In public, Dick Cheney wears a grimace. In private, Americans have never been quite sure what Cheney does--until now. From June 24-June 27, the Washington Post ran a four-part series on Cheney’s vice presidency that, in the words of Post columnist David Broder, “reveals more about the inner workings of this White House than any previous reporting.”

“Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before,” write reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker in the series’ first installment. To back that claim, they spent a year working on the series and conducted over two hundred interviews with people who work with, for, or in the orbit of Cheney. The result is a high-resolution picture of how the vice president, armed with an intimate knowledge of the federal bureaucracy and connections accumulated during his forty-year career in Washington, exercises unprecedented and unseen influence on policies ranging from air pollution and water allocations to war and torture.

Journalist Michael Gartland incited the wrath of concerned parents in Paramus, NJ, when he reported in late May in the Bergen Record that soil at a local middle school was contaminated with pesticides at levels 39 times greater than the state's safety guidelines. What's more, school district officials had known about the pesticides since January, but failed to inform the public -- and failed to fix the problem.

As a result of Gartland's work, the state and city re-tested the school’s soil and found pesticide amounts exceeding 160 times the safe level. Superintendent Janice Dime is enjoying an indefinite period of leave, the contractor responsible for removing the contaminated soil has been fired, and authorities have promised to clean up West Brook Middle School.

Paramus authorities aren't exactly thanking Gartland for his public service, however. The reporter was arrested for trespassing on June 2, when he removed soil from the school’s grounds for independent testing, and police confiscated the soil samples. Gartland, who faces arraignment on June 27, contends that such newsgathering is protected under the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.