BY JULIA M. KLEIN
DEC. 4, 2023 12:11 PM PT
REVIEW
Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning
By Liz Cheney
Little Brown: 384 pages, $33
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In these upside-down times, a conservative stalwart can quickly become a pariah to erstwhile allies and a profile in courage to ideological foes. No one has managed that feat more definitively than former Rep. Liz Cheney. For her unstinting criticism of former President Trump’s election-related shenanigans, her vote to impeach him and her role in investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, she lost first her GOP House leadership post and then her Wyoming congressional seat.
Cheney’s new book, “Oath and Honor,” is a mostly straightforward, occasionally repetitive, literarily undistinguished account of that investigation as well as its antecedents and aftermath. It oozes contempt toward Cheney’s former colleagues, whom she calls “enablers and collaborators.” A particular target of her ire (no surprise here) is former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Cheney describes as “craven,” “unprincipled,” cowardly and deceitful. “Kevin McCarthy lacked the courage and the honor to abide by his oath to the Constitution,” she writes.
Unlike, of course, Cheney herself, who quotes liberally from her own political speeches as well as remarks she made as vice chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.
There’s no question that Cheney’s contributions to that Democratic-led committee, her outspoken condemnation of Trump’s increasingly desperate attempts to cling to office and her willingness to risk political exile as a result seem, to many, entirely admirable.
But those who’ve witnessed Cheney’s transformation, watched those powerful, televised committee hearings and generally followed the news won’t be stunned by the thrust of “Oath and Honor.” It’s long been reported (and was underlined in McKay Coppins’ recent “Romney: A Reckoning”) that many Republican officeholders have privately disdained Trump while publicly supporting him. It is not exactly a shock to learn that Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, while signing his name to electoral-vote objections, muttered, “The things we do for the Orange Jesus.”
After the attack on the Capitol, many GOP officeholders seemed ready to move on from Trump. But Cheney, like others, sees McCarthy’s late January 2021 meeting with the ex-president at his Mar-a-Lago resort as a brake on that momentum. McCarthy assured Cheney that the visit was, in effect, a humanitarian mission prompted by Trump’s alleged depression and inability to eat. But he apparently told different stories to others.
“Oath and Honor” lays out the various schemes by Trump — “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office” — to negate the 2020 election. It reveals Cheney’s own behind-the-scenes attempts to dissuade her colleagues from assisting him as well as her early support for articles of impeachment. And it summarizes the Jan. 6 committee’s efforts to illuminate what Cheney terms, borrowing the title of Philip Roth’s counterfactual novel, “the plot against America.”
But the book falls short of being a classic memoir — or for that matter an engaging read. Its emotional tone rarely veers beyond strident anger and self-righteousness, however well-earned.
Categories: Fundamentalism, USA