Vice president gets sucked into Plamegate vortex.

WASHINGTON -- The wreckage of the Nixon administration was still smoldering when Dick Cheney became the White House chief of staff. He had been a lowly staff assistant under President Nixon, and by some accounts he had been deeply upset by Nixon's destruction. Under Gerald R. Ford, Cheney had the unenviable task of guiding the first presidency after a scandal brought down an entire administration. It was like captaining the first ocean liner through the ice fields after the Titanic.

Almost 30 years later, back in the White House as vice president, Cheney has spoken regretfully of the weakening of the presidency after Watergate.

"In 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job," Cheney declared on ABC in 2002.

Avoiding scandals has become one of Cheney's obsessions, and the vice president has fought repeatedly to expand executive privilege to create an informational firewall around the presidency.

He has refused requests for records of his energy task force, and he has succeeded in asserting a new level of protectiveness for executive-branch documents.

But this week, despite his best efforts, Cheney may be facing a scandal. The vice president is uneasily awaiting the completion of a grand jury's investigation into whether White House aides leaked the name of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame.

The leaker's motivation seemed to have been to punish a critic of the Iraq war, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson 4th.

Wilson's wife is a CIA agent, and some officials apparently felt that the CIA connection undermined Wilson's credibility, since agents had been feuding with Cheney and his staff over the reliability of evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.

Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is among the suspected leakers, and others on the vice president's staff have been grilled by investigators.

Cheney himself was interviewed by the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, as part of the investigation.

The attack on Wilson was a preemptive strike aimed at avoiding a scandal over the veracity of the administration's case for war.

But the question now is if, in trying so hard to avoid a scandal, individuals in Cheney's office might have created one.

If so, ifs a bitter irony for a man who is uniquely positioned to know the corrosive effects of a criminal investigation into the White House.

No one expects the leak probe to mushroom into Watergate, but the mere idea that this administration would become ensnared in a legal investigation seemed far-fetched when the Bush-Cheney team took office five years ago.

Much of the machinery of the Washington scandal culture had already been dismantled, having reached maximum torque during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal and then having blown a gasket. The independent-counsel law, which had wrought havoc on every administration from Jimmy Carter's to Clinton's, expired in 1999, freeing the Bush-Cheney team from the threat of any federal prosecution generated outside its own Justice Department.

Bush and Cheney also could breathe easier with loyal Republican majorities running the House and Senate. Cheney, as a Wyoming congressman, had seen how congressional investigations had undermined the White House. He had been President Ronald Reagan's chief defender on a panel probing the Iran-contra scandal.

This year, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee reneged on a promise to investigate whether political influence had played a role in creating flawed intelligence before the Iraq war.

But instead of a bipartisan congressional investigation, Bush and Cheney ended up with a criminal inquiry after all. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose aides supervised the initial inquiry into the case of Wilson and wife, passed it on to a special prosecutor, possibly because Karl Rove, who had been Ashcroft's strategist on past political races, was becoming a focus of the investigation.

The resulting inquiry, headed by Fitzgerald, now threatens to throw a harsh spotlight on efforts by Cheney aides to highlight intelligence about Hussein's weapons systems, while lashing out against those who challenged their interpretations. Any revelations would be viewed through the prism of a petty political trick, designed to undermine Wilson and his wife.

Cheney, who viewed Watergate as "just a political ploy by the president's enemies," according to his former boss Bruce Bradley in a Rolling Stone article last year, surely appreciates the irony. This week's indictments, if they come down, could be just the beginning of a wrenching look into how America went to war in Iraq--and how the vice president's office handled the prewar intelligence.