Dick Cheney’s new memoir might just be an unapologetic confirmation of what we’ve already assumed, yet the former Vice President and long-time Washington insider is already drawing strong opinions from commentators and former colleagues hooked on decoding Cheney's past.

In a segment to air Monday, Cheney told NBC News that his book, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” would have “heads exploding all over Washington” with its many revelations. Among the new details: 

• He had a resignation letter stowed away in the event health issues would pose a serious problem.
• He was unconscious for weeks in 2010 after undergoing heart surgery and vividly dreamt of life in an “Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.”
• He told George W. Bush to bomb Syria in 2007.  

Yet for some journalists, surprising revelations end there. Charlie Savage of The New York Times, who received an advanced copy of the book, told Robert Siegel of NPR that Cheney’s memoir as a whole, while informative, differed little from the archetypical “Washington memoir.”

Well, the whole book is full of nuggets and it's kind of hard to say what's the single biggest one of them. In one sense, none of them are big. There's not a huge revelation here. Rather, like a lot of Washington memoirs, I would say this is - it's full of small, new details, new texture, new spin on known events.   

Michiko Kakutani of the The New York Times reiterated Savage’s words and asserted that the book had “head exploding” qualities of a different, more frustrating kind:

Whatever readers think of Mr. Cheney’s politics, their heads are more likely to explode from frustration than from any sense of revelation. Indeed, the memoir — delivered in dry, often truculent prose — turns out to be mostly a predictable mix of spin, stonewalling, score settling and highly selective reminiscences.  

For Zev Chafets of Newsweek, the value of “In My Time” comes not from new tidbits but rather its successful defense of Cheney-esque policies – policies which, as Chafets writes, are increasingly present under the Obama administration.

President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals. Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach. The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days. Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli. The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won. We’re all Cheneyites now.

In a direct response to Chafets article, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic challenges the idea that the Obama administration amounts to an exact carbon copy of Cheney’s worldview:

Although President Obama has betrayed his supporters by adopting some Bush/Cheney policies that he campaigned against, particularly the expansive view of executive power advanced by the former vice-president, Obama continues to regard the Iraq War as a foolish conflict to have entered; has rejected Cheney's counsel that torture should be used to interrogate captured terrorists; and ignores the approach Cheney would take in places like Iran and Syria.

Journalists aren’t the only ones dissecting “In My Time.” With Cheney taking shots at an array of former colleagues from former C.I.A. director George Tenet to onetime boss Richard Nixon, past friends are also taking issue with the Cheney memoir. 

In particular, former Secretary of State Colin Powell feels the Cheney memoir goes too far in its negative portrayal of past constituents. As noted by the LA Times, Powell told "Face the Nation":

“There’s nothing wrong with saying you disagree, but it’s not necessary to take these kinds of barbs and then try to pump a book up by saying heads will be exploding," Powell said. "I think it’s a bit too far.  I think Dick overshot the runway with that kind of comment.”

Cheney, 70, co-wrote the memoir with his daughter Liz Cheney. Since his departure from office, he has been increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Obama administration, in sharp contrast to friend and former president George W. Bush, who in 2009 stated that President Obama deserved “my silence.”

Reach reporter Aaron Liu here.

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