In My Time (21 page)

Meeting with a Wyoming voter on the campaign trail in 1978 (Cheney for Congress photograph)

One was in Evanston, Wyoming, where I walked into the local radio station and found it empty. “Hello, anybody here?” I called out. A large man wearing bib overalls walked out of a back room, holding a very big knife that was dripping blood. It was the station manager, who’d just poached a deer out one of the station’s windows and was in the process of butchering it in the back room. He promised to interview me next time I stopped by.

I talked to the Rotary clubs and Kiwanis clubs and Chambers of Commerce. Yes, I had been White House chief of staff, I would say, after I’d been introduced, and the guy who held the job before me was Don Rumsfeld. He’d gone on to be secretary of defense. And before that it had been Al Haig, who’d gone on to be supreme Allied commander in Europe. And the guy who’d held the job before that was Bob Haldeman. He’d gone on to do time in a California penitentiary. It was a good way to describe my credentials in Riverton, Wyoming—or most places for that matter.

I soon discovered that in almost every community there was an informal gathering on weekday mornings at the local diner that usually included the main street merchants who were the economic backbone of the town and senior citizens who paid attention to what was going
on and had time to think about things. I learned a lot just by showing up, sipping my coffee, and listening.

Some places what you weren’t was more important than who you were. In the Ramshorn Bar in Dubois, when I was introduced as Dick Cheney, candidate for Congress, an old cowboy at the bar looked me over and asked, “Son, are you a Democrat?” I said, “No sir.” “Are you a lawyer?” he asked. I said nope, and he said, “Then I’ll vote for you!”

PRESIDENT FORD HAD OFFERED to come to Wyoming and appear on my behalf, but particularly in light of the hard feelings left over from the 1976 campaign, we agreed we didn’t want it to look as though he were trying unduly to influence the state’s choice of a congressman. He agreed to deliver the keynote address at the Republican state convention in Jackson. He neither mentioned my name nor endorsed my candidacy. But everyone knew that the reason he was there was that I had asked him.

The day before his speech, he came to Casper, spoke at the local community college, and then spent the night as our houseguest. We put him in the master bedroom upstairs, thinking maybe we should warn him about the eccentricities of the master bath, but in the end, neither Lynne nor I could bring ourselves to tell a former president to be sure to close the shower curtain tight. The next morning, as we sat around the breakfast table waiting for the thirty-eighth president of the United States to come down and join us, water began to drip into the dining room just under the bath. We enlisted the kids, and the four of us ran around trying to catch the drips in kitchen pans and dry up the ones we missed.

We hosted a small coffee for friends and neighbors to come meet our distinguished houseguest. Edness Kimball Wilkins, a longtime Democratic state legislator, lived across the street. She brought a photograph taken around the turn of the century showing two couples on a stagecoach in front of the local Casper bank. One couple was her parents and the other was President Ford’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. C. H. King, who had been Wyoming residents. Their son Leslie was the president’s
biological father, from whom he was largely estranged. He did tell me about stopping to see King in Riverton one summer when he was in college on his way to work as a park ranger in Yellowstone. But he always considered Gerald Rudolph Ford, his mother’s second husband, to be his real father.

IN MID-JUNE 1978 LYNNE and I drove to Cheyenne for a few days of campaigning. As usual we stayed with our old friends, Joe and Mary Meyer. Joe had been a high school classmate, my roommate at the University of Wyoming, and an usher at our wedding. Mary, a former Miss Wyoming, was introducing me to people all over the state, including in her hometown of Sheridan.

About 2:00 a.m. I was awakened with a tingling sensation in two fingers of my left hand. I wasn’t in any pain, and there were no other symptoms, but my cousin, a physician in Idaho, had suffered a major heart attack just a few weeks before. Thinking of his experience, I decided to have a doctor take a look at me. Joe drove Lynne and me to the Cheyenne Memorial Hospital. On the way I said that I really felt fine and that it was probably a false alarm—although my fingers were still tingling. When we got to the hospital, I walked into the emergency room, sat down, and immediately passed out. When I came to I noticed that there was a great deal of activity in the ER. Then I noticed that it was all focused on me. That was when I was pretty sure I had suffered a heart attack.

I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather, my mother’s father, who had had heart disease and had suffered his last heart attack in our home. Heart attacks ran in my family, and I knew that they were serious business.

I had been warned by an internist shortly after I left the White House that I was a prime candidate for a coronary. I had a family history on my father’s side as well as my mother’s. I had been smoking for nearly twenty years. The tobacco companies supplied free cartons of cigarettes to the Nixon and Ford White Houses, with each pack in white and gold boxes bearing the presidential seal. For the last few years
I had been going through two or three packs a day. I found they went especially well with the unlimited supply of strong black coffee provided by the navy stewards in the White House Mess.

But I’d ignored the warnings, and so here I was, thirty-seven years old and a heart patient, wondering if I might have to give up my campaign and my hoped-for career in politics. There were no cardiologists in Cheyenne, but I was blessed to have a fine young internist named Rick Davis handling my case. When I asked him whether I could—or should—resume my campaign, he said, “Look, hard work never killed anybody. What takes a toll is spending your life doing something you don’t want to do.” He encouraged me to plan on continuing my campaign after a suitable period for rest and recovery and gave me strict orders: Get some exercise and get rid of the cigarettes. Rick and his wife, Ibby, remain good friends and strong supporters to this day.

Out of the hospital and back in Casper, I took it easy for a month and followed doctor’s instructions to the letter. I quit smoking and began to watch my diet. I walked to restore my strength, each day going a little farther, and I read. We had a big beautiful old spruce tree in our backyard and I spent most of each day in a comfortable chair under that tree reading President Nixon’s memoirs. A friend of mine, Frank Gannon, had helped Nixon write his memoirs and managed to ship me an early copy.

In the meantime the campaign continued with Lynne filling in for me at meetings, rallies, and speeches. She was so good at it that many friends suggested my vote totals would have been higher if I’d just stayed in the backyard and let Lynne do all the rallies.

I had plenty of time to think about how my heart attack was likely to impact voters. My friend Bob Teeter flew in from Michigan, and we talked about a poll to assess voter attitudes, but concluded that the situation had so few precedents we wouldn’t even be able to figure out what questions to ask.

We shot a TV commercial of a group of people sitting around talking about prominent political leaders, including Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, who had suffered heart attacks and still served
productively in office. But my instinct was that the finished product would make people uncomfortable, and we never put it on the air.

In the end we decided that I should send a letter to every registered Republican in the state explaining why I was running in spite of the heart attack. I described some of the reasons why I had decided to run—the public policy and budgetary issues that had motivated my decision. At the top of the second page I became more personal:

But a man’s political beliefs are only a part of what motivates him, and in June an event in my life gave me reason to evaluate why I am running for Congress from a different perspective. While I was campaigning in Cheyenne, I suffered a mild heart attack. At thirty-seven years old, I had hardly expected such a thing to happen.

I noted that doctors in both Cheyenne and Casper had told me that I could expect a full and complete recovery. I reflected Rick Davis’s diagnosis when I wrote, “They saw no reason why I should not return to an active schedule in August. I have worked hard all my life, and the doctors said, after a period of rest, I could continue to do so—as long as I take proper care of myself.”

I continued with more personal thoughts:

An event like a heart attack, however mild it might be, causes a man to reflect upon himself and what is important to him. I must admit that when I found out what had happened, it occurred to me that there are certainly easier ways for a man to spend his life than in running for Congress and being a public official, ways of life which are easier on his family, on his privacy, on his pocketbook.

But as I talked to my family, it became clear to me that while public life is sometimes difficult, it is also, for the Cheneys at any rate, immensely satisfying. All of us, Lynne, our two daughters, and myself, like being involved in an effort which goes beyond our own personal interests. Trying to achieve goals which benefit many people gives all of us a good feeling, an uplifting sense of purpose.

The letter was an unusual campaign document because it didn’t ask for anything. The heart attack gave me an opportunity during a political campaign to talk to people on an important subject, with politics set aside.

In time I came to think that the heart attack, much as I might have wished it had not happened, helped from a political point of view. It increased my name identification in the months before the primary election and even helped raise a little money. Wags joked about forming a “Cardiac Patients for Cheney” group, but Foster Chanock, my young assistant from the Ford White House, actually took it upon himself to contact my friends and tell them to send campaign contributions in lieu of flowers. In a typically generous gesture, Bill Steiger, who didn’t face much of a challenge in his race for reelection to his Wisconsin congressional seat, urged supporters of his to contribute to me.

The heart attack had occurred on June 18, 1978. One afternoon at the end of July I walked over to a nearby park where some senior citizens were having a picnic. I worked the tables, shaking hands and chatting—and thus relaunched my campaign.

After my heart attack, the campaign became even more a family affair. I turned in the Mustang, and we rented an RV with room for all of us, including my parents and the girls. Dad drove, and Mom made sure I ate regularly and sensibly. The kids took it all in stride. Mary would later write that she thought everyone grew up walking door to door, handing out campaign buttons, and worrying about what was going to happen on the first Tuesday in November. She also claimed that her proudest assignment was standing outside our headquarters wearing a “Honk for Cheney” sandwich board. Liz showed formidable political skills, pressing Cheney buttons and literature upon everyone in sight. She also provided one of the key stories in the archives of Cheney campaign lore when she took a wrong turn in the state fair parade in Douglas, Wyoming, and got lost for several hours.

As the September 12 primary approached, we found ourselves, despite the generosity of many friends, running out of campaign funds, but we did have some personal savings, thanks to Lynne’s father, who
had left us money from his civil service retirement when he died. It was enough so that we could either buy another round of advertising or pay for a poll, but we couldn’t do both. We decided on the advertising, figuring that the poll wouldn’t do us any good anyway if we had no money left to act on the results. We were confident that if we won the nomination, we would be able to raise sufficient funds to repay our loan to the campaign, and we managed not to think about the alternative.

Primary election night was a very special time. We waited for the returns to come in at our home on Beech Street, and when the votes were tallied, I had won the Republican primary with 42 percent of the vote to 31 percent for Ed Witzenburger and 27 percent for Jack Gage. That first election victory was an emotional high, topped by few things in life, not just because of all the hard work, although there was plenty of that, but because of the ups and downs and the risks we had taken. In the end, it had all worked out, and Lynne, Liz, Mary, and I celebrated with family and friends into the wee hours of the next morning.

I BELIEVED THAT ONCE I won the primary, I could be confident of winning the general election in the fall. My Democratic opponent was Bill Bagley, longtime aide to Congressman Roncalio, who was from Star Valley. He could expect to capture some GOP votes in that area of the state, but overall it was going to be a tough year for Democrats in Wyoming. With seven statewide seats including the governorship on the ballot, the Democratic Party was going to be stretched for resources. The GOP had advantages in registered voters and in finances, and the Democrats had the added disadvantage of having Jimmy Carter in the White House. He was a definite liability in Wyoming.