The Great Rift; Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and the Broken Friendship That Defined an Era

xii, 416, [4] pages. Notes. Index. Inscribed by the author on the title page. The inscription reads: "To Gary, an old friend over the years. J Mann 1/25/20". Dick Cheney and Colin Powell--it is easy to forget that they were once allies. The two men collaborated closely in the successful American wars in Panama and Iraq during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. However, conflicts of ideology and sensibility drove them apart. Under George W. Bush, they fell into ever-deepening antagonism over the role America should play in a world marked by terrorism and other nontraditional threats. In a wide-ranging, deeply researched, and dramatic narrative, James Mann explores each man's biography and philosophical predispositions to show how and why this deep and permanent rupture occurred. He brings to life the very human story of how this influential friendship turned so sour and how the enmity of these two powerful men colored the way America acts in the world. James Mann (born 1946) is a journalist and author. As a newspaper journalist, he worked for more than two decades for the Los Angeles Times, where he served as Supreme Court correspondent, Beijing bureau chief, and foreign-policy columnist. Earlier in his career, he worked at The Washington Post, where he was part of the newspaper's Watergate coverage. His magazine articles have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and The American Lawyer. His 1992 article, "Who Was Deep Throat?", was included in The Atlantic Monthly's collection, "The American Idea: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly. Derived from a Kirkus review: A useful review of the hard-right shift of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, delivered via a comparative study of two of the seminal players. As Mann shows in this illuminating dual biography and history lesson, early on in their careers, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney both hitched their stars to top government insiders who helped propel them to the highest levels of power. Powell, the amiable, popular soldier, was an aide to both Frank Carlucci and Casper Weinberger at the Defense Department and National Security Council—before becoming national security adviser in 1987. Cheney became Donald Rumsfeld's aide during Gerald Ford's brief administration before assuming the role of White House chief of staff. Both men achieved stellar appointments during George H.W. Bush's administration and led a "good war" that expelled Iraq from Kuwait while agreeing not to extend the war into Baghdad. Yet it was in George W. Bush's administration that the two—Cheney as VP, Powell as secretary of state—began to diverge in thinking and action. Cheney's "blueprint" was essentially to keep the U.S. as the world's dominant military superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union and actively "block" any hostile rival. Powell maintained a centrist position and urged caution and restraint, especially regarding another war with Iraq. Cheney pushed for aggressive "antiterrorist measures," including the controversial and ultimately self-defeating "black sites" and "enhanced interrogation" measures, while Powell emphasized working with U.S. allies. Both men would develop their own "tribes" of followers. Yet it was Powell who became the poster child for the invasion of Iraq, convinced by U.S. intelligence into making a false casus belli of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. The friendship was over, and the split caused deep rifts in the country at large. Still, as Mann demonstrates thoroughly in his insightful dissection of their relationship, Powell was as complicit and eager a participant in the nation's disastrous ventures as Cheney. A significant work of American history. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated].…