Cheney: Then and Now!

It appears that Adam Liptak at the New York Times has become a member of the “Reality-Based Community.” This story today isn’t exactly news, but it does put somethings in context. And putting stuff in context is often lacking in the news gathering business of late.

So, even if it is just a little too late to the party, Liptak finally makes it to the party and brings some gifts as well.

Here it is:

February 11, 2007

The Press Patrol

Cheney’s To-Do Lists, Then and Now

By ADAM LIPTAK

RETURNING to the White House after the Memorial Day weekend in 1975, the young aide Dick Cheney found himself handling a First Amendment showdown. The New York Times had published an article by Seymour M. Hersh about an espionage program, and the White House chief of staff, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was demanding action.

Out came the yellow legal pad, and in his distinctively neat, deliberate hand, Mr. Cheney laid out the “problem,” “goals” while addressing it, and “options.” These last included “Start FBI investigation — with or w/o public announcement. As targets include NYT, Sy Hersh, potential gov’t sources.”

Mr. Cheney’s notes, now in the Gerald R. Ford presidential library, collected and synthesized the views of lawyers, diplomats, spies and military officials, but his own views shine through. He is hostile to the press and to Congress, insistent on the prerogatives of the executive branch and adamant about the importance of national security secrets.

Fast forward three decades and that same handwriting appears on a copy of the Op-Ed article in The Times that set in motion events that led to the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff.

Then, as in 1975, Mr. Cheney played a central role in managing the White House’s relationship with the press. It was not precisely the same, however. In 2003, for instance, Mr. Cheney was not protecting secrets but authorizing Mr. Libby to peddle them to Judith Miller, then a reporter for The Times, in an effort to counter the points made in the opinion article, according to Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony. But his combative relationship with the press and the goals that animate it have not changed.

“He’s had the same idea for the past 30 years,” said Kathryn S. Olmsted, a history professor at the University of California at Davis, who wrote about the Cheney file in her 1996 book, “Challenging the Secret Government.”

“His philosophy is that the president and the vice president and the people around the president decide what’s secret and what’s not,” she said. “They thought they had to aggressively go after the press and Congress to reclaim the powers the president lost in Watergate.”

The 1975 article by Mr. Hersh disclosed details about American submarines tapping into undersea Soviet communications. Among the goals Mr. Cheney methodically listed in considering a response were enforcement of the espionage laws, discouraging “the NYT and other publications from similar action,” locating and prosecuting the people who leaked to The Times and demonstrating “the dangers to nat’l security which develop when investigations exceed the bounds of propriety.”

Mr. Cheney also sensed an opportunity. Congressional investigations of the C.I.A., including one by a select committee led by Senator Frank Church, were under way in the post-Watergate era.

Under the heading “Broader ramifications,” Mr. Cheney wrote: “Can we take advantage of it to bolster our position on the Church committee investigation? To point out the need for limits on the scope of the investigation?”

More immediately, Mr. Cheney considered possible responses to the article. One was to “seek immediate indictments of NYT and Hersh.” A second was to get a search warrant “to go after Hersh papers in his apt.”

Next to last: “Discuss informally w/ NYT.”

Last: “Do nothing.”

In the end, the administration pursued the last option, based largely on the advice of Attorney General Edward H. Levi.

There were two fundamental reasons for that decision. First, the Soviets apparently did not read The Times. “The White House feared,” Ms. Olmsted wrote in her book, “that any sort of government investigation would alert the Soviets to the importance of the story.”

Indeed, as Mr. Levi told President Ford, any legal action by the government “would put an official stamp of truth on the article.”

The second reason the government stood down had to do with its just having lost an effort to stop the publication of a classified history of the Vietnam War by The Times and The Washington Post, the Pentagon Papers case. Mr. Levi said he was wary of turning the Hersh matter into “a journalistic cause célèbre without securing any conviction on the merits.”

He also predicted that Mr. Hersh would “accept imprisonment for contempt” rather than name his sources.

That prediction was correct, Mr. Hersh told the PBS program “Frontline,” which interviewed him for “News War,” a documentary series that has its premiere on Tuesday.

“You can’t trample the Constitution,” Mr. Hersh said. “I’m going to scream and moan and be a hero, you know, and give more trouble than they would if they’d just left me alone, which is the same thing they did in this case.”

Ms. Miller did accept imprisonment for contempt, spending 85 days in jail to protect her source, Mr. Libby. Mr. Cheney has said little, but he is on Mr. Libby’s witness list, and the defense begins its case tomorrow.

Now this article isn’t perfect, but it is still contextual. And the fact it is contextual is pretty good. Hopefully there will be more reporting along these lines.

Why is this guy in charge? I think that the questions that this raises are about the VP and the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution, you know that “Piece of Paper” that the rule of law and our country is based on.