In My Time - Dick Cheney [141]
After the formal announcement at 2:00 p.m., we headed back to the Governor’s Mansion, where photographers for Time and Newsweek were waiting to take the first official portraits of the newly minted Republican ticket. Newsweek ran the photo on the cover with the title “The Avengers: Taking Aim at the Age of Clinton.” The headline in the Washington Post the next day pretty accurately captured the gist of the coverage of Bush’s vice presidential selection: “GOP Hails Cheney’s Inclusion on Ticket; Democrats Prepare to Fight Big Oil.” A lot of the reaction focused on my experience, particularly in national security, and my twenty-five years of government service, but the Democrats were waiting in the wings, ready to attack.
Of course, the fact that the head of the vice presidential selection committee had ended up as the vice presidential nominee was great material for late-night comedians. And even my family joined in, entertaining themselves by speculating on exactly what I’d told the Halliburton board, offering lines like “So, gentlemen, as you know I’ve been conducting the vice presidential search process, and I’d like to tell you today that I’ve picked...me.”
There was some effort to make a serious charge that I had conducted the search process so that I could position myself to be the nominee, but it ignored a pretty important fact. If I had wanted the job, I could have said yes back in March 2000 when Joe Allbaugh asked if I’d be willing to be considered. It would have been a heck of a lot easier way to end up where I did.
WITH THE CONVENTION LESS than a week away, I had much work ahead of me to get ready for what would be the biggest speech of my political career. Luckily, the campaign assigned the task to two of the best speechwriters I have ever worked with: John McConnell and Matthew Scully. Lynne and I sat with them in the dining room at the Governor’s Mansion that afternoon and began to sketch out what I would say. It was Lynne who came up with one of the most memorable parts of my speech. She recalled how Al Gore in 1992 had repeatedly used the phrase “It’s time for them to go,” referring, of course, to President George H. W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle. “Let’s turn it back on them,” she suggested, and we did.
At the end of the day on which I was announced, Lynne, Liz, and I joined George, Laura, and their eighteen-year-old daughter Jenna for a small family dinner at the mansion. It had been an historic day of such intense media coverage that it wasn’t hard to feel as though everyone in the country was focused on the fact that I had just been selected to be George Bush’s running mate. Fortunately, there is nothing like a teenager to bring you back down to earth. About halfway through dinner, Jenna turned to me and said, “Hey, what about you? You going to the convention?”
Indeed I was, but before that we had one very special stop to make. The next morning we flew to Casper with the Bushes for our first Bush-Cheney campaign rally, in the gym at Natrona County High School, where Lynne and I had first started dating more than forty years before. Mary flew from her home in Denver to be with us, and the advance team used the green chalkboard in the choir room to diagram the event and brief us before we went on. It was a special moment, to be back in a place that had meant so much to Lynne and to me and to be arriving there as the soon-to-be Republican vice presidential nominee.
Lynne introduced me that day. She talked about our daughters and our great pride in them. She talked about what an honor it was to be joining the Bushes in this historic effort, and she talked about our life together.
Dick, when I look back on our more than forty years together, on more changes and adventures than I could ever have imagined