In My Time - Dick Cheney [160]
It is hard to describe the emotion I felt as the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President–Elect, Richard Bruce Cheney.” I thought of my parents, neither of whom lived to see this day. My mother, who was the family archivist, had documented every important family event for years, taking photos and carefully pasting news clippings into the family scrapbooks. If she had been on the platform, she would have had her camera, and I knew how proud she would have been. My father was a man of few words and a lifelong Democrat, until he switched parties to vote for me in my first Republican congressional primary. He would have taken immense pride—and probably enjoyed a chuckle of disbelief—at seeing his son sworn in as Vice President of the United States.
Four brown leather armchairs were arranged in a semicircle near the podium for George Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and me. The morning was cold and drizzly, and we had space heaters at our feet. Lynne, Laura Bush, and the Bush girls were seated directly behind us. Mary and Liz were two rows back, seated with Laura Bush’s mother, Jenna Welch, and the president’s parents, Barbara Bush and President George H. W. Bush.
The family Bible we had chosen for the occasion belonged to my grandfather, Thomas Herbert Cheney, who had signed the first page in pencil, “T. H. Cheney, Sumner, Nebraska 1895.” It was a very large Victorian Bible, the kind you could imagine a mother or father reading from as the whole family gathered around a fireplace together. It was so large, in fact, that when Barbara Bush saw Liz holding it on her lap before the ceremony, she said, “Boy, you guys are serious about this, aren’t you?”
Shortly before noon I joined Chief Justice William Rehnquist at the podium, raised my right hand, placed my left hand on the Bible, and surrounded by my wife and daughters, became the vice president. It was an emotional moment for all of us, made even more so by the battle of the thirty-seven-day recount. I saw the tears in my daughters’ eyes and felt my own emotions well up. We’d been through an election like no other, but here we were. And here was America, once more showing the world the way we peacefully transfer power.
AFTER AN INAUGURAL LUNCH in the Capitol, Lynne and I rode in the inaugural parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, then got out of the car and walked the last few blocks to the White House.
With Lynne, Liz and Mary in the presidential reviewing stand at the inaugural parade, January 20, 2001 (Official White House Photo/Karen Ballard).
Still in our winter coats, we visited my new office in the West Wing. It had been stripped bare. The furniture was gone, the carpets had been pulled up, and the walls were getting a fresh coat of paint. By the next day it would be ready for me to move in. Twenty-four years earlier, on January 20, 1977, I had walked through the West Wing hours before power transferred to a new president. It was nice to be back, on the incoming team this time. My new office stood next door to the one I’d occupied as President Ford’s chief of staff when I was just thirty-four. Now I was nearly sixty, and as a helpful staffer pointed out, the oldest guy in the West Wing.
On my sixtieth birthday my family threw a surprise party for me in the vice president’s ceremonial office, a beautiful space in the Old Executive Office Building. Each new vice president learns that there is a special drawer in the desk in this office. Pull it open, and under a sheet of Plexiglas you’ll find the signatures of every vice president since Harry Truman. On top of this desk, on January 30, 2001, my family unrolled my birthday gift, a hand-painted map showing the battles my great-grandfather Samuel Fletcher Cheney had participated in during the Civil War. For the eight years of my vice presidency, this map would hang behind my desk, surrounded