In My Time - Dick Cheney [148]
With Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. As I left the meeting the Pope squeezed my hand and whispered, “God Bless America.” (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
She reminded us that life is short. “We do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us,” she said, “so be swift to love and make haste to be kind.” In the midst of a hard-fought political campaign, her sermon made all of us pause and reflect. Hannah died a few days later, and Suzanne’s words that autumn morning in Jackson are still fresh in my mind as I write this a decade later.
My assignment on October 3 was to travel to a battleground state where the media could cover me watching Governor Bush’s first debate with Al Gore. We chose Ohio and took over a restaurant there for a Bush-Cheney debate-watching party. In the lead-up to this first Bush-Gore debate, Gore, who had already demonstrated a propensity for unnecessary overstatement, had made a few quotable remarks that turned out not to be true. First, in order to dramatize a point about the failings of America’s health-care system, he said that his mother-in-law paid almost three times as much for the same arthritis medicine that the Gores bought for the family dog. Then, speaking at a Teamsters convention, he claimed that when he was a child, his mother had sung him to sleep with the song “Look for the Union Label.” The Gore campaign had to admit that the medicine costs Gore quoted weren’t personal at all, but rather from a House Democratic study. And the song Gore claimed his mother had sung to him in the cradle hadn’t been written until 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven.
The press, with a little Republican help, of course, sensed a theme, and as we watched from Ohio, Gore locked it in by claiming to have traveled to Texas with Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt when wildfires broke out in Parker County. But as the press discovered, the closest Gore got to the fires was Houston, well over two hundred miles away, and he didn’t get there with James Lee Witt—or even meet with him. To this day I can’t understand how such a seasoned politician continually got so tangled up in trivial untruths, nor have I ever figured out why he huffed and sighed so audibly that night. It certainly didn’t earn him any votes.
The night before my debate, I made sure I got a good night’s rest by sleeping in my own bed. We got up early on October 5 and flew to Lexington, Kentucky, then drove to Danville, where our first stop was the official walk-through of the debate site at Centre College. The walk-through was meant to give me a feel for the stage, the auditorium, the table where we would sit, and the “hold room” where I would be just prior to going onstage.
Two of my granddaughters, Kate and Elizabeth, joined us, and having them around certainly helped cut through some of the high anxiety of that day. Elizabeth, three at the time, climbed up into Joe Lieberman’s seat at the debate table. While I was listening to a staff briefing about the lights that would time our answers, Elizabeth acquired a pen and set about diligently drawing a dinosaur on Joe’s place card. True, dinosaurs were one of the few items in her repertoire at the time, but we all laughed at how well it fit into our campaign theme that the Democratic ticket represented the policies of the past.
While we were doing the walk-through, news was arriving about escalating protests in Serbia. The parliament building in Belgrade was burning, and it looked as if the brutal and murderous president, Slobodan Milošević, was going to have to yield to the will of his people and leave office. I told Liz to get a summary of what was happening from our foreign policy team—Hadley, Wolfowitz, and Libby—and to assign one of them to give me a five-minute briefing on the latest developments. Then I went in to take a nap.
I’d been prepared for Joe Lieberman to be tough and aggressive, and I understood later that he had expected