In My Time (43 page)

The Kerry-Edwards campaign made a TV ad using the same lies, and I was gratified when the University of Pennsylvania’s Public Policy Center analyzed the ad, obtained the relevant documents, including the gift trust agreement, and concluded in a statement on the website
FactCheck.org
that the ad was “flat wrong.”

As I was notifying my board of the possibility that I might be selected as the vice presidential nominee, I also arranged to have a complete physical with my doctors in Washington. After taking a stress test and having an electrocardiogram and a battery of other tests, my doctors spoke with Dr. Denton Cooley, the world-renowned heart surgeon from Texas, who had performed the first heart transplant in the United States. Governor Bush had asked Cooley to assess whether my heart condition was a disqualification.

Lynne was on the board of American Express mutual funds, and once a year the company had a board meeting in Minneapolis to which spouses were invited. That’s where I was on the night of July 12, when I was called away from the dinner table to take a call from Governor Bush. He told me that Dr. Cooley had given me a green light on the health front, concluding that there was no reason why I could not run for and serve as vice president. Of course that was good news, but I was still looking ahead to the meeting scheduled for Saturday, July 15,
at the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, where I intended to lay out the case against myself. And I wouldn’t be just going through the motions. There were solid reasons why I didn’t think I made sense as George Bush’s running mate, and I intended to put them on the table. I was so serious about talking him out of picking me that my family was confident I would come back from the meeting having taken myself off the list.

The governor, his chief strategist, Karl Rove, and I met in the yellow parlor of the Governor’s Mansion, a high-ceilinged room with portraits of famous Texans on the wall. I began by going through a list of things about me that I believed the governor should be aware of. First, I told them, I had been arrested twice when I was in my early twenties for driving under the influence, and I’d been kicked out of Yale twice.

I also had health problems. Despite Dr. Cooley’s reassurances I wanted to be sure Governor Bush understood how serious they were. At that point I’d had three heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery. I explained what would happen on the campaign trail if I ever felt chest discomfort or any other symptom. Heart patients have to be vigilant, and I told them that if I ever felt even a twinge in my chest during the campaign, I would go directly to a hospital. It would make no difference if I were in the middle of a speech or in the middle of a debate; minutes could mean the difference between life and death. There was simply no way to judge the impact of such an event on the outcome of a presidential race, but it wasn’t likely to be positive.

I also pointed out that the governor and I both had a history in the oil business. Governor Bush had been in the oil business years ago in Midland, and I’d been running Halliburton for five years. It wasn’t hard to imagine the negative charges our opponents would level at us based on that common denominator. We also had a potential constitutional problem because we were both living in Texas. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution prevents the Electoral College electors from any state from voting for a president and a vice president from their state. In other words, the electors from Texas could not vote for both me and George Bush. Before moving to Texas in 1995, I had been a
nearly lifelong resident of Wyoming and still had a home there. But we would need election lawyers to make sure that Governor Bush wasn’t giving away Texas’s electoral votes by putting me on the ticket.

Finally, I told the governor he needed to understand how deeply conservative I was. He said, “Dick, we know that.” And I said, “No, I mean
really
conservative.” I had a reputation of being somewhat moderate, partly, I think, because I wasn’t a “bomb thrower” like some of my conservative colleagues, and partly because I got along with people all across the political spectrum. I think it was also because I got my start on the national scene working for Jerry Ford, who was a moderate. I needed to make sure the governor understood that my voting record was certainly not moderate.

Karl joined me in vigorously making the case against me as the vice-presidential pick, and the governor listened carefully to both of us. When the meeting broke up, I had no indication whether I had changed Bush’s mind, but I was sure that there would be further discussions among his top advisors. We continued to look at one other possibility—former senator Jack Danforth from Missouri. On Tuesday, July 18, I picked up Jack and his wife, Sally, in St. Louis and flew with them to Chicago, where the governor was campaigning. We all met at his hotel downtown to discuss the vice presidency. I stayed for the first part of the meeting and then excused myself so they could talk alone.

During the meeting, the governor’s personal aide, Logan Walters, came in the room and told me Liz was on the phone and needed to speak with me. She told me that Pete Williams had called her to say NBC was getting ready to report that I was the governor’s pick to be vice president. I told her to tell Pete that no decision had been made yet, which was the truth, as George Bush was right that minute interviewing another potential candidate.

Later in the week I got some very timely advice from election lawyer Jan Baran, who had been one of our advisors in the vice presidential search process. I had asked Jan to look into what the requirements would be for reestablishing my Wyoming residency. Jan explained that there were generally a number of things a court would look at to determine
an individual’s residency, including where he was registered to vote and whether he had voted in recent elections in his home state. Jan also explained that an important deadline was looming. If I wanted to register to vote ahead of Wyoming’s August primary, I would need to do so in person at the Teton County clerk’s office no later than that Friday, July 21. I arranged to make the trip home to Jackson and registered in person on that day.

I have always suspected that Pete Williams had a source in the Teton County clerk’s office that he shared with his colleague Lisa Myers, because shortly after I registered to vote, she ran it as breaking news on NBC. Suddenly the story was national news and speculation reached a fever pitch.

My voter registration trip even caught many in the campaign’s highest ranks by surprise. The process of selecting a vice president had been very closely guarded, and few knew that the governor was as close to picking me as he was. Joe Allbaugh and Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, who knew Liz had been helping me on the search, got hold of her on her cell phone and asked, “Could you explain to us just what your dad is doing in Wyoming?” Liz, who happened to be getting her hair cut at the time, excused herself, stepped into a utility closet at the salon, and whispered into her cell phone as much as she could about the Twelfth Amendment, the deadline to register in Wyoming, and why I was suddenly all over the news.

EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, I was working out on the treadmill at our house in Dallas when the phone rang. It was George Bush, and he was calling to formally ask me to be his running mate. I said I would be honored.

Ever since the previous Friday when I’d registered to vote in Wyoming, the press had been camped out in front of our house in Dallas. There was a double front door with a large window over the top, and on Monday morning when I walked out of our bedroom in my pajamas, I looked up to see a camera mounted so that it was looking straight in through that window. Another enterprising journalist left a disposable
camera on the doorstep, along with a note suggesting that we might use it to take some personal photos of this historic day and then give the camera back to her to develop them.

I drove Lynne and Liz to Love Field, parked the car, and we flew to Austin for the formal announcement that I would be George Bush’s running mate.

Getting ready to fish the Snake River with Mary and Liz during the Democratic National Convention in August 2000. (Photo by David Kennerly)

It was the last time I would drive myself for the next eight and a half years. Even though I had held some prominent public positions as White House chief of staff, member of Congress, and secretary of defense, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what was about to happen. When you become your party’s vice presidential candidate, you’re instantaneously swept into an all-consuming bubble of motorcades, campaign staff, and Secret Service agents, with legions of reporters and cameras following close behind.

After the formal announcement at 2:00 p.m., we headed back to the Governor’s Mansion, where photographers for
Time
and
Newsweek
were waiting to take the first official portraits of the newly minted Republican ticket.
Newsweek
ran the photo on the cover with the title “The Avengers: Taking Aim at the Age of Clinton.” The headline in the
Washington Post
the next day pretty accurately captured the gist of the coverage of Bush’s vice presidential selection: “GOP Hails Cheney’s Inclusion on Ticket; Democrats Prepare to Fight Big Oil.” A lot of the reaction focused on my experience, particularly in national security, and my twenty-five years of government service, but the Democrats were waiting in the wings, ready to attack.

Of course, the fact that the head of the vice presidential selection committee had ended up as the vice presidential nominee was great material for late-night comedians. And even my family joined in, entertaining themselves by speculating on exactly what I’d told the Halliburton board, offering lines like “So, gentlemen, as you know I’ve been conducting the vice presidential search process, and I’d like to tell you today that I’ve picked...me.”

There was some effort to make a serious charge that I had conducted the search process so that I could position myself to be the nominee, but it ignored a pretty important fact. If I had wanted the job, I could
have said yes back in March 2000 when Joe Allbaugh asked if I’d be willing to be considered. It would have been a heck of a lot easier way to end up where I did.

WITH THE CONVENTION LESS than a week away, I had much work ahead of me to get ready for what would be the biggest speech of my political career. Luckily, the campaign assigned the task to two of the best speechwriters I have ever worked with: John McConnell and Matthew Scully. Lynne and I sat with them in the dining room at the Governor’s Mansion that afternoon and began to sketch out what I would say. It was Lynne who came up with one of the most memorable parts of my speech. She recalled how Al Gore in 1992 had repeatedly used the phrase “It’s time for them to go,” referring, of course, to President George H. W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle. “Let’s turn it back on them,” she suggested, and we did.

At the end of the day on which I was announced, Lynne, Liz, and I joined George, Laura, and their eighteen-year-old daughter Jenna for a small family dinner at the mansion. It had been an historic day of such intense media coverage that it wasn’t hard to feel as though everyone in the country was focused on the fact that I had just been selected to be George Bush’s running mate. Fortunately, there is nothing like a teenager to bring you back down to earth. About halfway through dinner, Jenna turned to me and said, “Hey, what about you? You going to the convention?”

Indeed I was, but before that we had one very special stop to make. The next morning we flew to Casper with the Bushes for our first Bush-Cheney campaign rally, in the gym at Natrona County High School, where Lynne and I had first started dating more than forty years before. Mary flew from her home in Denver to be with us, and the advance team used the green chalkboard in the choir room to diagram the event and brief us before we went on. It was a special moment, to be back in a place that had meant so much to Lynne and to me and to be arriving there as the soon-to-be Republican vice presidential nominee.

Lynne introduced me that day. She talked about our daughters and
our great pride in them. She talked about what an honor it was to be joining the Bushes in this historic effort, and she talked about our life together.

Dick, when I look back on our more than forty years together, on more changes and adventures than I could ever have imagined when we graduated from NCHS all those years ago, I know that what has sustained me is your deep and abiding kindness and decency and love. . . . So here we are beginning another adventure....

And what an adventure it would be.