In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  The best part of the campaign was that it was a family effort. Lynne and Mary were on the campaign trail with me nearly every step of the way, and Liz was there most of the time with my three granddaughters in tow. We’d introduce the kids at rallies and then usher them offstage before they stole the whole show. Afterward, we’d gather to recap the highlights—and the lowlights. All these years later, I realize that the disasters often made for the best stories—and the most laughs.

  After the convention I knew that my performance at one event in particular, the vice presidential debate, would likely matter more than all the other campaigning I did. The debate was scheduled for October 5, 2000, in Danville, Kentucky. I had spent some time during the Democratic convention that summer watching tapes of Lieberman’s debates against Lowell Weicker, the liberal three-term incumbent Republican senator whom Joe had upset in 1988, in no small part because of his superior performance in their televised debates.

  Presidential and vice presidential debates are events like no other. First of all, the stakes are unbelievably high, and a single gaffe can derail a candidacy. A mistake can cost an election. And although being able to answer the questions competently is crucial, it isn’t nearly enough. A candidate has to have a sense of the most important messages he or she wants to leave with voters and the presence of mind to return to those messages again and again—and then again. It also helps a lot if you can come up with some memorable one-liners. After all is said and done, after all the studying and planning and strategizing, it is likely to be the one-liners that stay with people and determine who wins and who loses a debate. Knowing that I had my work cut out for me, I asked Liz to organize a process for formal debate preparation.

  Governor Bush had already participated in numerous debates during the primary campaign, so work had been under way for many months preparing briefing materials and possible questions and answers for him. Gary Edson, who would later become deputy national security and economic advisor to the president, had been in charge of the Bush briefing materials. He came out on the road with us right after the convention, bringing about fifty pounds of briefing books with him. We went through them, and Liz began to prepare briefing books for me, adapting the governor’s format and background materials. We also added questions that I was likely to get, about Halliburton, for example, that the governor might not. Gus Puryear, a Nashville lawyer who’d worked with my son-in-law, Phil Perry, on Senate campaign finance hearings, came on board to help with the research and drafting.

  I studied the briefing books between campaign stops, and then in early September started having practice sessions with either Phil or Stuart Stevens, a communications consultant with the campaign, playing the role of moderator. They would pepper me with questions, and my job was to hit all the main points we wanted to get across on each key issue within the allotted time for each answer. When I got pretty comfortable with this format, I asked Rob Portman, then a congressman from Ohio, to join our sessions. He played Joe Lieberman, and did a tremendous job. He had spent countless hours listening to tapes of Lieberman’s speeches and knew not only the substance of the responses the senator was likely to give, but even the way he was likely to deliver them.

  I invited several people I trusted—including Steve Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Dave Gribbin, and Scooter Libby—to watch these sessions and give me feedback. At first we stopped after every answer for comments, but this turned out to be pretty frustrating. Everyone had an opinion about how the question should be answered, and I didn’t find it particularly helpful to watch my advisors debate each other over the answer I had just given. And I worried we were in danger of missing the big picture—the overall impact of what I was saying. So after a few sessions, I asked everyone to hold their comments to the end.

  In late September we moved the debate prep out to Wyoming and instituted a pretty rigorous schedule. Each morning we’d spend three hours going over questions on a particular subject. Each night, at precisely the time the debate would be taking place in Kentucky, we would hold a mock debate. We filmed these prep sessions, and when each session was done, Liz worked with my assembled advisors to summarize their comments on my performance. With their assessments in hand, Liz, Lynne, Rob Portman, and I would review the video and work to improve and hone my responses.

  By this time we knew that Lieberman and I would be seated at a round table on the debate stage, and we looked around for some place in Jackson where we could replicate this setup. We settled on the Jackson Hole Playhouse, which not only offered a table and a stage, but came with red velvet curtains and a saloon out front. Photos from one of our practice sessions show a backdrop of branches and vines from the previous evening’s performance, and Phil and Rob Portman clowning around in top hats they’d found backstage.

  Security is a big issue in presidential and vice presidential debates. While we were getting set up at the Jackson Hole Playhouse, we learned that a staffer working for Mark McKinnon in the Bush debate prep sessions had sent a copy of the governor’s briefing book and a tape of one of his practice sessions to a member of Gore’s debate team. The materials were immediately turned over to the FBI, but the incident underlined how important it was to be vigilant. Debate preparation sessions already showed up on my schedule as “communications meetings.” And the briefing book full of issues and potential questions and answers was neutrally labeled “Secretary Cheney Policy Book.” But the Jackson Hole Playhouse, for all its charm, turned out to be a less than secure location. Several reporters, pretending to be tourists who wanted to look around, stopped by the theater one day just before a debate rehearsal began. Fortunately, Liz happened to be in the lobby and was able to send them packing. But after that we decided to relocate and ended up holding most of the practice sessions in our living room, using a rented round table covered with a bedsheet.

  The effort that we put into debate preparation was critically important. But if I had to give one piece of advice to future presidential and vice presidential candidates preparing for debates, it would be this: Get some rest. Once you’ve gone over the issues and know what message you want to convey to the voters, you can do yourself a real favor by just taking a nap. You’ve got to be relaxed—or at least look like you are—when the moment comes. I think voters figure out pretty quickly that if you can’t handle the stress of a political debate, you’re not going to be much good in an actual crisis.

  Of course, one of my favorite ways to unwind is with a fly rod, and there is no better place to do that than on one of Wyoming’s beautiful rivers.

  The most effective way to prepare for a debate - fishing the Snake River in Wyoming.(Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  Thus it was that I was sitting in a drift boat on the Snake River when I got a call asking if I would accept CNN anchor Bernard Shaw as the moderator for our debate. I said yes with no hesitation. I knew Bernie to be an honest, objective, hardworking journalist, who would study the issues and ask tough questions of us both. He would forever be associated in my mind with the first night of Desert Storm in 1991—a night that turned out to be a tremendous success for the U.S. military. Like so many others around the world, I had watched Bernie broadcasting live from a hotel in downtown Baghdad on January 16 just as the first U.S. air strikes began.

  On the final Sunday before my debate, we attended church at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson. As I slid into the pew next to my family, I saw quite a few members of my debate prep team scattered throughout the congregation. I am sure that they, like me, figured a prayer or two couldn’t hurt.

  Suzanne Harris was in the pulpit that morning. Her granddaughter was battling leukemia, and we were all moved as Reverend Harris talked about three-year-old Hannah’s strength and courage, beyond what any child should ever have to demonstrate. She talked about what Hannah’s life taught about faith—“Our faith is not that bad things won’t happen,” she said. “Our faith is that when bad things do happen, God can still use that material to make something holy.
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  With Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. As I left the meeting the Pope squeezed my hand and whispered, “God Bless America.” (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  She reminded us that life is short. “We do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us,” she said, “so be swift to love and make haste to be kind.” In the midst of a hard-fought political campaign, her sermon made all of us pause and reflect. Hannah died a few days later, and Suzanne’s words that autumn morning in Jackson are still fresh in my mind as I write this a decade later.

  My assignment on October 3 was to travel to a battleground state where the media could cover me watching Governor Bush’s first debate with Al Gore. We chose Ohio and took over a restaurant there for a Bush-Cheney debate-watching party. In the lead-up to this first Bush-Gore debate, Gore, who had already demonstrated a propensity for unnecessary overstatement, had made a few quotable remarks that turned out not to be true. First, in order to dramatize a point about the failings of America’s health-care system, he said that his mother-in-law paid almost three times as much for the same arthritis medicine that the Gores bought for the family dog. Then, speaking at a Teamsters convention, he claimed that when he was a child, his mother had sung him to sleep with the song “Look for the Union Label.” The Gore campaign had to admit that the medicine costs Gore quoted weren’t personal at all, but rather from a House Democratic study. And the song Gore claimed his mother had sung to him in the cradle hadn’t been written until 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven.

  The press, with a little Republican help, of course, sensed a theme, and as we watched from Ohio, Gore locked it in by claiming to have traveled to Texas with Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt when wildfires broke out in Parker County. But as the press discovered, the closest Gore got to the fires was Houston, well over two hundred miles away, and he didn’t get there with James Lee Witt—or even meet with him. To this day I can’t understand how such a seasoned politician continually got so tangled up in trivial untruths, nor have I ever figured out why he huffed and sighed so audibly that night. It certainly didn’t earn him any votes.

  The night before my debate, I made sure I got a good night’s rest by sleeping in my own bed. We got up early on October 5 and flew to Lexington, Kentucky, then drove to Danville, where our first stop was the official walk-through of the debate site at Centre College. The walk-through was meant to give me a feel for the stage, the auditorium, the table where we would sit, and the “hold room” where I would be just prior to going onstage.

  Two of my granddaughters, Kate and Elizabeth, joined us, and having them around certainly helped cut through some of the high anxiety of that day. Elizabeth, three at the time, climbed up into Joe Lieberman’s seat at the debate table. While I was listening to a staff briefing about the lights that would time our answers, Elizabeth acquired a pen and set about diligently drawing a dinosaur on Joe’s place card. True, dinosaurs were one of the few items in her repertoire at the time, but we all laughed at how well it fit into our campaign theme that the Democratic ticket represented the policies of the past.

  While we were doing the walk-through, news was arriving about escalating protests in Serbia. The parliament building in Belgrade was burning, and it looked as if the brutal and murderous president, Slobodan Milošević, was going to have to yield to the will of his people and leave office. I told Liz to get a summary of what was happening from our foreign policy team—Hadley, Wolfowitz, and Libby—and to assign one of them to give me a five-minute briefing on the latest developments. Then I went in to take a nap.

  I’d been prepared for Joe Lieberman to be tough and aggressive, and I understood later that he had expected the same from me. But our debate that night at Centre College turned out to be a civil and informed exchange that to this day people cite as an example of thoughtful political discussion. I think it came about because of the respect that Joe Lieberman and I have for one another and because of Bernie Shaw’s good questions. We discussed everything from military readiness and the prospect for Middle East peace, to how to fix Social Security and reform education. We didn’t agree on much, but our disagreements were informative. We debated policy and substance and we never descended into personal attacks.

  About two-thirds of the way into the debate, Bernie brought up the matter of the partisan bickering in Washington. “How would you elevate the political discourse and purpose?” he asked. I talked about George Bush’s record of bipartisanship in Texas, and Joe talked about Al Gore’s record of bipartisanship in Washington. And then we had one of those unplanned, unscripted, and totally memorable moments that can happen in high-stakes debating. In response to my charge that the Clinton-Gore team hadn’t done anything, bipartisan or otherwise, to fix Medicare or Social Security or to improve the nation’s schools, Joe laid out all the ways in which the country was better off than it had been eight years earlier. Then he turned to me and said, referring to the extensive news coverage of my most recent financial disclosure forms, “And I’m pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers, that you’re better off than you were eight years ago, too.” It was a good line greeted by laughter from the audience. And it gave me the chance to respond by saying, “And I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it,” which drew even more applause and laughter.

  If the exchange had ended there it probably would have been pretty much a draw, with each of us scoring a good-natured shot at the other guy’s expense. But then, as Bernie got ready to ask his next question, Joe pointed to his wife, Hadassah, in the audience and said, “I can see my wife, and I think she’s thinking, ‘Gee, I wish he would go out into the private sector.’” It was an opening I couldn’t pass up. “Well, I’m going to try to help you do that, Joe.” It was completely spontaneous, and it caught Joe off guard. He was experienced enough to know he’d blown it by giving me such a great opening.

  Bernie’s questions that night covered the political waterfront, including the issue of sexual orientation. He asked, “Should a male who loves a male and a female who loves a female have all the constitutional rights enjoyed by every American citizen?” I had given the issue a lot of thought and answered it from the heart:

  The fact of the matter is, we live in a free society and freedom means freedom for everybody. We don’t get to choose, and shouldn’t be able to choose, and say, you get to live free but you don’t. That means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It’s really no one’s business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard. The next step, then, of course, is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction, if you will, of the relationship, or if these relationships should be treated the same way a conventional marriage is. That’s a tougher problem. That’s not a slam dunk. I think the fact of the matter, of course, is that matter is regulated by the states. I think the different states are likely to come to different conclusions and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be federal policy in this area.

  I concluded by saying, “I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.” Of course, I had my daughter Mary and her partner, Heather Poe, in my mind, but I was also thinking about what’s right for all of us as Americans if we truly believe in freedom.

  After Joe and I gave our closing statements, we received a sustained ovation from the audience. I think the applause was for all three of us at the table, an expression of appreciation for the caliber of our discussion and the tone of our debate. As soon as Bernie wrapped the show, Joe leaned over to me and said he was surprised at how quickly the evening had gone. I was, too, and pulled up my sleeve to show him that I hadn’t worn a watch. It had been a conscious decision, because I didn’t want to be tempted to glance at it.

  Lynne, Liz and Phil, Mary, granddaughter Kate, and my sister,
Susan, all came up onstage as soon as the debate was done. Al and Ann Simpson were also there, along with our dear friends Dan and Gayle Cook from Dallas, John and Mary Kay Turner, and Dick and Maggie Scarlett from Jackson, and many others. There were lots of hugs all around. After a stop at a very enthusiastic victory rally where I was able to thank everyone who’d worked so hard on all the debate arrangements, we spent the rest of the evening eating takeout pizza, watching reruns of the debate, and enjoying the postdebate analysis—much of which suggested I’d won.

  In the next three weeks, we hit most battleground states numerous times and even made it out to California for a bus tour the last weekend of the campaign. I campaigned with an Elvis impersonator in Reno, acquired a purple inflatable space alien in Roswell, New Mexico, and completely lost my train of thought in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when I looked out into the audience and saw Mary standing in the staff section wearing a large foam-rubber cheese head. I grew used to life on a campaign plane, though it did have its trials, and the ride hadn’t been without some bumps. Our campaign plane had oozed blue gunk from the latrines all over the luggage hold, been grounded in Maine when Austin forgot to pay the monthly lease, and been the site of more than a few apple and orange bowling contests as well as at least one competition that involved staff members sliding down the aisles on food trays during takeoff.

  One characteristic of life aboard a chartered campaign plane is that no one pays much attention to the rules about buckling seat belts and stowing carry-on luggage. Lynne particularly appreciated this since her own campaign-issued cell phone was usually missing. Whenever we came in for a landing cell phones would slip out of purses and bags and it wasn’t unusual for one or two to wind up at our feet at the front of the plane. Lynne got used to picking up whichever phone was there and using it for the day. It worked for her, but caused real confusion among campaign staff, who thought they were calling the press secretary or the luggage advance guy and instead got Lynne on the phone.