(Nov. 20) In the immediacy of returning from the memorial service for former Vice President Richard Cheney, which ended just two hours ago as I write, what stands out is the sharp difference between the man accurately described in today’s ceremonies and the public caricature of him.
The real Cheney, as was recounted Thursday and as almost everyone who actually dealt with him experienced, was unassuming, thoughtful and kind. (For his first quarter-century in public life, that also was the public image of him, until the national media needed a bogeyman in the first two months of the G.W. Bush presidency and wrongly but effectively turned him into Darth Vader.)
The memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral, stunningly beautiful in tone, tune and substance, featured not a whiff of partisanship or politics and only a thimbleful of policy. It was about the grandfather who attended all his grandson’s football games and regularly drove his granddaughter for hundreds of miles for rodeo competitions in Wyoming. It was about the father who spent untold hours with his daughters while transmitting a love of history and country. It was about the avid fly-fisher who cherished the outdoors.
And, when his actual career was discussed at all, it was not about his policy battles or convictions; it was about what a good and caring boss he was. Retired NBC News correspondent Pete Williams, his press secretary when Cheney was secretary of defense, told two great stories.
One was when a magazine was about to “out” Williams’ homosexuality, which back then usually was a political career killer, so Williams called Cheney and offered to resign. Cheney not only told him in no uncertain terms that his job was safe but checked in on Williams regularly in the next few weeks to make sure he was doing OK as he faced some nasty public blowback.
And once when the elder President Bush was ready to adopt a new nuclear weapons strategy, Williams and a policy expert asked Cheney what to do when the New York Times got wind of it and wanted them to discuss it on “background.” Cheney said it was fine with him as long as they checked it with the White House first; but somehow Williams got his signals crossed on the timing, so the story came out a full day before Bush had planned a major public announcement on the subject. All heck broke loose.
But then, before their panic could fully sink in, Cheney gave a half smile, winked at them, and said: “Just kidding, fellas. I told the president it was all my fault. He’ll get over it.”
Cheney’s bedrock decency was an “old school” sort of politics. It is a trait sorely lacking in today’s political world. In the fall of 2016, at the University of Mobile, I was teaching a class on the history of presidential elections. I showed video excerpts from what then were recent national “debates,” full of invective and discord — and then I showed several minutes from the vice-presidential debate between Cheney and Democrat Joe Lieberman in 2000.
As they watched, the students’ faces turned puzzled, then outright surprised. Here were two people quite significantly differing with each other on numerous policies, but they were respectful of each other, even friendly. They were sober and serious but also relaxed, and their words and tone were entirely constructive.
By the time the video clip ended, my students were nodding with approval. They were manifestly impressed. Dare I say it, they were inspired. For perhaps one of very few times in their short lives, they now saw that politics could be ennobling.
And they loved it.
Speaking of inspiration: Cheney’s daughter Liz, the former House Republican Whip, said that although her father (obviously) was a Republican, he was first motivated to go into public service when he was in stadium bleachers in Wyoming for a speech by Democratic then-President John F. Kennedy, who gave some version of his famous “ask what you can do for your country” message.
Somehow, some way, this nation must rediscover that sense of higher purpose, pursued assiduously and with a degree of toughness, but without appeal to baser instincts.
As perhaps 1,500 mourners exited the National Cathedral after hymns as stirring as Amazing Grace, America the Beautiful, O God Our Help in Ages Past, and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, an acquaintance said to me he felt a sense of “catharsis” in the atmosphere. Maybe, just maybe, some similar catharsis can “go national” and at least somewhat ennoble our politics again.
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