Cheney
The other intern was active in Young Democrats and naturally wanted to intern with his party, which then controlled the legislature’s lower chamber. The Republicans, who controlled the state senate, agreed to take Cheney, the last man standing, as their intern. Cheney, by his own admission, “didn’t have a political identity.” His parents had been Democrats and if the other intern had been a strong Republican, Cheney would gladly have worked for the Democrats. In essence, Cheney became a Republican by accident.
All these from Stephen F. Hayes’ biography, Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President.
The power of a memo:
When Cheney learned that Rumsfeld had been appointed to run the OEO, he drafted an unsolicited twelve-page strategy memo on the upcoming confirmation hearings. He gave the memo to Steiger, who then passed it to Rumsfeld. Cheney’s memo focused on accountability, and—not coincidentally—so did Rumsfeld’s testimony:
What was the mission exactly at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Richard Nixon?
Rumsfeld sought to have many OEO programs reassigned to other departments, a move that many observers interpreted as the first step in a plan to dismantle the agency. “The president sent Rumsfeld there to close it down,” recalls Christine Todd Whitman, future governor of New Jersey and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who began her political career at the OEO as a special assistant. “Some of us thought the programs were worth saving, but we were all aware that the agency’s time was limited.”
Nixon:
Nikita Khrushchev, Nixon said, had once given him a sage bit of advice: in order to be a statesman, it is sometimes necessary to be a politician. “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there,” Cheney remembers Nixon saying. “You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” In late June 1972, the CLC froze food prices again.
A philosophy forms:
His experience in the Nixon administration began to change that. He saw well-intentioned government programs that solved one problem and created a dozen others. A plan by the Office of Economic Opportunity to train migrant workers to grow azaleas in South Carolina would have provided jobs for the workers but destroyed the market for azaleas in the process. Need-based assistance in the poorest parts of the country was diverted to “community-action programs” that did little more than line the pockets of local politicians. Through the Cost of Living Council, the IRS targeted small businesses because their owners wanted to give employees a raise. Grocery stores had to fight with the federal government to raise the price of a dozen eggs. To protect the American public, the Price Commission directed McDonald’s to reduce the price of Quarter-Pounders. To Cheney, these experiences not only demonstrated the inherent inefficiencies of big government but seemed to confirm the wisdom of individualism and self-reliance, the cardinal virtues of his home state.
(why not extrapolate that to how things would go when Big Government invades other countries?)
(it is really wild that the Nixon administration had federal government price controls on everyday goods and McDonald’s burgers! Every time I’m reminded of the Nixon era price controls I feel crazy)
Cheney was thirty-three years old when he began his work for the Ford administration. He had sat in on meetings with Ford when they were both working in the House. But Cheney didn’t meet his new boss until after starting full-time at the White House. Ford was a trusting soul, a rarity in the cutthroat politics of Washington, and he immediately saw Cheney as part of his inner circle. “He is as comfortable with Cheney as he is with Rumsfeld,” one senior aide of Ford’s said. “He doesn’t hesitate to say ‘Get me Cheney,’ if something comes up and Dick is the one close at hand.”
…
Little more than a decade earlier, Cheney had been a college dropout living in a tent and working as a grunt laying power lines in rural Wyoming. Now, he was working directly for the leader of the free world, coordinating the unceremonious dismissal of the man in charge of energy policy for the United States. It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic change in direction, but Cheney doesn’t remember spending much time reflecting on where he had been and where he was headed
How he stifled Nelson Rockefeller:
Frustrating the policy proposals of the vice president became a significant part of Cheney’s job in the Ford White House. Rockefeller, said Cheney: …would periodically produce these big proposals and he’d go in for his weekly meeting for the president and oftentimes give him these proposals. At the end of the day I’d go down for the wrap-up session and the president would say: “Here, what are we going to do with this?” And I’d say, “Well, we’ll staff it out.” So I would take it and put it into the system. It would go through OMB and it would go to the Treasury and all of the other places that had a say in his Council of Economic Advisers. Of course the answer would always come back, “This is inconsistent with our basic policy of no new starts,” so it would get shot down. He would later describe this role as putting “sand in the gears.” The phrase “we’ll staff it out” quickly became a euphemism for killing one of Rockefeller’s projects.
Back to Wyoming to run for office:
Although they complained about their father’s driving music—an eight-track tape of the Carpenters—the girls liked to go along.
Health tips:
As he began to mend, Cheney consulted with his doctor, Rick Davis. “He said, ‘Look, hard work never killed anybody.’ He said, ‘What is bad for you, what causes stress is doing something you don’t enjoy, having to spend your life living in a way you don’t want to live it.’”
…
He began a light exercise regimen, walking the five blocks from his house to the campaign headquarters and back.
Secretary of Defense:
As he stood behind the oversize desk that once belonged to General John Pershing, the legendary commander in World War I, he ordered an aide to fetch the Pentagon organization chart. The aide returned and flopped the mammoth diagram in front of his boss. “It sort of fell off both ends of the desk,” says Cheney. “And I rolled it up and stuck it in the trash and never looked at it again. I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time trying to reorganize the place.”
Odd incident on 9/11:
As the afternoon wore on, Condoleezza Rice noticed that Cheney hadn’t eaten anything. “You haven’t had any lunch,” she said to the vice president. As soon as she said it, she realized that it probably sounded odd. “I thought, ‘Where did that come from? What a strange thing to say in the middle of this crisis.’”
(Whether or not the US military shot down any civilian aircraft on that day (a mild conspiracy theory, that they shot down Flight 93), there was period on the day when Cheney certainly thought that they had, and on his orders. It seems to me that this traumatized him, or at least deeply affected his thinking.)
“I’ve seen him listen to some tirades from senators that would try anyone’s patience,” says McCain. “He stands there, smiles. Polite.” McCain sits up; straightens his face; and, speaking in an exaggerated monotone, does his best impersonation of Dick Cheney: “Thanks very much. Thank you. Yes.”
“I’ve seen a guy come up to him and say, ‘We’ve got to reauthorize the ag bill. Understand? My farmers, they’ve got to have this emergency funding. You’ve got to get the president to say, ‘We need this ag bill.’ He smiles,” says McCain, continuing as Cheney. “‘ Thank you very much. Yes. Yes, Pat.’ In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve never seen him fire back at any one of these guys when they do that. I just never have.” Cheney, of course, has a reason for subjecting himself to this gantlet. “What I try to do is maintain those relationships when you don’t need them so that they’re there when you do need them,” he says.
lifestyle:
Cheney sips Johnny Walker Red and snacks from a jar of Planters dry-roasted peanuts. (“ Yeah, and he doesn’t share,” laughs one friend.)
On fish:
Words stream out of Cheney’s mouth as he describes his favorite fish. “A steelhead is a magnificent fish. It’s a sea-run rainbow that spawns in fresh water. It hatches out, spends maybe a couple of years in fresh water. And then goes to sea, just like Atlantic salmon. A couple years in the ocean, cruising the Pacific, grows to considerable size and then comes back to fresh water. Probably the biggest steelhead I’ve caught—a few in the twenty-pound class,” he says, then clarifies, “twenty-pounds-plus. That’s a big fish on a fly rod. They catch a few up there every year where we go, over thirty pounds. I’ve never caught a thirty-pounder. And it’s very tough technical fishing. You might fish all day long and not have a strike, but, boy, once you’ve got one on it’s just—it’s an amazing experience when you’ve got a twelve-, fifteen-pound steelhead on the end of your line, tail-walking down the river, putting up a hell of a fight. And you do it in some of the most beautiful country. If I had one fishing trip left in me I want to go spend a week on the Babine.”
(source)
Previous coverage of Cheney:
