In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  Because of the late primary, the fall campaign was mercifully short, just eight weeks, and for part of it, the GOP candidates traveled together. This was a tradition based on necessity, since most communities in Wyoming were small and couldn’t possibly host separate events for every statewide office seeker.

  The star of the ’78 GOP road show was Al Simpson, our candidate for the United States Senate. His father, Governor Milward Simpson, had unexpectedly been defeated for reelection in 1958, and Al worked hard on that first campaign and every one after to make sure that never happened to him. He kept precise notes of all the people he met and how their families were doing and carefully filed the cards away after each event. He was a diligent politician, which I think most people never guessed because they were so taken with his sense of humor. It wasn’t that the jokes he told were so great, but the way that he told them brought the house down every time. In fact you could hear his jokes many times (and, believe me, I have) and still find yourself laughing.

  Al and his wife, Ann, also have a gift for friendship, and Lynne and I have been lucky to know them for more than thirty years. Al has campaigned with me every time my name has been on the ballot, including when I was running for vice president. Altogether we’ve done six statewide campaigns and two national ones, and we’ve never lost an election when one of our names was on the ballot.

  One of the most memorable days of the 1978 campaign came near the end. We had been in Sheridan in northern Wyoming for an event the night before, and my dad was driving Lynne and me back to Casper and Cheyenne for the closing events of the campaign. It was one of those glorious Indian summer days that Wyoming is famous for. All of the aspen and cottonwood leaves had turned to gold. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. We stopped, threw an old quilt on the ground, and spent a couple of hours sitting at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains reminiscing about all we had seen in the last twenty years. Now, some thirty years later, that day still stands out as a very special moment in our lives.

  When the vote was tallied on November 7, I had 59 percent of the vote. It would be my narrowest victory in six general election campaigns—and the sweetest one. For the next ten years I would be recognized on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as “the Gentleman from Wyoming.” I would have a lot of titles after that, but never one of which I was prouder.

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  SHORTLY AFTER THE ELECTION, there was a weeklong orientation for all the new GOP members at a hotel just outside Washington. It was designed to make us more effective as legislators and to get us thinking, even before we were sworn in, about our campaigns for reelection. The sessions covered everything from our salary ($57,500) to how to get mail answered. We heard from the leadership and senior floor staff about the House rules and procedures. And we spent a lot of time on the question of committee assignments. Many freshmen had unrealistic expectations, fully believing they could claim a seat on one of the most important committees, such as Ways and Means or Appropriations, when those assignments were hotly contested among more senior members and almost never given to newcomers.

  I had already called Republican leader John Rhodes of Arizona the day after the election to put in a bid for an assignment to the Interior Committee. With the federal government controlling some 50 percent of the surface and 65 percent of the mineral wealth in Wyoming, public lands policy issues were vital to the state. Whether you were involved in the energy business or ranching or tourism and recreation, the rules set by the federal government for access to and the use of federal lands were vitally important to your economic success. My time and work on the Interior Committee would be rewarded in 1984 with the passage of the Wyoming Wilderness Act, which was my most significant piece of legislation and the one of which I’m proudest. I worked closely with both my Wyoming colleagues on the Senate side, Al Simpson and Malcolm Wallop, and we were able to add almost a million acres to the state’s wilderness areas.

  When I’d first sought a slot on Interior, Leader Rhodes said he would support my request and that he had a request of me in return. He wanted to assign me to the Ethics Committee, which I thought was pretty unusual. Freshmen are almost never assigned to Ethics, which deals with some of the most sensitive issues to come before the House, including whether a member should be sanctioned or even expelled for misconduct. The leadership of both parties was very selective about whom they appointed to Ethics, and most members, reluctant to judge their colleagues, did whatever they could to avoid service on it. But I agreed and decided to take the request as something of a compliment to my responsibility and judgment rather than the result of Rhodes having been refused by all the more senior and wiser members. Besides, I thought it might be challenging, which turned out to be both true and an underestimate. During the 96th Congress, the committee would be busier than it had been for many years. And we would be responsible for expelling a member for the first time since the Civil War.

  After the election, Lynne, the girls, and I spent several days in Hawaii relaxing and enjoying the wonderful weather. Bill Steiger and I had both been invited to speak to a convention of realtors in Honolulu, and since his and Janet’s son Bill was the same age as Mary, the four of us sat around the pool at the Hawaiian Village, talking and watching the kids play. The conversation was wide-ranging, as it always was when we had time to spend with Bill and Janet. I looked forward to working alongside Bill in the House and expected to be one of the growing company of members who looked to him for leadership. His conduct and contributions to the work of the Ways and Means Committee had attracted attention and gained him widespread and bipartisan respect. Although he was only forty, his influence was steadily growing, and there was already talk about his presidential potential.

  I HAD SPENT ENOUGH years in Washington to know the importance of hiring the right staff. They should have knowledge of Congress and how to get things done on Capitol Hill, but just as important was having some feel for and understanding of Wyoming.

  As my administrative assistant (the equivalent of a chief of staff) I hired Dave Gribbin, who had graduated from high school in Casper and was a good friend. He’d served a tour in the U.S. Army, was working for the National Automobile Dealers Association, and was an ordained Methodist minister. He and his wife, Lori, had been our neighbors in student housing at the University of Wyoming when we were first married.

  I was able to persuade Patty Howe to come work for me as my top legislative aide. The Laramie native was a twelve-year veteran of Cliff Hansen’s staff, and she was intimately familiar with all of the federal issues that would have an impact on my constituents and our state. A single mother with only a high school education, she had started work for Cliff as a secretary. By the time she came to work for me she was recognized as one of the finest legislative assistants on the Hill.

  Kathie Embody (formerly Kathie Berger) was like part of our family after the months she had spent with us on the Wyoming campaign, and I was pleased when she agreed to come to Washington. There were many others who made significant contributions in those first days and during the early years, including Jim Steen, Pete Williams, Cece Boyer, Ruthann Norris, Norma Fletcher, Sue Benzer, and George Van Cleve. One of the things I always felt good about was the low rate of turnover among the people who worked for me. Once someone signed on they rarely expressed a desire to move on. Many were still working for me long after I left the Congress.

  On December 4, 1978, the House Republicans who would serve in the 96th Congress convened to elect our leadership for the coming Congress. I had an appointment scheduled with a photographer from U.S. News & World Report to take a picture for an upcoming issue on new members of Congress, and at the appointed hour I left the caucus. As I stepped outside, I noticed that the U.S. flags over the Capitol and the House office buildings were being lowered to half-staff, and when I asked why, I was told it was to honor a member who had just died.

  I asked who it was and was stunned to be told it was Bill Steiger. After living with
diabetes for many years, he had died of a heart attack at the age of forty.

  A few days later, I was granted permission to fly out to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for the funeral with the official delegation from the House, even though I had not yet been sworn in as a member. I’ve attended a great many funerals over the years, but few have rivaled the Steiger service for the sense of loss about what might have been.

  AMONG HOUSE REPUBLICANS THERE were a number of informal social groups that a member might be invited to join, including SOS (Society of Statesmen) and the Chowder and Marching Society. Neither group had official standing or function, but they were invaluable in developing relationships with colleagues. When I was invited to join SOS, I did so eagerly. We met every Tuesday afternoon at 5:00 p.m. in a member’s office, with the host providing snacks and drinks. During the course of the meeting each member would take the floor for a few minutes and talk about whatever he chose, everything from politics back home in the district to a report on a recent congressional trip overseas—or maybe just the latest gossip. On Wednesday mornings SOS and Chowder and Marching held a joint breakfast and invited an outside guest, a cabinet member, perhaps, or a columnist or senior White House official.

  There was also a third group, known as the Wednesday Group, which had more of an ideological edge. Its members were moderate Republicans, such as Jim Leach of Iowa, Bill Green of New York, Pete McCloskey of California, and John Anderson of Illinois, and there was some overlap with SOS and Chowder and Marching. When I was invited to join the Wednesday Group, I turned down the invitation because I considered myself a conservative and saw little value in being identified with liberal Republicans, but Barber Conable of New York, ranking Republican on Ways and Means and one of the most respected members of the House, called me to his office and suggested I reconsider. Not many members got an invitation to join the Wednesday Group, he said, and it was a “dumb move” on my part to reject it. He said as a conservative I would automatically get to know all the conservatives in the GOP caucus. Joining the Wednesday Group would give me a chance to know and understand the liberal Republicans. He was right and I joined. It was a good thing to do, and because of it I had support from the moderate camp as well as conservatives as I moved up in the leadership ranks.

  From my earliest days in the House I was involved with various outside groups, including think tanks and academic institutes, that took a scholarly, analytical, and bipartisan approach to the House’s past and present. I was invited by senior Democrat Dick Bolling, the chairman of the powerful Rules Committee and an old ally of Speaker Tip O’Neill, to join a small breakfast group he occasionally summoned. Bolling was one of the most brilliant historians and tacticians in the history of the House, and every time I was around him I learned something new and important. Among the others in his group were Dick Gephardt and Steny Hoyer.

  I was also invited to join a small group that was being assembled at the American Enterprise Institute by scholars Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann. They chose seven freshmen, four Republicans and three Democrats, and every few months would invite us to sit down over dinner and talk on a background basis about everything we were seeing and doing. In the monograph that was subsequently published, called Congress Off the Record: The Candid Analyses of Seven Members, we were not identified. Today the discerning (and dedicated) may be able to put the names Cheney, Gingrich, Martin Sabo, and Geraldine Ferraro to some of the sentiments on those pages.

  I participated in several events sponsored by the Aspen Institute, which ran seminars for congressmen and senators as well as two annual retreats. Lynne and I enjoyed a few midwinter days of great conversation and food at sunny places such as Bermuda and Round Hill in Jamaica. It was at Round Hill that I met Condoleezza Rice for the first time. She was at Stanford and had been invited to lead a seminar on Soviet military policy.

  The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which was then connected with Georgetown University, used to hold an annual retreat at Williamsburg, Virginia. That was where I met Sam Nunn, a Democratic senator from Georgia, who would later head the committee that considered my nomination to be secretary of defense.

  During my time in the House, I also participated in continuity-of-government exercises. They dealt with contingency responses to an attack on the United States that decapitated our government. What were our plans if both the president and vice president should be killed? If the Congress were wiped out? These were Cold War exercises, premised on the nuclear threat that the Soviets represented, and according to press reports, they were ended during the Clinton administration, discontinued as relics of another day. But the risk of mass-casualty attacks did not disappear with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and years later, on 9/11, the possibility of the government’s being decapitated would seem a real and present danger.

  I WAS OFTEN ASKED by people why in the world I wanted to be a freshman member of the House, serving in the minority party, after I’d already been White House chief of staff. I used to explain that there was something very special about having your name on the ballot and convincing thousands of voters to support you. That running and winning the right to cast your state’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives was politics at its best. That being elected in accordance with our Constitution meant you had earned the right to cast that vote and no one could take it away except by defeating you at the polls. Your political fate didn’t depend upon someone else’s success in an election.

  It would also be accurate to say that I was heavily influenced by my experience with men such as Jerry Ford, Don Rumsfeld, and Bill Steiger. An institution that could attract men like these had to be one that I could be proud to be part of. The fact is I loved the House of Representatives and had every intention of spending the rest of my career as a “Man of the House.”

  Every new class of House members arrives in Washington with the conviction that they are going to “clean out the stables” or “drain the swamp”; that at long last they are going to be the “reformers” the Congress so badly needs. Most of the time this phase passes, and the new members become established senior members with all the privileges and opportunities that entails. But every once in a while, a class does have an extraordinary impact. It may be because the class is especially large or they affect a particular issue or they stick around longer than most, thus gaining seniority, or because they have an unusual degree of cohesion and vote as a block larger than most. The 1974 Democratic class of “Watergate Babies” is often cited as an example.

  The 1978 class of which I was a part produced leaders who would shape Washington for decades: Jerry Lewis, who would become chairman of the Appropriations Committee; Bill Thomas, future chairman of the Ways and Means Committee; and Jim Sensenbrenner, who would one day chair the Judiciary Committee. On the Democratic side were Geraldine Ferraro, who would be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984, and Phil Gramm, who would become a Republican and a United States senator from Texas. Another Texan in the class of 1978, Democrat Kent Hance, had won his seat by defeating a future president, thirty-two-year-old George W. Bush.

  But no one in our class stands out in memory as much as Newt Gingrich of Georgia. An academic with a Ph.D. in history from Tulane, Newt decided in 1974 to run for Congress in Georgia against the incumbent Jack Flynt, a longtime member of the House Appropriations Committee. Nineteen seventy-four, of course, was the Watergate election, not a good time to begin a career in elective office as a Republican, and Newt was defeated.

  Two years later Newt again ran against Flynt and lost again. Nineteen seventy-six, it turned out, was a tough year to win in Georgia as a Republican, because the state’s own Jimmy Carter was running as the Democratic candidate for president. When Newt announced that in 1978 he would be running a third time against Jack Flynt, Flynt quit. It was said he just couldn’t take any more. Newt was nothing if not tenacious.

  I first met Newt at the orientation session for freshman Republicans in 1978, and he was fascinating to watc
h. He had tremendous energy, a head full of ideas, and an absolute, unwavering conviction that we Republicans could once again become the majority in the House. But to do it, he argued, we had to quit being polite to the Democrats and go after them—a tactic that drove some of our more senior members right up the wall. Many House Republicans were comfortable in the minority and not eager to go to war against our Democratic colleagues.

  One of the innovations Newt came up with was for him and many of the other new Republicans to use the “one-minutes,” which were short speeches at the beginning of each day’s session, to really go after Jimmy Carter and his administration. Using one-minutes to go on the attack was typical of Newt: clever, creative, and very successful. It fired up the troops and fed the media. It was not, however, my personal cup of tea.

  My style was more restrained, and I was reluctant to speak unless I had something I really wanted to say—and then I’d save it for debate. I didn’t garner a lot of publicity this way, but I found that at least some of my colleagues appreciated what I wasn’t doing. I was at the rail at the back of the chamber, leaning over, watching one of my freshman colleagues give a barnburner of a speech—pounding on the podium and really letting the Democrats have it—when one of the senior Republicans came over, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “You know what I like about you, Cheney? You are the only member of your whole class who doesn’t drool when he speaks!” I took that as high praise.

  I wasn’t part of Newt’s Conservative Opportunity Society, the group with which he plotted the takeover of the House, but he encouraged my chief of staff, Dave Gribbin, to sit in on the regular meetings. And on occasion, when Newt would push too hard or take some action that angered the senior members of the caucus or the leadership, he would come to my office and seek my counsel on what he’d done to ruffle so many feathers and how best to patch things up. Our relationship was useful in maintaining some degree of peace among the Republicans in the House. For the leadership I served as a bridge to the younger, more aggressive members. For Newt I provided knowledge of which lines he shouldn’t step over if he didn’t want to get in a pile of trouble. And for me, my role allowed me to be identified on the one hand as part of the Republican establishment and on the other as someone who had close ties to that younger generation, eager to overthrow the establishment.