A piece on the Cheneys:
Vote for My Husband. Please.
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 22, 2000; Page C01
LANCASTER, Calif. –– Richard B. Cheney, the GOP vice presidential nominee, is a heavyweight: millionaire businessman, political insider and--if things go his way in November--right-hand man to the next leader of the Free World.
But that's not the man his wife, Lynne, wants you to know. That man, you see, is considered too stiff, too wonkish and not exciting enough to stir up audiences. That man--the rich, powerful one--is characterized far too often as uncaring because, as a Wyoming congressman, he voted against Head Start and a congressional resolution calling for the release of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa.
And so in her role as the official warm-up act for her husband, Mrs. Cheney introduces audiences to a Dick Cheney whom few outside his family know. Young Dick, audiences learn, failed choir because he couldn't hold a note. He whistles like a champ and can juggle three objects.
As a boy and young man, Cheney delivered newspapers, bused tables and built power lines. But he shuns sweets--partly, his wife says, because of the time he spent stirring vats of fudge and hawking it to customers.
"It absolutely killed his sweet tooth," she tells audiences. "I wish it had killed mine."
These folksy dispatches help Lynne Cheney fulfill her job of softening the rough edges of a guy whose demeanor toughened from defusing crises as President Ford's chief of staff, battling with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as secretary of defense and running a big energy services company.
Lynne Cheney relishes her role--similar to the one Al Gore's wife, Tipper, has undertaken--of trying to reintroduce Americans to a man who's spent a lifetime in the public eye. Their message to voters is the same: If only you knew my husband the way I do, you'd like him just as much as me. Really.
"I think people enjoy it," said Lynne Cheney, in an interview on the campaign plane, sitting next to her high school sweetheart and spouse of 36 years.
And what does the candidate--who preciously guards his privacy--think of all these revelations about his personal life?
"These kinds of stories are fine," Cheney said. "I don't have any problem with that. I knew when I got into this that my privacy was forfeited, gone."
Lynne Cheney held several important jobs of her own before becoming her husband's official introducer. She was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under presidents Reagan and Bush.
But on this campaign, she's the dutiful wife, defending her husband on national television and spinning tales from his youth.
"When he was a little boy, one of the things he enjoyed most was visiting his granddad, who lived with his grandma in a railroad car and cooked for the line gangs on the railroad," she told a group of teens and their parents at a suburban Fresno high school during a three-day California swing. "Can you imagine anything better for a little boy than going up and down on the railroad while his grandpa cooks for these guys?"
And she gets lots of laughs, especially from older audiences, when she says that the experience taught her husband that cooking was "an honorable male profession." Both acknowledge that he's the better cook in the family.
His specialties?
"Grilled steak on the grill, whip up a batch of spaghetti, nothing very elaborate. Bake a chicken . . . old family recipes," the candidate says matter-of-factly. "I'm competent in the kitchen, not Julia Child's quality."
His wife interrupts, "He's actually very good."
Her efforts to present her husband's human side may be having an effect. At an event here in Lancaster, he had the crowd in stitches at a self-deprecating joke about getting locked in the basement of the Pentagon for several minutes on his first day as secretary of defense.
With a driver waiting to bring him to meet President Bush, Cheney said he emerged several minutes later without saying a word. No one ever asked where he had been. The moral?
"Always act like you know what you're doing," he said.
It was one of those rare moments of ease on the campaign trail for Cheney, who continues to be more comfortable reciting the intricacies of foreign policy or the length of time needed to order, build and staff a new warship than interacting with children or engaging in the small talk associated with a rope line at campaign rallies.
But with his wife along, sometimes even scripted moments can come undone. At the Lancaster event, Lynne Cheney pulled a little more reality out of the candidate, and herself, than even she expected as she recounted a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington the day the Persian Gulf War began in 1991. As she began to talk about the visit, her eyes watered and her voice began to quiver. Following her to the microphone, Cheney had to remove his glasses and wipe his eyes before launching into a speech about national defense.
"It was very strong and unintentional," Dick Cheney said in a later interview. "Vietnam was there as a reminder of what happens when you screw it up. . . . It was a private moment the day the air war began. It was a reminder of the consequences if we didn't get it right. All of that came flooding back."
But even at the time, Cheney turned to his wife and said: "We have to do something about that introduction."
The heavyweight doesn't like to wobble in public.
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