I am an exceptionally excited man. Next week brings the publishing event of 2011: the appearance of Dick Cheney’s memoirs. The NYT has seen an advance copy, and highlights the former Veep’s claim that he advised President Bush to bomb Syria in 2007. Prescient, huh? But it looks like In My Time: a Personal and Political Memoir is going to be utterly jam-packed with enjoyable nuggets:
He [writes] that George J. Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, resigned in 2004 just “when the going got tough,” a decision he calls “unfair to the president.” He wrote that he believes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to undermine President Bush by privately expressing doubts about the Iraq war, and he confirms that he pushed to have Mr. Powell removed from the cabinet after the 2004 election. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney writes. His resignation “was for the best.”
I literally don’t know what I’m going to do with myself until I get my hands on a copy of this tome. Cheney has predicted that there “will be heads exploding all over Washington” when it comes out. The book is #3 on the Amazon best-sellers list. I only wish that the publishers had picked a more suitable cover design, like this:
