Former Vice President Dick Cheney died last week. The morning his passing was announced, I wrote a piece for The New York Times about how Cheney’s efforts to expand presidential power paved the way for Donald Trump’s imperial presidency, even though the two men became political adversaries.
My first book, Takeover, was about the Bush-Cheney administration’s effort to expand presidential power. When I was writing it, my working title was “The Cheney Project,” because this was really a story about him. The Bush administration’s pursue of that agenda came from Cheney, its roots stretching back to his experiences in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Walter Isaacson asked me to participate in an discussion of that topic for a segment on the PBS show Amanpour and Company which aired this evening: