The Bunker Hours

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.