Heart: An American Medical Odyssey (15 page)

In an effort to help the cause, I participated in approximately 150 campaign-related events around the country in that cycle. I also took advantage of the opportunity to test the waters to ascertain whether I should run for president in 1996. I established a political action committee (PAC) to finance my travels and contribute to a select number of candidates. David Addington and Patty Howe, who had previously worked on my staff at the Pentagon and in Congress, signed on to run the PAC.

The year 1994 turned out to be a great one for the GOP. We took back control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, and Newt Gingrich, who succeeded me as GOP whip when I left to take over the Defense Department, was elected Speaker of the House.

At the end of 1994, our family gathered for Christmas as we always
did at our home in Jackson Hole. We spent time that holiday discussing the topic of my possible candidacy for president in 1996. In the end, I decided not to run.

While I liked the idea of being president, I didn’t like what would be involved in running. I did not relish the idea of the significant amount of time I’d have to devote to fund-raising. I also didn’t like the loss of privacy that would be involved for my family and me. And of course my heart disease factored in. While I had experienced no heart incidents since my bypass surgery six years earlier and believed there was no limit on my physical ability to do the job, I was concerned that my history of heart disease could become an issue in the campaign. If that occurred—if I were perceived as having lost as a result of my health—I would be permanently labeled as “the guy with the bad heart.” That could severely limit my future possibilities.

I was fifty-three years old and had had a great twenty-five years in public life. I was still young enough to have a second career in the business world. So as 1995 began, I announced that I had decided not to be a candidate for president in 1996.

When I left the Defense Department in 1993, I went on the lecture circuit, making speeches across the country, and I joined a number of corporate boards. I became a director of Union Pacific, Morgan Stanley, Procter & Gamble, and US West. Having spent most of my career in academia and government, service on the boards of some of the most important and successful companies in America gave me a whole new perspective on our economy and the private sector.

In January 1993, as we were making the transition from the Bush to the Clinton administration, our daughter Liz was married to Phil Perry in Wyoming. Lynne and I took advantage of the opportunity to make a down payment on a home in Jackson Hole, our favorite part of the world and part of my old congressional district. We planned to live in Jackson full-time and enjoy private life. There was no better place to pursue two of my favorite activities, skiing and fly-fishing, and I could travel from there to fulfill my speaking commitments and board responsibilities.

But within a few years, our plans took a detour. In September 1994, I was invited to join a group of men for a trip to a salmon camp on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Canada. One of the eight fishermen there was Tom Cruikshank, then chairman and CEO of Halliburton, a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest energy services and engineering and construction companies in the world. Some months later, I received a phone call from Tom indicating that he was preparing to retire and that after an extensive search for a replacement, the company hadn’t yet found anyone. He wanted to know if I would consider becoming Halliburton’s CEO. I agreed to fly to Dallas to meet with the board of directors and explore the possibility. In August 1995, we announced that I would begin full-time with the company on October 1 and after a ninety-day transition period would become chairman and CEO on the first of January 1996.

When the Halliburton board recruited me, I made it clear that I had no further political aspirations. I’d had a great twenty-five years in public office and had no desire to return. I was committed to spending the remainder of my working career at Halliburton, which was a great company. In 1996, it had 100,000 employees operating in 130 countries around the world. We built offshore oil platforms in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and provided energy services to major oil companies worldwide. We built a new baseball stadium for the Astros in Houston and a railroad across the Australian Outback from Alice Springs to Darwin. I had put public life behind me.

•  •  •

My mother had died in 1993 of a stroke after nearly ten years of battling Parkinson’s disease. She had refused to give in to the Parkinson’s, insisting on doing all the things she had always done, including cooking for my dad. When she began falling occasionally, she started wearing knee pads, like a basketball player, so that when she fell, she could land on her knees and get right up and keep on working.

During my time at Halliburton, my father, who was living in an assisted living care facility in Casper, died. He was still able to get around unassisted
and drive his own car, although he was increasingly displaying the symptoms of congestive heart failure. Periodically he would accumulate excess fluid in his body and would then enter the hospital for a few days so they could administer doses of Lasix intravenously and “dry him out.”

He had begun to get his affairs in order. He “had his sale,” an old Nebraska saying for getting rid of all the items accumulated over a lifetime. First, he told my sister, Susan; my brother, Bob; and me to take anything we might want, and then he brought in someone to run the sale. Early on the day of the sale, my sister found him sitting alone in the garage, among the belongings of his lifetime, with tears streaming down his face. I had never seen my dad cry, but coming to terms with the end of his life was understandably overwhelming.

I had told him not to worry about his sale—that we would take care of everything at the appropriate time. But he was determined to take care of it himself. After the sale was over, he put the house on the market and sold it.

A few days after Dad’s sale, I was back in Dallas on a Saturday when I decided to call him. He had checked back into the hospital for another round of “drying out.” When I called, I got a busy signal. At that same moment, we later discovered, my brother and sister also tried to call him. Bob also got a busy signal, but Susan got through. Later that afternoon, I received a call from the hospital in Casper telling me that Dad had died shortly after Sue talked to him.

As the family gathered in Casper for the funeral, I thought about the last time Dad and I had been together. A few weeks before his death, I’d been in Casper closing up a house Lynne and I had owned and rented out for many years to the parents of some friends. As I was packing up to close down and sell the house, Dad appeared. He had driven over to spend some time with me while I worked. Dad was not someone who engaged in idle chatter, but that afternoon we talked for nearly two hours.

Among other things, we talked about the fact that Congress had passed legislation naming the federal building in Casper after me. He liked
knowing that the building where he had worked for many years as the state administrative officer for the Soil Conservation Service was to be named after his son, probably especially because his name was also Dick Cheney. He didn’t live long enough to be there for the formal ceremony, but he took pride in knowing it was going to happen.

As he left that afternoon, I walked him across the street to his car, an old Buick. Dad never bought a new car in his life, no matter how much money he had. He said you could get a perfectly good car without paying for a new one. Until the day he died, he was saving money every month of his life, a habit he acquired when he saw the pain his parents lived through during the Depression.

When Dad died, I was fifty-eight. I had already survived three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery. Since that surgery in 1988, I had lived trouble free for more than a decade, and two things made me optimistic that I had a lot of years ahead. First, my dad had lived to be almost eighty-four, despite having serious coronary artery disease. Second, I had already been the beneficiary of amazing medical advances and was hopeful there would be more ahead.

In fall 1999, Lynne and I hosted a fund-raiser at our home in Dallas for the literacy program sponsored by Barbara Bush. George W. Bush, governor of Texas, attended and during the evening asked if there were some place where we could talk privately. I took him into the library and closed the door. He asked me if I would be willing to take on a major role in his campaign for the presidency. I supported Bush and was prepared to do what I could to help him get elected, but I also had a full-time commitment to Halliburton and a significant position in the campaign simply wasn’t possible.

A few months later, once the primary campaign had gotten underway, Joe Allbaugh, one of the governor’s top aides, came to see me in my office in Dallas and asked if I would be willing to be considered as a candidate for vice president. I said no; I was not interested. I told Joe that I thought I was a bad choice from the campaign’s standpoint. My home state of Wyoming is one of the most Republican in the country and has only three electoral votes. I told Joe that if Governor Bush couldn’t carry Wyoming without me on the ticket, they had bigger problems. I made the point that because I was in the oil business and Governor Bush had previously been in the oil business, a Bush-Cheney ticket would be a ripe target for the Democrats. I also pointed out that I had a history of coronary artery disease—three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery. Joe didn’t argue with me. He took my answers on board and reported back to the governor.

What I didn’t tell Joe, because I wanted to be polite, was that I had
absolutely no interest in being vice president; I thought it was a terrible job. President Ford had told me on more than one occasion that the eight months he spent as vice president were the worst months of his life. I knew from personal experience that Nelson Rockefeller hated the job. The city of Washington is full of people telling stories about the irrelevance of the post. The only reason to take the job is to run for president, and I had decided not to do that several years before. Finally, I was very happy as chairman and CEO of Halliburton, and it paid a lot better than government work.

A few days after Joe’s visit, Governor Bush called me directly and asked if I would help him find a vice-presidential candidate. I readily agreed. It was an important assignment, and it was something I had done before for President Ford in 1976. It was also a short-term commitment that would not last beyond the national convention. I would not have to leave Halliburton to do it.

I pulled together a small team of key people to help review and screen the potential candidates. I had learned over the years that while there are a great many who want to be vice president, only a few meet the very high standards to qualify. First and foremost, the individual has to be capable of serving as president if something happens to the incumbent. Second, the candidate has to add to the overall political attractiveness of the ticket. Third, you want to avoid the train wreck of picking someone whose background or personal life contains embarrassing episodes or information.

The first list we put together numbered twenty-five or thirty prospects. We prepared and sent out a detailed form asking for a wide range of information from those still on the list after I had personally contacted each one. Not everyone wanted to be considered. One potential candidate threatened never to speak to me again if I put his name on the list. There were a couple of people not on the list who contacted me seeking to be included. They explained that they had tough reelection campaigns and it would help them back home in their districts if word
got around that they were under consideration. I promptly put them on the list.

We put together a file on each candidate who was seriously under consideration. We promised to maintain the confidentiality of their submissions, and when the process was complete, we returned all the materials they had submitted. As we went through this process, the list grew shorter. I personally interviewed a number of candidates. Throughout the process, I kept in regular contact with the governor. For each of our sessions, we prepared two notebooks, one for each of us—and he returned his to me when we finished.

On July 2, 2000, I went to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, for a final meeting. We spent the morning reviewing the remaining candidates, a much shorter list than we had started with. Then Laura joined us for lunch. Afterward, the governor took me out on the back porch for some further conversation. It was a typical Texas July day, with the temperature well over 100 degrees. He looked me in the eye and said, “You know, you’re the solution to my problem.”

At that moment, it occurred to me that he had never accepted my “no” when Joe Allbaugh had asked if I was willing to be considered for vice president some months before. And I must admit that going through the search with him had a significant impact on me. I had seen up close how much time he had devoted to selecting a running mate. He had given a great deal of thought to what he wanted in a vice president. He wasn’t making a conventional choice in terms of the Electoral College, or the GOP, or the expected impact on the popular vote. He had emphasized repeatedly to me that he wanted his vice president to be an important part of his team, someone who could help govern.

He had worked my “no” around to a tentative “yes.” I told him I would consider it. I said I would see what I would have to do if he were to select me. I had obligations to Halliburton and would have to have a conversation with my directors.

I would also have to switch my voter registration from Texas to Wyoming.
Under the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, the electoral votes of a state cannot be cast for a president and vice president from the same state.

There was also the matter of my medical history. We would need to satisfy ourselves that there was no health problem that would prevent me from running or serving.