A meticulous investigation of the expansion of presidential power under Bush and Cheney, and the decades-long project that preceded it. Charlie Savage, then of the Boston Globe, won a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting on presidential signing statements that grew into this book. His argument is that the post-2001 assertions of executive authority were not improvised responses to terrorism but the fulfillment of an agenda formed in the 1970s, when a cohort of Republican lawyers concluded that the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam constraints on the presidency had gone dangerously far. Dick Cheney, who served as Ford's chief of staff during that period, is the through line, and Savage traces how a set of once-marginal constitutional theories about the unitary executive migrated from the Federalist Society into the Office of Legal Counsel and then into operative policy. The book documents the mechanisms in detail: warrantless surveillance, the legal architecture authorizing torture, indefinite detention without trial, aggressive use of state secrets claims, the systematic use of signing statements to announce that the president would not enforce provisions of laws he had just signed, and a judicial nomination strategy designed to entrench the theory. Savage writes as a reporter rather than a polemicist, letting the documentary record carry the argument. Written before the presidencies that followed, the book has become more useful over time as a map of the machinery each successive administration inherits and rarely surrenders.