Word: chief
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Perhaps the most interesting element of the entire affair, though, was hearing the Commander-in-Chief weigh in. Barack Obama usually treats discussions of race like trips to the dentist—occasional, unpleasant necessities to be avoided whenever possible. But on Wednesday night, in a primetime news conference, the President was strikingly candid...
Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. For over a month Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon, aides reported, had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who seemed prepared to push...
...means, Cheney is settling in for a long siege in Washington, where he will soon be installed in a conservative think tank and where, Republicans say, he will pull levers on Capitol Hill to make his voice heard. Above all, Cheney will continue to insist that the Commander in Chief and his lieutenants had almost limitless power in the war on terrorism and deserved a measure of immunity for taking part in that fight. That's a conviction Cheney made clear to all those involved in the Libby affair - including, in his final hours in power, the President himself...
...Special Relationship A former White House chief of staff, Congressman and Pentagon boss, Cheney had an uncanny ability to guide Bush's decisions. Even as he claimed expansive Executive powers for the President, Cheney salted the bureaucracy with allies who could alert him in advance about policy disagreements, help him influence internal debates at key moments and give him a leg up in framing issues for the President. He was always deferential to Bush, often waiting with head down and hands clasped behind his back to address the President. Both by habit and by design, he cultivated a relationship that...
...Longtime Cheney ally Donald Rumsfeld was eased out as Pentagon chief in late 2006, and Bush replaced him with Robert Gates, a former CIA director and Bush-family ally. Gates was as effective a bureaucratic player as Cheney - and much more of a pragmatist. "Bush was persuaded that the day of the neoconservatives had to be over, because the direction of his presidency had become politically unsustainable," says a well-informed adviser. "It wasn't so much a repudiation of Cheney or Cheneyism but a practical judgment that the previous approach simply wasn't working." (See America's worst Vice...