Republican Convention: Dick Cheney: The Insider

Dick Cheney comes from well within the old Bush inner circle. Is that all we need to know?

There are a lot of reasons why George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney as his running mate. Charisma isn't one of them. When the Gulf War ended, you could have made a ticker-tape parade just from the press clips devoted to Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. In that media rush Cheney went mostly unnoticed, though as the hawkish Secretary of Defense, it was he as much as anyone who put in motion the military option against Saddam. That's what a retiring manner will sometimes get you. On a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when Cheney was a powerful...

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