In My Time - Dick Cheney [271]
AFTER HAVING BEEN HEAVILY involved in campaigning for many previous election cycles—midterms and presidential campaigns—I essentially sat out the campaign of 2008. I didn’t like being sidelined, but understood the reasoning behind it. After eight years there certainly was a sense of Bush-Cheney fatigue among the voters, and the McCain campaign wanted to distance their candidate from the White House and our policies. This made for some awkward moments. After the campaign’s tracking polls began to nosedive, for example, they quit sharing them with us. It also meant, though, that the American people didn’t get a chance to hear a solid defense of many of our policies, particularly concerning the War on Terror. Although Senator McCain was a solid supporter of what we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, he didn’t defend our terrorist surveillance program with nearly the same enthusiasm, and he opposed the enhanced interrogation program. I thought Senator Obama’s views in these areas were misguided, and I regretted that no one was making the argument on the other side.
Since I wasn’t campaigning, I had more time for other activities, such as appreciating two grandsons who had been born since the last presidential election: Liz’s and her husband Phil’s fifth child, Richard Perry, and Mary’s and her partner Heather Poe’s first child, Sam. I was also able to be of use to my granddaughters. In August 2008, I got a call from Liz, who needed a favor. “Do you think you could request a meeting with the Jonas Brothers tomorrow?” she asked. “The who?” I asked. She explained that a musical group called the Jonas Brothers was filming a public service announcement at the White House. Her three daughters, who were big Jonas Brothers fans, had heard about the taping and asked if they could come watch. Liz had called a friend in the first lady’s office, but was told it was a closed set. That’s why she was calling me.
“Trust me,” she said. “If you get your granddaughters a meeting with the Jonas Brothers, they’ll think you’re the coolest grandfather in history.” Apparently, though, the boys were in such high demand that the only way this would happen is if I made the request myself. Although I was frankly unsure what I was getting myself into, if it would make my granddaughters happy I was willing to give it a shot. I buzzed my assistant, Debbie Heiden, and asked her to call over to Mrs. Bush’s office and tell them I’d like to meet some people called the Jonas Brothers. “And I’m going to need some bios,” I added.
The next day, my delighted granddaughters helped me show the Jonas Brothers and their family the West Wing. They were impressive and polite young men, who hid well whatever surprise they might have felt at hearing that Dick Cheney wanted to see them.
IN SEPTEMBER, LYNNE AND I left on a trip that included stops in several former Soviet republics, including Georgia. We arrived in the capital of Tbilisi on September 4, just a few weeks after a cease-fire had been negotiated to put an end to a conflict between Georgia and Russia. The fighting had been centered initially in two “breakaway” republics inside Georgia: South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These territories, though part of Georgia geographically, had large Russian populations and had been trying to assert their independence. In August South Ossetian forces under the command of Russian commanders, fired on Georgian villages in South Ossetia. Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, had ordered a response, which seemed to give Russian leader Vladimir Putin the excuse he’d been looking for to launch an aggressive military action against the Georgians.
After first moving to defeat Georgian forces inside the two republics, Russian forces began moving into Georgia proper, first to Gori, a major transportation hub, and then toward Tbilisi. They moved with the kind of speed that strongly suggested significant advance planning, leaving the impression that Putin had been planning such an attack for some time. That, together with the