7.26.00
Cheney: A Personal View

7.26.00
Texas Backfire

7.26.00
A Tough Zell

7.25.00
Clinton's Complete Mideast Failure

7.25.00
Puerto Rico and U.S. Elections

7.24.00
The Mother of All Surprises

7.24.00
Don't Mess with Texas, Al

7.21.00
Slogan Mania

7.21.00
The Racism-Industry Lynch Mob

7.21.00
Beating the Limit

7.20.00
Price Ain't Right at the Fed

7.20.00
The Post Shills for “Hate Crimes”

7.20.00
Hollywood's Gender Apartheid

7.20.00
No Rare Cosmic Pollutants Need Apply

7.20.00
Litigation Lunacy in Florida

7/26/00 2:55 p.m.
Cheney: A Personal View
At once a most improbable and most appealing choice for Veep.

By Lou Cannon, author of President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime and Official Negilgence

his is a personal story about Dick Cheney, at once a most improbable and most appealing choice for presidential running mate.

The improbabilities are political. Cheney is the first nominee to hail from the least populous state in the union. His home state is so reliably Republican that George W. Bush could carry it with just about anyone on the ticket. In a tight election in which Bush is trying to hold the high middle ground, Cheney has a very conservative voting record, which Al Gore's flacks are already using to demonize him. Furthermore, Cheney is, by his own admission, a dull speaker. Sometime early in the 1980s, when I shared a cab with Cheney to Capitol Hill after he spoke to an economic conference, I damned him with faint praise by saying that his speaking skills had improved.

"Maybe," he said. "But you have to remember that the Democratic speaker was Bill Bradley." Cheney liked Bradley. More than that, though, he liked almost everyone with convictions, and he had a keen dislike for the phonies, who stood for nothing.

Here is why Cheney appeals to this longtime reporter. At a snowy Christmas party at Sam Donaldson's in 1989, the valet lost my car keys. The host was properly concerned, and my wife and I were overwhelmed with offers to call a cab or a locksmith. Cheney, then secretary of defense, was more direct. Both of us had grown up in sparsely populated western states (Wyoming for him, Nevada for me), where lost car keys in winter could be catastrophic. Ignoring a party where he was a focus of attention, Cheney volunteered to drive me home some 15 miles through the snow to get a spare set of keys. We were just leaving when the keys were found.

That's Cheney. I came to know him after he replaced Donald Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff for President Gerald Ford. "Rummy" was an accomplished insider — bright, tough, hard-working, and abrasive. Since I was new on the beat, he sought to intimidate me, putting down my stories to my editors. Fair enough, I thought, but I didn't like it.

Cheney, who had Rummy's qualities without the abrasiveness, took a different tack. He called me, not my editors, if he thought a story was off-base. And when a story was critical of Ford and on the mark, Cheney would credit me for getting it right. The word "spin" was not then in vogue, but Cheney never spun anyone, as far as I could tell. There was an unwritten rule that a public official should never lie but was not responsible if a reporter reached a wrong conclusion on his own. That wasn't good enough for Dick, who set me straight if I was going down the wrong track on a story — even one that helped his boss.

After Ford was defeated in 1976, Cheney ran for the lone Wyoming seat in the House. I was then the Washington Post's bureau chief in the West and declined to do a story on his campaign because I was too close to the Cheneys. He won easily against a Democrat who had an arrest record (marijuana) — some of us playfully accused Cheney of paying his opponent's filing fee. But Cheney was no joke in the House, where he quickly became a player and dealt ably with Democratic leaders who learned that Cheney's word was his bond. Cheney, more than any other Republican, held his party together during the dark days of Iran-contra. At the White House, spin was in vogue, and I often called Cheney to find out what was happening. He always gave honest assessments on politics or legislation. But he was also a leading Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and he drew a proper and patriotic line when it came to national-security matters.

When President Bush named Cheney secretary of defense, I attended the ceremony and told Cheney afterward that he had marched on the wrong foot. Cheney agreed, but said he wasn't being paid to march. What he was being paid for, he did well.

My wife, who once worked on the Hill, uses "normal" as her highest word of praise for politicians. Dick Cheney is utterly, completely, normal. He has good judgment and common sense. He is married to his high-school sweetheart, Lynne Cheney, who for my money could also serve on a presidential ticket. I don't know if Dick Cheney can help Bush get elected — in truth, the political calculus of this choice baffles me — but I do know that he could help Bush be a better president.

What Cheney has most of all, as the Founders would have put it, is a decent respect for the opinion of mankind. Any president could use a Cheney.

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