For those of us who lived through the Nixon years, we never get tired of learning more about how the mindset of the executive office worked from those who were inside the White House.  From our Hinterlands correspondent, Kathleen,  Harpers has an article about what former White House counsel John Dean’s thinks of our stalwart Vice President, Dick Cheney.

For some inexplicable reason, I was never able to lose the image of Cheney (along with chum Rumsfeld and some others) sitting in a small loft above the oval office pulling the strings that made President George W. Bush jump and twitch.  But Dean’s view, as published in the Daily Beast, is quite different.

For me, Cheney is the last of a dying breed of former Nixon aides and apologists who do not believe that the disgraced president set the standard for what should not be done, rather that he provided a “to do” list legacy. To understand Richard Nixon, as I believe I do, is to appreciate that Cheney has carried Nixon’s political DNA into contemporary Republican politics and governing.

Thirty-one years [after the Nixon-Frost interview], Wallace asked Cheney, “If the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” Without blinking, Cheney replied, “General proposition, I’d say yes.”

Like Nixon, Cheney operates best shrouded with secrecy. Cheney plays the enigma well. Unlike Nixon, however, who had intellectual heft, remarkable political acumen and a carefully developed world vision, Cheney has a small-bore mind along with a world-class Rolodex. At heart Cheney is and always has been the consummate “staff man”—an implementer of the ideas of others but neither an original nor analytical thinker. He started in Washington as a staff person and simply never grew beyond that role. As vice president, he was Bush’s super-head of staff, and when not doing Bush’s bidding, he was devoted to implementing Nixon’s vision of the presidency—a vision Cheney says he has held since Watergate.

The anticipation is that Cheney will keep himself busy following his White House stint, though with somewhat different motivations than many past office holders.

Cheney has no plans to retire, as he turns 68 years old ten days after leaving office. What better way to spend his time than on a book, for he has no eleemosynary inclinations about making the world a better place, like most Democratic holders of high office when they leave. Cheney does not need to earn a living, unlike his predecessors, with his net worth estimated as high as $100 million or more gained as Halliburton’s CEO. When he leaves his undisclosed vice presidential locations he will move into a new home he and wife Lynne are building in McLean, Virginia, along with their home in Wyoming, and their retirement estate in St. Michaels, Maryland (just a stone’s throw from his pal Don Rumsfeld’s property, who is working on his book.)

There, Dean predicts that Cheney will write a book, explaining why he’s right and the 87% of the country that dislikes with him isn’t.

It is not difficult to predict the underlying tenor and tone of Cheney’s book. There will have been nothing unconstitutional about the way they handled enemy combatants. Rather he and Bush got it right and the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong by six to three in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, by six to three in Rasul v. Bush, and five to four in Rumsfeld v. Padilla. Or as Cheney told Chris Wallace: “Sometimes the Court makes bad decisions.” No unlawful combatant detainees have been tortured, Cheney will again report, because the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed on 33 detainees, with waterboarding used on three, were not torture. Cheney requested and received legal opinions from the Department of Justice. Cheney will not mention how these opinions redefined torture out of existence under American law, for he never does, nor does he report that these baseless Justice Department documents were withdrawn almost as soon as they publicly surfaced, because they were not legal analysis rather legal cover. Cheney will explain that the unbridled expansions of executive powers following 9/11 were, in fact, presidential restraint. Or as he told Wallace: “If you think about what Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, what FDR did during World War II, they went far beyond anything we’ve done in the global war on terror.” He will not mention that Congress had declared war in both those situations, and he will not explain, for he never does, how or why he equated the so-called war on terror with the Civil War, World War II, or for that matter the Cold War with its potential for world destruction. And on and on the excuses and incomplete explanations will go.

For those who rail with some great continuity about the death of due process, while eagerly awaiting the new season of “24”, this will be Cheney’s opportunity to explain why all the bellyaching is just unAmerican, and what it means to be the President of the United States of America.

While Dean only goes back as far as Nixon, this attitude is a bastardization of the “rugged individualism” of a Teddy Roosevelt without the moral compass that constrains the “doing whatever one has to do” ideology.  This would be a valuable lesson in American politics and government, but for the fact that we forgot about Nixon in the intervening years, and will likely forget about the Bush/Cheney years as well as we work ourselves into a frenzy for some new duo in politics that will save us from the other guys, whoever those other guys might be.

But it’s good to have John Dean’s thoughts available just in case there are any George Santayana fans around.