In My Time - Dick Cheney [133]
I continued to monitor Harry’s condition over the following weeks and months and appreciated the grace with which he handled the situation. He was a true gentleman. As the days passed, the whole incident became great fodder for late-night comedians—and for the president himself. Later in the year, at the annual Gridiron Dinner, where politicians roast themselves, Bush said, “Here I am at thirty-eight percent in the polls, and Dick has to go and shoot the only trial lawyer in Texas who supports us.”
When Harry was released from the hospital on February 17, 2006, he spoke to the press and took note of the media frenzy generated by the accident, “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week,” he said. “We send our love and respect to them as they deal with situations that are much more serious than what we have had this week.”
I, of course, was deeply sorry for what Harry and his family had gone through. The day of the hunting accident was one of the saddest of my life. And I will never forget Harry Whittington’s kindness.
GEORGE W. BUSH BECAME governor of Texas the year before I took over at Halliburton. I had met him briefly when his father was president, but didn’t come to know him until we were both working in Texas and I agreed to serve on one of his business advisory councils. I started to see more of him as he began to think about running for president and invited me down to the Governor’s Mansion in Austin for one-on-one meetings and sessions with his foreign policy advisory team. The team consisted primarily of Condi Rice, Steve Hadley, Rich Armitage, and Paul Wolfowitz. Scooter Libby also attended some of the sessions. Condi managed the group, helping select topics for discussion and distributing briefing materials ahead of some of the meetings. It was a group of smart, experienced people, all of whom seemed pretty compatible. Had I been running for president myself that year and needed advisors on foreign and defense policy, I probably would have picked the same team.
A meeting of the team was scheduled for February 24, 1999, and I flew down to Austin the night before for dinner with the governor. The next morning I was in my guest room at the mansion getting ready for breakfast when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find the governor of Texas with a cup of coffee he’d made for me. It was a kind gesture and certainly the highest-ranking room service I’d ever had.
About a month later, Joe Allbaugh, who was helping Bush put together the beginnings of his presidential campaign, visited me in Dallas. We had a good discussion about the mechanics of a run for the presidency and the ins and outs of managing a campaign. We talked about priorities, hiring, scheduling, and how you put the whole thing together. They were just beginning to plot a course to the election of 2000, and I was glad to be as helpful as I could, but my main focus and priority remained my day job running Halliburton.
IN 1998 MY DAD had started to talk about “having his sale,” which is an old Nebraska expression for putting your affairs in order before you die. He was eighty-three, and he’d been doing pretty well in the five years since Mom’s death in 1993. He’d moved himself into an assisted living facility a year earlier, saying he wanted to do it while he was healthy enough to make the move himself. He still had the house at 505 Texas Place in Casper, and he had been driving out there regularly to check on things. But now he told my sister, Sue, my brother, Bob, and me that he was ready to sell his belongings and the house. We kept telling him not to worry about it, that we’d take care of it. But he wouldn’t hear of