That modest brief prompted Ben Franklin to label the vice
president “his superfluous excellency.” But John Adams, who
actually served in the office, had a much shrewder sense of the
paradox of the American vice presidency when he observed: “I
am nothing but I may be everything.”
The numbers bear Adams out. During the twentieth century,
one in three U.S. presidents died or became incapacitated in of-
fice (or in the case of Richard M. Nixon, resigned on the cusp of
impeachment). All but Woodrow Wilson, who remained presi-
dent despite a debilitating illness whose seriousness was not
made public, were succeeded by their seconds in command. But
Cheney upgraded his job description without waiting for a
change at the top. Like the Wizard of Oz, he toiled out of pub-
lic view, tirelessly influencing such momentous decisions as the
nation’s oil-centric energy policy, going to war with Iraq, and
adoption of such controversial policies as the use of “enhanced
interrogation” techniques such as water-boarding. Many ob-
servers believe Cheney was a major architect of the Bush
administration’s exceptional lack of transparency (which in no
way lessens the president’s responsibility for it).
As I noted earlier, it will be years before we know the full
truth about the Bush presidency. There are too few investiga-
tive journalists to go around in these days of shrinking newspa-
pers. But we already have some meaningful measures of its
unprecedented lack of transparency. Consider writer Graeme
Wood’s important 2007 piece on the subject in the Atlantic
magazine. Wood compared and contrasted the approaches
taken by the William J. Clinton and George W. Bush adminis-
trations in making government information public. According
to Wood, Clinton’s basic approach was, “When in doubt, let it
out.” His successor’s antithetical approach was, “When in
On Becoming a Leader