In My Time - Dick Cheney [79]
Lynne, meanwhile, was teaching English courses at George Washington University and Northern Virginia Community College. She had established herself as a writer and journalist, published a couple of novels, and contributed frequent freelance articles to different newspapers and magazines. She became a contributing editor at Wash-ingtonian magazine, where she wrote a monthly column about D.C. history. In 1985, President Reagan appointed her to the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution. In 1986 he chose her to succeed Bill Bennett as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
A few years after I’d been elected to Congress, Lynne and I both read The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman’s book about the period before World War I, and we had been particularly struck by Tuchman’s profile of the acerbic and autocratic House Speaker Tom Reed. We knew there must be more stories like that and decided to write a book about Speakers of the House, who have been generally underappreciated. Our subjects were Henry Clay, James Blaine, Thomas Reed, Joseph Cannon, Nicholas Longworth, Sam Rayburn, and James K. Polk, the only Speaker to become president. We also included Thaddeus Stevens, who led the charge for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.
One afternoon after the book came out, I was standing at the rail at the back of the House chamber when a page came over and told me that Speaker O’Neill would like a word with me. It turned out that he wanted to talk about Kings of the Hill. I had sent him a copy as a courtesy, but I was frankly surprised that he had not only read it but had some strong and detailed opinions about it.
For the next half hour—while he effortlessly presided over the business of the House—we discussed the book. He was interested in the reasons for our choice of subjects and the way we had divided the writing chores. His only criticism involved our chapter on Sam Rayburn. He did not think that we had sufficiently praised “Mr. Sam,” whom he had known and loved.
I WAS IN THE basement of our house in Virginia watching TV when the first reports of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut were broadcast on October 23, 1983. Early that morning, two separate trucks carrying bombs broke through the security perimeter and crashed into the American and French barracks. More than two hundred marines and a number of sailors and soldiers were killed.
The Marines, first dispatched to Lebanon in August 1982 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force, were part of an attempt to settle the Lebanese civil war. I was one of many in Congress who had questioned the wisdom of what appeared to be America’s ad hoc involvement in Lebanon. After the bombing there would also be questions about a decision-making process that had bunched all our marines into one building in the middle of a violent city only months after the American Embassy had been bombed. The tragedy raised a number of questions about interservice rivalries in the American military and a convoluted chain of command.
The invasion of Grenada, two days after the bombing of the Marine barracks, was a successful effort, but also underscored disorganization. When I visited the Caribbean island as a member of Congress a few days after we’d gone in, I was told about an army officer who had needed artillery support. He could look out to sea and see naval vessels on the horizon, but he had no way to talk to them. So he used his personal credit card in a pay phone, placed a call to Fort Bragg, asked Bragg to contact the Pentagon, had the Pentagon contact the navy, who in turn told