In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  One of the most important people I met at the orientation was Maureen Drummy, assistant director of the NCEP. She would play a crucial part in my life over the next few years, and we became good friends. Maureen persuaded me that the best place for me to work would be in Madison, Wisconsin, in the office of Governor Warren Knowles. Lynne liked the idea because the main campus of the University of Wisconsin was located in Madison and had a fine English department, where she could begin work on her Ph.D. We packed up the ’65 VW bug we had acquired and headed for Wisconsin through memorably cold January weather. Along about Dubuque, Iowa, the car became difficult to steer because the grease in the steering column had stiffened with cold, and we had to put the VW in the garage at a gas station to thaw it out. Despite the freezing weather, we faithfully stopped the car every few hours so that Lynne could get out and walk around, per doctor’s orders. She was pregnant with our first child, Elizabeth, who would be born in Madison on a warm day at the end of July.

  __________

  WARREN KNOWLES LOOKED LIKE a governor. Tall, with wavy silver hair, he had been elected in spite of the Democratic sweep of 1964. I became an all-purpose aide, traveling with him all over the state. My pockets were filled with buttons emblazoned with “We Like It Here,” which was the slogan of a campaign he had initiated to promote the state. We hit all the county fairs, and my job was to follow the governor up and down the midway, handing the buttons out. I also carried a Polaroid instant camera, and I snapped pictures as we went along. When the photo slid out, I’d rip the cover paper off it and give it to the fairgoer the governor had just shaken hands with.

  When I wasn’t traveling with the governor, I often worked at my desk, which someone had thoughtfully put in the center of the staff office so I could see everything going on. I participated in staff meetings and learned a valuable lesson early on. I don’t remember the problem we were discussing, but I do recall that I saw the answer with crystal clarity and offered it right up, using a tone of some authority, as I remember. There was silence, then the group went on talking, eventually ending up with the solution I had proposed, though it was as if I’d never offered it. As I thought about what happened, I realized that it’s often better to listen than to speak, particularly if you are the junior person around. Moreover, when a group has a problem to solve, they usually need to grapple with it for a while. If you have a solution, wait until people are ready for it, and then present it in a cool and collected way that makes the answer to the problem be about the answer—and not about you.

  One night when we had been in the northern part of the state, the governor gave Mel Laird a ride to Chicago on the state’s official twin-engine plane. Mel was the congressman from Wisconsin’s 7th District, and he would become Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense during the height of the war in Vietnam. As the three of us, the governor, the congressman, and I, flew through the night, I listened to Laird warn his old friend to be very careful what he said about the war in Southeast Asia. It was 1966, and the American presence had just begun to expand. The antiwar movement had yet to gain much momentum, but Laird was concerned that the Johnson administration didn’t have a coherent policy on the war and that things would get much worse before they got any better. I remember being impressed by the way Laird was looking beyond the moment, and, as it turned out, he offered good advice.

  I hit it off with the governor, and when my fellowship was over, he asked me to stay on. He even offered me a paycheck. At the same time, I’d decided to begin my Ph.D. at Wisconsin. Lynne and I both wanted to be college professors, and while we looked at other places where we might both do graduate work, there were few universities where both the political science and the English departments were as good as the ones at Wisconsin. We had also applied for and received teaching and research assistantships at Madison, which, combined with my part-time salary from the governor’s office, would pay our way.

  Shortly after I began work on my Ph.D., I turned twenty-six and was no longer eligible for the draft. In the days when I had been, I had received deferments as a student and father. Earlier, when I was doing line work, I had been classified 1-A, but draft numbers were low and I wasn’t called. If I had been, I would have been happy to serve.

  MY MAJOR PROFESSOR AT Wisconsin was Aage Clausen, who was working on a study of roll call voting in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The work was highly statistical, and I spent a lot of time on the university’s computer, which in those days filled most of a big room, running calculations to show the various factors that played into a member’s vote. Our assumption—that political behavior could be understood scientifically—was very much the trend of the time, and the American Political Science Review, a prestigious academic journal, published a long article we wrote about our research. Professor Clausen, a generous man, shared authorship of the paper with me.

  But in 1967 many days were a reminder of a far messier politics. In October the presence on campus of recruiters from Dow Chemical Company, which made the napalm being used in Vietnam, precipitated what became known as the Dow Riot. When students blocked the entrance to the building where the recruiters had set up, the police were called in to remove them by force. In the resulting free-for-all, tear gas was fired off, and demonstrators as well as police were bloodied. Prancing through the whole chaotic scene, urging the demonstrators on, was a mime troupe from San Francisco. Lynne encountered the white-faced mimes, who were carrying animal entrails over their heads, as she tried, but failed, to get to a classroom where she was supposed to teach freshman composition.

  I strongly disagreed with the protestors trying to shut down the university and portray Ho Chi Minh as a hero. As a general proposition, I supported our troops in Vietnam and the right of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to make the decision to be involved there.

  Early in 1968 I got a job offer to manage a congressional campaign. The Republicans had a candidate who needed some help running in the 2nd District against the popular five-term Democratic incumbent, and a friend in the governor’s office called to see if I’d be interested. It sounded like something I’d enjoy doing, and it paid well, a thousand dollars a month as I recall. Taking the job would require delaying my preliminary exams—the comprehensive tests that had to be passed before starting a Ph.D. dissertation—but I saw no harm in that. When I approached the powers that be in the political science department, however, they were far from enthusiastic. It wasn’t just that I would have to delay the prelims, one senior professor said, but that working in a campaign would send the wrong professional signal. “If you get involved in politics,” he said, “you will not be taken seriously by political scientists.” That gave me a lot of pause, since I was pretty sure that real-world experience would be an asset whether I was doing research or in the classroom, but what did I know about how the academic world worked?

  I decided to turn down the campaign job and return to school fulltime. Before long, however, another interesting opportunity presented itself, and this one had the political science department’s approval. Senator Joe Tydings, a Maryland Democrat, had contacted the university about establishing a fellowship in honor of his grandfather, Joseph E. Davies, who had been born in Wisconsin and had served as FDR’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. Tydings wanted to make the fellowship part of the American Political Science Association’s congressional fellowship program, and the political science department suggested me as the first recipient.

  Years later, after I became vice president, one of the trustees of the Davies Foundation sent me the letter of recommendation that the chairman of the political science department wrote to Tydings, which noted that I was married and the father of a two-year-old daughter and described me as “a very bright, hard-working, wholly personable, and attractive young man of twenty-seven.” The chairman quoted Aage Clausen saying that I was “the most cooperative, capable, and helpful assistant” he had ever worked with. When I read that letter thirty-seven years later, what struck me most was
to think that in 1963, just five years before the letter was written, I had been sitting in a jail cell with my life pretty much in ruins around me. I’d gotten a second chance, and I’d made pretty good use of it.

  Senator Tydings was scheduled to come to Madison in April to speak at a rally on behalf of Bobby Kennedy, who had entered the Democratic presidential primary for president and was slugging it out with Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy. I attended the rally and afterward met the senator in a bar on State Street, where we had a beer and a long conversation. He offered and I accepted the congressional fellowship that would take me to Washington, D.C., for a year.

  More than thirty years later, when I was vice president, I attended a dinner at the University of Maryland where former Senator Tydings, now a trustee, was among the guests. I made a point of going over to thank him for what he had done for me all those years before. He was gracious, but seemed a little puzzled. Later he told a writer that he didn’t have the slightest idea what I was thanking him for. He didn’t remember our meeting on that cool spring night in Madison—although I have never forgotten it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Anybody Here Named Cheney?

  On a muggy Friday afternoon at the end of July 1968, I got behind the wheel of our black Volkswagen and headed south out of Madison. My goal was to drive to Washington and rent an apartment for Lynne, Liz, and me for when my American Political Science Association congressional fellowship started in September. Because I was cramming for my upcoming preliminary exams, I was determined to complete the whole process, including the 1,700-mile drive and finding and renting the apartment, over the weekend and be back studying by Monday morning.

  I’d done a lot of long-distance driving and I enjoyed it. I listened to the radio as I drove through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, stopping every now and then for food and gas and once to sleep for a few hours. When I finally hit Interstate 495, the Capital Beltway that surrounds Washington, I had to decide which way to go. So I turned right and continued south until I saw a sign that said “Annandale,” which I thought sounded pretty good, and I exited onto Little River Turnpike, a major thoroughfare that despite housing developments and apartment buildings hadn’t entirely lost its rural character. I turned into the driveway of an apartment complex—the Americana Fairfax—and found the rental office. Less than an hour later, I had signed a year’s lease on an unfurnished two-bedroom apartment for $130 a month.

  Before heading back to Madison, I decided to see D.C., a city I knew was still reeling from the riots and fires following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., only four months earlier. Twelve people had been killed, hundreds injured, and President Johnson had called in fourteen thousand federal troops to restore order. But as I crossed over the Potomac on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and caught my first glimpse of Washington, the turmoil I’d seen on the evening news dissolved into the background. Off to my right were the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, white and gleaming in the summer haze. They were an impressive sight, as was the White House, when I drove by it, and the Capitol, shining at the top of the hill. I did a slow loop around the Capitol building, trying to take it all in, then drove down Independence Avenue along the Mall and headed out of town. I was back in Madison for Sunday lunch.

  LYNNE AND I BOTH passed our preliminary exams, putting us a step closer to our Ph.D.s, and by mid-September we were unpacking our books and papers, a few clothes, and Liz’s crib in the Annandale apartment. Not long after we arrived, I had a meeting scheduled on Capitol Hill. I put on the only suit I owned, an electric blue one that had caught my eye at Jon-N-Jax Men’s Shop in Laramie, kissed Lynne and Liz goodbye, and caught the bus on Little River Turnpike. Forty-five minutes later, I was downtown in front of the Old Post Office at Eleventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

  I was still a long way from the Capitol, but since I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do a bus transfer, I decided to walk. Within a few blocks, I realized that my suit, which had been fine for winters in Wyoming and Wisconsin, didn’t function so well on a sweltering September day in Washington, D.C. I was also wearing shoes made of Corfam, a kind of synthetic leather, and they began to produce a swamp-like climate zone of their own.

  Half an hour and an uphill mile or so later, completely drenched, I was in Wisconsin Congressman Bill Steiger’s office in the Longworth House Office Building. I was there to see his chief of staff, Maureen Drummy, whom I’d met when she worked at the National Center for Education in Politics. She was one of the few people I knew in Washington, and I’d come to seek her counsel about the congressional fellows program, which, from her vantage point in Steiger’s office, she had seen in operation. Kind and generous as always, she overlooked my disheveled state and gave me her best advice. During the ten-week orientation that began the program, I’d have a chance to participate in seminars and listen to speeches by congressmen and senators. The idea was not only to look for members I might like to work for and arrange interviews with their offices, but also to figure out what they expected of fellows and to see if it matched what I wanted to do.

  One of the most impressive orientation speakers was a young Republican congressman named Don Rumsfeld, from Illinois. I had never heard of him before, but I learned he had a great reputation for allowing—in fact, demanding—his fellows’ participation in the work of the office. By the time he had finished speaking to us, I had decided that this was the man I wanted to intern for.

  I arrived early for my interview with Rumsfeld in the Cannon House Office Building and was ushered in to meet with him exactly on time. And exactly fifteen minutes later I was ushered out. In answer to his invitation to tell him something about myself, I had talked about how I was working on my doctoral dissertation on congressional voting patterns and planned to return to the University of Wisconsin at the end of my fellowship in order to pursue a career as a professor of political science. He described the setup of his office and mentioned the need for someone who could write press releases. After a little more back-and-forth, he stood up, extended his hand, and said, “This isn’t going to work, but thanks for coming in.”

  The next thing I knew, I was standing in the corridor outside his office. I didn’t have a swelled head, but since I had gotten my act together, I’d become a fairly good judge of what was going to work for me and what wasn’t, and this interview had ended in a pretty surprising way. Thinking back on it now, I realize I didn’t have the foggiest idea what a congressman needed, and Rumsfeld was probably right to view me as a fuzzy-headed academic. He had sized up the situation within the first few minutes and knew he was wasting his time. There was nothing personal about it. I just wasn’t what he was looking for. While some people might have spent some time chatting and softening the blow, that was not how Don Rumsfeld did things.

  I wasn’t feeling so magnanimous as I walked back over to Bill Steiger’s office in Longworth. I recounted my experience to Maureen Drummy, who smiled sympathetically and then proposed the perfect solution. She suggested I sign on with Bill Steiger when the fellowships started in January.

  WORKING FOR BILL STEIGER was a brilliant idea that had been hiding in plain sight. I had gotten to know him while I was working for Governor Knowles. He had been elected to the state legislature shortly after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, and the first time I saw him I understood the stories about the new assemblyman being mistaken for an intern. He was young and looked younger, and he had formidable political skills. I watched him campaign with Governor Knowles, and seeing how he loved meeting people and what a phenomenal memory he had for their names and concerns, I wasn’t surprised when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966. Although he was still in his first term, Bill’s obvious intelligence, easy personality, and deep integrity had already made a strong mark on his colleagues. He was known in the APSA program for placing his fellow’s desk in his own office. The months I spent working for Bill Steiger were the best introduction I
could have possibly had to the Congress of the United States.

  Members of my family had been Democrats going back quite a way. My grandfather Cheney had been a Democratic committeeman in Sumner, Nebraska. My grandfather Dickey considered it a point of pride that I’d been born on FDR’s birthday. But I was moving into Republican ranks, and as I did, I got a kick out of teasing my folks about it. “Sure will be sorry to see Nixon win the election,” I wrote to them on October 28, 1968. “Never can tell—Humphrey might edge him out yet.” But he didn’t, of course. On November 5, Nixon pulled it out by half a million votes, 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent, and became the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

  A few weeks later, while Lyndon Johnson was still president and Nixon was president-elect, the APSA fellows were given a special tour of the White House. After going through the public rooms of the mansion, we went over to the West Wing. This was truly hallowed ground, and I can still remember looking inside the Oval Office—the guards wouldn’t allow anyone to cross the threshold—and seeing President Johnson’s desk. It was in front of the windows at one end, and to the left of it was a low, white-painted console housing three TV sets so the president could watch each of the national networks’ news broadcasts. There were also two news tickers, with glass tops to mute the teletype clacking and the bulletin bells, so the president could have everything fresh from the Associated Press and United Press International. These were interesting examples of modern technology, but I was most impressed by the small box with three buttons that was next to the large phone console on the president’s desk. The guard explained that they were for ordering coffee, Coke, or Fresca (LBJ’s favorite) for the president and his guests.