In My Time - Dick Cheney [63]
We hosted a small coffee for friends and neighbors to come meet our distinguished houseguest. Edness Kimball Wilkins, a longtime Democratic state legislator, lived across the street. She brought a photograph taken around the turn of the century showing two couples on a stagecoach in front of the local Casper bank. One couple was her parents and the other was President Ford’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. C. H. King, who had been Wyoming residents. Their son Leslie was the president’s biological father, from whom he was largely estranged. He did tell me about stopping to see King in Riverton one summer when he was in college on his way to work as a park ranger in Yellowstone. But he always considered Gerald Rudolph Ford, his mother’s second husband, to be his real father.
IN MID-JUNE 1978 LYNNE and I drove to Cheyenne for a few days of campaigning. As usual we stayed with our old friends, Joe and Mary Meyer. Joe had been a high school classmate, my roommate at the University of Wyoming, and an usher at our wedding. Mary, a former Miss Wyoming, was introducing me to people all over the state, including in her hometown of Sheridan.
About 2:00 a.m. I was awakened with a tingling sensation in two fingers of my left hand. I wasn’t in any pain, and there were no other symptoms, but my cousin, a physician in Idaho, had suffered a major heart attack just a few weeks before. Thinking of his experience, I decided to have a doctor take a look at me. Joe drove Lynne and me to the Cheyenne Memorial Hospital. On the way I said that I really felt fine and that it was probably a false alarm—although my fingers were still tingling. When we got to the hospital, I walked into the emergency room, sat down, and immediately passed out. When I came to I noticed that there was a great deal of activity in the ER. Then I noticed that it was all focused on me. That was when I was pretty sure I had suffered a heart attack.
I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather, my mother’s father, who had had heart disease and had suffered his last heart attack in our home. Heart attacks ran in my family, and I knew that they were serious business.
I had been warned by an internist shortly after I left the White House that I was a prime candidate for a coronary. I had a family history on my father’s side as well as my mother’s. I had been smoking for nearly twenty years. The tobacco companies supplied free cartons of cigarettes to the Nixon and Ford White Houses, with each pack in white and gold boxes bearing the presidential seal. For the last few years I had been going through two or three packs a day. I found they went especially well with the unlimited supply of strong black coffee provided by the navy stewards in the White House Mess.
But I’d ignored the warnings, and so here I was, thirty-seven years old and a heart patient, wondering if I might have to give up my campaign and my hoped-for career in politics. There were no cardiologists in Cheyenne, but I was blessed to have a fine young internist named Rick Davis handling my case. When I asked him whether I could—or should—resume my campaign, he said, “Look, hard work never killed anybody. What takes a toll is spending your life doing something you don’t want to do.” He encouraged me to plan on continuing my campaign after a suitable period for rest and recovery and gave me strict orders: Get some exercise and get rid of the cigarettes. Rick and his wife, Ibby, remain good friends and strong supporters to this day.
Out of the hospital and back in Casper, I took it easy for a month and followed doctor’s instructions to the letter. I quit smoking and began to watch my diet. I walked to restore my strength, each day going a little farther, and I read. We had a big