Cheney: A VP With Unprecedented Power : NPR

Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman, author of Angler, an extraordinary book on the Cheney vice presidency, reports that Cheney was a sponge for details and a skilled bureaucratic infighter. And, at least in the first term, he drove policy on the issues he cared about. In the second term, with a more experienced and wary President Bush, Cheney's influence waned but hardly ceased.

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"You had the FBI director, attorney general, the next five levels of officials — which is a couple of dozen people — in the Justice Department, the general counsel of the CIA and the FBI, were all going to resign, in principle because they believed this program was unlawful," Gellman said. "And George Bush didn't know it until an hour before it was going to happen."

Faced with a wholesale resignation that would have made the Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre" look like a picnic, the president relented, withdrew his authorization and told Comey to fix the program to make it legal. Had he not changed course, according to Gellman, some of Bush's top aides believe he very likely would have been impeached.

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"I think from that moment, Bush understood more clearly than before that he had to take Cheney's advice at arm's length," Gellman said. "That was the beginning of a gradual loss of influence by the vice president over George Bush, because Bush realized Cheney could lead him off a cliff."

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