The partnership and then estrangement between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made for compelling politics. Excerpt from “Comparing Obama, Bush and Cheney,” November 5, 2013.

PETER BAKER, Senior White House Correspondent, The New York Times; Author, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

The partnership between these two men, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, ... is unlike that of any president and vice president before them in history, and no two Americans in public office ... have collaborated to such a great effect for good or ill in modern times since Nixon and Kissinger. What I discovered was that the common caricature we’re all familiar with, the puppet master and the puppet, one that is memorialized by a thousand late-night comics and “Saturday Night Live,” missed the fundamental and ultimately more interesting story of what was really going on, the evolution of this collaboration that went from this close partnership at the beginning to a virtually complete break by the time they left office.

Importantly, looking at their biographies [reveals] what helped shape them. I think with Bush, the struggle with alcohol, this determination that he was going to quit at age 40, fueled by newfound or rekindled faith, that helped him kick the habit, created in him this sort of feeling about discipline, about redemption and about the nature of people in recovery that influences politics.

Cheney, by contrast, had had four heart attacks by the time he comes into office. It lends an urgency to his way of thinking, to his priorities. To him, time can be short and there’s no business worrying about other people’s feelings if he’s pursuing something that he cares very deeply about and that he thinks is important and in that vein, he comes into office as the most influential vice president in history.

That’s not saying very much; it’s a pretty sorry job, as most of them would find out. It wasn’t until Walter Mondale that vice presidents even had an office in the West Wing. They spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill. But Cheney created a different understanding with Bush, and Bush authorized him to take a greater role than any of his predecessors had taken. Bush gave him access to every meeting and every decision in a way that none of his predecessors had had. In fact, Harry Truman as vice president met with Franklin Roosevelt just twice after inauguration. Cheney was asked in 2002 how many times he had met with Bush and he pulled out a schedule and said, “Let me count … three, four, five, six, seven – seven times” and then he paused, “today.” He used that access to great effect, and he wasn’t shy about prodding the president to go in the direction he thought he ought to go. One time, they were having lunch and Cheney was frustrated that Bush wasn’t moving fast enough in his view on Saddam Hussein. And he says, “Are you going to take care of this guy or not?”

And Bush was glad to have Cheney on his side. He was OK with this. The first time the American planes bombed Iraq was actually during a no-fly zone violation in February of 2001, just a month after President Bush took office. His first instinct was to say, “I’m going to call Dick.” That was the person he wanted to talk to, the person he relied on, the person he needed for advice. [Then-National Security Advisor] Condi Rice, who was with him at that time, told me how struck she was that the president was leaning on his vice president so much even at that point.

All of this gives the idea of a powerful vice president, which is true, but it also gives a misimpression of Cheney’s role to some extent and it creates a static picture as if it never changes. It also underestimates Bush, who was a graduate of two Ivy League schools and Andover, and not the figure I think a lot of people imagine him to be, owing partly to his own inarticulation at times. I interviewed hundreds of people for the book, and as General Dick Myers put it to me, “the alpha male in the White House was Bush.” In all these interviews, not one of Bush’s friends, not one of his former aides, not one of his relatives I talked to, said he ever told them that Cheney made him do something or convinced him to do something he otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to do.

[In] the first term, there are examples where Cheney’s influence, as high as it was, wasn’t enough to convince Bush. Cheney and Rumsfeld came to Bush in July 2002 to argue that they should go ahead and hit Iraq right away, because there was intelligence suggesting there was a chemical weapons camp in northern Iraq run by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later of course became the head of al-Qaida in Iraq. Bush refused. He didn’t want to do that. Cheney, likewise, didn’t want Bush to go to the UN or authorize inspectors to go in Iraq. Bush again rejected him.

But as you explore the evolution of the presidency, you find that Bush begins to move much more dramatically away from Cheney in the second term. He’s frustrated by the failure to find the weapons he was told were there, he’s frustrated by the rising crescendo of violence, which has been so unanticipated by the planners who had reported to him, unhappy to find himself isolated by allies, eager for breakthroughs that would help shape his legacy.

So Bush turns to Condi Rice and elevates her to secretary of state and effectively supplants Cheney as the first among equals in the second term. Not to say that Cheney was on the margins necessarily; he still obviously wielded an influence. But he was much more on defense than he was on offense by the second term, trying to fend off changes that he thought would weaken the country or unravel the policies he had brought to place. By the time they left office, they were on opposite sides of so many different issues. This is the thing that really surprised me; that they were disagreeing on North Korea, gun rights, Iran, same-sex marriage, tax cuts, Guantanamo, interrogation practices, surveillance policies, the auto bailout, climate change, the Lebanon war, Harriet Miers, Don Rumsfeld, Middle East peace, Syria, Russia and federal spending. And all that is before their fight over a pardon for Scooter Libby.

A particular telling moment comes in 2007 when Bush is asked by Israel to bomb what they find is a nuclear facility in Syria that had been built with the help of the North Koreans. The deliberations kind of resemble some of the discussions that happened before Iraq, where President Bush brings his team in, they have a conversation. Should they do it? This time, rather than kick them out and just talk to Cheney, he asks Cheney in front of everybody else, “What’s your position?” The vice president says, “I think we oughta bomb it. I think the Israelis are right. We should do it. You’ve put out a red line on proliferation. We need to live up to that.” Bush says OK, and he asks, “Does anybody here agree with the vice president?” and no hands go up. He’s all by himself on this. And so not only has Bush left his vice president isolated, he’s forced him to confront that isolation in front of the entire team. That’s a big change from the March 2003 and the February 2001 moments, and all this comes in the final, frantic days of the administration, when as if they didn’t have enough on their hands with the economy and the auto crisis, they were fighting about this Scooter Libby pardon.

Now, Scooter Libby had been the vice president’s chief of staff and national security advisor. He was “Cheney’s Cheney,” as people put it; very valued to him. He was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak case; he wasn’t charged with the leak itself. He was accused and convicted of not telling the full truth about how he had learned about Valerie Plame’s identity. She was the wife of Joe Wilson, the critic who had accused the administration of misusing intelligence. The vice president comes to the president and he says, “Look, this is a travesty of justice.” He believes it’s a bogus prosecution; he thinks it’s political; he thinks that the prosecutor is actually kind of coming after him and that Scooter Libby actually took a bullet for what amounted to a disagreement in memories between him and other witnesses. The president looks at it. He says, “OK.” He assigns the lawyers at the White House to go back and relook at the case. They go through the trial transcripts and the evidence. They even meet with Scooter Libby in a seafood restaurant not far from the White House. They come back to [Bush] and say, “We think the jury had ample reason to find what it found. They made a determination and looked at all of the evidence, and we don’t think there’s enough to suggest that they were wrong.” So Bush says no to Cheney in a way that irritates and exasperates the vice president, and he tells him, “You’re leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.” After all the differences in these last few years, this is sort of the final break for them; this is the moment of final confrontation. Cheney is essentially asking for one last validation of their partnership, and Bush is refusing to give it.

Bush is so upset about this that he dwells on it his entire last weekend in office. He’s up in Camp David with his family and friends. He’s looking forward to leaving office. He’s had eight years of every possible calamity that could happen. In fact, a few weeks earlier, he hosted a White House ceremony, where he gave a, I think it was a Medal of Freedom to Morgan Freeman, the actor. He says, “Morgan even played a president once when a comet hits the planet and destroys civilization,” and then Bush kinda says to the audience, “It’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened in the last eight years.” So he feels very tired and, I think, worn down by the time it is over. President Bush is ready to leave, and he’s up in Camp David and he’s just dwelling on this fight he’s had with Vice President Cheney. It’s just eating away at him. Condi Rice pulls him aside and says, “Look, you need to stop this. There’s no reason for this to be a pall over your last few days.”

You know, it speaks to the level of break in this relationship that he is dwelling on it so much. Because, as we know, he’s famous for not second-guessing decisions. But in this case, it is just eating away at him. The day of the inauguration, President-Elect Obama comes to the White House for the traditional coffee. They have their meeting and then the two of them get into a limousine to go to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony. It’s just the two of them in the back, and President Bush gives him one last piece of advice, “Whatever you do, set a pardon policy early and stick to it.” Even in his final minutes, literally his final minutes as president, what’s going through his head, what’s bothering him the most, is this rift with his vice president.

Of course, you know what happens then. The two of them separate geographically and metaphorically, and even to some extent politically. Bush goes back to Texas. He’s happy to stay out of politics; he’s done. He told guests at a dinner party in Dallas, he said, “The minute I saw Obama’s hand go up, I thought to myself, free at last.” But if he was free at last, so was Cheney. Cheney was finally free to say what he really thought. He became a very fierce critic of President Obama, very strong in his public enunciation of what he saw as President Obama’s mistaken decisions on national security.

So what’s the state of their relationship today? It’s proper, I think; it’s appropriate; the two have respect for each other, but they’re not friends. As Cheney told me in an interview, “We’re not buddies.” They never socialize together. They were never really personally close anyway. Today, I think, they have a professional but not close relationship.

In April, Bush opened up his library in Texas, and Vice President Cheney was, of course, invited. He’s actually doing much better with his new heart, by the way. I saw him hang out at a bar until midnight, the night before the library opening, which he couldn’t have done in the past. But when it came time for the ceremony, Condi Rice stayed on stage, she had a speaking role, and Vice President Cheney sat in the audience, along with the kids and the Cabinet secretaries. And when you went into the library after the ceremony – President Bush said some very nice things about Vice President Cheney from the podium, but when you went into the library after and you looked around, what you saw were the way President Bush wants his presidency to be remembered: exhibits on freedom, on the anti-AIDS program, even an exhibit on the marine reserve he established off Hawaii for the environment. You see videos narrated by Condi Rice about 9/11 and videos narrated by Josh Bolten and Andy Card, his chiefs of staff. You see a portrait of Laura Bush and pictures of Jenna and Barbara Bush. You see a statue of the dogs.

What you don’t see is Dick Cheney. He doesn’t show up in the library except sort of in brief snatches of news footage, and that’s because, I think, at the end this was Bush’s presidency. The decisions he made were his, good or bad, whether you like them or not, whether we agree with him or not, he owns them and I think that’s the starting point for a good discussion.