In My Time (20 page)

The family thrived. Daughters Liz and Mary immediately settled into new schools, rode their bikes around our tree-lined neighborhood, and learned to camp out and fish. Their grandparents were delighted to have their only grandchildren living just five minutes away. Lynne and I renewed old friendships and made new ones.

NINETEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT WAS SHAPING up to be a big political year in Wyoming, with every statewide office from the governorship on down up for grabs. In addition, Cliff Hansen, the former Republican governor and two-term U.S. senator, had announced that he would not stand for reelection, causing a lot of stirring around in
both parties about his seat. About the only office not open was Wyoming’s single seat in the House of Representatives. Democratic Congressman Teno Roncalio, a ten-year veteran of the House, was expected to win an easy reelection.

Shortly after we returned to Casper, I drove to Cheyenne to seek advice from former governor Stan Hathaway about the political outlook in the state. Stan had helped me get my first political job as an intern in the Wyoming Senate in 1965, when he was GOP state chairman, and was revered as a great governor and grand old man of the Republican Party. I knew I could count on him for candid advice on my prospects—or lack thereof—and he didn’t disappoint. When I told him that I was giving some thought to seeking the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Cliff Hansen, he said, “You could do that. You could run for that Senate seat, but if you do, Al Simpson’s going to kick your butt.”

Al was the ideal candidate for whatever office he wanted. He was just completing twelve years in the Wyoming Legislature, the last two as Speaker pro tem. His family had deep roots in Wyoming, his father having been governor and a U.S. senator. The Simpsons were held in high regard by people all over the state, and Al—tall, gangly, and very funny—knew how to win a crowd over with both humor and substance. Stan Hathaway was right. Everyone who ran against Al—in 1978 and in his two subsequent campaigns—got their butts kicked.

My conversation with Stan Hathaway ended any idea I’d had of running for the Senate, and since I wasn’t interested in state office, it looked as though I was going to have to put my political aspirations on hold for a while. But all that changed on a sunny mid-September day when Congressman Roncalio went up to the press box at a University of Wyoming football game and told the radio audience that he didn’t plan to run for reelection. Teno’s announcement opened the way for me to put my name on the ballot in hopes of returning to Washington as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

THE FIRST MEETING OF the “Cheney for Congress” Committee was a small affair, just four of us: Lynne, Dave Nicholas, Celeste
Colgan, and me.

With Lynne, Liz, Mary and our dog, Cyrano, on the front porch of our house in Casper, Wyoming during my first campaign for Congress, 1978. (Photo by David Kennerly)

Dave was a high school classmate who had been the best man at our wedding. He’d attended Harvard and the University of Wyoming College of Law and was now practicing law in Laramie. He and his wife, Karen, another high school classmate, who was now teaching at the university, were two of our closest friends. Dave agreed to be my campaign chairman. We recruited Lynne’s brother, Mark, to be campaign treasurer, responsible for keeping track of the money and filing all the required federal reports.

Celeste Colgan had shared an office with Lynne when they were both English instructors at the University of Wyoming. As the only four-year college in the state, the university is in many ways the common denominator of the state’s politics. I was lucky that after my detour to New Haven, I got my undergraduate degree at UW.

Celeste was from Riverton, in Fremont County, where her brother Bruce McMillan, a state legislator, ran the local feed elevator and farm implement store. The first time I went to Riverton, Bruce was my only contact. He wasn’t willing to commit to support me at that point, but he walked me around and introduced me to people—which was a start.

Over in Lander, Fremont County’s other main town, I went to see Jack Nicholas, Dave’s brother, who was the local county judge. Jack and his wife, Alice, introduced me to Judy Legerski, an active Republican and an ardent Catholic who was willing to support me because of my pro-life stance. Every time I went to Lander, I would stay with Jack and Alice and meet more of their friends and neighbors.

I arrived in Cody with only the name of the Republican county chairman, who kindly agreed to make some calls and get several women over to her house to meet this guy they had never heard of who wanted to run for Congress. One of the women was Mildred Cowgill, a former schoolteacher who had outlived two husbands, was tough as nails, and had a heart of gold. Mildred was one of the most respected people in northwestern Wyoming. If she vouched for you, you were good in Park County. She took me under her wing, and we stayed in her house whenever we were up there. She put me together with Gordon Brodrick, her stepson, who owned the General Motors dealership over in Powell, the
next town. Gordon and his wife, Esther, hosted an event for me to meet all their friends. That’s the way things work in a state where a population of fewer than five hundred thousand is spread out over a hundred thousand square miles.

I knew that my campaign had to look and feel like Wyoming. The last thing I wanted was to import a lot of out-of-state guns for hire, who would cost me a lot of money, ride roughshod over the locals, and end up losing me more votes than they would gain. Friendship and professional expertise justified a few exceptions to that rule. I had worked with Bob Teeter during the Ford campaign, so I asked him to help us do our polling from his base in Michigan. And I asked Bob Gardner, another Ford alum and friend, to moonlight from his agency in San Francisco and help with our media and advertising. Kathie Berger, my White House staff assistant, had gone home to Pittsburgh, but when I called she agreed to drop everything and move to Casper. It was great to have her running the campaign headquarters, supervising volunteers, and managing my schedule.

Finally, I decided to do something the experts always tell you not to do, and that was to be my own campaign manager. While it was true that I was a first-time candidate, I was not exactly a neophyte where campaigns were concerned. I had done every job from passing out buttons for a governor to setting poll questions for a president. I couldn’t imagine hiring someone to tell me what to do.

EVERY MEMBER OF CONGRESS will tell you his congressional district is special, but that is really true for Wyoming. It’s big and it’s beautiful, with high mountains and prairies that go on forever.

During the 1978 campaign, on the road from Casper to Rawlins. (Photo by David Kennerly)

And the small population means that you can often drive a long way without seeing a soul. I once took Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Kennerly, whom I had gotten to know in the Ford White House, on a campaign trip between Casper and Laramie. “It’s a long way between voters,” he said after we’d gone an hour or so without seeing a town. And he was right, and the fact that there are so few people means that politics is very personal. Voters want to meet you, look you in the eye,
and hear what you have to say. It’s a kind of campaigning that I feel totally comfortable with, though, as Kennerly observed, the ratio of miles traveled to voters met can be pretty high. I once traveled three hundred miles to attend a two-person coffee—and one of the two people was my local chairman who had organized the event.

That first election—the 1978 contest for the GOP nomination for Congress—turned out to be the toughest of my six campaigns for the House of Representatives. It was a three-way contest among me, the incumbent state treasurer Ed Witzenburger, and Jack Gage, an attorney who was the son of a former Democratic governor. Witzenburger and Gage were both from Cheyenne and could be expected to split the vote there. If I could run up a respectable total in Casper and at least be competitive in Cheyenne, I had a good chance of getting the nomination. Of course, it was also important to work hard in the rest of the state. If I won the primary, I wanted to have a foundation for a strong showing statewide in the general election.

AS A CANDIDATE I was not without liabilities. Between graduate school and working in Washington, I had been away from Wyoming for a dozen years. The last time I had voted there was in 1964. Even having served in the White House as President Ford’s chief of staff was a mixed blessing. On the one hand it was by far the most impressive entry on my résumé, but few Wyoming voters would be all that impressed. I would have to be careful not to come across as some hotshot from Washington who thought he was entitled to the House seat. I had to earn it by persuading Wyoming voters that I was really from Wyoming and the best man for the job.

Wyoming was also one of those states where Ronald Reagan had an early and loyal following. The Wyoming delegation to the 1976 GOP convention had been evenly split between Ford and Reagan, and the Reagan state chairman, Dick Jones, a trucker from Cody, was so angry about Reagan’s loss that he stormed out of the convention. At the start of my campaign I tried to patch up the relationship by asking to meet with Jones, but he refused to see me. I worked around the problem with
the Reagan people by recruiting Peggy Mallick, a Reagan delegate to the ’76 convention, to be my county chairman in Casper.

I was also lucky enough to recruit Toni Thomson, a Reagan supporter, who had worked in Washington in the seventies, and her husband, Bill, a prominent attorney, to head up my campaign in Cheyenne. I met them, as I did so many people, through friends. Both Thomsons were about as politically savvy as they come and had deep connections in the state. Paul Etchepare, Toni’s father, owned one of the largest ranches in Wyoming. Thyra Thomson, Bill’s mother, was Wyoming’s secretary of state, and Keith, his father, had been Wyoming’s congressman. He was elected to the Senate but died before he could be sworn in. With Bill and Toni on my side, I had good prospects for taking a healthy number of votes out of Cheyenne.

Jimmy Carter also came to my aid by announcing his plans for the Panama Canal. During the Ford-Reagan battle in 1976, ownership of the canal had been a major issue, with Reagan going after Ford for supporting its return to the Panamanians. I hadn’t agreed with President Ford on the canal, and when President Carter announced that he would initiate the diplomatic and legislative process of transferring it to Panama, it gave me an opportunity to demonstrate my independence and validate my conservative credentials.

I denounced the giveback of the Panama Canal in the first campaign speech I ever made. It was late fall in 1977, and the Republicans of Lusk, Wyoming, had invited everybody who was even thinking about running to come to a rally and speak. Lusk was a small town named after a local rancher, and the event was modeled after
The Gong Show,
a weekly TV program popular at the time. Each speaker was allotted eighty seconds, and the instant anyone ran over, a tall cowboy with a handlebar mustache would bang a large gong.

This format turned out to be quite a draw, and there were hundreds of people in the Lusk gymnasium that night. It looked like the whole town had turned out. Talking fast, I managed to work in the Panama Canal and several other issues, and if I didn’t bring the house down, at least I got through it all without being gonged to a halt.

I formally announced my candidacy on December 14, 1977, and in a rented Ford Mustang began driving all over the state. It had a tape deck on which I could listen to the Carpenters and Anne Murray when I was out of range of a radio station. Later on when Lynne and the girls came along, there would be a chorus of groans from the backseat every time “Close to You” or “Son of a Rotten Gambler” began to play. I had thought that my musical taste was actually pretty with it, but my pre-adolescent passengers enlightened me. And I suspect at least one of them had something to do with leaving the Carpenters tape on the car dashboard to melt in the hot midday sun during one of our campaign stops.

I’d go into a town, introduce myself to key party officials, visit with local newspaper editors and radio talk show hosts, and speak to any group that would have me. I met a lot of nice people and saw a strange sight or two.