He reigns, in the popular liberal imagination, as the Lord Voldemort of the world stage: he whose location must not be named, a dark, didactic, unyielding presence who shoots first and asks questions later, and who answers to no one, not even the president he supposedly serves.

But there is a dwindling corps of old Washington hands who remember when Dick Cheney was not the Dark Lord, but the bright young wizard from Wyoming who ran the Ford White House at age 34, the youngest presidential chief of staff in American history. They remember when the curled-lip expression now assumed to be a malevolent sneer was only a lopsided smile.

It turns out that Dick Cheney remembers, too. On a morning not long ago, the vice president, whose relations with most Washington reporters are now so corrosive that he actually banned The New York Times from Air Force Two for the duration of the 2004 presidential campaign, was reminiscing about the Times’s Ford-era White House correspondent, James Naughton, in his day the mainstream media’s merriest prankster.

In the 1976 campaign, it was Naughton who appeared at an impromptu presidential press conference in the feathery yellow head of the San Diego Chicken sports mascot; who put a live sheep in a colleague’s hotel room with Cheney’s connivance; who sent out phony telegrams to his brethren on the bus, telling them they had just been chosen by the League of Women Voters to ask questions at the next televised presidential debate. And on the morning after the election, it was Cheney who helped reporters pay him back.

“They recruited me to get Naughton for all that he’d done to the others in the press corps,” Cheney tells me in his West Wing office, his whole bearing suddenly softening as he rubs his palms together and warms to the tale. “So we basically made an arrangement that I would call Naughton and tell him that President Ford had decided to give one exclusive interview on what it was like to lose the preside...