Didion On Cheney

Given that our former Vice-President has recently been making a push for most visible, most vocal Republican leader (with a forthcoming HBO mini-series about him) this seems like a good time to remind everyone about Joan Didion's excellent October 5, 2006 portrait of Dick Cheney published in The New York Review of Books:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376

It's the best portrait of Cheney's life and career that I've seen and what ultimately makes it so good is Didion's fairness. She doesn't take any cheap shots at him and refuses to demonize the man, instead approaching his life and rise in politics as the very classic American story it is.

Side note: I hate to sound morbid but...when I read this piece the first thought I had was, "God, that was really well done," followed by, "God, what's going to happen to American letters when Joan Didion dies?" I mean, who else comes even close to doing the kind of work that she's produced over the last several decades? Who are we left with? Harper's magazine? Frank Rich? Keith Olberman? As John McEnroe says, "You can not be serious!"

Didion's perspective strikes me as very unique and, finally, very reasonable, i.e. she never lets herself slip into that easy Liberal-Conservative divide where everything on one side is good and everything on the other side is bad that seems so frighteningly common today. She's the master of nuance, precisely the quality you want in your political writers. And, unfortunately, it's precisely the quality you can't teach. The woman has a gift for seeing all the angles.