In My Time - Dick Cheney [143]
without being reminded of how enormously fortunate we are to be Americans, and what a terrible price thousands have paid so that all of us and millions more around the world might live in freedom. This is a great country, ladies and gentlemen, and it deserves great leadership. Let us go forth from this hall in confidence and courage, committed to restoring decency and honor to our republic.
At the end of my speech, white banners emblazoned with “Bush-Cheney” in large red letters unfurled from the rafters, and confetti and beach balls showered the crowd. As the celebrations died down, Lynne and I stepped to the side of the stage to listen to one of our favorite singers, Lee Greenwood, end the evening with his great song “God Bless the U.S.A.”
There were many amazing moments during the Philadelphia convention. One was when I went with my daughter Mary, who had agreed to serve as my personal assistant during the campaign, to visit my old boss President Gerald Ford. As we arrived in his suite, the eighty-seven-year-old former president walked over to Mary, put his arm around her, and said, “I bet you’re proud of your dad, aren’t you?” “Yes, sir, Mr. President,” she replied. “I sure am.” “Good,” he said. “Me too.” If it hadn’t been for President Ford and the trust he placed in me a quarter century before, I wouldn’t have been the Republican nominee for vice president, and I was grateful for the opportunity to thank him personally.
The day after Mary and I visited him, he was hospitalized, having suffered a stroke. He would live six more years, time deeply valued by those of us who loved him, and when he died, it was my great, though sad, honor as vice president to eulogize him in the Capitol Rotunda. I remembered his brief presidency, just 895 days, as a time “filled with testing and trial enough for a much longer stay.”
Even then, amid troubles not of his own making, President Ford proved as worthy of that office as any who had ever come before. He was modest and manful; there was confidence and courage in his bearing. In judgment he was sober and serious, unafraid of decisions, calm and steady by nature, always the still point in the turning wheel.
A man who never assumed airs and was known for his kindness, Gerald Ford led our nation through one of the greatest constitutional crises in our history.
On the day after the convention, Governor Bush, Laura, Lynne, and I left Philadelphia on a special campaign train, making old-fashioned whistle-stops all across the battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. After that we would spend most of the next nine weeks traveling separately. That way we could double the territory we covered, hold twice as many rallies and town hall meetings, and generate twice the local press coverage.
Unlike many vice presidential candidates who come to their campaigns with a political staff largely in place, I had been gone from politics for seven years, so I used the weeks just after the convention to hire people. My longtime executive assistant, the steady and well-organized Debbie Heiden, came on board and stayed with me through all eight years of my vice presidency. I signed on Dirk VandeBeek, who had handled public relations at Halliburton, to act as my campaign press secretary. I interviewed only one candidate to be my chief of staff, Kathleen Shanahan, who had worked for President Reagan, George H. W. Bush, when he was vice president, and California Governor Pete Wilson. She was extremely competent, tough, smart, and funny, and she fit in right away with the whole Cheney family.
The campaign also assigned a team of three policy people from Austin to take turns traveling with me. I hadn’t had time to get up to speed on every