# The Bunker Hours *A Biography of Dick Cheney* — Legendary Biographies No. 034 - **Subject:** Richard Bruce Cheney - **Written by:** Theodore Pemberton - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / American Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 226 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 226 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-062-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Eric Mercer (ISBN 979-8-90623-207-6) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/034-the-bunker-hours.html ## About this book September 11, 2001, 9:55 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney is in the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center, three stories below the East Wing of the White House. Air Force One is in the air over Florida with President George W. Bush. Cheney, sixty, authorises the rules of engagement that would, had United Airlines Flight 93 not been brought down by its passengers in a Pennsylvania field eight minutes earlier, have permitted United States Air Force fighters to shoot down a civilian airliner with Americans aboard. The next six years are the eight-year arc the book treats as its subject. Theodore Pemberton's biography opens earlier — in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Cheney was born in 1941 — and follows the arc through the Wyoming high-school years, the two academic suspensions from Yale, the Gerald Ford White House chief-of-staff appointment at thirty-four, the six terms in Congress, the Defence Secretary years under George H. W. Bush, the five-CEO turn at Halliburton, the unprecedented vice presidency of 2001-2009, the long campaign to authorise enhanced-interrogation techniques the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel produced August 1, 2002, the 2005 Plame leak and the Scooter Libby conviction, the 2012 heart transplant, and the long retirement at the Jackson Hole Wyoming ranch. What emerges is a portrait of the most powerful Vice President in American history — and the eight-year arc the country, twenty years later, has not finished assessing. ## Contents 1. The Wind 2. The Dropout 3. The Apprentice 4. Chief of Staff 5. Wyoming Congressman 6. Secretary of Defense 7. Halliburton 8. The Selection 9. September 11 10. The Legal Architecture 11. The Case for War 12. Iraq 13. Abu Ghraib 14. Scooter Libby 15. The Second Term 16. The Heart Transplant 17. Liz Cheney 18. The Architect's Legacy 19. Country Over Party ## Questions **Who is The Bunker Hours about?** Richard Bruce Cheney. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Bunker Hours — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,254 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 68,500 words, 19 chapters, 226 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Theodore Pemberton is a Boston-based biographer whose books on American presidents and political operatives have been shortlisted three times for the Lukas Prize. He writes biography that takes campaign finance and procedural history seriously, focusing on the mechanics of political power. His early publications, including The Playbook and The Chief, established his reputation for meticulous archival research. His subsequent works, such as The Founder, Blexit, and The Bunker Hours, continued to examine the inner workings of political machines. With The 1972 Florida Primary, The Bletchley Park Hut, and The Mar-a-Lago Storeroom, he turned his attention to specific, high-stakes environments that shaped national policy and intelligence operations. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his time teaching writing workshops and rowing on the Charles River.