In My Time - Dick Cheney [178]
In fact, my undisclosed location was sometimes the Vice President’s Residence—we just didn’t tell anyone I was there. At other times, it was a city other than Washington where I had an event scheduled. Sometimes the staff and I would work from my home in Wyoming for extended periods. I stayed involved in policy deliberations while I was out of Washington by means of secure video teleconferencing, or SVTS, technology. I could set up a machine that looked like a very large laptop just about anyplace and be wired into meetings going on in the White House Situation Room or anywhere else around the world where the other participants had the same technology.
My most frequent undisclosed location was Camp David. Lynne and I spent many a day there, and sometimes children and grandchildren came, too. During a period of increased threat around Halloween 2001, our granddaughters brought their Halloween costumes, and my staff—Mary Matalin, David Addington, and Scooter Libby—handed out candy at their cabins, as did Lynne’s assistant, Laura Chadwick, and the Secret Service agents manning the command posts.
From the beginning, we brought our dog Dave, a hundred-pound yellow Lab, to Camp David. He loved roaming the paths and the woods, and I quickly got used to taking him everywhere with me. One weekend when the president had scheduled a National Security Council meeting at Camp David, I drove with Dave in one of the Camp David golf carts over to Laurel for breakfast. I parked the golf cart, and Dave and I walked down the path toward the big wooden doors of Laurel. I had briefing materials for the day’s meetings and the morning newspapers under one arm and opened the door with the other. No sooner had we walked inside than Dave caught sight of the president’s dog, Barney, a Scottie, and set off in hot pursuit. I couldn’t really blame him. Barney was only slightly larger than the squirrels Dave so much loved chasing, but we didn’t want any permanent harm to happen here. I dropped my papers so I could get hold of Dave, who by now had rounded the corner into the dining room. I rounded the same corner to encounter some of the cabinet spouses who had also been invited to Camp David for the weekend. Joyce Rumsfeld, Alma Powell, and Stephanie Tenet, all seated for breakfast, were watching aghast as Dave bounded around the dining table after a furiously scurrying Barney. At about that moment the president appeared. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. It was not an unreasonable question. I saw a tray of pastries on the breakfast buffet, grabbed one, and hollered, “Dave, treat!” He stopped in his tracks, then I grabbed him and took him back to Dogwood, the cabin in which Lynne and I were staying. I hadn’t been there long when there was a knock at the door. It was the camp commander. “Mr. Vice President,” he said, “your dog has been banned from Laurel.”
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THE ATTACKS OF 9/11 had a significant impact on the nation’s economy. The airline, tourism, and insurance industries were all badly hit. The stock market remained closed for four trading days—the longest period of time since 1933—and then plunged nearly seven hundred points the first day it was reopened for trading. As we began to plan our response and think broadly about the War on Terror, I sought advice from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan about the likely short-and long-term effects of the attacks. Alan came to the Vice President’s Residence on Saturday, September 22, for one of the periodic