In My Time - Dick Cheney [138]
The board was helpful as I worked to separate myself from the company financially. They even offered to accelerate the exercise dates on all Halliburton options that had been granted to me, so I could exercise them before I was elected, thus eliminating any accusations of a conflict of interest. I declined this offer because I did not want even the appearance that I was getting special treatment. After I left Halliburton I sold the stock I held outright and exercised options that had vested, but that left a significant number of options that had not yet vested. That is, they had been granted to me, but the dates when I could choose to sell them were in the future.
There was no legal requirement that we do so, but in order to sever all our financial ties to Halliburton, Lynne and I set up an irrevocable gift trust agreement that would donate all the after-tax profits from these unvested options to three charities of our choice: the University of Wyoming, George Washington University Hospital, and Capital Partners for Education, which provides scholarships to inner-city children in Washington, D.C. That agreement has resulted in more than $8 million being donated to charity.
I also had deferred income from the company from one year in which I had taken a portion of my salary and asked for the rest of it to be paid out over five years. This was salary that I had already earned, so it was due to me whether the company was doing well or badly. But before I became vice president, so that there would not be even the slightest confusion or suspicion that I had any ongoing connection with Halliburton or any interest or stake in the fortunes of the company, Lynne and I took the extra step of obtaining an insurance policy, for which we paid fifteen thousand dollars, that guaranteed these payments regardless of what happened to the company.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but after all the steps I had taken to guard against any possible assertion that I had an ongoing stake in the fortunes of the company, it angered me that my critics continued to make false claims about my ties to Halliburton. During the 2004 campaign, the charges were especially outrageous. Early in that campaign summer, Senator Pat Leahy conducted a conference call as a campaign surrogate in which he suggested I was being dishonest and dishonorable and was profiting from Halliburton business while I was vice president. Not long afterward, when I was on the Senate floor for the annual Senate “class photo,” Leahy came over and put his arm around me, acting as though we were old buddies. I used a colorful epithet to suggest what he could do to himself and stepped away. It was probably not language I should have used on the Senate floor, but it was completely deserved.
The Kerry-Edwards campaign made a TV ad using the same lies, and I was gratified when the University of Pennsylvania’s Public Policy Center analyzed the ad, obtained the relevant documents, including the gift trust agreement, and concluded in a statement on the website FactCheck.org that the ad was “flat wrong.”
As I was notifying my board of the possibility that I might be selected as the vice presidential nominee, I also arranged to have a complete physical with my doctors in Washington. After taking a stress test