In My Time - Dick Cheney [173]
One of my proudest moments at the Vice President’s Residence was January 30, 2008, when I managed to surprise Lynne with a party to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. I remembered the date all on my own, though it is easy to remember because we went out for the first time on my seventeenth birthday. With help from Cece Boyer, Lynne’s chief of staff; Liz Denny Haenle, the social secretary at the Vice President’s Residence; Molly Owen Soper, Lynne’s personal aide, and many others, I was able to sneak dozens of our friends from high school, along with singer Ronnie Milsap, who provided the evening’s entertainment, into the observatory without Lynne guessing anything was up. It was a very special celebration.
Our lives at the observatory were as pleasant as they were largely because of the staff of U.S. Navy enlisted aides who work there. These terrific men and women are consummate professionals. Many of them became like family to us, and we will always be grateful for everything they did.
Lynne and I felt the same way about the Secret Service agents who protected us and our family for more than eight years. After 9/11, their responsibilities and hours increased dramatically. They lived through some pretty tense days with us, did an outstanding job of providing security, and managed kindness and good humor as well.
I am particularly grateful that they had the good sense to understand how important fishing is to me when they selected my Secret Service code name, “Angler.” They also picked a great name for Lynne, “Author,” and she certainly lived up to it. While I was vice president, she wrote six bestselling books on American history for children and their families and donated well over a million dollars in proceeds to charity.
DESPITE HAVING BEEN ELECTED in one of the closest elections in U.S. history, George Bush and I had major legislative accomplishments in those first months we were in office. The president’s education program went into place, we cut taxes, and we proposed an energy policy for the nation. We also dealt with important foreign policy issues in China, Russia, and elsewhere around the globe. We had many achievements to our credit, but the big test of our administration was yet to come. Our time in office would be largely defined by the unprecedented attacks of September 11, 2001.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Nation at War
On the night of September 11, 2001, the Secret Service evacuated Lynne and me to Camp David, a secure location apart from the president, in case there were further attacks. On Wednesday morning, September 12, we flew back to Washington, now a wartime capital, so that I could attend a National Security Council meeting at 9:30 a.m. I took newspapers with me on the helicopter. The Washington Post’s banner headlines read, “Terrorists Hijack 4 Airliners; 2 Destroy World Trade Center; 1 Hits Pentagon; 4th Crashes.” The Washington Times’ headline was a single word: “Infamy.”
Although we had experienced the fog of war in the first few hours after the attacks, plenty of things were now clear: We had been attacked by a ruthless enemy willing to slaughter innocents in an effort to bring America to her knees. This enemy wasn’t a traditional military force, but terrorists who found safe haven wherever they could and operated on a worldwide scale. They had struck us before, blowing a crater five stories deep in the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. Al Qaeda had attacked our embassies in Kenya