Warshaw, Shirley Anne. The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney.

• Author: Friedman, Barry D.
• Position: Book review

Warshaw, Shirley Anne. The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 320 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., describes President Franklin D. Roosevelt's use of a number of advisers as a conscious effort to "check and balance information" and, therefore, ensure that no one adviser would become the Rasputin of his administration. (1) Political scientist Shirley Anne Warshaw assembles a strong case that George W. Bush paid insufficient attention to the shrewd strategizing by Richard B. Cheney, which allowed Cheney to accumulate inordinate policy influence while he served as head of Bush's search for a running mate, as head of the incoming president's transition committee, and during their eight years in office together. Thus, Cheney had influence in the Bush administration comparable to that of Grigori Rasputin in the family of Russia's last monarch, Czar Nicholas II. As Warshaw shows, Cheney's advice was nearly as ruinous to Bush as Rasputin's was to the Romanovs.

Cheney's opportunity to wield more power than any vice president ever has had and, Warshaw predicts, ever will have, arose from three circumstances. First, Bush's knowledge of politics at the national and international level was extremely limited. Bush was driven by born-again religious faith and by his policy-making experience as governor of Texas. Accordingly, Bush entered the 2000 presidential campaign and the White House with an agenda that was limited to engrafting the "compassionate conservatism" philosophy onto social-welfare policies (with the aid of volunteerism and the "faith-based initiative"), reducing the burdens of taxation, and reforming the nation's schools. Second, Cheney possessed a wealth of experience in the operations of the U.S. government and in international affairs, which he obtained as he served in numerous capacities in the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford (including service as Ford's chief of staff) between 1969 and 1976, as he occupied Wyoming's only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1978 to 1989 (during which time he was a member of the House Intelligence Committee), and as he served as President George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense until the end of the elder Bush's single term in office. Cheney's experience in international affairs was bolstered by his five years as chairman and chief executive officer of the multinational energy-industry service firm...