Re-Evaluating Dick Cheney

Jonathan Karl reviews Peter Baker’s Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.

“Mr. Baker, a White House reporter for the New York Times, has pulled off something of a journalistic miracle: He has written a thorough, engaging and fair history on the Bush-Cheney White House, the most polarizing presidency since Johnson’s (Andrew, not Lyndon), with the possible exception of the current one. Mr. Baker chronicles the astonishing influence of Mr. Cheney, but unlike so many other writers, he doesn’t fall for the popular caricature of the vice president as a sinister force controlling a hapless president.”