When I started college, Dick Cheney , the 46th vice president of the United States, was already rebuilding the presidency — quietly, methodically, and with no intention of returning it in its previous form. Today, as a presidential historian, I study the system he left behind. That’s what I thought when I woke up to the news that Cheney had died from complications of pneumonia and cardiovascular disease: By setting out to reclaim executive authority after Watergate, Cheney supercharged it —