In My Time - Dick Cheney [128]
The idea of serving as president was very appealing. I had worked in the White House or served in the cabinet of three presidents—Nixon, Ford, and Bush—and I had watched Ronald Reagan from the perspective of my eight years in the House leadership. I had seen presidents succeed and fail. And I believed I knew what it takes to make an effective chief executive.
I also understood the importance of recognizing that no one gets a lot of opportunities to run under circumstances that are right to sustain a presidential campaign. If you don’t take your chance when it comes along, you may never get another.
On the other hand, I knew how tough, brutal, and demanding a national campaign can be. It is impossible to preserve even a modicum of privacy for either the candidate or his family under the intense scrutiny that goes with running for president. And fund-raising, which I had never learned to like, demands an enormous commitment of time and energy.
And, of course, there was my health. In 1996 I would be fifty-five years old with an eighteen-year history of coronary artery disease, including three heart attacks and a quadruple coronary bypass. If I decided not to run for president, I wouldn’t link the decision to my health, because I didn’t want people to think that I was somehow limited in what I could do or that I had decided not to run because I had a “bad heart.” But clearly my health history would be an issue in a campaign, and it figured in my thinking as I evaluated the prospects of a grueling presidential run.
Meanwhile, I was itching to get involved in the 1994 midterm elections. As secretary of defense it hadn’t been appropriate for me to participate in politics, and now that I was no longer bound by that tradition, I had a lot I wanted to say. I thought Bill Clinton had been let off easy during the 1992 campaign, and I was less than enthusiastic about the way he was managing national security policy. The botched operation in Somalia in October 1993 particularly troubled me. Men were sent on a mission in Mogadishu without being allowed to use the AC-130 gunships that could have helped them succeed. They were denied the armored support they needed—and that their leaders had requested—and eighteen brave Americans lost their lives.
IN DECEMBER 1993 OUR family gathered once again in Jackson, where we had celebrated many happy holidays, but the end of 1993 was filled with great sadness. My mother died the day after Christmas. She had fought Parkinson’s disease for years, absolutely refusing to give into it. There would be no assisted living facility for her, she said, because she had to take care of my dad. When the disease began to cause her to lose her balance, she bought a pair of black rubber knee pads to cushion the blows when she fell. And she always picked herself right back up again. I was on a hunting trip in South Texas in the fall when I got word she’d had a stroke. Our friends the True family from Casper sent their plane to pick me up so I could get home as quickly as possible. I got to her bedside, and she knew I was there, but after the stroke she never spoke again.
Five months after Mom died, our lives were filled with joy when our first grandchild, Kate Perry, was born. Today, when I see Kate’s skill and athleticism on the softball field, I think of my mother, who loved her ball-playing years with the Syracuse Bluebirds, the team from a little Nebraska town that twice played the Cleveland Bloomer Girls for the national championship. I know Mom would have been so proud of Kate, and all seven of her great-grandchildren.
EARLY IN 1994 WITH a presidential run in mind, I set up a political action committee. The Alliance