If you're looking for a Petraeus break, you can't do much better than checking out Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage sitting down this week at TPMCafe's Table for One.

Savage joins us to discuss his book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. In his first post, he explains how he came to gradually understand the radical project that was underway:

I kept asking the question why. What was driving Dick Cheney and the other “presidentialists” who were so relentlessly and systematically pushing this agenda, about which they had said nothing to voters when campaigning for the office? Where was this coming from? This question took me to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, where the National Archives houses a bookcase full of documents in gray boxes titled “RICHARD CHENEY FILES.”