With the Colleagues You Have

Mark Kleiman notes that one surprising element of the Post's recent long account of Dick Cheney's power is that "is Condoleeza Rice's passivity in the face of this interference in her communication with her own staff" which one would expect pettiness and thirst for power, if not professionalism and good sense, to keep in check.

Jim Henley counters with the observation "that Dick Cheney played a large role in selecting the Bush Administration’s cabinet and senior staff and he knew what he was doing when he gave the nod to Rice and Powell. Surely at the top of his list of criteria for NSA and Secretary of State was 'Who can I roll?'" According to Jim Mann's account in Rise of the Vulcans Cheney very much didn't want Powell as a colleague (they'd worked closely together in the Bush I administration, and Cheney knew he didn't like him), but his appointment was ordained by the political situation. Thus, one of Cheney's key priorities was to arrange the rest of the national security team in which to make ti possible to roll Powell. It wasn't clear that this was going to work, but Bush apparently felt upstaged by Powell at the press conference announcing his appointment and agreed to Cheney's Powell-checking scheme.

For Rice, I would take a look at Joshua Kurlantzick's 2004 examination of her ineffective spell as National Security Advisor.

Comments

This is interesting. But don't overplay the inside-the-administration play-by-play. Cheney could roll Powell and Rice because there was an organised social movement in US politics pressing for an attack on Iraq. If there'd been a hardball no-war-on-Iraq Veep and a war-on-Iran Secretary of State, the invasion would likely have gone ahead, because there was no support in US civil society for determined opposition to the invasion.

Posted by otto | June 26, 2007 8:57 AM

Is that picture photoshopped? That is a terrific picture of her.

Posted by Random Dude | June 26, 2007 9:14 AM

Again something is up in Rice's career. Very, very few academics basically leave doing research as quickly as she did to take on an administration position. Given her source of expertise basically became worthless by the mid 90s....

Posted by Rob | June 26, 2007 9:55 AM

There should be no surprise about this, since Paul O'Neill told Ron Suskind that this was how Cheney operated in The Price Of Loyalty. Different people in the administration thought they were having a policy debate involving the President, but Cheney was the gatekeeper, controlling what and how reached the President and shaping his decisions.

I meant to find the passages in Suskind's book and blog about them -- perhaps tonight.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | June 26, 2007 10:11 AM

Is that picture photoshopped? That is a terrific picture of her.

It's a cropped version of her official portrait on the State Department website. I normally use official portraits for government officials because they're all public domain.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | June 26, 2007 10:29 AM

Prior to 9/11, it was not at all clear that Powell would be the one to get "rolled."

I was recently at a discussion where Lawrence Wilkerson described the way that Cheney responded to the (now long-since forgotten) China spy plane incident in the summer of 2001 by using it as an excuse to launch a Cold War with China. Cheney and his allies pushed Bush to ratchet up the tensions and refuse to negotiate. Powell advocated for sensible restraint. According to Wilkerson, Bush came down firmly on Powell's side (primarily due to his appreciation for our economic ties to China) and the crisis was quickly resolved.

It was the fear and uncertainty in the wake of 9/11 that gave Cheney the opportunity to roll Powell (and Ashcroft, for that matter) and steer Bush in all of the directions he preferred. This was not, in reality, an outcome that was preordained by the composition of the Cabinet.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 26, 2007 3:10 PM