Cheney's unprecedented power

By Robert Kuttner, 2/25/2004

DICK CHENEY is the most powerful vice president in US history. Indeed, there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that Cheney, not Bush, is the real power at the White House and Bush the figurehead.

The true role of the shadowy Cheney is finally becoming an issue in the election, and it deserves to be. A recent piece in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer lays out in devastating detail how Cheney, while CEO of Halliburton, created the blueprint for shifting much of the military's support role from the armed services to private contractors. The leading contractor, of course, is Halliburton. When Cheney became vice president, Halliburton was perfectly positioned to make out like a bandit.

Cheney, whose prior career was in politics, became a very rich man as Halliburton's chief executive, earning $45 million in just five years, with $18 million still available in stock options. Cheney also went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret the meetings of the Bush energy task force, which included primarily private companies positioned to profit from public decisions. The press treated all this as newsworthy for a time but then backed off.

What is significant about Mayer's New Yorker piece is that it was pieced together mainly from the public record. Cheney's unprecedented role and dubious history are mostly hidden in plain view, just like Bush's. The press needs only to decide that it's a story.