The New Yorker:

For years before taking office, the former Vice-President appeared less dogmatic than he was.

By Nicholas Lemann

As I think about Dick Cheney after his death, my memory offers up a snippet from an interview I had with Bob Michel when I was reporting for a New Yorker profile of Cheney that appeared in 2001. Michel now looks like a figure from a forgotten Republican past, an amiable congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who had voted for all the major civil-rights laws and who loved crafting legislative compromises with Democrats. In the eighties and early nineties, Michel was the House Minority Leader. The rise of Newt Gingrich and his incendiary brand of Republicanism eventually forced Michel aside—but during much of the time that Michel was leader, Cheney was one of his principal deputies. In the interview, I suggested to Michel that Cheney might be a conservative ideologue. Michel did an instant, reflexive double take: Dick Cheney? The phlegmatic-process guy? No way.

We were speaking some months before the September 11th attacks, and it’s likely that George W. Bush still saw Cheney in the same way that Michel did. Cheney had loyally served George H. W. Bush, a much more moderate Republican than his son, had been chief executive of a Dallas-based energy contractor, and had gone from running the 2000 Republican Vice-Presidential search—a perfect assignment for a neutral professional—to becoming the Vice-Presidential nominee himself. After 9/11, it instantly became clear that Cheney had been a genius at appearing to be neutral, at least to Republicans who outranked him, rather than actually having been neutral. Within minutes of the attacks, he was in charge (Bush was out of town), expertly putting the country on a path that led to the War on Terror and the Iraq War.

Go to link