In My Time - Dick Cheney [62]
This format turned out to be quite a draw, and there were hundreds of people in the Lusk gymnasium that night. It looked like the whole town had turned out. Talking fast, I managed to work in the Panama Canal and several other issues, and if I didn’t bring the house down, at least I got through it all without being gonged to a halt.
I formally announced my candidacy on December 14, 1977, and in a rented Ford Mustang began driving all over the state. It had a tape deck on which I could listen to the Carpenters and Anne Murray when I was out of range of a radio station. Later on when Lynne and the girls came along, there would be a chorus of groans from the backseat every time “Close to You” or “Son of a Rotten Gambler” began to play. I had thought that my musical taste was actually pretty with it, but my pre-adolescent passengers enlightened me. And I suspect at least one of them had something to do with leaving the Carpenters tape on the car dashboard to melt in the hot midday sun during one of our campaign stops.
I’d go into a town, introduce myself to key party officials, visit with local newspaper editors and radio talk show hosts, and speak to any group that would have me. I met a lot of nice people and saw a strange sight or two.
Meeting with a Wyoming voter on the campaign trail in 1978 (Cheney for Congress photograph)
One was in Evanston, Wyoming, where I walked into the local radio station and found it empty. “Hello, anybody here?” I called out. A large man wearing bib overalls walked out of a back room, holding a very big knife that was dripping blood. It was the station manager, who’d just poached a deer out one of the station’s windows and was in the process of butchering it in the back room. He promised to interview me next time I stopped by.
I talked to the Rotary clubs and Kiwanis clubs and Chambers of Commerce. Yes, I had been White House chief of staff, I would say, after I’d been introduced, and the guy who held the job before me was Don Rumsfeld. He’d gone on to be secretary of defense. And before that it had been Al Haig, who’d gone on to be supreme Allied commander in Europe. And the guy who’d held the job before that was Bob Haldeman. He’d gone on to do time in a California penitentiary. It was a good way to describe my credentials in Riverton, Wyoming—or most places for that matter.
I soon discovered that in almost every community there was an informal gathering on weekday mornings at the local diner that usually included the main street merchants who were the economic backbone of the town and senior citizens who paid attention to what was going on and had time to think about things. I learned a lot just by showing up, sipping my coffee, and listening.
Some places what you weren’t was more important than who you were. In the Ramshorn Bar in Dubois, when I was introduced as Dick Cheney, candidate for Congress, an old cowboy at the bar looked me over and asked, “Son, are you a Democrat?” I said, “No sir.” “Are you a lawyer?” he asked. I said nope, and he said, “Then I’ll vote for you!”
PRESIDENT FORD HAD OFFERED to come to Wyoming and appear on my behalf, but particularly in light of the hard feelings left over from the 1976 campaign, we agreed we didn’t want it to look as though he were trying unduly to influence the state’s choice of a congressman. He agreed to deliver the keynote address at the Republican state convention in Jackson. He neither mentioned my name nor endorsed my candidacy. But everyone knew that the reason he was there was that I had asked him.
The day before his speech, he came to Casper, spoke at the local community college, and then spent the night as our houseguest. We put him in the master bedroom upstairs, thinking maybe we should warn him about the eccentricities of the master bath, but in the end, neither Lynne nor I could bring ourselves to tell a former president to be sure to close the shower