Lewis Libby, who was known to all as Scooter and had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that had its roots in the origins of the Iraq War. For two months, Dick Cheney had been lobbying for a pardon for his former chief of staff, I. His vice president, the man who had been at his side through every crisis for eight tumultuous years, was pressing him as never before. The nation's forty-third president had just days left in office, and the Decider, as he had memorably dubbed himself, was struggling with one final decision. 'Yeah,' the lawyer said, 'I think he did it.' Bush was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum, staring, and listening-in fact listening longer than usual. Thank you for supporting our publishing ministry.George W.

To keep reading, subscribe-subscriptions begin at $4.95-or log in. This article is available to Christian Century magazine subscribers only. And by eschewing judgment on the persuasiveness of competing claims about what happened and why, thereby confusing neutrality with objectivity, Baker leaves his readers with the impression that answers to these questions are more elusive than they are. But by pursuing a strictly narrative approach, Baker fails to provide much of an answer to these questions, which require analysis and not simply a story. The Cheney vice presidency raises a number of crucial questions: Just how powerful was he? How did he secure his power? How did he exercise it? Why did he use it for the ends he did? Baker addresses these questions by way of a highly detailed, sometimes day-by-day narrative in which he attempts to create “a neutral history” of the Bush years.

Even those, such as me, who hold Cheney in very low esteem would not deny his powerful influence on the politics and public policy of the early years of the new century. And when was the last time you heard the current administration referred to as the Obama-Biden White House? Yet most of us regard the phrase “Bush-Cheney regime” as apt. Few Americans today could identify any of FDR’s vice presidents. Bush in this entertaining if superficial first draft of the history of Bush’s years in the Oval Office. It is therefore symptomatic of the exceptional character of the vice presidency of Dick Cheney that little surprise is occasioned by Peter Baker’s treatment of Cheney as a costar with President George W. One of Franklin Roosevelt’s vice presidents, John Nance Garner, famously complained that the office is “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” and few historians-or vice presidents-have contested the metaphor. Presidential history is a venerable and popular art.

Days of Fire by Peter Baker