Leadership Quote by Dick Cheney

Power, in Cheney's telling, is less about elections than about staffing. The line is blunt, almost antiseptic: "people at the top" should "respond to" presidents and be "selected by" them. That repetition of the chain of command is the point. It's a defense of executive primacy disguised as common sense, and it treats the federal apparatus not as an independent steward of law and expertise but as an instrument that must reliably carry out the president's will.

The subtext is a warning against any rival center of gravity inside government: career civil servants, semi-autonomous agencies, inspectors general, even Cabinet officials with their own constituencies. Cheney isn't just arguing for loyalty; he's arguing for controllability. "Respond to" implies deference in real time, not merely alignment on paper. "Selected by" frames democratic legitimacy as something that can be transferred downward through appointment, turning the president into the moral and operational warrant for everyone beneath him.

Context matters because Cheney's political identity was forged in the post-Watergate reaction against constraints on the presidency and then hardened in the national-security state after 9/11, when speed, secrecy, and unity of command were cast as necessities. Read that way, the quote isn't an abstract management tip. It's an ideological blueprint: a centralized executive staffed with people who won't treat internal norms or institutional independence as a veto. The rhetoric works because it sounds like accountability while quietly redefining accountability as obedience.