no vice-president’s in history has been. Furthermore, he used every trick in the book to circumvent Congress and ensure that the law became whatever the president wanted it to be – or more specifically, what Cheney wanted it to be. The definition of torture became whether the president thought it was. Illegal spying became legal if the president considered it to be expedient. Although the book never utters the word, it becomes clear that Cheney militated for the president to become a dictator, with his word and judgement defining what could be done and what could not. He did his utmost to subvert any democratic process that stood in the way of this aim. From his point of view, he might have considered that this was what America needed in a time of war to keep it safe. But that doesn’t necessarily make him right and in any case, having declared a War on Terror, with no clearly defined enemy or timeline, it meant that presidential powers could be increased in aeternam. The book makes fascinating and essential reading and by the end of it you realise how "The Land of the Free" and the "world’s greatest democracy" has managed to sanction wholescale spying, torture, black sites for interrogation, internment without trial and a host of other nefarious practices which continue to damage the USA’s standing in the world and bankrupt its moral authority. And all this has been in no small part to the pivotal role played by Cheney – probably a far greater role than that of his president. One of its strong points is that Gellman seemingly has no axe to grind. The book is not written from “an angle”. Rather the facts, damning as they are, are laid out so that the reader can make up her own mind. The only oversight as far as this reader is concerned is that there is little or no mention of Cheney’s interfacing with the other principals in the Bush cabal – with Rumsfeld or Powell for example. Rice was treated with total contempt. This corroborates other narratives which have shown how totally dysfunctional Bush’s close team was. Team players they were not. We also learn next to nothing about Cheney away from his office, but that is not especially surprising for such a secretive individual. All in all an enthralling read and if you want to really understand how the world has changed in the past decade or so, an essential one.

• A good account of how Cheney operates.

  In Angler, Gellman argues that with the Cheney vice-presidency we came as close as possible to having a deputy president. That's putting it mildly. What we learn in this book really is that we had a co-presidency. While Bush rarely appears in this book, since it's not about him, we have to assume that Bush at some point does whatever it is that presidents are supposed to do, although there is little evidence here. What we do learn is that Cheney did an awful lot of what a president does and then some. Cheney had two personal interests in joining this administration: the economy and foreign policy. Today every American can judge for himself to what extent Cheney was a success in these areas. In terms of the economy, Cheney is the old-fashioned conservative: small government, big military, tax breaks for the rich as the only solution for all ills. Bush, we are told, is more of a populist, who cares about the little guy and has no problem with big government. Bush's (only?) two interests were education reform and prescription assistance for the elderly. Again and again we are introduced to issues where ideology takes Cheney in one direction and instincts take Bush in another, yet Cheney invariably wins- while claiming that the president has the last word. And every time this entails plenty of collateral damage: people whose careers where destroyed for not going along with Cheney. In foreign policy Cheney saw the end of the cold war as a chance for America to become and remain the only power on earth to dictate the new globalism. 9/11 was a key event because with it, Cheney saw the chance to give the executive office absolute powers. Almost every chapter focuses on some issue where Cheney exerted more power than a VP has ever had. The book is also arranged chronologically, from the days of Cheney trying to find a running mate for Bush to Bush reflecting in 2008 about his relationship to Cheney. Some of the issues discussed are: 2 chapters on the environment, a couple on economic issues, 9/11, domestic spying, dealing with Congress, Iraq, torture, Iran. We find out how Cheney works: by learning as much as he can about an issue, not because he is interesting in learning to make up his mind but rather because he is looking for definitive arguments for his already-made-up mind. He tried to manage as much information as possible, that is, get as much information, and let no info out. He did this by inserting himself in meetings that a VP has no business in or sending his proxies, by obtaining all communications that went to the president and to the State Department. He would create alternative channels of communication and influence if the official ways didn't get the result he wanted fast and he did so without letting those who should know have any idea of what happened. He did it all it utmost secrecy. Then, of course, he'd lie about it all. He'd be the last guy in the room with the president after everyone else left- and that meant that Bush ended up agreeing with Cheney. We meet an interesting cast of characters. We are told that Libby is a Cheney's Cheney, but he does not appear often in this book, perhaps that's how secretive he is. Instead the one who really seems to be a Cheney's Cheney is Addington, who is also a psychopath and acts as Cheney's mouth. While Cheney rarely speaks but mainly asks questions, Addington pretty much gives voice to whatever is in Cheney's mind- and it's never good. But Addington did more than talk, he also articulated in writing what Cheney wanted. Whatever law or order Bush signed and regardless where it came from, it went through Addington before Bush signed it and Addington created the final version making changes that allowed for things to go Cheney's way in the end and after all was said and done- even if the law was one explicitly opposing Cheney. While the author does not insert himself in this book for the most part, he does become particularly confrontational when it comes to constitutional issues. He tries not to be judgmental or take sides, but a lot is made clear by what issues he chose. Chapter eight, "Matching the Science," pertains to an economical/environmental issue: whether to let farmlands dry out and put farmers out of business or insure the survival of some type of fish. Gellman wants the reader to become outraged over Cheney's choice to side with the farmers over the fish, but you'd have to be a radical to fault Cheney here for putting people over fish. I will also give credit to Cheney for fighting to allow the CIA to be free of restrictions in their investigative methods, and for trying to inject some dynamism in Washington, a town characterized by inertia. Note that this book is NOT an analysis of the Cheney vice-presidency or of Cheney himself, it is an account and description of events and what went on behind the scenes. It is an easy and quick read thanks to large print and generous margins (hardcover edition). The research the author did is first rate. I am not so impressed by the writing style. I take it in this genre sentence fragments are acceptable. The chapters on the events that almost led to a part of the administration resigning are thrilling. What I concluded from this book is that Cheney is very intelligent and competent as a bureaucrat. The faculty of reason alone, without a moral directive, however, has proven catastrophic again and again in history. And Cheney is not intelligent enough to recognize when he is wrong. But it must be an accomplishment to get so much done in Washington with a handful of acolytes and without everyone else finding out. Unfortunately, he was wrong on nearly everything; his ideology is flat out immoral, incorrect, and disastrous. The man is also emotionally-challenged and for whatever reasons (inability to trust others?) starved for power. He can only work with those who are like-minded and has an uncanny type of leadership, where he was able to control any meeting he was in, whether invited or uninvited, in person or via TV, merely by his presence. Perhaps it is true that image is everything in America, and all these high-powered people deferred to the grandfather-figure Cheney to get the last word on everything. Gellman wants to convince us that Bush and Cheney are men who have the best of intentions and are entirely driven by the desire to serve this country. His books proves that this is not the case at all. The chapters on 9/11 show that before 9/11 the intelligence community did their best to get Cheney's attention about the threat of Al-Qaeda. Yet Cheney would have none of it. During 9/11 Cheney remains completely and in my view pathologically apathetic. After 9/11 the administration blamed the intelligence community and used 9/11 to try to install a tyranny. This book gives support to the view that the Bush-Cheney administration was the worst ever in American history, if nothing else for the fact that the people did not perform their assigned roles. Bush happily allowed Cheney to usurp the roles of his cabinet and of himself. There weren't enough courageous folks to effectively counterbalance Cheney's wrong doctrines and apparently those who tried did not have Bush's support or even his ear. Bush blindly accepted nearly every position Cheney took. Cheney moreover filled the administration with the insane but articulate neo-cons whose ideology has no basis whatsoever in reality. But don't look for details about the Cheney-neo-con relationship in this book. How that ever happened is for others to investigate; the index doesn't even include the word "neo-conservative," which Gellman does mention, and he does spend some time discussing the absurd views of Yoo and Wurmser. I want to conclude this review by mentioning the names of some of the good guys who appear in this book and who did the right thing and fought against this administration and the entire Cheney machine for what was right: John Ashcroft, James Comey, Jack Goldsmith, Richard Haas, Ben Miller, Theodore Olson, Jim Jeffords, Alberto Mora, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Paul O'Neill.

• Five Stars

  Intersting book so far, worth reading it. It arrived quick from US too.

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