RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s hard to believe now, but Dick Cheney was once a favorite of the Washington establishment. As a young chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and then for 10 years a member of Congress, he was deemed by the town’s political arbiters to be a sensible conservative, not a Reaganite or Bible-thumping crazy. The media loved him. When George H.W. Bush nominated him to be defense secretary after John Tower was rejected, he was confirmed unanimously in seven days.

Then came the George W. Bush administration, 9/11, the wars on terror and in Iraq, and Cheney the Reasonable became—pick your Dowdian cliché—Darth Vader, Dr. Strangelove, torturer in chief, Rasputin, the mad bomber.

This image transformation says far more about Washington’s partisan warfare than it does about Mr. Cheney, who emerges in “In My Time” as the same man I’ve observed for more than 20 years—measured, more discreet than a journalist would prefer, conservative with a pragmatic streak but also relentless and unapologetic in pursuing his policy goals. Readers looking for a memoir with the strategic sweep of Dean Acheson’s or Henry Kissinger’s will be disappointed. The book nonetheless makes a contribution to history by showing how the Bush administration worked, and why it often didn’t.

The book’s early chapters recount Mr. Cheney’s Wyoming upbringing, his two-time failure at Yale and his early years in government. They serve to humanize Lord Vader and also show the vagaries of fate in political life. As a young staffer in the Nixon White House, Mr. Cheney was invited to join the Committee to Re-Elect the President. His career might have ended early if he had accepted.

The book’s latter half is devoted to his vice-presidential years and especially to the war on terror. About the policies he and Mr. Bush pursued, the veep is unapologetic. On Guantánamo, interrogations, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wiretapping without a warrant, and the rest of the Bush antiterror architecture, he marshals familiar arguments and claims vindication.

He has a strong case, aided in no small part by the Obama administration. One virtue of Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 is that it has put a Democratic stamp on the war on terror. In every particular except for interrogations, Mr. Obama has either embraced or been forced to accept substantially the policies that the Bush administration devised.

In this sense, the Bush-Cheney war on terror resembles Harry Truman’s containment strategy in the early years of the Cold War. Republicans fiercely resisted NATO and other international entanglements, only to have them accepted in large part by the Eisenhower administration and later GOP presidents. Mr. Obama may not want to admit it, but his success against al Qaeda owes more to Dick Cheney than it does to his own campaign agenda.

On the many internal fights in the Bush administration, Mr. Cheney has been accused of score-settling and “cheap shots,” notably by former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. This is overwrought. Mr. Cheney recounts their disputes, but his criticisms aren’t personal. They are strictly policy business. My impression from the reaction is that Mr. Cheney has told too much of the truth, and it stings.

In eight years as vice president, he said very little in his own defense despite being pounded from inside and outside the administration. His aides were equally tight-lipped. Mr. Cheney writes that this was deliberate, in order not to undermine President Bush by drawing attention to his own role. Even for journalists who shared his views, he was a lousy source. This memoir is his first extended attempt to tell his side of these policy fights, and his account is well worth the time.

Especially instructive is Mr. Cheney’s chapter on the 2007 Iraq surge and what a controversial and close-run decision it was inside the administration. Ms. Rice and her State Department were opposed. So were many of the joint chiefs of staff, the commanders in Iraq and some of the White House staff. Mr. Cheney led what amounted to a policy insurgency, including Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, a passel of colonels at the Pentagon, deputy NSC adviser J.D. Crouch, and retired Gen. Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. In one scene, Mr. Cheney brings Gen. Keane into the White House to see Mr. Bush privately and make a case that the president wasn’t getting from his own government.

Mr. Bush deserves ultimate credit for endorsing the surge, but Mr. Cheney recounts how the White House staff and even the president himself were hedging their bets. News stories based on highly placed administration sources doubted the surge’s success deep into the summer of 2007. After Mr. Cheney complained about one story in an Oval Office meeting, NSC adviser Stephen Hadley admitted that he had been the leaker—at the behest of Mr. Bush. This was even as Gens. Petraeus and Odierno were well on their way to defeating the Sunni and Shiite killers.

Mr. Cheney won that policy battle, to the country’s great benefit, but he also recounts several fights that he lost. When Syria was caught building a nuclear weapons facility, Mr. Cheney wanted the U.S. to bomb it and predicted that Israel would do so if the U.S. didn’t. Others said that bombing could lead to a wider Middle East war and Ms. Rice predicted that Israel wouldn’t risk its own attack. Israel did bomb the site, Syria knew it had been caught red-handed and kept quiet, and nothing much else happened except that the region was spared one more WMD threat.

Ms. Rice’s memoir is set to come out later this year, and it will be fascinating to see how she responds to Mr. Cheney’s dissection. His chapter on North Korea is especially devastating, recounting the State Department’s persistent mistakes and even duplicities in hapless pursuit of a pledge from Pyongyang to end its nuclear weapons program. Mr. Cheney says Ms. Rice’s assurances to Mr. Bush about an agreement with North Korea on verification were “utterly misleading,” and despite her efforts North Korea still walked away.

Ms. Rice this week denied misleading Mr. Bush, but her strategic misjudgments are arguably more embarrassing. Combined with Donald Rumsfeld’s critical account of Ms. Rice’s inability as NSC adviser to broker policy disputes, Mr. Cheney’s account suggests that she was the source of many of the Bush administration’s dysfunctions. She clearly dominated foreign policy in the Bush second term, to little good policy result.

One major mistake was her decision—and Mr. Hadley’s—to apologize for the 16 words in the 2003 State of Union address mentioning Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium ore in Niger. This was the basis for Joseph Wilson’s accusation that the Bush administration had “lied” about WMD in Iraq. Mr. Cheney says that he opposed an apology, not least because the claim was “well-founded,” as a British intelligence review later concluded. Ms. Rice was attempting to appease the Iraq critics, which of course only set them baying more loudly. Thus began the long hunt for heads, culminating in a special prosecutor who indicted Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for lying about who leaked the name of Mr. Wilson’s wife, CIA official Valerie Plame.

Mr. Cheney defends Mr. Libby as unjustly accused, as well he should, but one wishes he were more critical of those who ran for cover, including his boss. He does nail Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, the man who did leak Ms. Plame’s name to Robert Novak. Both men never told the public or Mr. Bush the truth, even as Mr. Powell sat next to Mr. Bush at a photo opportunity when reporters asked the president if he knew who had leaked. Mr. Powell’s behavior was a shameful betrayal of colleagues, and Mr. Cheney’s account is notable for its restraint.

Also restrained is his account of Mr. Bush’s failure to give Mr. Libby a full pardon, despite Mr. Cheney’s importunings. “George Bush made courageous decisions as president,” he writes, “and to this day I wish that pardoning Scooter Libby had been one of them.” This understates Mr. Bush’s abdication by a good measure. In justifying his refusal, the president hid behind White House lawyers who said that they had looked at the trial transcript and concluded that Mr. Libby had lied. The reality is that the case boiled down to two different recollections, Mr. Libby’s and the late Tim Russert’s, of their telephone conversation. Mr. Libby was targeted because he worked for Mr. Cheney, and the former vice president is too forgiving of Mr. Bush for letting a loyal aide hang.

As for Mr. Powell, Mr. Cheney makes clear how much the secretary of state was at odds with Mr. Bush’s policies. Mr. Powell opposed the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty on grounds that the move would alienate Moscow, but there was no backlash. Mr. Powell pursued Yasser Arafat as a Middle East peace partner, to hopeless avail. Before the Iraq war, Mr. Powell opposed dealing with the opposition figures in exile, which after the war extended the U.S. occupation. Those exiles are now running Iraq after winning elections.

Such differences occur often in government, but in the Bush administration they persisted and became all but open warfare. Mr. Cheney doesn’t say this directly, but it’s clear that this failure to settle disputes contributed greatly to the post-invasion troubles in Iraq. Mr. Bush was too loyal for too long to too many aides who gave him bad advice and even worked against his own policies.

On that point, one of the oddities of this book is the degree to which Mr. Bush is a figure offstage. Mr. Cheney praises the president often and thanks him for honoring his pledge to let him participate in governing. Yet Mr. Bush remains a distant figure. We rarely see Mr. Bush as a participant in debates, or learn how or why he decided as he did. This opacity may be out of deference to the presidency or a belief that Mr. Cheney shouldn’t betray his private conversations with Mr. Bush. But the omission diminishes the memoir and, perhaps unintentionally, Mr. Bush as well. This reader would have liked a fuller assessment akin to Acheson’s of Truman.

There are other disappointments. Mr. Cheney’s discussion of economic policy is cursory, though in the end it is the financial panic, not the war on terror, that may do the most harm to Mr. Bush’s legacy. It certainly did the most damage to Republicans in 2008. The vice president does hint at some of the problems when he notes that economic policy was run from the White House, not the Treasury. Note to GOP candidates: Pick a strong Treasury secretary.

He also suggests the insider role that Alan Greenspan played in administration councils as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Greenspan endorsed Mr. Cheney’s misguided advice to Mr. Bush to select Paul O’Neill as his first Treasury chief. Such closeness to the White House may explain why no one in the administration noticed that the Fed’s easy money policy was producing a credit mania that led to surging oil prices, the housing bubble and ultimately to financial panic. Second note to GOP candidates: Keep your Fed chiefs at a prudent political distance.

Of course, none of this was Mr. Cheney’s main brief. That was national security and the Herculean effort to prevent another attack on the U.S. homeland. On that overarching mission, the evidence 10 years after 9/11 is that he succeeded. Americans are safer because Dick Cheney was willing to be hated by all the right people.

—Mr. Gigot is the Journal’s editorial page editor.