In My Time - Dick Cheney [61]
That first election—the 1978 contest for the GOP nomination for Congress—turned out to be the toughest of my six campaigns for the House of Representatives. It was a three-way contest among me, the incumbent state treasurer Ed Witzenburger, and Jack Gage, an attorney who was the son of a former Democratic governor. Witzenburger and Gage were both from Cheyenne and could be expected to split the vote there. If I could run up a respectable total in Casper and at least be competitive in Cheyenne, I had a good chance of getting the nomination. Of course, it was also important to work hard in the rest of the state. If I won the primary, I wanted to have a foundation for a strong showing statewide in the general election.
AS A CANDIDATE I was not without liabilities. Between graduate school and working in Washington, I had been away from Wyoming for a dozen years. The last time I had voted there was in 1964. Even having served in the White House as President Ford’s chief of staff was a mixed blessing. On the one hand it was by far the most impressive entry on my résumé, but few Wyoming voters would be all that impressed. I would have to be careful not to come across as some hotshot from Washington who thought he was entitled to the House seat. I had to earn it by persuading Wyoming voters that I was really from Wyoming and the best man for the job.
Wyoming was also one of those states where Ronald Reagan had an early and loyal following. The Wyoming delegation to the 1976 GOP convention had been evenly split between Ford and Reagan, and the Reagan state chairman, Dick Jones, a trucker from Cody, was so angry about Reagan’s loss that he stormed out of the convention. At the start of my campaign I tried to patch up the relationship by asking to meet with Jones, but he refused to see me. I worked around the problem with the Reagan people by recruiting Peggy Mallick, a Reagan delegate to the ’76 convention, to be my county chairman in Casper.
I was also lucky enough to recruit Toni Thomson, a Reagan supporter, who had worked in Washington in the seventies, and her husband, Bill, a prominent attorney, to head up my campaign in Cheyenne. I met them, as I did so many people, through friends. Both Thomsons were about as politically savvy as they come and had deep connections in the state. Paul Etchepare, Toni’s father, owned one of the largest ranches in Wyoming. Thyra Thomson, Bill’s mother, was Wyoming’s secretary of state, and Keith, his father, had been Wyoming’s congressman. He was elected to the Senate but died before he could be sworn in. With Bill and Toni on my side, I had good prospects for taking a healthy number of votes out of Cheyenne.
Jimmy Carter also came to my aid by announcing his plans for the Panama Canal. During the Ford-Reagan battle in 1976, ownership of the canal had been a major issue, with Reagan going after Ford for supporting its return to the Panamanians. I hadn’t agreed with President Ford on the canal, and when President Carter announced that he would initiate the diplomatic and legislative process of transferring it to Panama, it gave me an opportunity to demonstrate my independence and validate my conservative credentials.
I denounced the giveback of the Panama Canal in the first campaign speech I ever made. It was late fall in 1977, and the Republicans of Lusk, Wyoming, had invited everybody who was even thinking about running to come to a rally and speak. Lusk was a small town named after a local rancher, and the event was modeled after The Gong Show, a weekly