EXPLAINED: Dick Cheney relished being the lightning rod of the Bush administration — and tells why in a major Showtime profile this week. (
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Dick Cheney, unrepentant, unbowed and unapologetic, does to himself in a new documentary what many people — including some in the George W. Bush administration — believe he did to the country.
He screws himself, but good.
Cheney fully cooperated in this scorching doc, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” by R.J. Cutler (“The War Room,” NBC’s “Nashville”) and Greg Fenton.
And it is not a pretty, as-told-to picture.
Even his mentor and former best friend, former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld — who helped engineer the war in Iraq — seems to be mad at him.
Cheney, nonetheless, declares that it was all a big success.
George W. Bush hasn’t left the ranch since giving up the White House to explain why they did what they did after 9/11.
Cheney believes that job is up to him — and he has no regrets.
Still, you have to ask what in the world convinced him to cooperate in “The World According to Dick Cheney,” a film he could not control?
According to Cutler, who waited months and months to get a response from the former vice president, “I told him I wanted to afford him the opportunity to tell his story in his own words. After all, the country will see him [in history] as the most impactful, non presidential figure the world has ever known.”
That was enough to convince Cheney to sit for the cameras for five days, although when he saw the finished film, he may not have been exactly thrilled. Cutler would only say, “We had what I consider a, ah, stimulating conversation.”
When the documentary opens, Cheney is fly-fishing. And the questions begin.
What does he value most in a friend? “Honesty.”
What’s the most important virtue a person can possess? “Integrity.”
As for honesty in a friend, Rumsfeld has it. “The fact that the stockpiles [of WMDs] were not found and the fact that the administration — I think unwisely — placed so much stock in the idea that they [existed]” was a mistake, Rumseld now says. “[The president’s decision on the war] was not rooted in a single thing.”
Cheney retells the stories of his early life — admitting without a flinch that he was a boozer with several DWIs and a slacker who got thrown out of Yale.
After working as a laborer, his then-girlfriend, now-wife Lynn, gave him the ultimatum that changed his life: Go back to college or get out of her life. He went back to college, worked for Rumsfeld and Nixon and kept climbing until, 35 years later, Rumsfeld was working for him.
When it premiered at Sundance last January, some critics complained that “Cheney” wasn’t harsh enough.
Many expected to see Cheney not just screwed, but nailed to the wall.
This documentary comes awfully close.
CHENEY ON CHENEY:
On life: “ It’s more important to be successful than loved.”
On torture: “‘We’re not going to force you to tell, because it might create a bad image for us,’ is not even a close call for me.”
On his own mistakes: “Ahhh, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my faults.”
On engineering Henry Kissinger’s ouster from the Ford White House: “You needed to mix things up a bit there — so he went down.”
On WMD: “We didn’t find stockpiles, but we know [Saddam Hussein] had intent.”