In his newly released memoir, “In My Time,” former U.S.
Vice President Dick Cheney is unapologetic about his oft-criticized role in the
Iraq war. He defends the practice of waterboarding and says he was a lightning
rod for criticism during the Bush administration. He added that he was regarded
as “Darth Vader.”
Reaction to his book suggests that opinions haven’t changed
much.
“Self-reflection is not something we have come to expect in
elected officials, particularly those who have left office fairly recently. But
could former Vice President Dick Cheney have not even made the slightest effort
to convince people he didn’t deserve the “Darth Vader” moniker
assigned by his foes? Cheney’s memoir, written with his daughter, Liz Cheney,
is so unapologetic as to be a caricature.”
—Susan Milligan, U.S. News & World Report
“Mr. Cheney has had a long and distinguished career and I
hope in his book that’s what he will focus on, not these cheap shots that he’s
taking at me and other members of the administration who served to the best of
our ability for President Bush.”
— Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing on
the CBS program “Face the Nation.” He was clearly displeased with Cheney’s
criticism of him. In the book, Cheney said that Powell didn’t privately object
to the Iraq war. (Former U.S. President George W. Bush said he knew about
Powell’s reservations prior to the war.)
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“Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his
knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about
matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decision-making,
sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.
“After his early years of public service, he capitalized on
connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of
dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt
Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United
States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive
that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged
the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the
public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became
directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail. Thus his unpopularity circa 2008, when he left office. Good riddance.”
— Conor Friedersdorf, associate editor at The Atlantic.
“But the fact of the matter is, and people know my feelings
about this pretty surely, he’s a war criminal. Torture is a crime and this is a
guy who can’t travel to Europe anymore for fear of being- ending up in the
Hague. Does he deal with that, do you suppose, in the book?”
— Ronald Reagan Jr., appearing on Fox Nation
“If this book were read by an intelligent person who spent
the past 10 years on, say, Mars, she would have no idea that Dick Cheney was
the vice president in one of the most hapless American administrations of
modern times. There are hints, to be sure, that things did not always go
swimmingly under President George W. Bush and Cheney, but these are surrounded
by triumphalist accounts of events that many readers – and future historians –
are unlikely to consider triumphs.
— Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post
“So Mr. Kaiser, the news media never defends its own messes
— for example, the Post trying to sell access to its own editors — with a
tone its critics would find “long on self-justification, short on
self-examination”? Kaiser fails to acknowledge the depth of media hatred
for this man, and how a memoir might serve as a rare attempt to tell his own
story without some liberal editor screaming in his face that everything he did
was a ‘fiasco.’”
—Tim Graham of NewsBusters, a site that claims to be dedicated to “documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.”
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