Dick Cheney's Psychology | Part 1: Almost Pleasantly Adrift

  Dick Cheney's Psychology
    Part 1: Almost Pleasantly Adrift
    By John P. Briggs, M.D., and JP Briggs II, Ph.D.
    t r u t h o u t | Special Report

The name Dick Cheney conjures images of Svengali or Rasputin. Even Republican White House staffers have called him "Edgar," referring to the vaudeville ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy, whom they see as Bush.

But has the man who's considered a master at manufacturing false realities successfully manufactured one about himself?

Adversaries and defenders alike find Dick Cheney a puzzling character: taciturn and so obsessed with secrecy that he is willing to go to any (sometimes paranoid) lengths to elude accountability and remain in the shadows; simultaneously arrogant and non-egotistical; a problem-solving technocrat or a Machiavellian monster, depending on your point of view; an avuncular presence with a soothing voice capable of delivering untruth or preposterous distortion with such breathtaking reassurance that even experienced politicians or journalists come away convinced; reassuring to some, vicious to others; a factotum to his political masters and yet, somehow, their behind-the-scenes puppeteer; a brilliant opportunist; a man who always seems in control and careful, yet is sloppy and takes aggressive risks; an apparently committed ideologue who is also apparently utterly amoral and without real principle except for a determination to accumulate power (but not necessarily for himself); self-sacrificing of his own personal ambition (to be the president, for instance), yet nonetheless ruthlessly ambitious; a man whose mature "adult" demeanor is contradicted by an adolescent locker room snideness; a personality tinged with gloom and resignation.

From a psychological point of view, how do all these odd pieces fit together, and, most importantly, what effect does the psychodynamic that binds them have on the processes and the policies of the administration of President George W. Bush?

Finding information about the vice president on which to base a psychological understanding of him is not easy. His friends like to say jokingly that "Dick Cheney is always at a secure undisclosed location, even when he's sitting right in front of you." His daughters describe him as a remote figure, a bull walrus out on a rock by the Arctic Ocean.

When Cheney was 13, his family moved to Casper, Wyoming, from Lincoln, Nebraska. Accounts of his days at Casper's Natrona County High School offer early glimpses into his psychology.

The coach wanted to reject Cheney and his buddy Tom Fake from the varsity football squad because they were too small. The pair demonstrated potential usefulness by charging hard at each other four or five times. They made the team. Biographer John Nichols believes that a Cheney life theme also shows up at this point. "He was not all that big or strong, but hinting at things to come, he showed up early, stayed late, and made himself the essential player on a team of better athletes. Someone else could be the star quarterback; Dick, a linebacker, managed things as the team's 'co-captain.'" (Nichols, The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney 18)

Joan Frandsen met Cheney at a sock hop at the end of junior high school. They went steady for three years (1955 to 1958). Lengthy interviews with her reveal a young Cheney who seems far different from the Darth Vader character of current conception. He was a "real charmer," says Frandsen, "and everybody really liked him." She portrays a very popular young man - a bright, "sweet guy," always with "a big smile for you" and lots of laughter, attentive to buying corsages when he was supposed to, remembering Valentine's Day and his girlfriend's birthday. "In the three years I knew him, I never heard him say anything negative about anything." He was easygoing. He won school elections with little effort; he wasn't full of himself. He coasted along smoothly on his laid-back geniality and traded running for class offices with his friend Tom Fake. Frandsen, who went on in life to be an airline attendant, a community organizer and self-described "beatnik," portrays Natrona County High School as a 1950s "Happy Days" world where "everything was laid out for us and we did what they said, and it was okay." Nobody thought about the future.

The people who were there agree that Lynne Ann Vincent was a phenomenon: a petite, smart, ambitious, ruthless, competitive teenager with a Playboy figure. Frandsen says that Lynne was the only one of their group who had "foresight." She plotted for the future. She let nothing get in her way. Frandsen and Lynne had been friends since first grade, yet when Lynne suddenly lost her date for the homecoming dance to another girl, she thought nothing of betraying her best friend. The next day Lynne went to Dick's house for a dinner with his parents to celebrate his birthday. "I was way taken aback by that," said Frandsen, "I never got invited over for dinner."

But by the rules of their social world, taking Dick from her oldest friend enabled Lynne to become Homecoming Queen, and that's what mattered. A short time after, Dick became Lynne's campaign manager for another honor, Mustang Queen, in their last semester. He put up posters, "making sure everyone knew Lynne was the person who should be homecoming queen because of everything she does for the school," recalled one classmate. (Nichols 18)

And there's the well-known story of Lynne's baton-twirling career. Frandsen had taken up the baton, but wasn't good at it. Says Frandsen, "Lynne used to peek through the fence watching me practice. By the time Lynne got through baton twirling, she was twirling two batons with fire on both ends." Dick Cheney stood offstage to douse the fire in a can of water as she competed and eventually won the state championship.

In his later years, Dick would regularly tell the joke about Lynne that seems to go the heart of their relationship. "I explained to friends the other day that if I hadn't moved to Casper, she would have married someone else. And she said, 'Right, and HE would be vice president of the United States.'"

Frandsen thinks this is the only way to answer the question of how the easygoing Dick Cheney people knew in high school became the Machiavellian Cheney who purportedly runs the country. "It kind of takes a lot of us around here aback. Then we say, well, you know, he had Lynne. That was it, right there."

The Dick Cheney of high school recollection appears passive, lacking focus like many teenage boys. He takes a backseat role in football as a "slower than a fencepost" linebacker, but because he impresses his peers with a dependableness and seriousness of manner, perhaps a trait modeled on his silent, dependable bureaucrat father, he gets a passenger-seat job as co-captain.

Lynne Vincent would probably have sensed young Dick Cheney's passivity, dependency, his uncertainty about himself, his protective need to be liked and his emotional distance. This last trait was on display when he wrote a dispassionate line in Frandsen's yearbook after three years of going steady with her, "Joanie, I enjoyed knowing you and going out with you."

Of course, almost none of what we're describing occurred in the minds of these individuals as thoughts or concepts. It took place as feelings.

Lynne has been called by one biographer "Lady McCheney," likening her to Shakespeare's famous female villain. Macbeth sees his wife as a masculine soul inhabiting a female body, and at one point she herself wishes she were not a woman so that she could act in her own right. Like Lady Macbeth, Lynne Ann Vincent has remarkable strength of will that takes her outside the 1950s gender stereotype, and her classmates notice. Where did it come from?

Another childhood friend of Lynne's, Diane Jacobs Schatz, told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Mike Weiss a revealing incident before the time Lynne took Dick from Frandsen. Schatz had a crush on a boy and was going to invite him to a dance. She told her girlfriend Lynne about her plans. Lynne immediately asked the boy out. But Schatz got back at her. In front of their friends, Schatz said that Lynne's mother - whom Schatz called "very pushy, very ambitious for Lynne" - had arranged the date. Lynne was humiliated and ran away in tears.

Frandsen agrees that Lynne's mother - who did clerical work for the sheriff's office, but carried a deputy's badge - had something to do with her daughter's ambition. Frandsen says, "Lynne's mom never hung out with other moms or did anything that other moms did. She was a bit of an outcast." There was rumored to be a "dark secret" about Lynne's mother and her father's former marriage. "Her mother was real, I guess you'd say, pushy. I think that's where Lynne Ann came from - from her mom being such a strong-willed person."

It's not hard to see the high school Lynne in the adult Lynne who became the feared culture warrior when she ran the National Endowment for the Humanities, who regularly flattened guests on CNN's Crossfire and who more recently excoriated CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer had invited her on his show to hawk her children's book, then tried to challenge her about her earlier trash novels that dwelled on brothels, lesbian relationships and rape. She immediately went into a high-gear attack mode that left Blitzer shaken. But he had touched the nerve of a contradiction: Lynne Cheney as author of erotic fiction and patriotic children's books. One senses in the children's books and moral values stance some attempt to cover up her aggressiveness, her hostility - a defensiveness, that, in fact, reflexively emerged when Blitzer questioned her.

It is also Lynne who feels humiliated. If the observations about her mother are correct, she also probably feels lacking, and the bullying bluster means to cover that up. Perhaps she feels unfeminine in some deep way. Marriage and family would be necessary to mask these feelings. Her history suggests she's also conflicted between a sense of herself as a liberated woman pushing to succeed on her own in a male dominated world and a conventional draw to be the good wife supporting her husband. Her conflicted ambivalence is mirrored by her husband's. Our important voluntary relationships come with people we sense - rightly or wrongly - need something from us that we can provide; we're going to help them out. Also, subliminally, we feel they're going to help us out.

Biographer Nichols emphasizes an oddly recurring pattern in Dick Cheney's life. Cheney appears to linger passively on the periphery of the action when someone says, "Well, we don't have anybody now to fill that position, so why not Dick?" For example, when Donald Rumsfeld moved from President Gerald Ford's chief of staff to become secretary of defense, Rumsfeld said to Ford, "Well, why not Dick?" As a result, Rumsfeld's 34-year-old assistant suddenly became the youngest chief of staff in modern history. When the House Republicans were seeking a new whip, Minority Leader Bob Michel asked, "What about Dick?" When the first George Bush's nomination of John Tower to be secretary of defense crashed in scandal and Bush needed a quick replacement, someone asked, "What about Cheney?" After Bush 41 lost the White House, Cheney went on a fishing trip, and, as Nichols describes it, "As it happens Cheney's fishing partners were a group of corporate bigwigs who were concerned about the coming transition at Halliburton, a firm that was in the process of a management shuffle. After Cheney had said good night, the others began talking about Halliburton's need for a new CEO. 'Why not Dick?'" one of them asked. (Nichols 138) Finally, in 2000, exhibiting the humorous passivity of a technocrat fulfilling a mildly burdensome task, Cheney sets out to find a vice-presidential candidate for George W. Bush and stumbles on himself: "Well, why not Dick?"

Perhaps emotionally, young Lynne Ann Vincent, too, was saying, "Well, why not Dick?" as she contemplated her future.

It is Lynne who gets Dick into Yale. She is working part-time for a big Yale donor in Casper, introduces him to her boyfriend, and the donor calls Yale to admit Cheney with a scholarship, while Lynne goes to Colorado College. (Doubose and Bernstein, Vice 123) Lynne Vincent has stirred in her boyfriend dreams that he could be drawn out of a safe, phlegmatic state to conquer reality - which he encounters immediately.

Interviews with Jacob Plotkin and Stephen Billings, Cheney's roommates in 1959-1960, his first failed year at Yale, when taken together with the probable influence of his relationship with Lynne, suggest a young man in crisis.

His education at Natrona has not prepared Cheney for what he meets at Yale, filled as it is with well-trained prep school boys. "It didn't take long for the competition to be something he didn't expect," says Plotkin, now a mathematics professor retired from Michigan State University. Cheney fails his courses - but it's essentially by default: he just doesn't attend classes. He immediately joins the freshman football team, though his size and modest athletic talents ensure that he will never move on to varsity. He begins drinking heavily. He sports cowboy boots and a Western drawl, appearing something like Heath Ledger in 'Brokeback Mountain,'" says Plotkin. To project an identity, he brags to his roommates about working in the summer on power utility line crews in back country Wyoming. "He was proud of that," says Plotkin - "the fact that he could stand up and work with these guys who were full-time linemen."

Cheney's other roommate that year, Stephen Billings, was smaller in stature than Cheney. "There was a little friction there between Steve and Dick," remembers Plotkin, "mostly because Steve was not the sort of manly Western type." Plotkin remembers Cheney calling Steve "Mother Billings." Billings, now a retired Episcopalian minister from the Philadelphia area, says that Cheney occasionally tried to humiliate him. Billings remembers him as "a rough fellow" with humor that had "an edge," different from the person his high school friends remember. Billings recalls a "lopsided smile, almost a smirk, an 'aw shucks.' But you'd feel, who's being kidded here?" Especially when Cheney was drinking, the anger, nastiness and smirk seeped out. We believe his hostility was partly an overcompensation, the weak-feeling tough guy teasing someone smaller. It was also probably a reaction to his situation. One of the key issues for each of us in the evolution of our psychology is, "How do I feel good about myself in the world?" For Cheney, in high school that was not a big problem. At Yale it became a big problem.

Perhaps Cheney, during this first year away from home, is also subjecting Billings to a little of the humiliation and emasculation he feels for failing to live up to the active dreams awakened by the girl back home. He's probably also rebelling against her dominant grip and his dependency on her. Perhaps that rebellion is one reason he doesn't go to class. Plotkin teases him about spending hours almost every day typing long letters to Lynne. "If he wasn't at football practice, he would just keep on writing those letters." Lynne excited a critical ambivalence in him between making his mark or just letting life happen. Perhaps an early referent for him of this ambivalence lies in the juxtaposition of Cheney's reportedly silent, almost invisible father and his mother, described in her obituary as a constant "high-spirited competitor." (Lemann, New Yorker, May 7, 2001; obituary by Nadia White, Casper Star Tribune 12/28/93)

Plotkin also recalls seeing the charming side of his roommate, the side that comes from his friendly, going-along-to-get-along passive personality. "If you watch him on Meet the Press, he has this way of hunching over and leaning into you and cocking his head to the side, and this familiarity develops almost instantly. And he had that as an 18-year-old." That's the Cheney that Frandsen remembers from high school.

Another reason Cheney doesn't go to class is obvious. He can't be successful immediately or in the same way as these students raised with advantages. Billings, who was later trained in psychology, sensed him "wanting to belong and be accepted and entitled." Billings's characterization highlights the hidden passive, dependent cast in young Cheney's aspirations: successes would happen to him, bestowed. Despite his reputation as a workaholic, all through his life he would espouse a reverence for the magic of the passive point of view. In a commencement speech at Michigan State University in 2002, Cheney talked about opportunities "that come out of the blue," and how "others know better than we do just what our gifts are, and how we can use them" - "Why not Dick?" raised to a cosmic principle.

To think through a subject, either to learn it or to act on it, requires engaging the uncertainties of what you don't know and letting the conclusions emerge out of a chaotic mental process. Plotkin remembers Cheney bragging about passing a psychology course without going to class. He gives Plotkin the impression that he's thinking maybe he doesn't need much information in order to understand a subject. It's a defense for not wanting to do the anxiety-producing real work of learning. Cheney will eventually develop a reputation for attention to detail. For now, in the one political science course he enjoys and concentrates on, he only gets a "C." (Nichols 24) Does that reinforce his fears about the difficulties of a world filled with focused or well-connected people?

Both Plotkin and Billings remember Cheney as a person inclined to bluffing. Plotkin describes him as projecting an air of confidence. But Billings feels that even there "he may have been bluffing; I think underneath he was pretty insecure. I think he still is."

Part 2 will explore how Cheney used his dependence on Lynne as a template for the political relationships that lifted him to the national stage.

Dick Cheney's Psychology | Part 2: The "Attendant Lord"
By John P. Briggs, M.D., and JP Briggs II, Ph.D.
t r u t h o u t | Special Report

For a couple of years in the early 1960s, Dick Cheney keeps returning to Yale, floundering again, before totally flunking out and losing his scholarship. In between he's on crews building power lines. His first-year roommate, Jacob Plotkin, doesn't quite understand why he keeps coming back to New Haven, since he still apparently doesn't study. Is it a combination of Lynne's insistence and his resistance?

Then finally it's over. Plotkin vividly remembers seeing Cheney for the last time. "It was a cold day and he was standing on the approach to the library steps and I was coming out of Calhoun College and I greeted him because I hadn't seen very much of him, and he told me he was leaving and wasn't coming back." Plotkin says that in the memory, "I can almost feel the cold breeze blowing on me." Standing by the library, Cheney seemed to Plotkin not angry or bitter, but "resigned."

Back in Wyoming, Cheney returns to his job on the power lines. Joan Frandsen says, "It is what guys do around here if you don't go to college." He continues drinking, gets arrested a couple of times for drunk driving in 1962 and 1963. At one level he seems comfortable with just drifting, as he had in high school. Resigned. Letting things happen. At another level he wants to succeed, whatever that means. But he can't find the engine of his own. Lynne has the engine. As Cheney later tells it, "She made it clear she wasn't interested in marrying a lineman for the county." When Lynne gives him the final ultimatum - succeed in the world or we're through - by his own account, everything changes. (Nichols 26)

In short order, he enrolls in Casper Community College, then the University of Wyoming in 1963. He and Lynne marry in 1964. He follows an interest in the subject of politics. In 1965, he gets a degree from the University of Wyoming and follows Lynne to the University of Wisconsin for graduate work. She plans to make college professors out of both of them - but perhaps anything will do. The Vietnam War is on. Cheney gets five draft deferments during this period, the fifth one remarkably calculated. Cheney applies for his exemption three months into Lynne's first trimester of pregnancy, and then, exactly nine months and two days after the Selective Service eliminated special protections for childless married men, the Cheneys have their first daughter. Years later, the future secretary of defense tells a reporter that he didn't go to Vietnam because "I had other priorities." At confirmation hearings, Cheney told a lie that would have been laughable if it hadn't been swaddled in the famous basso, you're-in-good-hands Cheney voice: "I would have been happy to serve had I been called." (Nichols 33, 37, 107)

We believe the "other priorities" came from Cheney having come upon a way to resolve his conflicted ambivalence. The resolution allows him to overcome his passivity by letting activity and purpose flow into him from an outside force. With Lynne's fierce wind now filling his phlegmatic sails, he finds he can move.

In the mid 1960s, a couple of academic internships take Cheney into the world of politics, where he ingeniously applies the template of his dependent relationship with Lynne to relationships with political patrons. He does their bidding, his strength of will pumped up by working for their ambitions so that a magic occurs. He holds the campaign button bag for Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles; Knowles recommends him as a staffer to Bill Steiger, a new congressman heading for Washington. Already a master go-fer, Cheney gets the Washington nod, though he is only fourth choice for the congressman's staff (an early, "What about Dick?" moment). He next offers his services to Donald Rumsfeld, a rising star of the Nixon administration.

The Rumsfeld relationship illustrates how Cheney's dependency "solution" worked in the political arena. In his book, "Rumsfeld," Andrew Cockburn says: "Observers of this relationship in its early years were in no doubt as to its internal dynamic: Rumsfeld ruled; Cheney served ... To the extent that Rumsfeld's social circle took note of the dour young assistant and his buxom spouse, a former drum majorette with literary pretensions named Lynne, it was to remark on Cheney's subservient attitude to his ebullient boss. 'Flunky' is the word that most often comes up in reminiscences of the period. " (Cockburn, Rumsfeld 17-18)

It's easy to imagine from this description the high cost for Cheney of taking this subservient position.

Cheney described his first interview with the notoriously arrogant, abusive Rumsfeld in 1968 as "one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life.... The truth is I flunked the interview." He tried again, and Rumsfeld took him on. Cheney's initial difficulty seems to have involved finding the right tone, mixing confidence with cringing so as to construct a relationship that would energize him (as had happened with Lynne).

Cheney rises rapidly, almost miraculously, by becoming an all-purpose servant to the powerful boss - whether it's Rumsfeld, Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, George Bush Sr., the bigwigs at Halliburton or George W. Bush - slavishly loyal and willing to do anything asked. He first becomes useful, then indispensable.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use ...
- ("The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock")

The efforts that other politicians expend in trying to get love from the public, Cheney puts into making powerful patrons have confidence in him. He writes everyone else off. Reportedly, Cheney does not seek praise for his behind-the-scenes work, nor does he give it to his underlings. (New Yorker, May 7, 2001) It may well be precisely the held-out-but-withheld carrot of approval from his patron (including Lynne) that pulls him forward. In any case, safely inside the framework of his dependent relationship, the passive Cheney becomes hyperactive, focusing on details and manipulating the system, which he treats as "a game where you never stop pushing," as a Cheney friend from the 1970s remarked. Cheney's father was a bureaucrat; the son becomes the ultimate bureaucrat, a Wizard of Oz moving to convince himself (and, obliquely, the world) that he's running the show from behind the curtain while reassuring the patron that the patron is in charge. In the process he becomes increasingly isolated in his secrecy, hidden by the threads of the plots he spins around himself, remaining always tethered to his external power source.

We might picture many of the feeling layers of Cheney's psyche caught up in a strongly conflicted ambivalence that can be dramatized as "Do I exist as a separate and solitary identity or is my identity entirely dependent on attachment to a stronger person?" This ambivalence gives rise at a more conscious level to thoughts, feelings and behaviors that attempt to resolve the internal conflict. These shape Dick Cheney as a public servant.

Fixation on authority. Over the years, Cheney has argued that executive authority should be essentially unaccountable and unlimited. His machinations have pushed, usually secretly, to assert presidential power to spy on American citizens, torture prisoners and abrogate treaties. His idea places the American people in a subservient position to authority. Their subservience mirrors his own. But when he seeks a unique, unlimited father-knows-best authority for the president, is he really seeking that authority for Dick Cheney, as part of a scheme to be his own man? The answer is confused in his own mind as well as the public's.

Secrecy. Secrecy pervades Cheney's thinking. The Washington Post's recent four-part series on the vice president provides many examples: For instance, in Cheney's office "Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped 'Treated As: Top Secret/SCI (sensitive compartmented information).'" It's as if his least machinations were a matter of national security.

For Cheney, secrecy is required by a paragraph of the unspoken dependency contract with his patron. It reads, "I'll secretly do for you, patron, things you couldn't get away with doing yourself. In return, you provide me an identity and power in the world." Cheney is known for leaving no fingerprints on even his most important successes. This sacrifice on Cheney's part is part of the psychological deal to inspire the patron's confidence and bond.

On the other hand, only in the darkness can he seem to be The One, the autonomous power, since he has foresworn taking that leading role in public. A psychological advantage for him of secrecy is that when he fails few know about it. Secrecy probably also grips his psyche because of a need to hide the humiliating depth of his subservient arrangement.

Secrecy has an accompaniment in Cheney's notorious silence. Colleagues remark that no one's ever sure what Cheney is thinking, or doing. (New Yorker, May 7, 2001) "In my experience," Cheney says, "those who have the most impact are people who keep their own counsel." His assertion implies to the reporter that he's an "impact" person. It also reveals how he copes with being in the back seat. Working behind the scenes and in silence is "what I'm comfortable with," he says. Silence is often a defense a weaker person employs against a powerful one to avert conflicts and cling to dignity. There is no report of Cheney ever disagreeing in meetings with the president. He carefully keeps any disagreements to himself.

Anxiety. A byproduct of dependency is anxiety - fear that if you're not very careful you could lose your connection with the powerful partner and be left without the partner's power source. T.S. Eliot's passive Prufrock character remains in constant dread. He asks, "Do I dare" and, "do I dare?"

In Lynne Cheney's book, "Executive Privilege," a character reputedly patterned after her husband works to keep his outward demeanor "calm and positive," though it's a mask. (Dubose and Bernstein 125) The fictional character may reveal Lynne's awareness of her husband's underlying anxiety.

One expression of Cheney's anxiety shows up in his fears that the US is afflicted by a national passivity that needs to be overcome by a constant vigilance if he is to prevent catastrophe. (New Yorker, May 7, 2001) Cheney's sense of inner dread, gloom and fear is so high that he insisted he and the president shouldn't be in the same place together. He vanished into a "secure undisclosed location" for the president's first State of the Union message after 9/11, despite the fact that the Capitol Building was apparently safe enough for the rest of the government to appear, including the Supreme Court and both houses of Congress.

Cheney has organic heart disease, but anxiety and internal stress have undoubtedly played a key role in his several heart attacks.

Anger and aggression. Cheney's anger percolates beneath his calm exterior. One reporter who interviewed him used the words "venom" and "vicious" to characterize the way Cheney talked about opponents. (Nichols 77) Even his humor has an aggressive cast, as when he remarked that "a dunk in the water" for terrorists is "a no-brainer for me." The violent mental world he lives in came out when he wrote in a meeting note that his associate Lewis "Scooter" Libby was being asked to "stick his head in the meat grinder." Was this a moment of Cheneyian empathy for Libby's service in a subordinate role analogous to Cheney's?

When Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy tried to question the vice president about his days at Halliburton, Cheney startlingly told the senator to "Go fuck yourself." Was this a moment of displaced anger he would like to launch at his domineering patrons? - an anger he feels at his own weakness for needing them? In Eliot's poem, the passive Prufrock displays his aggression in the line, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Tied to his patrons (including Lynne), Cheney probably longs to exist alone and without anybody. New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann writes that Cheney prefers to be teased by his male friends in patently unmeant locker room type insults, though he never teases back. (New Yorker, May 7, 2001)

Working the problem. Cheney manages the stress of his negative feelings by concentrating his focus, like a pilot in an emergency, on the problems in front of him. He works incessantly across the broad range of the federal bureaucracy to manipulate the results and bring more power to his patron. (Or is it to really himself? He's not sure). A man always found "working the problem," Cheney is flexible and creative at locating its hidden "pivot points" to accomplish his tasks. During the Ford administration, he wrote memos about drainage problems in a White House bathroom. (Nichols 58) Reportedly, he is unable converse normally in the way that people do to feel each other out emotionally. But he becomes energized by discussions of strategies for how to get things done. (New Yorker, May 7, 2007)

Lying, deception, amoral behavior. Bluffing, which comes from Cheney's passivity, was a characteristic noted by his Yale roommates. Biographers and profile writers cite many instances of Cheney's lies and deceptions. They construct the reality his patron wants to hear. But Cheney's lies begin at home. The whole structure of his dependent relationships involves lies. He can't tell his dominant partners what he's really feeling, or even what he's really doing. He is an amoral public official. He will say or do almost anything that serves the purposes of the symbiotic relationship. The patron's needs are the greater good which justifies any means. Then Cheney's anxiety, aggression, silence and emotional detachment (one associate described him as "the coldest fish there is" ) come into play in achieving the ends.

Impulsiveness.Dick Cheney's image is of a man always in control; however, biographer Nichols describes Cheney's recurring "decide first and analyze later" impulse. (Nichols 140) Cheney's underlying anxiety from time to time causes him to leap. Then control calls for him rationalize why he jumped. He knows his calm, deliberative voice can make even the most outlandish construction of reality sound reasonable. In February 2006, Cheney enters a highly controlled, "canned hunt" where birds are placed in front of hunters' guns. He shoots his friend in the face in an impulsive moment, then he detaches himself from the emotions of the accident and focuses on micromanaging the release of the information to the media in order to make it appear nothing much has happened. Think of the "canned hunt" as the war on Iraq.

Attempts to escape his subordinate condition. The dependent arrangement that Cheney enters into with his patron energizes him to operate with "a singular force of will," as the Washington Post described it, within the limited sphere that falls to him. But he is also enslaved by the arrangement, which crushes his identity. He attempts to escape its bonds by expanding his sphere of influence - for example, writing administrative orders that give the vice president the same powers to classify documents as the president has. But he can't escape. The subordination that enslaves him is exactly the arrangement that empowers him.

When Cheney first ran for Congress in 1978, journalist Lou Cannon observed that sometimes while listening to Cheney, it sounded like "Gerald Ford had helped Cheney run the country." Cheney smiled and replied, "That's a fair comment." (Nichols 82) On the stump in 2004, Cheney entertained audiences by telling them how little influence he had in the White House, the laughter of the crowd affirming their awareness of his Edgar Bergen trick. It's Cheney claiming he's The One even as he is compelled to deny it.

In 1984, running for another term in Congress, Cheney told a home state magazine, "I used to worry about what I'm going to do when I grow up.... I've gotten to be pretty fatalistic about it." (Horizons magazine, Casper Star Tribune, April 1, 1984) It's a revealing comment that recalls Plotkin's image of him "resigned" on the steps of the Yale library. Why fatalistic? There is an odd mix of superiority and self-effacement in his phrasing, as well as hopelessness. At a psychological level, he appears fatalistic about ever finding an identity that is truly his own - a place in the world not determined by others.

Perhaps the closest Dick Cheney has come being The Man was on 9/11. He seemed to take charge. He ordered the president to stay away from Washington, made the call to shoot down any further airliners. He could feel confident at that moment because he could operate behind the scenes in a secure undisclosed location, the position where he feels most comfortable.

Dick Cheney's parents were staunch New Deal Democrats. His father worked for the Soil Conversation Service, which made him an early environmentalist. In the name of powerful patrons, their son spent a career working to savage the environment and wreak havoc on other progressive causes his parents would have held dear. When Dick returned to Wyoming to run for Congress in 1977, his father remarked, "You can't take my vote for granted." (Nichols 16) A Washington Post profile during the first Gulf War in 1991, when Cheney was secretary of defense under the first George Bush, offers a vignette of Cheney's parents seeming not to know what to say about their radically conservative, warmaking son.

"We had mixed feelings on the whole thing when it started," Cheney's father told the Post reporter, referring to the US assault on Kuwait, "It seems unbelievable they can run around the sandpile like that."

Parlaying his passivity, Cheney had come a long way from the easygoing, popular boy at Natrona County High School.

The analysis here does not support the conventional wisdom that, as vice president, Dick Cheney is a malevolent Edgar Bergen manipulating George W. Bush into positions and actions he would otherwise not take. Critics typically imagine Bush too simple-minded to run the country, so it must be men like Cheney or Carl Rove ("Bush's brain") who are really in charge. But the ability to dominate has little to do with intelligence, and Bush, for all his blundering speaking skills and dysfunctional analytical abilities, dominates. In fact, as we discussed in a previous analysis, Bush is an effective emotional bully. Rather, Cheney has engineered with the president a variation of the relationship he made with Lynne.

The recent Post series points out emphatically that "Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore." (Post chapter 1, pg. 2) Rather, Cheney "inhabits an operational world." Of course, the devil is in the details; since that's precisely where Dick Cheney resides, he seems the devil. At a subtler dimension, Cheney has fashioned his vassal relationship with Bush into a tightly co-dependent one. This was illustrated by Bush's insistence that both appear together at the 9/11 commission where, as the president said, commission members can "see our body language ... how we work together." In fact, we have seen them leaning together making snide comments like boys in a locker room. Bush told one Republican senator repeatedly, "When you're talking to Dick Cheney, you're talking to me. When Dick Cheney's talking, it's me talking." (The New Yorker, May 7, 2007)

Cheney shares with Bush the characteristic of reacting to situations strongly from individual psychology, rather than from an engagement in a seriously deliberative process. For Bush, decisions come by his "gut," an illusion of divine inspiration, which frees him of his pervasive fear that he is inadequate to engage any truly analytical decision process. In Cheney's case, his underlying passivity, his dependency solution and his authoritarian longings lead to a web of secretive actions, jury-rigged rationales and clever stratagems.

In 2002 and 2003, the world saw the result. There was no discussion in the small White House decision circle about whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do, only how to get it done because the president wanted it done. It fell to Cheney to work the problem: to manipulate intelligence and various levels of government to make the war happen.

George Bush Sr. had reportedly pushed the idea of Cheney for vice president in order to provide his son with adult supervision. (Nichols 168) What the father didn't realize was that the psychology of Dick Cheney - the man Gerald Ford's security detail dubbed "Backseat" and the current White House security dubs "Angler" - predestined him to subordinate himself in his own special way to the son. Bush's father sought a regent and instead found a man who would make his son's dysfunctions worse.

John P. Briggs, M.D., is retired from over 40 years of private practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Medical Center in New York City for 23 years and was a long-time member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. For 20 years, he practiced co-therapy for married couples with his late wife, Muriel.

JP Briggs II, Ph.D., is a Distinguished CSU professor at Western Connecticut State University, specializing in creative process. He is the senior editor of an intellectual journal, the Connecticut Review, and author and co-author of books on creativity and chaos, including "Fire in the Crucible" (St. Martins Press); "Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos" (Simon and Schuster); and "Seven Life Lessons of Chaos" (HarperCollins), plus a collection of short stories, "Trickster Tales" (Fine Tooth Press). He is working on a book about the power of ambivalence.