Dick Cheney seemed to enjoy fostering a Darth Vader image while he was in office as the most powerful vice president in American history.
Some of his positions are so strident when he sits down to talk to filmmaker R.J. Cutler in “The World According to Dick Cheney” (Showtime, 9 p.m.) you may think he’s putting you on. He can’t think of a single negative trait he has? Doesn’t have a single regret about anything he did? Even when what he said was deliberately misleading, wrong or led to two wars?
There’s plenty of time to get all that in the film, which begins and is laced with the interviewing but takes plenty of time to follow his career from someone kicked out of Yale twice for bad grades, got two DWIs back home in Wyoming before he decided to apply himself, go to a Midwestern college and through sheer luck, met Donald Rumsfeld just before he ascended into the brand new Gerald Ford White House.
With Rumsfeld the new chief of staff, and Cheney just under him, it wasn’t long before before Cheney was the youngest chief of staff when Rumsfeld moved to Defense Secretary for the first time. It was a dizzying rise to power in just over a decade.
A Congressman for 10 years, he was picked by George H.W. Bush to be Defense Secretary, went into private industry during the Clinton years (at Haliburton) before returning under the other Bush as vice president.
To hear him tell it in the film, he was making the tough calls on 9/11. And everyone knows how much he led the toward war in two countries, opening up Guantanamo Bay and defends even know “enhanced interrogation” that the rest of the world knows as torture.
This, however, is “The World According to Cheney” and it is still a chilling one; unbending, unyielding, not softened with his heart ailments over the years and instructive to be reminded all what he is responsible for, because Americans ultimately are the ones who put him in power to do so.
How wonderful to have him on the sidelines now, largely powerless. Until Jeb Bush maybe gives him a call.
In addition to Cheney, the film gets interviews from Rumsfeld but not Bush, with whom he was estranged after he refused to pardon his chief of staff Scooter Libby (and when’s the last time you considered that name?).
Part of the service of the film is to remind us of all the low points of the Bush era that we have perhaps pushed far into our memory. It’s helpful to be reminded.