In My Time - Dick Cheney [132]
AFTER LYNNE AND I moved to Dallas, an old friend from there asked me, “Now that you’re in the oil business, what’s it going to be—golf, gin rummy, or shooting?” It wasn’t a tough call. “Shooting,” I said. Texas has some of the greatest quail country in the world, and when Halliburton took over Dresser Industries we acquired a forty-thousand-acre hunting lease on the King Ranch. We got a lot of business done on hunting trips, and it was a heck of a lot of fun.
My favorite place to hunt was the Armstrong Ranch, down in South Texas, about fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico.
Hunting in Falfurrias, Texas, with Jim Baker and President George H. W. Bush. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
Like any Texas ranch worth its salt, the Armstrong is huge, some fifty thousand acres. The quail coveys were as plentiful as any place I know, but the Armstrongs themselves were the real reason to look forward to spending a weekend at the ranch. Anne and Tobin were lovely people, with a sense of hospitality as big as Texas. Their ranch house, as unpretentious as could be, was full of hunting trophies, English antiques (many acquired by Tobin while Anne was ambassador to the Court of Saint James), and hundreds of pictures. They were testimony to many a celebrity having been to the Armstrong, including Prince Charles.
After a hearty ranch breakfast (jalapeño jelly was always on the table), we would load into big Chevy Suburbans and follow caballeros across the prairie until they spotted a covey. Then we’d get out and shoot. We’d have lunch under a huge old oak tree, stop for a siesta, then hunt again, coming back to the ranch in time for drinks and conversation—though the conversation usually depended on getting Tobin to turn the mariachi music down.
I had some wonderful times hunting at the Armstrong, and both Lynne and I really miss Tobin and Anne. He died in 2005 and she in 2008. But the Armstrong was also a place where I knew great sadness. On a hunting trip there while I was vice president, I accidentally shot one of my hunting partners, Harry Whittington.
It was late in the day on February 11, 2006. There were three of us shooting—Harry, Pam Willeford, then U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, and me. The first covey flushed and Harry shot two birds. While he went with his guide and the hunting dogs to find the quail, Pam and I moved on to a second covey. I was on the right and Pam was on my left. I thought Harry had quit shooting and was still looking for his birds from the first covey.
A single bird flushed on my right and I turned to fire. The sun was just starting to set on the horizon, and I did not know that Harry had come up on my right. He was standing in a dip in the ground and the sun was behind him. I didn’t see him until it was too late. I will never, as long as I live, forget the sight of Harry falling to the ground after I fired.
We rushed over to him. His face was bloody, and he was stunned. My Secret Service agents and the military doctors who always traveled with me as vice president were there and treated him immediately. We called for the ambulance that was on the ranch as part of my motorcade. Members of the White House medical unit traveling with me administered first aid to Harry and then got in the ambulance with him. They stopped at ranch headquarters to pick up Harry’s wife, Mercedes, and then headed for the hospital in Corpus Christi. I received reports throughout the evening on Harry’s condition, and I was able to visit Harry in the hospital the next day.
It was a terrible accident. We had been lucky it wasn’t worse. I was using a 28-gauge shotgun that day, which is less powerful than the 20-gauge or the 12-gauge I sometimes used. Harry was wearing shatterproof safety hunting glasses, so his eyes were not hit by any of the pellets. Still, I had shot my friend and he was now lying in a hospital. The last thing on my mind was a press statement, and we didn’t issue one that night. In retrospect, we should have.
The following day we issued a statement to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, a local paper